Does your SaaS product need an AppSumo Campaign? - our key takeaways

In this post, I will describe the preparation of BOWWE, the problems we encountered and how we dealt with them, but most of all, I will share my opinion and what the first campaign has already taught us.

There's already been some valuable writing on the AppSumo experience, but I thought I'd add my two cents. Perhaps these insights will be useful to IH community.

Let me start by saying that I wanted to include as much information and personal insights as possible in this post, but to keep it from being too long. You can read the original post with more details on our blog ➡ BOWWE AppSumo Campaign (Case study)

Perhaps a brief introduction.

Although I doubt there are many people here, for those who don't know AppSumo is a digital marketplace. It is a large community of entrepreneurial business owners and deal hunters that offers opportunities for both founders and their potential customers by listing many exciting lifetime deals.

We've been developing https://bowwe.com/en for seven years, but it was only in 2021 that we were lucky to be on AppSumo.

AppSumo chose us for one selected deal!

That's a great opportunity! As a startup (from Poland) we've been noticed and appreciated - it would be a shame not to take it.

We started preparing right away.

We took a few necessary steps to best prepare the product and the team.

✅ Checking the competition - the basis of an effective campaign is in-depth research. Analyzing products from a similar category to prepare ours to stand out for Sumo-lings was the first step.

✅ Preparing reliable support available 24/7 - Analyzing the competition in terms of their offers is not everything. We should also pay attention to their users' comments and questions. This not only helped us to tailor our offerings but also to prepare a database of ready-made questions that later improved the work of the support team.

Here is a side note - we received a support person from AppSumo, yet he did not help us once.

✅ Developing the BOWWE builder for easy onboarding - Additional improvements so users feel familiar with the tool right away and we can avoid unnecessary questions or problems.

✅Creating tutorials - to help users quickly get familiar with BOWWE and develop projects with us.

✅Preparing materials to visually present your offerings - it is easy to fall victim to such visuals. Creating a graphic that will stand out among all the products on AppSumo is quite a challenge and we fell for it too at first. The second option is to make a video. We decided to dedicate this video to show in a fun way how simple our tool is.

Our campaign (and our mistakes)

One of the first and key mistakes we made was to agree with them when negotiating what the offer should be.

Our standard offer includes a total of three products plus two (eCommerce and App design in the near and distant future), and each of these products has a different target group

• Websites and Landing Pages ➡ campaigns and online marketing
• Linking pages ➡ people active mainly in social media
• CVs ➡ individuals

It seemed logical to us not to combine these offers but rather to make three separate campaigns, yet AppSumo insisted. They claimed that they know their users, and all three products in one offer will be the best - we trusted them, we thought they know best. And we were proven wrong.

Conclusion: follow your own reason. AppSumo has great consulting service, but you have to be careful and it's helpful mainly for people who don't have much experience in the business.

Being one of the selected deals at such an intensive time of year has its pros and cons.

👍Pros - high visibility.

👎Cons - It is important to know that positioning on AppSumo is extremely important and influences the campaign results. and that positioning is also determined by the results of previous sales and reviews. We were one of 20 other companies mentioned, unfortunately, the only one with no history on this platform. We had zero campaigns, meaning zero reviews and the rest of the products were already experienced with even 2 or 3 previous campaigns - there was no way to have a 'fair' competition.

There was also the carousel aspect, a place where offers appear on the main page. At first, we were not there, but we raised this issue with AppSumo and managed to negotiate an improvement in our visibility.

Adding keywords to our deal gave a lot. It turned out that earlier our offer was not optimized for the keywords most often searched by Sumo-lings. As soon as we added the right tags, the traffic increased.

Key Takeaways:

1. Reach - Noticeable increase in website traffic and sales - which was expected. Even though the campaign ended over a month ago there is still some traffic.

2. Users - Users are focused mainly on the price. They want products for the least amount of money and do not pay greater attention to what is included in the offer. They have extremely high expectations for discounts - even though our deal for Tier 3 was worth less than 1% of the normal price.

That said, they are experienced with the tools and are committed. I really appreciate the time they took to discuss ideas and share feedback and opinions. AppSumo allowed us to quickly get a large audience and collect from users what they really want from the tool.

We had a lot of valuable discussions with them, it was nice to see how engaged they were with our tool and how much time they spent exploring it and giving feedback (incredibly long). If you want to attract engagement and believe in your product, we definitely recommend it.

In the end, we reached 20 reviews - and ended up with over 4.94 grade!

Thanks to the 20 reviews, AppSumo also included us in their mailing when our offer was near the end, as a reminder of the last days of the sale.

What is our perspective now?🤔

It would be better for us to make and think about campaigns and trust our own experience and knowledge of the tool.

LTD =/= Best option

We found out that it would be much better to suggest 3/5/7 years of subscription for each product and more features within each offer. The offer would be much more attractive and profitable for users, especially those who value the product, ethics, and experience.

I talked to a few other companies that also had their campaigns on AppSumo and they had similar feelings. After some time, such a deal generates losses, is short-term, and does not aim to develop the company.

If you focus on quick profit and sales, I recommend it right away. If you want to build a brand and long-term relationship with clients, it is still a good option to consider, but better opportunities exist.

Conclusions🔍

I know I have listed a portion of disadvantages but not to grumble but rather constructive observations and comments on how to plan your campaign.

Generally, AppSumo had a positive impact on us. Allowed us to believe in our own product, and brought a lot of new users and publicity for our tool. It gave us good feedback on the product and pointed us in a direction worth developing. Showed a great involvement of users and drew significant attention to our product.

I think that with a few improvements and our own experience we would even like to repeat this campaign.

😉 Leave your thoughts in the comments. I'd love to read about your experiences and what worked for you. I'm eager to chat and answer any questions you may have. AMA