From $36K to $90K on AppSumo (Day 17) — what actually changed

Hey everyone,

I shared this post earlier about our AppSumo launch: Which is about the early traction and learnings.

Now, wanted to give a real and honest update.

Today is day 17 of our AppSumo launch.

We’ve now crossed $90K.

But honestly, it didn’t feel like this at the beginning. Today, I am more focused on what works and what keeps the momentum going!

The start was not what I expected

We launched on March 9.
And it was… slow. I was confused and in my mind most of my plans (also life plans) started to shake and change. Being a founder, I hate this rollercoaster feeling, but I accept it, it is always there. Let’s turn back to the main story, not be emotional.

Conversion rate was around 0.7%
First day we didn’t even get 5 reviews
Overall traction was weak

Also, AppSumo is experimenting a lot these days:

Different homepage layouts
No video on product pages (which I always thought was their unique sauce)

So visibility + conversion both felt low.

I had higher expectations and did not know what to do at first.

What we did instead of stopping

We had a similar situation before with Product Hunt.
Didn’t get featured → we didn’t push → we moved on.

This time we didn’t do that.

We stayed and focused on early users. Because Appsumo is totally different from ProductHunt. For me, I won’t launch any product there any more… We stayed because AppSumo is a real sales machine.

We reached out to first buyers and asked: