My experience with AppSumo: pros and cons

Two years ago I helped a friend launch his SaaS on the most famous Deals marketplace on the web. Nope it's not Group-On, it's AppSumo and this is how it works.

How it works (summary)

• They specialize on Life Time Deals (LTD - pay once, use forever) and only ~20% of the applicants get to be featured on AppSumo: This makes the bar for being selected quite high.
• You cannot direct list on AppSumo, instead they will help you list it: This is great as you get a good onboarding experience
• They truly take the time on making sure the deal is ready before launching it on their platform i.e. product-testing, copywriting, in-depth hype review, product description, pricing
• They truly care: they do a good job once you're accepted at making sure you will succeed. Their success is from your success.
• If you apply and you don't hear back: they'll usually contact you when the time is good (for them) so keep improving your product, don't just wait
• It can really help you boost that revenue, and get some cash to extend your burn-rate, at the expenses of your operations (read more in the cons section to understand why)
• The AppSumo engine generates unique codes that the LTD buyers can redeem on your app, so there's a tiny bit of engineering to do to make sure the whole ordeal has an happy ending
• AppSumo customers leave review of your product on AppSumo

List of PROs

✅ You get customers for your SaaS/product with minimal effort from your part, since AppSumo has a huge list of subscribers and audience of probably over 1M eyeballs
✅ You make a nice chunk of money if you're doing a successful product launch, which
even if it means you're giving up 70% of your revenue, it could mean 6 figures earnings.
Example:

You sell 5000 LTD of your SaaS for $99 - they take 70% of your gold, but you still take home $148k

✅ The people actively using your product might actually only be <10% over a year, meaning that you have 90% people paying for something that they might only be using once or twice a year. This means that 90% of these people will not bother you via customer support or ask for product updates.
✅ You get - in case you sold 1000 LTD deals - 1000 email addresses and eyeballs on your product. The more you sell the bigger your audience. Crosssells and upselling can become quite fruitful in here.
✅ Word of mouth from successful users that might bring in new sales opportunities
✅ Did I mention you're getting a lot of money for a little effort in marketing and sales?

List of CONs

However, here are the cons:
❌ You give up %70ish of your revenue
❌AppSumo might rank better than you on Google, so your brand name is going to come in 2nd place after their LTD page.
❌If your product isn't intuitive but your marketing is - you're gonna have X thousands new users in your customer support inbox/channels
❌ You're giving up %70% of your revenue!!!!!!!! yess I said it again it's a super bad thing IMHO
❌ Some users might be asking for LTD outside of your LTD timeframe because they feel like they've missed out and thus you'll get a bunch of extra noise
❌It might really hurt you psychologically: AppSumo makes it feel simple to launch a product and you might feel like you're suffering from imposter sydrome, that you've not talked enough to your customers, aren't good at sales or marketing, that your product isn't ready. The truth is - these are probably all partially true. However, you also need to be proud of your progress and not focus on the negatives!!!!!!
❌Cost of infrastructure might become suddenly more expensive if your product gets used a lot by your LTD buyers
❌LTD buyers can ask for a refund for ~90days so you don't truly see a payout until 90 days later the end of the LTD offer expired.

Is AppSumo worth it?

Worst case scenario all your LTD customers are going to ask for a refund within the first 90 days meaning that you're not going to get the big, hoped-for check from AppSumo - since they are the ones who will process the refunds.

Depending on the size of your company (my friends' SaaS was 3 employees and about 20 active customers) it will be a benefit being featured on AppSumo.
Be wary of the reasons you might not want to do an AppSumo deal.

All in all, if you execute well you can get money, good customer feedback (from AppSumo reviews and employees but also from the fact that your LTD might be sticking with you for a long time, and customers that you can upsell to.