What I learned making $14k via AppSumo in 8 months

My co-founder and I are both builders. We had validated the idea of a video capture tool to collect screening responses back in Feb ’22 with a landing page. Since both of us were busy with freelance projects, we only started building Hirevire full time in August of ’22.

Hirevire would be a tool to collect screening responses from candidates. We built the MVP and then crickets. 
We tried fb/google/linkedin ads, reddit/twitter/linkedin posts. Some cold DMs on Linkedin, and some cold emails. But not one person signed up. 🦗

I read a post on IndieHackers about Appsumo and decided to Apply. 

Appsumo has been the only consistent source of traffic and revenue for our project as of now. It’s helped a lot, so I decided to explain everything I learned running my AppSumo Marketplace Deal.

Marketplace Lifetime Deals
:
Upon reaching out to AppSumo, they informed me that I could secure a position in the Marketplace Deals, and not in the Select Deals. The key difference in the requirement for driving all the visits to your deal's designated page and Appsumo making a promotional video. However, the upside is getting 70% of the revenue as opposed to the Select’s 30%.

Limited visibility was a little bit of a worry, but more revenue was a big plus.

I submitted the deal to Appsumo on the 8th of Nov, and had followup up them 6 days later, because I didn’t get any feedback. They have a beta testing program that created an account, and I believe tested out the app to be working. We saw this account and usage sporadically in the app. 
Appsumo approved us and we were live on Nov 22.

Just in time for Black Friday.

Appsumo support were very responsive and helpful. They even helped us change the price and features quickly on email once we started getting feature requests from Appsumo customers.

My primary concern was sending traffic towards AppSumo.
From the beginning Traffic was the problem with our SaaS - we could not drive consistent traffic towards it. During the onboarding process with Appsumo, you will come across the directive to consistently generate traffic towards the deal. While it may result in significantly higher sales, it is not an absolute requirement.

Consistent with our previous efforts, we were able to direct zero traffic to the deal's page. And yet, it performed exceptionally well right from the first week. Some of it was just the Black Friday effect, but most of it was Appsumo’s loyal user base.

Occasionally, I stumbled upon AppSumo ads for Hirevire on Google, Instagram and Facebook.

Support
With the typical Select Deal, you get thousands of hundreds of dollars in a few weeks, but this comes with enormous support pressure, you lose a lot of control, and it can be risky because when you decide to close the deal, you might have too many customers in.

That is not the case with Marketplace Deals. I got one or two support requests per day, maybe a few more in the first weeks. 

These are amazing from a product development point of view. We got a lot of insights into what these users wanted to see. A lot of them had favourite features that they explained to us. Delivering these quickly also got us some great reviews on Appsumo early

Appsumo comments on the product page are also a good way to show your commitment to service. 

Some of the support requests were asking for upgraded features. When we accommodated these through changes in the Appsumo deal, we got higher and higher sales.

In Dec we made available within Appsumo the ability to stack 19 codes - to get the unlimited jobs version of Hirevire. This was $575 and we got two sales for this one month.

We created a Canny page to collect user feedback and I would add feature requests myself on behalf of the users here. This would be a good way to let them know that their feature requests were completed. Also the canny widget is a good way to show the changelog within he app.

Payment

Appsumo pays out 60 days after the end of the month. So sales in November came to our bank account in the first week of February. This was to accommodate refunds (which we’ll get to later).

In Jan we moved the highest plan out of Appsumo and on to our website directly. This gave us cash in the bank to continue development, and saved us the Appsumo commission on these products as well.

January onwards sales numbers above are combined version of both Appsumo platform sales and Lifetime Unlimited Plan sales on our website.

Appsumo continued to be the only source of good traffic to our site. 

Stripe would transfer the money to our account within 7 days of payment.

Refunds


Right now we’re at a 22% refund rate. Most of these are 1 code refunds. 

The customers who paid the most also had the least refund rate. Zero refunds from the lifetime unlimited users from the website or Appsumo.

Customer

We got a lot of users who liked to buy the service but not use it, and few power users who used it a lot. Hiring is cyclical, power user usage was in spikes and not constant.

All of the users were very cognisant of the fact that we were early stage, with a lot of helpful feedback and patient understand when things did not work like they expected.

These users are not going to pay the monthly recurring fees. We tried changing the MRR pricing around for the Appsumo users but got no upgrades.

Suggestions:

Use these early stage customer to find features to build. 

I used Crisp chat and Canny’s feature request forms to collect features to build. There’s no better feeling than building something that people want.

Setup Automatic emails asking for reviews.

A day after they signup, offer an incentive for a review, via an automated email. Most users look at number of reviews before they buy. 
Ask for a review after a good support call as well.

The deal change timer
When the price changes by $10 you can request for a deal changes timer. This gives you additional visibility on the homepage and on the Appsumo email for in the deals closing soon section. FOMO drives up sales.

Hope this helps you on your journey with Appsumo - hit me on twitter @hSanat if you have any more questions.

After a year of being available to users we’ve launched HIrevire on Product Hunt today - Would love your support

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hirevire