We Made $214,500 and Set a New Record on Appsumo Deals

Are Appsumo deals worth it?

What’s the story behind Appsumo?

Funny unexpected cases

How to successfully launch on Appsumo

1. Build custom plans for Appsumo users
2. Have a public roadmap
3. Prepare help articles and use a chat tool
4. Support team schedule
5. Stay active on every platform
6. Attract people with kindness
7. Enjoy what you do!

A couple of months ago we publicly launched our Krisp noise-canceling app for both Mac and Windows. The launch was very successful and got us even more excited about Krisp’s future. We realized that our app can help a lot of people live a more productive life, and things just went boom from then on!

We landed on Appsumo deals. I just knew this would be the perfect headstart for Krisp. Let’s dig deeper from here

What is the story behind Appsumo?

Appsumo is an incredible LTD (lifetime deal) platform full of great products, early adopters, and successful entrepreneurs. The essence of the platform is to provide the community innovative products at an extremely convenient price for a lifetime. It sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? 

If you’re new to the concept, the idea of a lifetime deal might sound a bit risky for SaaS products, but long-term it’s going to prove itself a worthy chapter of your journey. Think of it as showcasing your product to a wide community of at least 800,000 early adopters and tech-savvy people and getting the chance to hear down-to-earth feedback from them.

We went right in and sealed the Appsumo deal with a launch date of August 7th, 2019. Nevertheless, you’ll surely still ask the question:

Are Appsumo deals worth it? 

If you want to prove something to people, you always talk numbers. Thanks to the Appsumo deal we:

• Got total sales of $214,500 🤑
• Hit 1000 purchases in one day 
• Welcomed 5,500 new very active paid users into the Krisp family
•  Only 6% of all sales have been refunded
• Got a 4.7/5 overall rating in tacos
• Had 103 reviews and 170 questions on Appsumo 
• Got over 1.7k shares on social media

Naturally, all of this came with fun sleepless nights and a broken keyboard from answering too many questions :)

One vital point most people don’t know is that we only got 30% of the total revenue, so in reality, we only made $64,350. The other 70% fairly went to the AppSumo team. Judging by the chart, it seems intimidating to agree to a deal where you only get so little. 

But the essence of Appsumo deals is not just the revenue that we generated. It’s more about: 

• Communicating with 1000s of tech enthusiasts
• Receiving detailed and constructive feedback on the product
• Getting brand exposure in the form of video reviews, social media shares, and word of mouth

To top it all off, we got plenty of new Krisp users and comments from all over the world. You can imagine how excited we all were!

All the feedback we got from our new users gave us more room to make Krisp better and discover more ways to make it accessible to people from different fields and occupations. 

Trust me, Appsumo deals are definitely worth it, but all these results don’t appear all by themselves. It all depends on your and your team’s hard work and dedication, which brings us to the next question:

What’s the Appsumo launch like? 

Hectic. 

After negotiating the deal with the Appsumo team, we prepared the marketing copy, planned out the entire launch period, and stood still awaiting the launch date. 

Several people flooded in with questions about Krisp and started rating and leaving reviews on the Appsumo page right in the first 48 hours of the launch. There were a few of us, but we made every conversation count. 

We prepared a list of help articles so that the team could refer to them anytime they had any common questions - it’s the quickest and most efficient way to make sure people get a detailed answer and onboard successfully. 

Besides, you manage to respond to more people and focus easier. In numbers, we had a total of 612 open tickets at the time and if you happen to exclude the help articles, you’d get a crazy amount of people waiting for answers they didn’t find.

Every conversation was a way to engage with users more and understand them better. We were excited to see people test Krisp and feel genuinely amazed by how it works, especially with all the different creative ways they chose to make noise for it. 

But just like everything else, nothing is picture-perfect and we had negative reviews as well. It’s important not to lose the spirit and be able to handle negative reviews as well (I’ll tell you how we do it shortly 😉)

And then someone rated us 1 taco 😱

Funny story, we had a conversation with a new user who had just checked out how Krisp works and by the sound of it, he was absolutely amazed at the innovative technology behind the app. Impressive reviews are motivational unless you see them rate 1 taco afterward. We couldn’t understand why we got a rating of 1 taco if the review was so positive.

After reaching out to him once again, we discovered the misunderstanding and how in a rush to leave a good review, he actually did the exact opposite. 

This is where we got a little worried because changing a review is not really common practice and it took several hours to get the Appsumo support team to resolve the problem. (Kudos to you Appsumo, but please make the support faster 🙏). 

Negative reviews are often a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication. We had another case where a user gave us 1 taco because they misinterpreted the purpose of the app. 

They thought Krisp is supposed to remove the background noise in real life so that you don’t hear it around you even with your own ears (which is actually a brilliant idea). Of course, things worked out because I reached out to the user and explained how Krisp works in detail, and the benefit of the call was that I even got to show them a live demo on the spot.

Anyway, cases like this help us understand how one word is capable of changing the essence of the product and how vital it is to carefully plan out the messaging for your brand and handle such situations. 

During the launch, Appsumo also sent out newsletters to its community members, which was a great opportunity to reach out to a wider audience at once. 

The first newsletter was sent out on the launch date to the top 4,000 sumo-lings (their community members), followed by another newsletter in the second week to all the sumo-lings. If you take a look at the chart, you can see the first newsletter had the most impact on the visits to our website along with the fact that the launch generated quite the buzz.

To keep up with all of these cool events all at once, we had to stay active on every platform 24/7. And I mean it! We had to carefully plan out the overall strategy throughout the launch, and here are a couple of essential points that you should keep in mind.

How to successfully launch on Appsumo

As an early-stage startup, launching on Appsumo can have a pretty varying outcome for everyone, but after having to experience this head-on I separated some common points that will benefit you either way.

1. Build custom plans for Appsumo users 

First and foremost, it’s vital to implement custom pricing plans and build a coupon system for the Appsumo users. You will provide 10,000 coupons to the community members and your primary objective will be to tailor correct pricing and write out all the necessary instructions on how to redeem those coupons as well. Keeping it simple would be the best way.

Appsumo will prepare a separate article page with all the information about your product as well as the deal terms, plans and features.  

This is where many users are likely to visit your website, so it’s better if you just go over your landing page and confirm that everything is in place and ready for the big wave.

2. Have a Public roadmap 

Now we didn’t actually go over this step during launch, but having a public roadmap can significantly impact the future development of your product. You can include all the possible features that you want to integrate into your product and ask the sumo-lings to vote for the ones they think are useful and exciting.

A public roadmap is a quick and easy way to understand what your users are interested in and how much do their expectations align with your future plans. 

If you do plan to put out a roadmap to the public and be transparent, there are a few ground rules that you need to follow - don’t give out any internal information, any specific dates and especially keep everything high level, since you don’t want the competitors to get in the way. 

Overall, having a public roadmap during the launch will be a quick way to gain a lot of insights and improvements by awesome tech-savvy people. 

3. Prepare help articles and use a chat tool

As I said before, help articles will save you some time. Pick out all the important features of your product and write out tutorials (preferably with videos) to make sure people know how to use your app. You can also brainstorm some questions that you think the users are likely to ask and pick out some questions from the ones they’ve already asked before. When you write the articles, make sure those are simple to understand and detailed enough to be useful. Don’t make them too long either - short and concise is the way to go. 

We managed to do all this thanks to Crisp customer support solution 🙌 which let us set up everything super quickly and even integrate with Slack to help monitor the opening tickets on the spot. 

You can open different categories like features, how-to’s and stack the most important help articles in each of them for quicker access. 

Doing this will ensure your support team’s availability and rule out some recurring questions throughout the entire launch period. I’ll be more than happy to share more insights on this, so if you’re interested in the entire process drop me a message.

4. Support team schedule

For the rest of the questions, it’s important to prepare a 24/7 schedule for all the people who are going to answer questions. As a co-founder, I highly encourage to answer questions yourself as well, since it builds more trust with the community and you get a quick picture of what users think and what insights they have.

The most traffic to the website happens on the first couple of days after the launch, and especially after sending out the newsletters. When planning out the schedule, also consider if your support team is operating remotely, because you’d also have to consider the time zone differences.

And it’s not just the customer messaging platform that you’d have to manage… ⏰

5. Stay active on every platform

You have to be actively guarding every platform for any new questions, and be as fast as the wind - all customers appreciate fast support. 

First of all, set up your customer messaging platform for those who visit your website. That’s the most immediate way people will contact you after direct questions on the Appsumo page (where you also have to stay active and respond to comments). Have the help articles ready and constantly monitor their questions; there might be a need for a couple of quick changes. 

Stay active on social media, because people might tweet about you or reshare the launch-related posts. Joining lifetime deal groups on Facebook like Martech Wise and Lifetime Tech Deal Fans is mandatory since most of the people lead internal discussions there as well. It’s a good idea to stay up-to-date with what people think. 

All of us were up and about on all these platforms and even though it was hectic and busy, it was also quite inspirational.

6. Attract people with kindness

Our ultimate motto in any situation. And trust me you’ll have a lot of situations where you will have to handle criticism, negative reviews, and skeptical people. 

Of course, many people are gonna be excited by what you create and wholeheartedly support it, but there will also be people who’re skeptical.

The truth is no matter what you do and how perfectly you plan everything, there will always be people who seem suspicious of your activities, beliefs, and products.

And that’s okay!

There’s no need to feel obligated to perfect your product for every single individual; the real deal is to be able to inspire and motivate people with your story and help them with your innovative ideas and products. 

If it doesn’t work out, simply do your best to never leave any unanswered questions. And don’t forget that a healthy dose of skepticism can be motivational and help you perceive your cool product in a new way. 

7. Enjoy what you do!

Launching on Appsumo is a big event and a great opportunity for your startup, so try to enjoy every single day of it. It’s a whole month but in reality, it will be so hectic you won’t catch the moment it ends. Take a moment and appreciate what you’ve accomplished together with your team!

The bottom line is any early-stage startup should try and launch on Appsumo and get to know a whole new tech community of people who are passionate about innovation and will have a massive impact on the development of their product. 

We are thankful we got to experience this ourselves because it only made us dream bigger and work harder! ❤️

If you have any questions on Appsumo deals I’ll be glad to have a chat so ask away in the comments or write directly to my LinkedIn profile.