Lifetime deals - The growth opportunity for your SaaS

We’ve run 3 lifetime deal campaigns for our SaaS project to sell $50k in revenue and boost our business. In this post, I’m sharing why I think LTDs could be a good idea, how to prepare for this campaign, and how you can benefit from it in the long term.

Intro

We are 2 indie hackers building a Quora marketing tool. We were very skeptical about lifetime deals because it means users can get lifetime access to your product for a single, one-time payment. It turned out to be a good choice, and we benefit from it.

Why I think LTDs are a good idea, especially for tech founders

Let’s be honest. Tech founders, like us, usually prioritize product over marketing. Getting your first sales and growing your product to $100, $200, or $300 MRR takes time and marketing effort/skills.
One way to increase your revenue and get paying customers faster is by running a lifetime deal campaign. You can do that yourself or list your product on lifetime deal platforms.

Here are some of the benefits 👇

Someone else is marketing your product
If you get a deal with a lifetime deal platform, they will sell your product to their audience in exchange for 40-60% of the revenue. This includes creating content and videos, organizing webinars, pitching your product, paying affiliates, etc.
They do all marketing activities (you should probably do 🙈) and take a reasonable cut. It works pretty well.

You will get a ton of feedback from paying users
Receiving feedback from paying customers is different. They expect instant value for their money. Compared to free users who just don’t usually complain when the product is free.
In an early stage of your product, that kind of feedback is most valuable to you. It could help you tune up your product fast. We have received great feedback and feature requests to fill out our product roadmap for months.

They won’t abuse your product
I know many of you are afraid to support LTD users for life, but the truth is they don’t use your product too much. We found out many of these customers just wanted to support us because they believe in what we are building. In fact, our server costs are lower compared to free users' consumption.

There is a big FOMO effect as well. They buy it because they think they will use the tool sometime in the future. I talked to a guy, and he has like 100 Lifetime deals. No joke. These people are collectors.

How to prepare your product for the LTD campaign

Before the campaign

Set up onboarding flow, email sequences, processes, etc.
You can expect a huge spike in new users. Create a sales funnel to get them from registration to succesfull purchases.

Create a public roadmap
It’s an excellent opportunity for you to get feedback from the users. Prepare a system how for gathering feedback and organizing it. It looks good if these users see your plans and what features they can expect from you.

Educate users
Prepare learning materials and teach users how to use your product. It’s much easier to navigate users to the prepared guidelines than explain everything over support chat. You can save a lot of time by having a simple knowledge base.

During the campaign

Regularly engage with users
To avoid high refund rates, talk to the users frequently. Keep them in the loop. Share what’s new, create learning materials, etc. They want to see you are working on the tool, and it’s getting better and better.

Organize webinars
That’s something we have never done before, and it worked perfectly. Dozens of people joined our live stream, where we shared advice on Quora marketing and taught people how to use our tool. We saw sales spikes after each of the sessions.

Build a community
Lifetime deal users are great supporters. They bought your deal because they believe it will have a more significant value in the future. It’s an investment for them. Therefore, they support you when you need it. They share reviews, create content about your tool, like, comment, upvote your posts…they are nice.
Use the momentum to launch a community. Just a simple Facebook group, Slack, or Discord is great.

After the campaign

Launch a referral program
Lifetime deal platforms have a huge network of affiliates. After the campaign is over, you can reach out to them and offer them to join your referral program. It’s a great deal. They only need to update their links, and you will get many backlinks to your website. Win-win. We got over 20 affiliates this way.

Invest resources back into the product
Use the resources you gained and feedback from users and build on that. Focus on MRR, increase your product value and find new customers.
Fun fact: our MRR grew 30% during the lifetime deal campaigns.

Conclusion

Are lifetime deals for everyone? Probably, not. You need to figure it out first. Even we had to downgrade our product for everyone to be able to run a sustainable business.
If you are not sure, run a small LTD campaign by yourself. We did that during the Product Hunt launch when we offered a limited number of deals (50). Then, we evaluated how these users used the product and ran a bigger campaign later.

Don’t worry about losing users you would eventually convert into monthly plans. These LTD customers are a very specific niche audience, and they would probably never buy your tool for a monthly fee.

Did you like my post? We are launching on Product Hunt today, and we would really appreciate your support 🙏 1 upvote = 1 thanks.

Do you want to learn more about lifetime deals? Here are some other helpful links:
We made $2500 from our Product Hunt launch
How I raised $50k from 234 customers via LTD sale
What I learned making $60k on AppSumo