How to navigate through the uncharted waters of an AppSumo campaign
How it all started
What does a co-founder do when he’s done programming? Launch its product on Product Hunt.
We followed the same path with socialinsider.io and launched it as a completely free tool on PH where 272 people up-voted the product, and we got more than 600 signups in one day.
Next days, the user signups continued to increase, we started receiving Drift messages from people telling us the tool is nice and that they want more features. There was a pretty good vibe in the air.
Along those messages was one from Jeff asking what our pricing plans would be after 6 months. Our exact answer was: “hi, we don’t know, actually we have no idea :))” which was spot on. He told us he works for AppSumo and he thinks we would be a “pretty cool company to promote”.
After recovering from the fact that somebody called us a company (much wow!) we realised we were clueless to what AppSumo was and he had to explain their business model to us. We ended up setting up a Skype call to get more details on how that would work.
We agreed to start the AppSumo campaign at the end of August. Jeff also had great product feedback that we needed to incorporate into the product by then.
This was the start of a great experience.
How to run a successful campaign on Appsumo
What is AppSumo?
AppSumo is a deals website for software (especially SaaS) that posts offers two times a week with a significant discount and special conditions for their audience.
The AppSumo campaigns results
Before digging into the story, here are the results of the campaign and why it was worth spending more than 3 months preparing:
- 4002 sales
We got users from:
- 41.9% US
- 9.48% United Kingdom
- 7.19% Australia
- 6.58% Canada
- 2.77% Italy
- 2.35% Germany
And the list continues with Spain, Singapore, Netherlands, South Africa, Austria, Greece, Denmark and other 29 countries.
- 361 comments & reviews
- 1.4k shares on social networks
How to prepare your servers’ architecture for 4002 customers in 2 weeks
We expected much more traffic and our main concern was that everything would work smoothly and have no downtime during the week the deal was live.
We took a lot of precautions to make sure it all goes well:
- Setup new servers
- Extended our data replication
- Improve load balancing
- Increased storage capacity — the works.
- We got to polishing the dashboard, making it load at least 2x faster and improved the look and feel of the app while continuously consulting with Jeff on the details. He was really helpful and responsive and his insights drove a lot of progress (Jeff, if you’re reading this, we love you!).
In hindsight, it might have been overkill but it kept us not thinking about tech problems.
We got all our flows tested and braced for what would come.
Before the deal went live, we got the text that would go up on their landing page. It looked great and catchy, and we were starting to feel nervous.
The mail went out while we were sleeping and we woke up having tens of notifications from Drift. Lots of people were asking questions, suggesting changes or complaining about things. We all got to it, and for the first day we only did that.
Talked to people. Some were happy, others not so much. Some didn’t understand what the app did, some found some bugs, others just wanted to say ‘hi’ or give us some advice.
It was a big surprise that so many people wrote to us. We each had at least 3 chat sessions opened at any time for the whole day.
When it thinned out we were quite exhausted and thought of a plan for the next days — each of us gets a part of the day when he answers all the chats so the other two can rest.
The next days went by with us either responding to users on chat, replying to comments on the AppSumo page or helping users get on track.
“Show us your Roadmap!” users demanded. We looked at our wall lined with all our future ideas, were struck by a d’oh moment and quickly published a list online. While we were at it we created a community forum and added content, such as FAQ, and a “Feature requests” area.
We managed to finish the sale with 4002 deals sold. This is double what we expected to sell and it mostly happened in the two days we were featured. Our sales graph looks like this:
The spikes were the most demanding ones, as those are the days you get featured on the front page of AppSumo along with the emails going out to all of their subscribers. The end is so abrupt because after the deadline no other purchases are accepted.
We suddenly had a couple of thousands new demanding users that felt like more than users to us. Sumo-lings are a different breed of client, with many of them mentoring us. I think of them as partners that supported us in the early stages of our app.
They took time to do sketches for us or provide reports and data from similar tools in an attempt to help us build a better product. We talk to some of them on a regular basis, and they are always there to give us great feedback, suggestions or just sending their love.
It’s funny how, at first, we thought that we will most probably up-sell the people that come from AppSumo to get them on a more profitable monthly plan. It took less than an hour of the campaign to figure out that this was exactly the opposite of what the community wanted. We quickly dropped the idea and I’m happy we did.
We finished the campaign with 4.5/5 tacos and it was a hell of a ride.
Was it what we expected — definitely not. It was better in every way. If we were cautious the first time Jeff approached us, we would now do it again without taking a second to think about it.
What we learned
1. Having a chat tool was a lifesaver.
Can’t stress how important it is engage with users, especially when they’re just getting started with the application. Be there when they are happy but especially when they are upset. A great chat can bring a person around. Transmitting the right energy and allowing them to vent the frustration can change their perception of the app.
It can also save you a couple of bad reviews and turn people into your advocates.
2. Respond quickly, in a genuine human way (no support, emotionless lingo) and you can turn a bad experience great. People understand that we are real humans that try their best to make every user happy and they appreciate it.
3. An important point was to set up the correct expectations. Whenever we failed to transmit the right, complete info, users would fill in the blanks. And the users are over-optimistic. Of course, what they assumed wouldn’t match reality and this leads to frustration.
This is when being there was crucial. We knew we could deliver on all the features we advertised, but sometimes things weren’t running smoothly. We explained what was going on, fixed their issues and realigned the expectations.
4. People don’t always want things done immediately, but always appreciate it when they don’t feel abandoned.
5. Don’t worry too much, enjoy the ride.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the awesome people we got to know through this campaign: Kim Doefler, Stuart from SEO Chat Guides, Javier, Jeff, Sampath, Nitesh, and many others that keep the positive energy flowing and enable us to go forward :D
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*photo credits go to Vecteezy
