Insights from Alice AppSumo campaign 🌮
Recently, we launched one of our side projects, Alice, on AppSumo, the world's most popular LTD platform. I want to share our first impressions and some insights with you
How are we doing on AppSumo almost a week after the launch?
💰 We earned $5,478.68
👀 9,726 people viewed the offer
📈 Conversion rate is 1.49%
🥵 We have 100+ questions and reviews
⭐ Average rating is 4.33/5
I'll briefly comment on all these statistics shortly. The first question that probably comes to your mind is, what exactly is this LTD? It stands for Lifetime Deal, meaning a lifetime offer on software. In short, you buy once and get updates for life. Generally, this refers to the life of the application, not yours, because LTD is a rather poor deal for app creators and developers. After an initial small cash injection, they have to maintain and develop it indefinitely. So why did we even decide to go for this? I'll write about that a bit later as well.
First, let's break down the numbers:
The entire campaign on AppSumo lasts 60 days and can be extended or launched multiple times. Some tools never leave AppSumo. They can then earn around $200-300k. How much of that goes to their creators? It depends. I negotiated hard (or at least I think I did) and managed to get a better than standard 30% deal, but not much.
The best moments of the campaign are the beginning and the end when the application is promoted on the main page. You could say that we've passed the beginning and closed it with a result of $5,478.68 (which means the application sold for over $15k).
So far, this is our net earnings, although this figure will likely change after taking returns into account. I've noticed that on AppSumo, people are very willing to return products, and the purchase is a form of "trying out" the application, so you can expect a lot more returns by the end of the campaign. This is also one of my observations on why AppSumo is so popular. People trust the return procedure, so they feel safe. You have to be ready for 20% of buyers to make a return. Fortunately, AppSumo handles this, and you don't have to worry about it, except for creating a mechanism that revokes access.
At the end of the campaign, you simply invoice AppSumo for the earned amount, minus tax, minus returns, minus their commission. As you can easily guess, this leaves you with a few percent of the original purchase price. So if you consider our cheapest plan for $49 (which AppSumo forced us to create, arguing that deals with a higher initial threshold perform much worse) and the fact that we offer 100 conversations with AI tokens included in Alice - our profit is totally negligible, if at all. So again, why even bother? I’ll answer this soon.
It's worth understanding that there are two types of campaigns on AppSumo. First, you can simply submit your application and create your own LTD, which AppSumo accepts and lists on the site. Such a deal probably gathers some reach but is not especially promoted by AppSumo. The second type of application is AppSumo Select, where you work together with the AppSumo team on launching your offer. Then it gets additional exposure on the main page, a Select badge, and is featured in AppSumo's email campaigns, and you work closely with the team to prepare the best possible offer.
That was the case for us. I personally reached out to AppSumo, and that's how we got accepted into the Select program. The AppSumo team wrote the offer content for us, as well as the script for the video, which they recorded, and helped us construct the offer and individual Tiers. Of course, we had input on everything and could provide feedback, and the entire process took place smoothly on AppSumo's Slack. If I were to recommend anything, it's definitely worth trying the Select version because, despite a bit more involvement, we get significant exposure. Just write to AppSumo, and your tool will be considered.
Okay, so what does the traffic on the offer page look like? In less than a week, our offer was viewed by almost 10,000 users, with a conversion rate of 1.49%. AppSumo itself records about 200,000 visitors daily. In terms of visits, that's quite a decent result. For comparison, on the day of Alice's launch on ProductHunt, we had about 3,500 visits from that channel, securing the #4 spot. Besides the offer views on AppSumo, this also translated to visits on our site, and here's what the stats for the past week look like.
So you could say that quite a lot of people transition from AppSumo to our site, primarily to read more and compare offers. This is an important aspect of running a campaign: what you have on your site must be consistent with the offer page on AppSumo. Even the slightest discrepancy leads to continuous questions and issues, so it's worth taking care of. During the campaign, I've already changed both the site and the AppSumo offer several times to make them as aligned as possible.
Another significant advantage of running a campaign on AppSumo, besides the site traffic, is the dofollow link we get from a domain with a very good reputation. It can be said that this is a very substantial added value (similar to launching on Product Hunt). The AppSumo domain has a high DR and positively impacts SEO. From my experience, links from good domains are one of the best things we can do for our project.
Next in line for analysis are the questions and reviews. I believe this is one of the most valuable aspects of the entire campaign. Firstly, I didn't expect it at all, although perhaps I should have, because on the first day on Product Hunt, we usually respond to over 100 questions as well. Here, we received a ton of questions, which deeply engaged us in support.
And you know what? Great - that's exactly the point!
Some creators treat the necessity of supporting customers as a chore, but I appreciate every opinion and review. This is simply the most important thing that allows me to create an even better product. The value that can be derived from such comments is priceless! Not to mention the reviews, which directly give me immense value: I can place some of them on the site, and from most, I can extract specific phrases that I can use to talk about the product, because the language of customers is the best language for promotion!
To not be too cheerful, of course, there is also a negative aspect. For example, we received a few negative reviews at the beginning, which certainly negatively impacted the campaign's performance. We had to deal with them somehow; some were justified, so we quickly fixed minor bugs, but unfortunately, some were not, and we couldn't do anything about them. Despite email contact, the reviewers were not interested in resolving the issues, or maybe they didn't have any at all because the reviews were very general. So what was the motive? Hard to say, doesn't matter. On AppSumo, we have the last word, as we can add a comment to the review, so I just hope people read it and draw their own conclusions.
The AppSumo algorithm works in such a way that the main engine determining our success is engagement in the campaign. This includes gathering reviews, actively participating in discussions, and responding to questions. The AppSumo community is quite demanding, and it's important to understand and accept that. Gaining many positive reviews and activity in the campaign guarantees a better position during the campaign and mentions in AppSumo's emails, which provide a significant boost.
I also try to make the most of the campaign and engage the AppSumo team even more in the results, as we are ultimately playing on the same team. Therefore, I strive to remain active in the campaign and encourage them to take action as well 😊
Additionally, a few people, including our friend Rafał from Digital First AI, who had a successful launch on AppSumo, gave me plenty of tips. Rafał, among others, recommended reaching out to the administrators of LTD AppSumo groups on Facebook. Another friend advised me to announce the deal in several specific newsletters focused on AI. We also plan to launch a campaign to our email lists, but we've left that for a bit later and are just starting the communication.
AppSumo provided us with an affiliate link, from which almost the entire sales amount goes to us, so we also posted it on the Alice site and in the current pricing. This is important because we don't want anyone who buys at the regular price to feel bad when they find out about an ongoing deal they missed. Above all, it's worth being honest and transparent with our users. Similarly, we tried to ensure that the deal on AppSumo was not worse than what was offered to those who supported us earlier. The pricing of Alice was arranged in advance to take this into account, but it's mainly about not creating a situation where someone who buys earlier and supports us gets worse conditions than within the LTD.
Is it worth being on AppSumo?
Returning to the question of why we decided on a theoretically not-so-good deal as the creators of Alice? Many of the arguments have probably already been mentioned, but I'll add a few more and summarize them:
#1 First: Market Feeling
Alice is a tool that competes in a very saturated space of AI tools. We have little time to promote Alice because solutions of this type appear daily. Probably, those that gain the right reach first have a chance of success; the rest will fail. AppSumo gives us the advantage of quickly reaching many users.
#2 Second: Why Not?
The way Adam and I run our ventures simply allows us to experiment without any consequences. If we were developing the project with a larger team and investors, we certainly wouldn't have the opportunity to carry it out. We always try to be in a comfortable situation where we can just test something and see if it works.
#3 Third: We Want to Learn
This stems somewhat from the previous point. Our main motivation is learning and drawing conclusions. Also, to be able to later deliver them to you, in this form or during a Sprint. This is definitely the most valuable for us because we gain valuable experience that will pay off in the future.
#4 Fourth: Feedback
As I mentioned, the most important thing for me is feedback from users. If places like Product Hunt or AppSumo can provide me with hundreds of valuable questions and comments in literally a few days, I think it's an unfair advantage that should be utilized.
#5 Fifth: Good Fun!
Seriously, we treat it as a sport and good fun. We try to enjoy our projects and their achievements. We are not attached to the financial outcome or specific results. We simply enjoy the process, gaining experiences, new acquaintances, and reaching more people with what we believe gives them value.
Was it worth launching Alice on AppSumo? It will probably be easier for me to summarize this after the campaign ends, but if asked today, I would say yes, considering the above.
That’s not a reason for posting, but if you want to know what Alice can do and how AI assistants can help you with productivity - of course, I invite you to take advantage of the offer, there probably won't be a better one 😊 Just please, use our link, so that we can get more than few bucks!
Get lifetime deal for Alice now »
Once you do, please, write a review 🙏 Now you know why this is especially important for us. Thank you!
Until the next one,
Greg