Hyde: How to get SaaS product to AppSumo - successes and some mistakes

A few months ago we went to AppSumo with a 93% discount on our product. Preparation took us a month and a half, and in the process we did not find a detailed guide or description of what is required of us, how everything will happen and how we could improve the result. We communicated with several companies that have gone this way before us, but this information seemed insufficient to us. Following this journey from and to, Maria Bocheva, Business Development Manager at OWOX BI, provided a step-by-step guide that will help you prepare for the launch and save time.

Why did we do that

OWOX BI is a B2B SaaS company that performs the role of personal marketing analytics for a business and helps to fulfill a sales plan with analytics data.

In the CIS market, more than 20,000 people use our product, and we decided to test it on the US and European markets. AppSumo is one of the best options for this purpose. There are a lot of users from the USA, Canada, England and Spain in the audience of the site, but there are also many from India and Pakistan.

We did not set a goal for income, but wanted to get feedback and questions from users from other markets. After all, AppSumo users are those who can become early adopters in the market of North America and Europe. They follow the news and try not to miss a good deal.

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How does AppSumo work?

AppSumo is a popular site with regular big discounts on online services and products. The subscriber base is 1M, moreover, AppSumo makes supersegmentation of subscribers based on their involvement and behavior on the site. A large number of affiliate sites and partners can reach more than 50 million people. 500k AppSumo subscribers in social networks is a nice collaboration bonus.

The task of AppSumo is to maximize sales, and there are thousands who want to shine on this platform. Therefore, AppSumo accepts far from everyone and has a long waiting list. You can submit your product here , but it’s better to be introduced by someone who has already successfully launched on AppSumo. Otherwise, the response to the application can wait a few months.

After the application is approved and you have filled out forms with information about your product / service, the AppSumo team prepares a simple, clear and humorous landing page for your product, and also shoots the video itself in order to clearly convey the value of the product.

Users buy a coupon for AppSumo, which is activated in your product.

If the user didn’t like something, he couldn’t figure it out, he realized that he didn’t need the product - he could return the coupon within 60 days from the moment of purchase. Therefore, your task is to involve the user, convey your value and “lead the user through the product”.

AppSumo takes a big commission on sales, but if your product is promising and you know how to bargain, you can get better conditions.

2 months after the receipt of the last payment (when the refund time ends), AppSumo transfers the amount you earned during the campaign to your account.

Be prepared that you will need to sign a non-launch agreement on other discounts for a year. So AppSumo reserves the right to exclusivity.

Who should go on AppSumo?

You already have your audience in the western market. For example, you went to Product Hunt. Since AppSumo users, seeing the product, go to look for social proof of your product.
Do you have a support team with knowledge of English and understanding of the product or you can quickly organize it.
Your site and product are stable and will not fall under the influx of visitors with AppSumo.
Your product is designed for the mass market - you do not sell something super narrowly specialized. It is important to note here that narrowly specialized products are also buying, but the exhaust will be several times less + it will be harder for you to sell this idea to AppSumo.
Your product is easy to explain and convey its value. You can put the whole point of the product in the “elevator pitch” (for 1-3 minutes).
Your product is easy to set up and use - users can go through the funnel on their own without filling technical support with questions. After all, if the interface is confused and buggy, it will be easier for them to return the coupon than to figure it out and wait for the next product from this niche.
You have a large and sensible knowledge base. This will help bring value and sell new features.
Your COGS (cost of goods sold) allows you to make an attractive discount for a lifetime or long-term subscription.
You are ready to receive money after 3 months after the start of the campaign.

We realized that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the possible risks and decided to launch. Further, in great detail and in steps we will analyze all our way from dating to receiving payment and assessing why all this was necessary.

Stages of preparation for launch

Intro We asked for an intro by Vadim Nehaj, CEO Depositphotos, because they have already been successfully launched on AppSumo. Read more about their experience in the presentation .

Preparing for a job interview . At the preparatory stage, it is worth making a document that will answer the following questions.

Which category is the product (Design, Analytics, Education, Marketing / SEO, Advertising, Developer, WordPress, Customer Relationship, Website Tools, Small Business Tools, Productivity, Entrepreneur).
Describe in one sentence what the product does, so that any visitor to the site without special knowledge is understandable.
5 reasons why your product is cool and loved by users.
What are the advantages of the product and what are you cooler competitors.
Cases and success stories that show the practical value of the product.
Formulate your proposal, for example: lifelong access to the product; 3-year access to the most advanced tariff plan; access to online marketing course on Facebook, consisting of 3 hours of video and 7 PDF lists; 215-page book on web design for beginners. We sold a lifetime subscription to OWOX BI Basic 0 plan for $ 49 instead of $ 720 a year.
The retail price of the product, i.e. how much a regular user pays for the offered package of services.
The price of the same product on Appsumo. When pricing it is important for you to consider several factors:
- COGS (cost of goods sold).
- Ability to transfer incoming users to a more expensive tariff plan.
- Expectations of community members. They, by the way, are called Sumo-lings. To evaluate expectations, we monitored previous offers.

What is the purpose of your presence on AppSumo, which will be considered a success, for example: attracting new users, traffic to the site, getting feedback. It is important to understand that the purpose of AppSumo is to generate income.
How many technical and project support staff do you have who can participate in supporting the campaign in good English? In addition to increasing their normal load, it is worth considering the willingness to work in the evening and night shifts. AppSumo must be sure that during the promotion you will be able to work with users 24/7 in all time zones.
The desired start date is usually at least 3-4 months from the date of the interview. This allows you to prepare well for all teams and solve organizational issues. Take into account public holidays in the target markets, you are unlikely to want to start these days.
Duration of the campaign. You are asked to generate 20,000 promotional codes and offer to launch a campaign for 2 weeks with the condition that if the promotional codes are sold out earlier - the campaign stops. Also, you can offer to extend the campaign for an additional month, if sales go, but not all promotional codes are sold out. All conditions are negotiated individually.
Names and contacts of employees who participate in the campaign:
- with whom to coordinate content
- Sales Support
- Technical support
- Legal and financial issues.

This information is needed in order to add you to AppSumo Slack:

The AppSumo team uses Slack to quickly communicate with your team, as well as, in order to acquaint the companies that run on AppSumo between themselves and share feedback. Do not neglect this tool, you can learn something new from those who have already started and discuss the pain common to SaaS companies.

Negotiations - your launch depends on this conversation. It is important that the conversation was conducted by a person with good English who will do Small talk and build trust with the AppSumo representative. Usually the first phoned takes up to 40 minutes, the questions from paragraph 2 are pronounced.

After that, if you filed through a recommendation, you will need to fill out an application form. You can find an example of our form here .

After this begins the longest, painstaking and important stage. It needs to cover several areas at once: marketing, technical readiness (site, landing pages, promotional codes), the formation of a knowledge base and FAQ, the training of the support team. More about each of them.

Marketing

Think about how and when you interact with Sumo-lings. Will you broadcast this campaign to all users (may lead to loss of money due to switching to a lower tariff plan), how do you plan to disseminate information about the campaign (listings, partner posts, advertising), how will these information channels be distributed during the campaign?

We registered in Western listings ( https://www.techbargains.com/ , www.offers.com/c , www.newegg.com , bensbargains.com , www.couponchief.com/coupons/submit ), launched a remarketing campaign for non-paying users and visitors with AppSumo, as well as made announcements in English-language ezines.

All visual materials should be prepared in advance: for landing pages, newsletters, retargeting campaigns, user’s personal account, posts in their own and partner social networks, etc. Make a list of cases to be used for promotion. In order for the AppSumo team to prepare their part of the content, you will need to call their content production team and the writers.

Content production will prepare a video for landing. On the call, you will need to show a demo of the product and answer the same questions that you used to prepare. Also, the team will need a demo access to the product or “sandbox” in order to make a screencast. Before publishing the video on your channel / landing page, the AppSumo team will send you a video for approval, so if there are any inaccuracies in it, you will have the opportunity to correct this. You can find more video reviews of releases on their channel .

AppSumo writers prepare all the content for the landing page. You will get in touch with the copywriting team for the interview, they will ask you the same questions as the video team and the AppSumo representative during the first call. It is worth paying their attention to the reviews on the G2Crowd or Capterra. These are sites with reviews and recommendations that are familiar to Western users and that increase the credibility of your brand. Several such reviews can be shown on the landing page:

After that, the AppSumo team takes a week or two to work through and will return to you with a draft for feedback.

Here is a checklist of what needs to be prepared during this time.

Video from myself. Record a welcome video for the landing page and the first letter. This will help to be closer to the users and look friendly. The video may be a custom screen of the product with an explanation, or it may be an appeal from the company's founder, product manager or another employee.

Landing Prepare a landing page for users who bought a coupon on AppSumo. You no longer need to sell on this page, users come to it with promotional codes. Try to stick with Sumo-lings style, add jokes, references to Taco and one-in-a-lifetime deal.

Triggers for Sumo-lings . Think about how you want to interact with the users who come with AppSumo. For example:

Send a welcome letter with a guide for new users to those who have already activated the license in your product.
Send an engaging letter after a couple of days to help the customer get familiar with the product.
Upsell by product - these mailings can not be immediately prepared, they will need 2 months after the end of the campaign. But think about how they will fall into your communications card from the very beginning.

Reviews and reviews on G2Crowd and Capterra . To prove your reliability and quality of service, use these sites. If all reviews are received in 1 week or from employees of one company, it will look strange. Therefore, get ready in advance, contact loyal users and be sure to add a simple and clear description of the company.

Offer for those who missed the action . And such will be. Think about whether they are ready to sell at this price if the campaign has already ended. If not, what discount are ready to offer?

Webinar with AppSumo (optional) . Often, the AppSumo team offers to conduct a joint Q & A webinar on their platform so that you can show your product and answer questions from users or potential buyers. You should decide in advance on the webinar participants from your team. It will take 2 people with good English. One will lead the presentation, and the second will answer questions in the chat. If you are very limited in resources, you can get by with one person, but in this case you will have to work through the questions from the chat orally at the end of the webinar. All webinar support: invitations, reminders, the AppSumo team takes over. Here is a recording of our webinar.

Formation of knowledge base . Even if you have an extensive knowledge base, create a separate guide for new users with AppSumo. This will help them pass the funnel smoothly, quickly and not create an extra burden on the support department. This is what ours looked like.

FAQ for support . Surely you have sample answers for common questions. Consider how they can be expanded for AppSumo users. For example, our frequent questions were:

How the AppSumo plan differs from our standard Basic plan
For how many GA or ad accounts can I use an AppSumo subscription
Can I try the trial, and then return to AppSumo?

Feature request page . Be prepared for the fact that you will be asked about features that you do not have. This is an excellent source for identifying market needs, but it is important to approach it with sound skepticism and look not only at the feature, but also at the person / company that initiated it. Is this your target customer or not? When we were asked about features that have not yet been released, we asked users to vote (if the feature has already been announced) or leave a feature request on a special page. This does not mean that you definitely need to create such a page, but you should pay attention to feedback and user ideas.

Roadmap product development . AppSumo users may ask you about what improvements are planned, because they buy lifelong access to the product. Therefore, it is important that your support team be aware of product development plans, ideally - to make it public, because Some Sumo-lings may buy a product for a feature that has not yet been released, but will be in the world in the next quarter or two.

Technical readiness

You will need to generate 20,000 unique promotional codes that should apply to the project after the user has entered them on your landing page. You should not request a card from him or require any additional actions to activate the product. These codes are sent to the AppSumo-team, they use a couple of codes to test the funnel, and the rest will be sent to users.

There are no specific requirements for promotional codes, but we got confused and checked each with the help of wordsafety.com , because in the first implementation the code “GAYHUI” was randomly generated.

Check out how promotional codes are displayed in the interface. In this part, we’ve been a little wise and the users, once on the site, often switched to billing to check the settings and this is what they saw there:

The problem is that it does not look like an AppSumo subscription, for which they paid money, it looks like some kind of Basic plan, which is given for free. This caused a flood of confusion and questions at Intercom. Therefore, consider a single messaging at all stages of the funnel, which the user passes.

Make sure the site can handle the load. AppSumo has a large enough coverage and, if the service architecture is not reliable / resistant to surges, you should prepare in advance.
It is also important to understand that users from the USA, Canada and Europe are more demanding on UI and UX. If your funnel is difficult to complete, be prepared that you will have a lot of returns and not very good reviews. Ideally, after entering the promotional code on the landing page, the user should get into the product / project, where it is immediately clear what to do next. If you use any tools for onboarding, do not forget to configure them for the AppSumo script.
The schedule for the fix urgent bugs - if your product is raw, there is no tester or autotest, this will be a critical requirement. You need a person who can fix urgent bugs in the middle of the night. AppSumo users mostly come to the site from evening to morning and they will not wait 12 hours until you fix something - it is easier for them to return the money. We were confident in the product and the schedule was not, although some bugs still found. It is good that they were not critical.

What does it cost to prepare project and technical support teams

Examination . Here again, the difference in mentalities comes to the fore - a good customer success, to which Western users are accustomed to, does not become one day. It is important for you to create support that will anticipate the user's expectations and solve his tasks. Useful article from Megaplan about how to establish friendly support. It is also worth watching the video “Penetrating US Market” from Olman Quesada from AppSumo from the SaaS Nation conference, where he talks about the difference of mentalities and mistakes that make companies from the CIS, communicating with the leaders and customers from the United States. In addition, it is important to have a clear duty schedule: who, when and for which channels are responsible. We will tell about it in more detail a little further.

Tags in Intercom . They should be used. For example, "AppSumo", for all those who turned on the topic of the campaign. This will help customize messages for users.

Decide in advance how you meet the client . Sometimes they have small requests and wishes. If you determine in advance how willing you are to make a concession, this will help users respond more quickly and not lose time and resources for coordination.

Manual for solving technical problems . If your team that is involved in supporting the campaign in Intercom has not encountered such a thing before, let them read this article about bug reports (old, but everything is also relevant). This will help them gather quality feedback from the user and pass it on to the development team.

We were helped in the preparation of spreadsheet with the division of roles :

As you can see, there are fewer areas of responsibility and tasks than are written in this article. This is because at the time of our release such a detailed guide was not yet :)

Sales

Release time . Our campaign started on August 29 at 7 am in the Pacific time zone. If we started on AppSumo again, then we would ask to start as early as possible, for example, at 00:01, since Many AppSumo users are in the east. So by the time the morning comes on the west coast, we would have had our first sales and reviews.

Repeated mailings . The AppSumo team sends mailings in batches - first to the most loyal audience to test your product, then to the rest of the base. During the campaign, the AppSumo team sends mailings several times mentioning your product. It is advisable to know the schedule of mailings in advance and be prepared for the influx of these days.

The continuation of the action . AppSumo can offer to extend the action, if things are going well, and promotional codes have not yet ended. Do not forget to inform your teams about this and extend the duty schedule.

Finish on the way . Be prepared for the fact that you have to finish something in the process, for example, comparison of services or some features. For example, we created a document that was posted in Intercom in order to make the differences between the two tariff plans obvious to Sumo-lings.

Support We tried to have 1 Sales in each shift - for those who doubt and ask questions / leave feedback on AppSumo, 1 person from technical or project support to solve technical issues in Slack, Intercom or by mail, 1 SMM user, for tracking references on social networks and other platforms. Our schedule looked like this:

Time crossing was needed to transfer complex dialogs, detected bugs, etc. Frankly, we were ready for a larger influx than we received, so we changed and adapted the schedule along the way - it makes no sense to sit 3 people all night, if 1 man does it normally.

Reviews from those who bought . Do not forget to thank for the feedback of those who have already bought and work with objections, if any. We had a funny case when a user from the CIS (identified by name and surname) wrote us a good review, but he had only 1 successful purchase on AppSumo (this is displayed in the user profile). The AppSumo team blocked the review, considering that it was fake, although the review was real. Here are the reviews on the AppSumo company page:

Dashboards with sales statistics . During the campaign, you will have access to dashboards from AppSumo, where you can see sales and returns by day:

It is very useful to use this dashboard to keep your finger on the pulse. If you see returns starting to rise, maybe something is broken or there are malfunctions in support work. It is worth checking out. Also, with the help of this dashboard, you can navigate by the approximate income from the campaign.

Analysis of user activities . We analyzed the movement of users in the funnel, based on raw data that we collected in Google BigQuery. It helped to understand where users face difficulties, how they use the product and where they spend the most time. And if necessary, work with certain segments immediately.

What do we do at the end of the campaign

Training So that the base you received from AppSumo does not lie dead, you need to understand the needs of new users and train them to work with your product. This will help get not only positive feedback from them, but also ideas for new features. Over time, this may even push them to move to a more expensive tariff.

Determine where your audience came from. We did this using raw data that we collect in GBQ. Depending on geography, users may have different offers for them, as well as different timing of sending these offers.

Prepare a promotional script for UpSell . Here it is important to consider a couple of points:

Start selling the next plan no earlier than the opportunity to return subscriptions. Otherwise, you can transmit and start annoying users, and they will simply return the promotional code.
Leave them the opportunity to return to the old life plan, if something does not suit them on the upsell plan. This should increase conversion.

Receiving money . 2 months after receiving the last payment, the AppSumo team will clarify the details for the transfer and transfer you your share of the campaign.

What could be done better

Pre-make a landing with the differences of the standard Basic tariff and plan for AppSumo. For many customers, the difference in plans was not obvious. To make it more transparent, I had to make a document with a comparison on the go.
Consider the scenario, why customers should buy several promotional codes, for example, several packages can give access to the next feature.
Add information about the value for agencies that want to make money on the product. There are many agency representatives on AppSumo and if you can formulate your offer so that the agency has to buy 1 code for each client - use this to increase your income.
To formulate an offer so that it is not profitable for current customers to transfer to it, otherwise you may lose part of regularly paying customers. Or, so that it would be beneficial for them to stay on the current plan + buy AppSumo. Then you find yourself in a win-win situation.
Exclude the market (audience) where most of your paying customers are located. Otherwise, this may lead to the fact that they will switch to a cheaper rate.

Spend more time preparing training materials to better convey the value of the product. , e-book , AppSumo

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