AppSumo Part II: A Year Later

This is a follow up to our original post, for context read about our initial experience with AppSumo.

When we wrote a year ago about AppSumo and our experience crafting a deal for the Sumo-lings, we praised the experience, but confessed to having hoped for a bit more. Although we made just over $1,000 in our initial offering, we had stars in our eyes as we created the deal pages over getting access to the massive AppSumo megaphone promised at 10 reviews. Not the email list - which is still out of reach requiring 25 reviews, but rather the post to their (still massive) Facebook group.

We reached 10 reviews and received a small boost in traffic - but not a big surge in sales. It makes sense, we're not as widely accessible as a product as some of the SaaS tools on AppSumo (requiring some light markup-editing) and we considered the experiment pretty much done. We removed the AppSumo banner from our page, stopped driving traffic to them, and moved on to other things - but the signups kept dripping slowly in.

Those signups have quietly added up. Over time, our AppSumo total has risen to approximately $3,500 (approx because some money is still pending review since AppSumo allows for 90-day refunds). Those Sumo-ling customers (perhaps because many are experienced SaaS power users) haven't required too much support or even maxxed out their submission or action limits - many modestly using the service, at all.

AppSumo hasn't been what we expected - but hasn't failed us either. It's quietly succeeded by driving us a trickle of traffic and conscientious software-savvy users who appreciate our product. Those that do enthusiastically use our service have given great feedback and been wonderful product champions, which kinda makes sense - they already bought it, so they have an interest in it succeeding.

So for the return on the value that we've gotten, AppSumo has been an excellent deal for us, as we've seen codes continue to sell but without a corresponding increase in support burden. And AppSumo users consistently give us great feedback that drives our feature roadmap.

That's why at Formcake, Sumo-lings are always welcome!