My SaaS made +$400,000 in its first year. Here's how!

My SaaS generated +$400,000 in its first year.

$300,000 of them were generated in < two months!

How?

We sold lifetime deals 💸

Let me share some honest learnings about launching on AppSumo!

We launched FeedHive on AppSumo last year in November.
It was on the platform for a little under two months.

It was in top-5 best-selling products, and it generated more than $300,000 in gross revenue.

Though - before you consider launching on AppSumo - here are some important things to keep in mind!

Revenue split

You will collaborate closely with the AppSumo team.

They do a ton of work for you, and they spend (on average) 50% of the revenue on advertisement.

The remaining 50% is split between you and AppSumo, giving you 30% of the revenue, and leaving them with 20%.

Some think this is a bad deal.
In my view, it's totally fair.

They reach a massive community, they do a lot of initial work, and they take on all the risk.

Though, before you consider launching on AppSumo, do understand, that you get to keep 30% of the revenue.

Consider the risk

With lifetime deals, there's an obvious risk.

You're acquiring customers who only pay once, but who will keep generating operational costs, support costs, etc, which are ongoing expenses.

Before you launch a lifetime offer, make sure you fully understand the implications.

With FeedHive, this was a pretty easy decision to make.

We have worked very hard on keeping our server costs low, thus, it will take a tremendous amount of time before the expense of these lifetime users will exceed the revenue.

In fact - realistically, they never will.
(Lifetime users churn as well).

The growth and upsell potential greatly outweigh the cost here.

And for us, this was a much, much better solution than taking $100K in investments and giving out shares 💀

Support

Support took us by surprise 😵

Our team was not equipped (or prepared) to handle the massive surge of support tickets suddenly coming in.

Unfortunately, this left a lot of users with a bad experience.

If you're considering an AppSumo launch - make sure you have support covered.

If you're lucky enough that your product gets a lot of traction, do yourself a favor, and make sure you can scale support quickly!

The LTD Community

The community can be tough 😬

Unfortunately, there are some founders who take advantage of this system.
They launch, grab the cash, and abandon their project.

This leaves a large part of the LTD community a bit sensitive to certain cues.

At some point, I mentioned in a Facebook group, that FeedHive (obviously) couldn't guarantee to include any possible future feature in the lifetime deals - which caused a small riot.

Users took this as a cue that we were preparing to abandon the project.
Unfortunately, this small mistake did end up hurting our launch.

The LTD community is fantastic, and they are mostly very supportive 🧡

But they can be very alert.
Which is understandable. They've seen a lot of this.

Vicious LTD circle

Finally - be careful not to end up in a vicious circle.

Consider your lifetime offer a way of letting early adopters "fund" your product (as an alternative to taking investments).

And even if it seems tempting to come back and do another launch - refrain from it!

I've seen products doing AppSumo launch after AppSumo launch.

And in between, they're launching on Dealify (or some of the many other LTD market places).

If you notice a product doing this - most likely, they're struggling.

Your goal should still be to establish sustainable, recurring revenue for your SaaS.

However successful your LTD launch is, make a commitment to only do that one launch.

Then spend the money carefully on getting your business properly off the ground 🚀

My experience

My overall experience with AppSumo?

🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮

(...yeah, they roll in tacos, not stars).

Great experience.
Awesome community and the AppSumo team are super professional.

I'd do it again with another product (I might very well 😉)