Meet the Makers: Success Stories from the AppSumo Marketplace

The AppSumo Marketplace is a bustling, collaborative community where creators can easily launch and sell their best digital downloads, courses, and apps to help fellow entrepreneurs succeed. Think that could be you? Submit your product here!

Our Meet the Makers series rounds up some of our favorite Marketplace success stories and talks to the enterprising founders behind some of your favorite Marketplace products about their experiences. Jump into some of the best Marketplace Case Study stories below, hear about their launches, and steal their secrets for success!

1. Thrive Anywhere

What It Does:

The Lead Magnet Library from Thrive Anywhere features workbooks, planners, and everything else entrepreneurs need to create their own professionally-designed lead magnets and tripwire products, so they can grow their lists.

Meet Lynette:

My name is Lynette Chandler. I am the founder, creative director, content developer, and basically Lead Everything at Thrive Anywhere.

I was talking to a long-time friend, and she said that being on AppSumo legitimizes our company in her eyes. This is something I cannot buy or advertise my way to.

For 14 years, I developed WordPress plugins, and that was my business. After a traumatic event in my personal life, I felt inspired to make a change. I’m a planner junkie, love creating systems, and enjoy creating art. So I merged the two and Thrive Anywhere took off in 2018.

How did you find out about the AppSumo Marketplace?

I’m a long-time fan of AppSumo and one day, I read someone’s email. I can’t remember if it was Noah’s email or the AppSumo email. What I do remember was seeing the call for people to submit their products through Haul Drop.

Naturally, my products don’t qualify, since they’re not exactly physical products. I followed some links and landed on the AppSumo submission form. At that time, I didn’t think you guys were accepting any other products but SaaS. I also didn’t know you all were planning the AppSumo Marketplace. I figured, “What’s the worst that could happen?” and submitted my product and promptly forgot about it.

Months later, I heard from Seann, who told me the application wasn’t approved for the full promo—something I completely expected—but approved for the new Marketplace.

Tell us about your launch! Any challenges?

Overall, it was a smooth process. The folks at AppSumo gave lots of information about the process in an easy-to-understand format. I appreciated the examples given along the way.

The hardest part was to figure out what to offer, at what price points, so it could be sustainable for us. Plus, we had to figure out how to make all that work within our existing delivery system. For example, I didn’t know how to generate thousands of coupon codes, and now I do. I also learned more about our own shopping cart system through this.

The other tough part is also writing the copy. In one portion, I didn’t know where that copy would go and how it’s presented. Writing copy also isn’t my strong suit. I wrote and rewrote everything so many times. I was also very grateful for Seann, who cheerfully answered all my questions and was super fast, too.

What value did you receive from your promotion?

The best value from the promotion isn’t monetary. Sure, we’ve sold many codes and reaped financial rewards from it, but one of the biggest values for me is impacting how people see us.

I was talking to a long-time friend, and she said that being on AppSumo legitimizes our company in her eyes. This is something I cannot buy or advertise my way to.

The other thing of value for us is in reaching new people we couldn’t otherwise reach on our own. Again, I can advertise to reach new people, but with this promotion, I’m not losing my shirt on advertising mistakes.

What advice would you give to anyone interested in the Marketplace, so they can get the most of their launch?

Understand that Marketplace deals are different.

Since you have to bring your own traffic (and reviews) at the beginning, you must decide if you want to make your offer available for new customers only or everyone.

If you decide it’s for everyone, you want to strike a balance between offering an unbeatable deal and future sales. Do something special for people who give you reviews. You can tell them—or not—but you can’t go wrong if you reward them. Pull out all the stops. Ask people you know to share the promotion and reach out to your affiliates if you have any. For best results, reach out personally.

What’s been your favorite thing about launching with us?

It would definitely have to be reading the reviews and seeing how my product helps others.

What’s your company vision? Tell us what’s next for you!

I’m working on streamlining our system even more. I’m always on the lookout for new topics to make into workbooks and now looking into creating Canva templates.

2. DocPro

What It Does:

DocPro offers a document generation tool that helps users quickly and efficiently create automated documents and contracts. Users can choose from over 1,500 templates through DocPro’s advance search function, complete a questionnaire to customize the template, and generate a legal document automatically.

Meet Kim:

I’m Kim, the CEO of DocPro, a leading online provider of automated documents to businesses and individuals.

I think AppSumo has the fairest revenue sharing plan anywhere on the planet.

DocPro launched at the beginning of this year (2020) with a team of 10 people. Our original idea was to build a community based on commonly used legal documents. We encourage our users to share their documents with us, which will then be revised by our lawyers into templates and made available to other users. We’re also open to document requests from our audience.

How did you find out about the AppSumo Marketplace?

We applied to Noah Kagan’s “Let Me Help You Sell” program soon after the launch of our site, and we got into the final 10 😀!!

Tell us about your launch! Any challenges?

Ultimately, we didn’t win in Noah’s program, but we got into the Community Spotlight program anyway. Launching is easy for a SaaS company like us, as we already have Promo Codes developed on our system. All we need is to generate thousands of unique codes for AppSumo, along with a promotion page for your product.

The most challenging part is actually responding to positive and negative feedback after launch. You will need to dedicate someone to respond promptly on a daily basis. It’s important to keep your feedback loop short and fix any issues promptly. It’s also always important to stay polite and positive, even if you think the criticism is unfair or unfounded.

What value did you receive from your promotion?

It is generating good regular income for our site, given how much revenue the new program shares with us. I think AppSumo has the fairest revenue sharing plan anywhere on the planet. In addition, DocPro has increased its exposure to our target market segment, small businesses through AppSumo.

What advice would you give to anyone interested in the Marketplace, so they can get the most of their launch?

You should have a dedicated sales or marketing personnel responding to feedback daily, particularly when your site is first launched.

What’s been your favorite thing about launching with us?

Your revenue sharing program— it’s the best deal in town.

What’s your company vision? Tell us what’s next for you!

We’d like to provide an end-to-end product whereby our users can not only create documents with us, but also negotiate, execute and store the signed document on our cloud for easy access.

3. Markup Hero

What It Does:

Markup Hero is a fast and elegant screenshot and file annotation tool that does everything you need without the bloat. It works on Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome, and Mobile Web.

Meet Jeff:

Hey, I’m Jeff Solomon, the Co-Founder & Product/Marketing Head at Markup Hero.

Our primary goal was receiving feedback to help prioritize our roadmap. We have a list of 1000 things we want/need to do, but prioritizing them based on what customers really need was always a challenge. We got this in spades.

We’re a small team of three hustlers: one dev, one product/UX, one marketing/BD/ops. You get the picture. We’re very scrappy; everyone is a builder and we’re very iterative and strategic about what we build, why, and when. We launched in March 2020. We actually use “bare metal” servers (as Glib likes to call it) for certain aspects of our product. Basically, it means we have some real hardware vs. virtual servers which is pretty standard these days; we use both.

How did you find out about the AppSumo Marketplace?

I’ve bought from AppSumo many times, but only stumbled on the marketplace recently through some FB groups.

Tell us about your launch! Any challenges?

There was some prep work, but it was clear that putting in the extra time to get the listing and being ready to field support/questions made a huge difference. We focused our channels to the AppSumo questions forum, our product roadmap, and Intercom. With that, we were able to manage the volume, which was particularly high in the first few days.

Sidenote: the listing was accidentally launched for six hours a few days before our scheduled launch, so we were caught off-guard. But it was promising to see people finding the listing even without any promotion!

What value did you receive from your promotion?

Our primary goal was receiving feedback to help prioritize our roadmap. We have a list of 1000 things we want/need to do, but prioritizing them based on what customers really need was always a challenge. We got this in spades.

As a company, we always try to balance our product development between two things: what customer is asking for and some aspirational/strategic goals that we think will either “wow” customers (“I didn’t even realize I needed that!”) or allow us to break into different customer segments. Of course, we also got users and revenue, which is always valuable. Because our product is somewhat viral—when you use it, you share it—we’re getting users from users, and that was important for us.

What advice would you give to anyone interested in the Marketplace, so they can get the most of their launch?

We went with a one code offer. I think for the Marketplace, this kinda makes sense. It makes support simpler. Also, consider that the Marketplace is better for earlier stage products compared to select deals. AppSumo is a great place where you can get started, learn what you need from the community, then build out your product from there. Afterward, you can try and launch a select campaign six months later. That’s what we’re planning to do.

What’s been your favorite thing about launching with us?

Meeting the users, for sure. While it’s true that AppSumo users can be demanding and extremely vocal, they can also be surprisingly reasonable. We had a number of users tell us that they wouldn’t use the product without X, Y, and Z features. But they also said that they would hang on until we had them. Along the way, Sumo-lings gave us more valuable feedback and even helped us debug some issues.

What’s your company vision? Tell us what’s next for you!

Our original idea with Markup Hero was “annotate anything”. The idea the file annotation could only extend to images and screenshots, which is what almost all of the competitors and incumbents offered, seemed so limiting. Why can’t you annotate more than that? PDFs, Google Docs, Word Docs, Sketch Files, PSDs, Keynote Files, etc.

Today, we have images, PDFs, and Google Docs/Sheets/Slides. In the long term, we’ll enable more and more file types. But the vision goes beyond that.

What we discovered is that file annotation doesn’t just need to happen in a silo. Again, that’s pretty much the standard approach for most products—you take a screenshot or upload an image, then you share it. But what we see is that people need and want to annotate from everywhere they already work.

So think of our product as something you can open files with from wherever you are: Google Drive, Slack, Asana, Jira, Toggl, whatever tool you can picture. If you want to annotate something, then you just “open with Markup Hero.” We’ve done some of this with Google Drive and Slack, and we’ll do more with more tools over time.

4. Niceboard

What It Does:

Niceboard is a modern, easy-to-use job board software that lets you create and manage your own job board business with just a few clicks.

Meet Olivier:

Hi, I’m Olivier and I’m the solo CEO/Founder of Niceboard. I design, build, and market the product!

The best part about launching on the Marketplace has been the exposure to a sizeable amount of users willing to share feedback and help improve the product.

I started the business early this summer after running DesignerJobs (a job board I had made for designers and creatives) for a few years. I’ve asked many times to either sell or white-label the software powering it. So I decided to take the plunge and created Niceboard!

How did you find out about the AppSumo Marketplace?

I heard about it on ProductHunt from an existing AppSumo user who was running a deal on the marketplace.

Tell us about your launch! Any challenges?

Launching on the marketplace was pretty smooth overall. It just took a little effort to put together a compelling listing (description, imagery), which actually helped me refine my pitch and value proposition in the process.

The main challenges I faced during and after launching were dealing with all the new customers I was onboarding and fixing bugs as they were being reported! At one point, my app was even crashing every now and then. I had to rewrite a good chunk of the code while doing customer support, which was super stressful at the time. In the end, it all contributed to making Niceboard into a much more robust product.

What value did you receive from your promotion?

I’ve received a ton of feedback and ideas for new features, had tons of bugs exposed and fixed, and gained a better understanding of the market and users’ needs. Oh, and the money doesn’t hurt 😀

What advice would you give to anyone interested in the Marketplace, so they can get the most of their launch?

Get into the habit of asking your users for reviews if they’ve been satisfied. Next, communicate a lot! Finally, be ready to handle a ton of feedback.

What’s been your favorite thing about launching with us?

The best part about launching on the Marketplace has been the exposure to a sizeable amount of users willing to share feedback and help improve the product.

What’s your company vision? Tell us what’s next for you!

I plan on releasing more features for Niceboard—more specifically, our “Pro Plus” plan, which will include the much-anticipated feature of API access.

Overall, the product’s direction will involve making job boards more and more customizable. That way, users can really go all out and build their own custom vision through our software—all without writing a line of code! Depending on the product’s rate of growth, hiring a developer could be a possibility!

5. Digital Dojo’s Advanced Course in Digital Marketing

What It Does:

The Advanced Course in Digital Marketing by Digital Dojo is a three-month course designed to train entrepreneurs and business owners on the practical aspects of digital marketing, from plan to execution. I’ve consolidated my 8+ years of hands-on experience in digital marketing to not only curate the content, but more importantly, the sequence of topics delivered.

Meet Sachin:

I am Sachin Sadare, Founder & Director at Digital Dojo OÜ. Digital Dojo OÜ is a leading digital marketing training & consulting company based in Tallinn (Estonia) with offshore offices in India (Mumbai & Goa).

But more than the money, the value we received was the feedback and questions we got from those who enrolled into our course.

Digital Dojo started as a digital marketing training company in June 2016. Our objective was to empower entrepreneurs, business owners, students, and working professionals with various digital marketing skills. In August 2018, we launched DDLP (Digital Dojo Learning Platform): our online learning platform.

DDLP provides a complete learning ecosystem—rich multi-media courses, live sessions, interactive quizzes, assignments, proctored online exams, project evaluation, block-chained certificates, and job/project listings—to help our audience achieve their learning objectives. We’re a 10+ member team constantly striving to improve the outcomes we can bring to our learners.

How did you find out about the AppSumo Marketplace?

I have been a Sumo-ling for a long time now. It was through emails that the concept of the AppSumo Marketplace was communicated to everyone. I thought it was a great opportunity for me to present my course as a deal through the AppSumo marketplace. It helps to read all the emails sent. 😊

Tell us about your launch! Any challenges?

The process of launching on the Marketplace was super smooth. The process has been so clearly defined and implemented that there are very few questions or concerns during the entire launch. Seann was amazing at answering emails and clarifying any doubts I had during the entire process. He made it seem like a cakewalk. The rest of the team at AppSumo made it super easy to launch our deal on the Marketplace.

What value did you receive from your promotion?

One definitely makes a good amount of money through the marketplace listing. But more than the money, the value we received was the feedback and questions we got from those who enrolled into our course. Having feedback from such a diverse audience helped us tweak some aspects of our offering and provide more value. Not to mention that the search rankings for the site and the learning platform also saw a huge increase—initially during the launch, and later once learners had enrolled in the course. So apart from the money involved, there are many more tangible and intangible advantages to my business because of our Marketplace launch.

What advice would you give to anyone interested in the Marketplace, so they can get the most of their launch?

I have three pieces of advice:

1. Make sure you have a deal with value for the AppSumo community and communicate that value well through the listing description. The AppSumo team offers enough guidelines to succeed in this regard.
2. Once launched, ensure that you create enough excitement and sufficient traction through some marketing efforts. Make use of the marketing milestones offered by AppSumo—they really help.
3. Look out for what people say about your product once they buy it. If you hear a lot of similar feedback, that’s where you should take action. Incorporating the feedback I received has helped me make more sales and have fewer refunds.

What’s been your favorite thing about launching with us?

There are two things I really liked about launching with AppSumo marketplace. The first is the transparency with which the entire process was communicated and implemented—it was amazing. Everything seemed so clear from the onset.

The second was the ease with which things moved right from when I submitted my product to when the product was launched and beyond (which included marketing campaigns and payments, too). It seemed the AppSumo team was more concerned about my product doing well than I was! 😊

What’s your company vision? Tell us what’s next for you!

Our goal today is to educate, endow, and equip people and organizations with digital marketing skills, strategies, and new business models in the age of digital disruption. In this journey, we aim to become the one-stop company for any digital marketing training needs. We have a ton of plans—more courses and more value through the DDLP platform, focusing on delivering individual learning needs through a standardized approach, and even more. Stay tuned!

Conclusion

Thank you to all the awesome creators and founders who took the time to talk to us! We’re so excited to watch your businesses grow into empires.

Feeling inspired? Ready to take action and be a part of a growing community of up-and-coming hustlers?

Our driven and hungry audience is waiting to meet your business.

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