As a small business owner, you need to know how to create content that stands out.

Today, you’ll learn the secret to creating social media content that resonates with your audience. Let’s dive in!

Know your target audience

To create social media content that speaks to your ideal customer, you first need to identify your target audience. Typically, this will depend on the purpose of your business and the types of products or services you offer. For instance, if you run an online pet shop, your ideal customers may include people who own pets, love pets, or work with pets.

Once you’ve identified your ideal customer, the next step is to take note of their interests and preferences. This will help you create content that resonates with them.

Important things to know about your target audience include:

• Their age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation

Now, how do you get all this information? You can send surveys to your existing customers to collect data. A simple Google form with the relevant questions will work. Just make the document shareable by email. You may even use a barcode your recipients can just scan to access your survey.

Once you have all these customer details, create a buyer persona, like the one below:

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Your customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. You’ll use it as your guide when creating social media content.

Define your brand voice and style

Your brand voice is the way you communicate with your target audience. It can either be formal or informal, serious or playful, and so on. Your brand style, on the other hand, is made up of the visual components of your brand like your logo, typeface, color palette, and overall design aesthetic. In other words, this is the look and feel of your business.

Your brand voice and style make up your entire brand personality. A strong brand personality will help you form a deep connection with potential customers. It will allow you to have a memorable relationship with your social media audience.

So, to effectively define your brand voice and style, you must first determine how you want to be perceived by your audience.

It’s not advisable to randomly pick a brand voice or style. Instead, work with something that matches the nature of your services.

For example, Zulily offers goods that include a variety of toys. So, Zulily went for a fun and welcoming brand personality. You can see this in their social media content.

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Additionally, you must ensure that your tone and style are consistent across multiple social platforms and even in your email campaigns. This way, people can easily recognize your brand and connect with it on multiple channels.

Choose the right social media platforms

You need to choose your social platforms carefully. The goal is to go where your customer is. So, the best platforms for you will depend on the type of business you run. Is it a B2B (Business-to-Business), or a B2C (Business-to-Customer)?

B2B brands will want to use platforms that will help you connect with top decision-makers in target companies. So, think about platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter. For B2C brands, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook can help you connect in a more relaxed way with your audience.

It’s also important to consider the social media platform your target audience uses. Go back to your audience persona. Are they primarily using Instagram or are they more active on Twitter?

Age is typically a factor here. For instance, Gen Z and Millennials (age 12-34) will usually be on platforms like TikTok. Older social media users, meanwhile, are likely to gravitate towards platforms like Facebook.

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Also, consider the type of content your audience is more likely to engage with. You can, again, check out your customer persona for this. For an audience that prefers visual content, Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube are recommended. If your audience prefers short, concise updates, then Twitter should be your social platform.

Develop a content strategy

As a small business owner, you want to create social media content that brings prospects closer to you. This means showing up with the right message at the right time.

You can only achieve this with a well-organized content strategy.

When defining your content types, consider what will help you achieve your social media objectives. These objectives could be to inform or entertain, among others. For instance, if the goal is to inform, you’d think about infographics or insightful carousel posts like Ceros’ below.

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Since you can have multiple social media objectives, it follows you can have different types of social media content, too. Here are other types of posts you can include in your content strategy based on your social media objectives:

• To entertain: Instagram Reels, Stories, TikTok videos
• To inform: graphs, LinkedIn Pulse articles
• To engage: polls, quizzes

Once you’ve determined the types of content to publish, determine each piece of content’s topic.

If you run out of content ideas, you can use a generative AI tool like Writer to help you. A simple prompt will give you something tangible to work with:

After sorting everything out, it’s time to create a content calendar. You want to plan the publication of your social media posts.

Although research has shown that the best times to post are from 6 PM to 9 PM and noon to 3 PM, you want to check what your own social media analytics tells you. Make sure this data gets reflected in your social media content calendar.

Here are other key details your calendar should have:

• Content format (image, video, text?)
• Content copy
• Metrics to track (we’ll talk more about this later)

You can use a spreadsheet like the one below as your calendar.

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This, however, can be time consuming. Tools like Buffer or Later come with automated features you might want to take advantage of.

Create Content

At this point, all you need to do is follow your content calendar.

Start creating the different types of content specified in your plan. You’ll want to begin with the content you want published soon.

Always use high-quality images and videos. Don’t worry. You don’t need expensive equipment for these. In general, you just need to know what visual elements to highlight when taking pictures or videos for your social media channels.

Check out these examples from Butterfly Loft Salon, a hair salon based in Los Angeles:

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The salon highlights its different hairstyles on Instagram posts.

Your social captions should also be well written. Use language that an average user can easily understand. For promotional content, always include a clear call to action.

You can use project management software in your content creation process. This will help ensure your content team members—from the writers to the graphic artists—know the tasks they need to complete and their corresponding deadlines.

Measure your success

You need to measure your content performance on social media. This is a key component of social media content creation. When you know what people like based on their interactions with your existing content, you’ll know what types of posts to produce subsequently. In other words, measuring your success can help you improve your social media content strategy over time.

Examples of key metrics you can track with your social media platform’s analytics include:

• Impressions
• Engagement
• Reach
• Website clicks

The social media metrics you focus on should be based on your social media goals. So, if you aim to boost engagement, for instance, you can track metrics like comments, shares, and likes.

Adjust your social media strategy based on your data. Experiment with new content types and strategies to keep your social media presence fresh and engaging.

BONUS TIP: Engage with your audience

It’s not enough to simply post content. You also need to engage your audience. This won’t just help you get more Instagram followers, Facebook likes, or retweets. It can also help you reach your ultimate goal with your content: to build relationships with your audience and increase your chances of converting them into paying customers.

One way to effectively engage with your audience is to respond to their comments on your posts. You can even use your social platform for customer service. Check out what Moo does below:

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In these cases, you should respond to comments on time. Around 76% of customers expect you to respond within 24 hours.

Building relationships with your audience will help you establish a loyal following and generate more engagement over time.

Conclusion

Creating social content for your small business requires a thoughtful approach. The content should align with your brand and speak directly to your target audience.

To recap, here are some key steps to creating social media content for your small business— know your target audience, define your brand voice and style, choose the right social media channels, and develop an effective content strategy. Finally, create your content and then measure its performance.

With these steps, you can create social media content that drives engagement and long-term success.

Can you build a sustainable software business through lifetime deals?

Short answer: Yes, AppSumo partners do it every day.

Long answer: Just look at Stackby, a popular bootstrapped tool that leveraged 4 AppSumo launches to build a sustainable software business—and compete in an industry fueled by venture capital.

Stackby is a no-code SaaS platform that combines spreadsheets and databases in a collaborative workspace. CEO and Founder Rachit Khator soft-launched Stackby in July 2019 at a conference in Hong Kong.

Only a few months later, Rachit received an email from a business development rep at AppSumo. Our rep was interested in what Rachit had built and asked if he was interested in launching a lifetime deal of Stackby on AppSumo.

Rachit was onboard. He knew multiple founders who had achieved success by launching on our software deals platform.

Most competitors in Rachit’s industry exclusively offered subscription-based plans to access their tools. By launching on AppSumo, Rachit saw an opportunity to experiment with lifetime access to his product for a one-time fee.

In a sentence: Could Stackby gain an influx of early users (and valuable feedback), while setting the foundation for future recurring revenue?

Rachit decided to find out.

Launch. Implement feedback. Repeat. 

AppSumo worked closely with Stackby to develop and execute a launch strategy.

Rachit and his team tweaked Stackby in preparation for an influx of new users, while the AppSumo team produced corresponding creative marketing assets. Stackby went live on AppSumo in January 2020.

For the India-based Stackby team, the launch went live in the evening. Rachit hired a few dedicated support staff. He jumped between every area of the business, helping to onboard users, listening to users, and building a community around his product.

Rachit said, “I was managing everything from getting feedback to making sure people are adding ideas to the product roadmap and helping early members of the community. During those first two or three weeks, I hardly slept. I slept maybe four hours a day because the traffic was so huge.”

The Stackby team paid special attention to user feedback. One of the biggest user complaints had less to do with the product itself and more to do with onboarding: users were sometimes overwhelmed by Stackby’s robust suite of features.

So Stackby simplified the tool. The team also created multiple onboarding experiences that catered to the unique business models of different users.

Around this time, Stackby was awarded Tech30 in India by YourStory, a prominent entrepreneurship & media channel covering Indian startups.

Stackby’s launch was a major success—so much so that the team has returned for follow-up launches. In fact, AppSumo has become a core part of their growth, a decision that has enabled Rachit to bootstrap Stackby. He has never had to raise outside capital.

Rachit used Sumo-ling feedback as a core part of growing Stackby. With every launch, Stackby has provided new and expanded features:

• Launch 1: Launched a mobile and desktop app
• Launch 2: Improved performance, 50+ API connectors, and 300+ templates
• Launch 3: Redesigned UI/UX/UI and the introduction of “Stackby PowerUps”
• Launch 4: Launched the Stackby Apps Marketplace (dashboards)

To date, more than 12,000 Sumo-lings have joined Stackby, many of whom still provide crucial feedback, test new features, and spread the word about Stackby in their own networks and online communities.

Stackby’s experience showcases how utilizing AppSumo to launch lifetime deals can lead to building a successful and sustainable business. Let’s talk about that sustainability part…

Turning lifetime deals into predictable recurring revenue

A lifetime deal can give new companies a fast influx of cash and users. So, what happens once the deal is done? How do companies translate a successful lifetime deal into sustainable recurring revenue?

For Stackby, building recurring revenue has come from two core factors: customer affiliates and a workspace-based business model.

Customer affiliates

Stackby’s first AppSumo launch helped them find and build a community around the product. Users became fans. Fans became advocates who promoted Stackby to other business owners.

Rachit said, “We did not have an affiliate program after the first launch. A lot of the customers who came were successful business owners who were beginning to recommend the tool to their own clients. Soon, agency owners were like, ‘Hey, I want to recommend this tool to my clients. Do you have a referral program?’”

Stackby listened and quickly implemented an affiliate program. Today, Stackby has more than 300 affiliates. This has helped Stackby generate more monthly recurring revenue for the business—while also giving their best clients more reasons to talk about Stackby.

Over 40% of new customer acquisition for Stackby is driven by positive word of mouth.

Workspace-based business model

Rachit focused Stackby’s business model to make it optimal for agency owners and freelancers, businesses that service multiple clients.

This was vital to helping Stackby build recurring revenue into their business. Stackby sold lifetime deals based on workspaces. Sumo-lings could use a workspace to add a number of databases. Users could add additional codes to access more workspaces for more databases and workflows.

Rachit illustrated this model with an example: “One workspace can be a company or department. For their first workspace, someone might buy it as a lifetime deal. The second workspace might be on a recurring plan.”

As Stackby’s clients succeed, they may require more workspaces. When that occurs, customers can either wait for the next AppSumo launch to buy new codes or simply sign up for a monthly subscription.

The key to this model is providing a lot of value to users. Stackby proved its value through the lifetime deal. As users fell in love with the tool, it became core to their businesses. These Stackby users could add workspaces in the future to grow their databases and apps.

Rachit said, “AppSumo launches provided a solid bedrock for our partnership program. We wouldn’t have discovered or onboarded some affiliates and partners if it wasn’t through AppSumo launches.”

Conclusion

Most software businesses rely on a subscription revenue model. But Rachit saw an opportunity to take his business Stackby to the next level by doing something different: doubling down on lifetime deals.

By partnering with AppSumo, Stackby accessed a global customer base and received valuable Sumo-ling feedback that inspired Rachit to simplify and improve the core product. Today, Stackby has grown over 40,000 companies & teams on the platform from 150+ countries and has over 100,000 users on the platform.

The best part is, Stackby is just getting started. Since its launch in 2020, Rachit says the team has added more than 1,000 new features and improvements—most recently, the Page Designer feature that allows users to create custom pages (invoices, certificates, cards, etc.) directly from the records. What started as a database product has transformed into a no-code platform.

Rachit said, “We’re working towards empowering 10 million spreadsheet users to become no-code creators by 2025. And I think AppSumo has been just a fantastic partner in that journey. For us to get to that scale, we need a partner like AppSumo to help build positive momentum.”

Why?

LinkedIn has become the most popular platform for securing new jobs. The social media platform now has more than 850 million members with over 58 million registered companies. It gathers professionals, business owners, and C-level executives in one place.

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In other words, LinkedIn can give freelancers ungated access to their target markets. Moreover, it provides the tools to find, connect, and build a relationship with potential clients.

If you’re wondering how to use LinkedIn to find new clients, just keep reading. You’ll learn seven major tactics on how to find clients on LinkedIn as a freelancer.

7 tips to finding new clients on LinkedIn

1. Understand your target market

Learning how to get clients on LinkedIn requires identifying the type of people you’re hoping to work with in the first place. These should also be your target audience. Identifying your target audience will help you create messages that attract the right types of customers.

So, how do you identify your target audience?

List what kinds of problems you solve with your service. Then list out the types of users who struggle with those problems. You’d probably get a list of large organizations, small businesses, or private individuals within a specific industry and location.

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Once you identify your target clients, create a buyer persona. You can do that by following the steps outlined in the graphic above. The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of your target market so that you can align everything you do with what they want. For example, the copy you include in your LinkedIn profile section would speak to your target client’s pain points.

Here’s a great example of a freelancer who knows her prospects and what their pain points are (in this case, SEO). She uses what she knows about them to create compelling copy. In her profile, Jessica specifies that she’s not just a freelance finance writer and journalist. She’s also an expert in on-page SEO:

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Your portfolio would also showcase the work these potential clients typically ask for. So, if your target audience is composed of people who want articles ranking higher on SERPs, then you’d include your articles in your portfolio and the relevant bits on how they fared in search engine results.

Bottom line? Any strategy to find new clients on LinkedIn will only be effective if you know who your ideal clients are.

2. Optimize your LinkedIn profile for search

Learning how to find clients on LinkedIn means polishing your profile first. If you optimize your LinkedIn profile accordingly, you’ll make it easier for clients to find you. Your LinkedIn profile is your calling card—especially when you’re a freelancer. You should present yourself in the best possible light.

Before you start optimizing your profile, make sure you know the right keywords and phrases people are using to find your service. You can use online tools like Moz to identify the best keywords and phrases for your profession.

You don’t just want people to find you on LinkedIn. You also want them to find your LinkedIn page on Google. So here’s how to maximize your LinkedIn profile for SEO:

Be descriptive in your headshot, banner, and images

Include keywords when naming your images, like a headshot or a banner. Uploading image files that include primary keywords people are looking for gives you a better chance of being found. So, for instance, if you’re a freelance accountant in a specific location, you could add words like “Best Accountant Service in Seattle” to your photo.

Also, a professional-looking photo gets users 14 times more views than other types of LinkedIn profile pictures. This image is a good example of a professional-looking photo:

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Use keywords in your headline, summary, and job description

You should make sure that your headline, summary, and job description talk about the value you offer and include popular keywords. In our example above, notice that Kimberley sprinkles in multiple keywords related to art and design all throughout her profile.

Your LinkedIn headline is the most important part of your profile. Along with your name and photo, this is the first thing people see when they look at your profile.

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Your headline should be a maximum of 120 characters and encourage people to connect with you. It should offer what your prospective clients are looking for.

Fill out your skills section

The skills section is indexed by Google. Put your key skills in the top three of the list—that’s how many appear when people glance at your LinkedIn profile.

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Additionally, ask your coworkers and members of your network to endorse you. (It’s always great to return the favor, too!)

Name your links within the contact information section

Instead of keeping the boring default “Personal website” text next to your website and relevant links, choose “Other” from the drop-down list and name your link with relevant keywords and descriptive phrases.

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Don’t forget to write a custom URL for your LinkedIn user profile. Having a custom LinkedIn URL will help with SEO. So, if the LinkedIn.com/in/yourname URL is taken, mix it up with your brand name or a service that you offer, like linkedin.com/in/yournamegraphicdesign.

3. Look at your views to find quality opportunities

Another way to learn how to get new clients on LinkedIn is to review who looked at your profile. You can assume that people who searched for a freelancer and clicked on your profile are interested in your skills. Take this opportunity to connect and start new business collaborations.

A free LinkedIn account allows you to see just the last five people who viewed your profile. Checking often will help you avoid missing opportunities. You can also upgrade to a Premium account so you can see everyone who’s viewed your profile.

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In the image above, notice how you can also view members who have read your articles. These folks might just become your new leads.

You can get the emails of prospective clients from LinkedIn with tools like Evaboot. They can help you automate all your email list-building tasks. Ultimately, you can use these emails to engage with potential clients via email marketing.

You can also use an outreach platform in your digital marketing strategy to help you find more potential clients to bring into your sales funnel.

4. Join relevant LinkedIn Groups

Joining relevant groups on LinkedIn is another way of finding new clients. By joining groups related to your niche or interests, you will widen your social circle on LinkedIn. Being active in groups is a great way to meet and engage with potential customers. Here’s how:

Search for groups on LinkedIn by using the search bar at the top of your homepage.

If you start typing, you’ll see suggestions:

The screenshot below shows how you can navigate to Groups after searching for a term, for example, “marketer”:

If you’re not sure where to start, take a look at the groups your prospects have joined. Join the most relevant ones to your business and your target audience. LinkedIn allows you to join up to 100 groups.

Here’s an example of a good group freelance marketers can join:

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Notice that the group has over 1,000 members. That number is bound to include a prospect. Even if all of its members are marketers, you can still get referrals and expand your network.

Lastly, have a peek at other freelancers’ profiles within your niche. You should be able to spot the best LinkedIn groups to join for your business.

5. Connect using personalized requests

Another tactic for how to use LinkedIn to get clients is to connect with them personally and personalize your connection requests. Using LinkedIn’s default text when sending a new connection request won’t get you noticed. Take this opportunity to write out a personalized message. It doesn’t have to be long.

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If you know the person or have a mutual contact, mention it! Details like that are great conversation starters. If you don’t, try commenting on the person’s work or a post they’ve published recently. It can be something along the lines of “Hi [Name], hope you’re doing well. I’ve recently read your blog article about [topic] and found it very interesting…”

You can also try generative AI to create your personalized message. You just need to insert the right prompts.

Sending a personalized message gives you a higher chance of your request getting accepted. Plus, it drastically increases the likelihood of potential customers interacting with you.

6. Share valuable content

Sharing valuable content on LinkedIn is another way to find a client. Creating high-quality content also boosts your authority, no matter which digital marketing means you use.

There are tons of different content types you can share on LinkedIn. If you’re a freelance graphic designer, for example, you can share a webinar, infographics, or industry-related articles. Check out this example below:

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The content that you post on the platform can also be published in LinkedIn groups. This is an easy strategy to help expand your network and reach new clients.

If you want to write your own article, LinkedIn has released an internal blog channel within the social network itself. It’s called LinkedIn Pulse and users can write their articles using the tool for sharing with their LinkedIn network.

If you’re a writer and run a blog, you can use LinkedIn Pulse to publish your articles. Here’s an example from freelance writer Ashley Cummings:

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Notice that the topic of Ashley’s article is related to her niche. She’s a freelance writer looking for clients, so her LinkedIn Pulse post is about what to look for when hiring a B2B freelance writer. It’s a good topic that potential employers will be interested in.

Opening the Pulse editor to write your own article is super easy. From the top of your homepage, click on “Write article”:

This opens up the editor:

Remember to use the relevant keywords to increase your visibility on the platform and write your Pulse posts in plain language. Label your images with the right keyword phrases. Once you’re done with your writing and have optimized your images, simply hit the “Publish” button.

A study that analyzed over 3,000 LinkedIn posts revealed that “how to” and list post headlines performed the best. Also, posts with titles comprising 40-49 characters were ranked the highest. LinkedIn analytics will help you check the reach of your published articles. This way, you’ll be able to see what kind of topics are most popular among LinkedIn users.

If you have your own website, you can share an article you wrote from your site on LinkedIn, too. Complement this LinkedIn sharing strategy with content optimization and you’ll reap the SEO benefits.

7. Always follow up with your LinkedIn leads

Whenever your request is accepted by a new LinkedIn connection, say thank you. Reach out with this message within 24 hours if possible.

Try to keep in touch with your contacts now and again. LinkedIn sends notifications if someone publishes a post, makes changes to their job information, or gets an achievement. Take every opportunity to congratulate your connections on starting a new job or getting a promotion and start a conversation.

Other ideas for following up with your LinkedIn leads include passing along relevant content that your leads might find interesting. You can also like and comment whenever your leads publish an article on LinkedIn Pulse.

Your comments and messages should contain some kind of value. Avoid general comments like “Good job” or “I agree” on a LinkedIn lead’s article. Ask a question or present an alternate viewpoint to start a conversation. This way, you’ll stand out from the crowd, and your new lead will remember you later on.

Final thoughts

Learning how to use LinkedIn to find clients will help your freelance business grow. Whether you’ve just started a freelancing business or are looking for new opportunities, tapping into your LinkedIn network can be a great way to secure new jobs.

Here’s a quick recap:

1. Start by determining your target clients and optimizing your professional social media profile so people can find your business.
2. Identify and include the keywords you want to be found for.
3. Reach out to members who searched and looked at your profile, and join LinkedIn groups.
4. Engage with LinkedIn members by personalizing your requests, sharing valuable content, and following up with your new leads.

Use these tips, and you’ll be onboarding new clients before you know it!

Automate your workflows and level up your craft with AppSumo’s top deals for freelancers.

That’s all changed now, thanks to the rise of no-code tools.

What used to take developers months and years to create has now pared down to weeks, sometimes days. For simple requests, developers can use no-code tools to spit out project outputs in just a few hours.

Entrepreneurs no longer need to rely on developers for easy tasks—they can instead invest in their services for more intricate work and custom projects. Plus, they’ll save time and money.

If you’re curious about the advantages and limitations of this type of software, stick around for an insightful read on what’s happening in the world of no-code.

The promise of no-code tools 

As a new or aspiring business owner, you’ve got a lot on your plate.

From building your website to setting up your internal document storage systems to automating your email marketing campaigns, there’s a lot to do.

If you have plenty of cash flow, by all means, hand over the reins to a developer and focus on more important tasks like growing your business.

But if you’re tight on funds or prefer to save money wherever you can, you’re going to love the options no-code tools can give you.

As a developer, learning no-code platforms opens you up to more opportunities and can help you learn new skills. By getting familiar with no-code tools and pairing that with your technical knowledge, you can learn to exceed client expectations.

You’ll be able to do everything from turning projects around faster to building basic structures with no-code and then using your coding skills to customize the skeleton. Ultimately, no-code tools will help you become infinitely more valuable to organizations and streamline your own workflow.

With that said, let’s review some additional benefits entrepreneurs and developers can look forward to when using no-code tools.

Create and resize visuals with ease

With no-code tools, entrepreneurs can enhance the visual appeal of their products and improve the user experience. As the trend toward hybrid work models continues, these tools are especially useful since they allow remote team members to participate in visual design processes effortlessly and effectively from anywhere in the world.

In the marketing space, the rise of upscale API has been revolutionary. These tools can convert low-resolution images to high-quality ones with ease—making it simple for anyone to create professional-looking visuals at scale for their website, app, and social media profiles.

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Both Picsart and Canva offer this feature.

With enhanced image features, entrepreneurs and developers can use tools like Picsart and Canva to improve image quality and auto-resize visuals to the perfect ratios for a variety of marketing channels in just one click.

Build websites and platforms with drag-and-drop features 

From Wix to Squarespace to WordPress, there are many tools you can use to build your own website or platform using drag-and-drop features.

This trend has been particularly significant in the online medical industry, where entrepreneurs and developers are leveraging no-code tools to build innovative platforms that connect patients with healthcare providers.

Here’s an example of a simple, engaging website online physicians can develop using no-code tools:

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Of course, a developer could easily come in to spruce it up and add more custom design, but consider whether this is necessary given the industry.

At the end of the day, it’s best to think about your unique target market before adding more customization to your site. For instance, if you’re in the creative arts space, putting extra flair on your site with custom code would be on brand. But if you’re in the virtual assistant industry, going the extra mile may not be necessary or worth it.

Streamline data management processes

One of the biggest problems for technology companies is that managing business processes often requires elevated technical skills to make it all work.

Thanks to no-code tools, you can achieve the same results without high competence. Take, for example, the Reverse ETL process provided by Hightouch. With this process, businesses can extract data from their central data warehouse and feed it directly into their operational systems and SaaS tools. That way, they can reduce the need to hire a team of developers and data experts.

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Not only can this help streamline the data management process, but it can also help teams leverage and interpret data better so they can ultra-personalize the customer experience.

In the past, tackling a data monster like this took brilliant minds and tons of code to set up. Now, businesses can access rich insights in real-time whenever they want.

Build custom mobile apps 

Mobile app design is another exciting area where no-code tools have made a significant impact.

With these tools, entrepreneurs and small business owners can design and launch mobile apps without specialized coding knowledge. This opens up a world of opportunities for those looking to test new ideas or launch a startup on a budget.

Building custom mobile apps also has advantages for freelancers, creatives, and service-based entrepreneurs.

For instance, with Passion.io, anyone can create their own branded app to sell memberships, digital products, and personalized services—think health coaches, personal trainers, and online voice actors, for example.

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For entrepreneurs that are interested in building businesses in order to sell them, no-code app builders offer a way to quickly prototype and test ideas without the need for a dedicated development team. With these tools, business owners can create custom applications to sell products or services, streamline operations, and eventually, sell their businesses.

Potential limitations and criticisms of no-code tools 

Regardless of how powerful no-code tools are, even the most cutting-edge technologies have limitations.

Let’s quickly review some of the downsides to no-code tools.

Some security measures still require code 

As more entrepreneurs and developers turn to no-code tools to streamline their workflows and create web apps without code, it’s essential to remember the potential security risks associated with these tools.

For example, many no-code tools and SaaS apps rely on providers like SAML or OAuth to manage user access. While these both provide secure authentication methods, it’s essential to understand the differences between SAML vs OAuth to make an informed decision about which one to use.

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Regardless of the option you go with, you’ll need a developer to help you set everything up.

Depending on what you’re making, working with a developer can ensure your no-code creations and logins are as secure as possible. Some developers may take this opportunity to upsell other security services that entrepreneurs may need but can’t set up on their own.

Ultra-custom designs still require code 

Want your website or app to feel like an immersive experience? Dreaming of creating an online space with custom illustrations, interactivity, and a dynamic nature? Do pre-built templates make you cringe?

If so, you’ll have to opt for custom code.

Each industry caters to different customer needs, and therefore each website will require different features. This holds true in real estate web design, for example, where some essential features are prone to require some custom coding.

Websites or apps in the real estate industry often require specific features such as property location search filters, interactive maps, virtual tours, and seamless integration with MLS databases to provide an optimal browsing experience for potential buyers and renters.

And as convenient as no-code is, it’s limited by specific parameters.

To get an ultra-custom site or app, you’ll need to reach out to software developers or software engineers that are fluent in a variety of coding languages, including HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

No-code is simpler but still has a learning curve 

Some no-code tools feel super intuitive, but don’t expect to literally build a new website in just a few minutes.

While you’ll have drag-and-drop capabilities, there’s a lot that goes into building a website, from design to copy to SEO and beyond. Whether you’re a business owner or a developer, expect to put in some elbow grease to learn how these tools work.

Wrapping up 

There’s a lot more where this came from, but this quick guide is a great start for anyone curious about what no-code tools mean for businesses and developers.

As a quick recap, here are the pros and cons we covered today:

Pros

• Create and resize visuals with ease
• Build websites and platforms with drag-and-drop features
• Streamline data management processes
• Build custom mobile apps

Cons

• Some security measures require code
• Ultra-custom designs still require code
• No-code is simpler but still has a learning curve

Now, it’s your turn.

Are you a business owner that needs flexible tools to build things with ease? Maybe you’re a developer curious about pairing no-code software with your advanced skills? Make a move by testing out some of the tools we covered today and check out our awesome deals on build-it-yourself software.

We’re so excited because Sumo Day is prime time for sales. In fact, last year, we saw 5x our normal site traffic and a 30K bump in total buyers! Some of our top partners in the past have included NeuronWriter, WordHero, and Tomba. And you’re about to join their ranks.

You’ve already done the work of listing your product in our store for Sumo Day. That’s great!

…now what?

Well, the next step is the fun part: promoting your product!

We’ve compiled some key dates, steps, and helpful tips to make the most of our biggest sale of the season. It’s all pretty straightforward—just follow along and build up the hype for your product!

Let’s get started.

Pre-Launch

Before Sumo Day goes live, it helps to start building up hype ahead of time and getting your audience excited.

Use these copy and graphic templates to start teasing out your Sumo Day sale!

Sunday, June 11

Our kick-off begins! At 5 pm CT, we recommend sending an email to your free users encouraging them to check out your can’t-miss deal on AppSumo. This is the best value they’re going to get for your product—one-time payment, no monthly fees. If they’ve been looking to upgrade their free plan, now’s their chance!

Use this handy template and feel free to make it your own!

Tuesday, June 13

As Sumo Day continues, make sure you’re using the most of your social channels, too.

This helpful template is a great starting point to spread the word about your special Sumo Day offer.

Wednesday, June 14

With one day left in the sale today, you’re going to keep the social momentum with another reminder post.

Here’s a handy-dandy template for your social channels.

Thursday, June 15

Now we’re nearing the finish line and it’s time to crank the FOMO up to 11.

Use this follow-up email template to let your audience know it’s their LAST chance to grab your limited-time deal before Sumo Day ends!

Heads up: Our sale ends at noon CT for non-Plus members. We highly recommend an early morning send!

Badges

Select partners, show off your AppSumo achievement with these “Top Partner” badges. It’s a great way to add social proof to your site and let the world know just how awesome you are.

Final Reminders

• Use our handy-dandy assets. We’ve collected these helpful creative templates and assets in one place to make promoting during Sumo Day a breeze. Just customize with your logo and branding, and share away on social and email.
  • Pro tip: Create banners and direct traffic to your deal page during the sale. You can try a tool like Optinly (lifetime access for just $59!) to make banners the easy way!

• Prep your support team. One thing past partners have noted during big sales events is how much the extra traffic they got. On launch day, make sure your support team is ready to answer questions and comments on your deal page to maximize your Sumo Day promotion. Responsive partners go a long way in building customer trust!
• Earn more as an AppSumo affiliate! 
  • If you’re not already an affiliate, there’s still time to join. Sign up to become an affiliate here—AppSumo Select Partners get preferential payouts, so don’t miss out!
  • If you’re already an affiliate, awesome. Be sure to prepare your affiliate link by heading into Impact and grabbing your unique URL. That way, you’ll be properly credited for your marketing and promotion efforts! The Affiliate team will be uploading all the Sumo Day creative you can use directly in your Impact account.

Dukaan is a professional ecommerce tools provider founded in July 2020 in India, at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As businesses were looking for new ways to sell online, the founders saw that Amazon didn’t cater to the needs of most small businesses. They built Dukaan to give ecommerce founders access to better online tools—at a lower cost.

The idea worked! Dukaan gained traction quickly in India. By 2022, the company decided to expand internationally. Now, they faced a major challenge.

Even for SaaS companies, which operate fully online, international expansion is typically very expensive and complicated. There are many unforeseen regulations and language barriers.

Dukaan needed a way to launch to a sizable audience, quickly test and improve their tool, and then develop features that could help the company meet the unique needs of different regions.

The mission 

All of the founding team were entrepreneurs before founding Dukaan—and they all knew about AppSumo. Some of the founders and investors had even launched previous AppSumo products, such as InVideo.

The team knew from previous AppSumo launches about the scale of feedback they could receive from the AppSumo customers. Sumo-lings, as they’re called, are tech-savvy entrepreneurs who love providing detailed product feedback to founders.

With AppSumo, Dukaan saw an opportunity to quickly get their product into the hands of a large international audience of savvy business owners. This would give Dukaan an opportunity to receive ample feedback and learn the numerous unknown unknowns about expanding to new regions.

Put another way: Instead of paying to launch their product in one country at a time over many months, Dukaan could get paid to leverage AppSumo’s audience and quickly receive feedback from dozens of countries in a matter of days.

The Dukaan team reached out to AppSumo.

Partnering with AppSumo

The first step was to determine a launch strategy.

AppSumo helped Dukaan determine the best offer that would resonate with AppSumo’s audience. Many of AppSumo’s customers are freelancers and agencies. Sumo-lings also love to stack codes to upgrade their plans and purchase multiple products.

To maximize the success of their launch, Dukaan decided to tailor their ecommerce product to appeal to AppSumo’s audience.

Dukaan was originally built to help ecommerce founders create a single store on one account. But what if the platform enabled Sumo-lings to build multiple stores on a single account? That way, agency owners could turn ecommerce site-building into a regular service—on the back of Dukaan.

The Dukaan team created a wireframe of what this major product change might look like. They showed the wireframe to developers, who brought the new version of the product to life.

And so it was official: Dukaan would sell a white-label ecommerce site builder that agencies and freelancers could use to build and service their clients’ websites.

Since Dukaan’s primary goal was to gain feedback from Sumo-lings, they priced to sell—which meant offering a competitive rate.

Meanwhile, AppSumo’s creative team drafted the marketing collateral for Dukaan’s campaign. They wrote persuasive copy for emails, social media, and the landing page. AppSumo scripted and filmed a promotional video, plus product detail page copy, to showcase the product.

In the weeks leading up to Dukaan’s launch, AppSumo told Dukaan to anticipate a lot of traffic. It was 6:30 pm in India for Dukaan when their landing page went live on AppSumo. The Dukaan team was gathered in a single room in their office, ready to pull an all-nighter.

Launch day

Dukaan launched on AppSumo on June 8, 2022. “Everyone was waiting in the office for something big to happen,” Jyotbir Lamba, the product manager at Dukaan recalled.

At 8:30 pm, AppSumo sent the first Dukaan announcement email to AppSumo’s audience. That’s when Dukaan started receiving some real traffic. The queries piled up. By 9:30, the Dukaan team was flooded. “We were receiving at least five different queries on five different channels within a minute—each,” said Neel Seth, Product Manager at Dukaan.

The entire Dukaan team was gathered in the same room to help each other answer questions. The DevOps team handled the most technical questions and everyone else took turns responding to more general support. Jyotbir Lamba said, “All of us worked the entire night together to answer questions. Within the first three and a half hours of launch, we hit 100 sales.”

The Dukaan team quickly noticed patterns in the inquiries. Taxation, for example, was a major point. Dukaan quickly added new taxation features to the roadmap.

The Dukaan team stayed up all night until 6 am, working from the office together to handle all the support. Support questions came in through their app, AppSumo, and from various social channels—especially their Facebook group.

Jyotbir Lamba said, “We were the #1 product on AppSumo that week. We had a phenomenal first launch.”

Following the feedback 

“There are many reasons companies choose to launch on AppSumo. One of them is immediate customer feedback from technical customers. Sumo-lings love to surface potential features, existing bugs, and so on. They’re a vocal customer base.”

Dukaan received a lot of feedback and questions about their product. They decided to create a public roadmap that enabled Sumo-lings to add and upvote feature suggestions. Almost immediately, one feature request rose to the top: Tools to handle U.S. taxation received about 300 upvotes.

Dukaan didn’t know the incredible complexity that went into taxation in the United States. This wouldn’t be an easy feature to implement, but it was clearly a necessary one if Dukaan wanted to gain traction in the U.S.

The first step was to understand this topic. The Dukaan team jumped on more than 150 calls with Sumo-lings, who explained the entire taxation system to them and offered insights into the kinds of solutions U.S.-based Sumo-lings were looking for. The team used these insights to implement features that now enable U.S. tax to be processed on the platform.

Results: 3,000 sold licenses

Dukaan sold more than 3000 licenses during their first launch (which inspired them to launch two more times on AppSumo!). Those 3,000 licenses turned into more than 6,150 active stores on Dukaan. Those 6,150+ businesses have already generated millions of revenue.

As part of the AppSumo launch, Dukaan created a Facebook group to help the team connect with customers. This group has grown into a massive community of more than 70,000 people, all gathered around the tool.

Members of the Dukaan Facebook group regularly assist each other. The Dukaan team is active in the group. Still, when someone has a problem or doesn’t understand where to access a feature, members often solve the problem for one another before Dukaan members have time to respond. The community acts as an organic support agent.

There are three hours each day when Dukaan’s support team is not active. During those three hours, if someone posts a query on Facebook, there’s a very high chance that by the time the support team gets back online, that query has already been answered by another Dukaan user.

These community members believe in the product and love the roadmap so much that people go out of their way to help each other. The community continues to engage creatively with the roadmap as well. They’ve helped discover bugs, suggest new features, and ultimately set the direction for the future of Dukaan.

In the six months between Dukaan’s second and third AppSumo launches, Dukaan published more than 1,000 improvements and new features.

And the numbers don’t lie:

• Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. (Demand Metric)
• Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website. (Hubspot Blog)
• Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI. (Hubspot Blog)

Of the 500+ million blogs in the world, over 60 million of them host their content on WordPress (Web Tribunal). WordPress was originally released as a blogging platform, but over the years has become one of the go-to spaces to house online content, powering two in every five websites (w3techs).

But sometimes managing a WordPress site can be overwhelming. That’s where software tools like WordHero, NeuronWriter, and WP Reset come in. They can help streamline your workflow, optimize your content, and make your site run more smoothly. Whether you’re starting from scratch or you’re a seasoned content creator, these three AppSumo favorites will level up your WordPress blog. Let’s dive in.

3 tools to level up your WordPress site

1. Supercharge copywriting with WordHero

As a blogger, your content is your most important asset. It’s what draws readers to your site, keeps them engaged, and ultimately, drives conversions. However, creating high-quality content can be time-consuming (the average blog post takes 4 hours and 10 minutes to write according to Orbit Media!). That’s where WordHero can help.

One of WordHero’s key features is its content analysis tool, which uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) technology to analyze your content and provide real-time feedback on how to improve it. For example, it can suggest ways to enhance your headline, sentence structure, and use of keywords, based on factors like readability, engagement, and SEO.

Another key feature of WordHero is its content discovery tool, which helps you find new topics and perspectives to write about, based on keyword research and trending topics. This can help you stay ahead of the curve and create content that resonates with your audience, increasing engagement and driving more traffic to your site.

TL;DR:

• Best for: Bloggers and writers
• Use cases: Generating new content ideas, editing existing content and enhancing readability
• What makes this tool unique? Access a long-form editor when you stack codes
• Cost: $89 LTD on AppSumo

Reviews from WordHero users:

“Love it! The outputs are top notch! I started with 2 codes and in no time decided to go unlimited. I wish I would have signed up sooner instead of wasting money on another a.i writer. Really love the ease of use in the long form editor. There’s not much dancing around you have to do, to get the results you want. Highly recommend this software.” – LMGX

“This app has helped me finish a YouTube post in as little as 3 minutes! It also helps me write scripts for my channel. It’s phenomenal!” – Jazz

2. Boost rankings with NeuronWriter

After whipping up a blog post in record time with WordHero, you’ll want to refine it with NeuronWriter—a tool packed with AI-powered research and writing tools to help you plan content that ranks high on search engine results pages (SERPs), such as Google.

One of the key functions of NeuronWriter’s SEO writing assistance is its keyword suggestion tool. The tool analyzes your content and suggests relevant keywords that you can include in your content to help it rank higher in search results. These keywords are based on a number of factors, including search volume, competition, and relevance to your topic.

NeuronWriter’s SEO writing assistance also includes analysis of your content’s readability and keyword density. The tool provides a readability score for your content, which can help you identify areas where you need to simplify your writing to make it more accessible to readers. It also provides analysis of your keyword density, which can help you ensure that you’re using your target keywords in a way that is natural and not overly repetitive.

TL;DR:

• Best for: Bloggers and SEO specialists
• Use cases: Improving SEO, content planning, and improving readability scores and keyword density
• What makes this tool unique? Competitor SERP analysis and a WordPress integration
• Cost: $69 LTD on AppSumo 

Reviews from NeuronWriter users:

“Best SEO AI Product on Appsumo. Neuron has allowed us to optimize and improve our rank across every keyword we’ve used it for. We are in a ‘somewhat’ uncompetitive industry in a small country so it’s easy to see the impact of optimizing a page vs when the page wasn’t optimized.” – dan9

“I think it’s simple enough to use right out of the box. Yet the more I use it, the more ways I discover that it can help me. It’s really a bunch of tools rolled into one. I love its workflow, which is very intuitive and streamlined – which is such an important feature, yet overlooked by many tool designers, in my opinion.” – CharlieStephen 

3. Test before you invest with WP Reset

Once you’ve created your A+ content using WordHero and NeuronWriter, you’ll need a dependable platform to host it on. That’s where WP Reset comes in—it’s a WordPress plugin designed to help users quickly and easily install themes and plugins, and reset defaults.

WP Reset works by creating a “snapshot” of your site’s current state, which you can then restore at any time if something goes wrong. For example, if you install a plugin that conflicts with your theme, you can quickly restore your site to its previous state, without having to manually uninstall the plugin or reconfigure your settings.

Another key feature of WP Reset is its bulk actions tool, which allows you to perform multiple actions at once, such as deleting all comments or resetting all users. With WP Reset, you can quickly experiment with different themes and plugins, test out different settings, and capture snapshots of your WordPress website for easy restoration.

TLDR;

• Best for: Developers and bloggers
• Use cases: WordPress website experimentation and emergency recovery script
• What makes this tool unique? Over 25 tools, snapshots and auto snapshots, plugin and themes collections, 2 GB storage per lifetime Cloud license (10 GB total)
• Cost: $49 LTD on AppSumo

Reviews from WP Reset users:

“Awesome plugin that gives a definite peace of mind when doing updates. Support is very responsive. I had a question and they responded back within 10 minutes, on a Sunday morning no less. Highly recommend grabbing this deal while you can.” – david.holloway

“One of those things you don’t need right now but you might need in an hour lol. Insurance is annoying until you need it and then it is like manna from heaven. And with an LTD, this is better than your car insurance cause you only pay once. Anyways I bought it like a week ago and then did some stuff on my site…and blew it up and used WP-Reset to fix it. Quickly became a total believer in the product and it was worth every penny. If you use WordPress, then you need this.” – MacroDave

Transform your blog today

These three software tools can take your blog to the next level.

So if you’re looking to optimize your WordPress site, consider giving WordHero, NeuronWriter and WP Reset a try. They’re all available now on AppSumo!

The challenge: Finding product-market fit 

In 2018, serial entrepreneur, Vikram Chalana, was running a 350-person company. Among all these employees, across many disciplines and departments, Vikram noticed that one person was in constant demand from their colleagues: the video specialist. They were swamped with requests from every department to create webinars, product demos, training videos, and so on.

“Everybody wanted to do videos,” Vikram explained. “Everybody wanted to consume videos. But videos were very hard to produce, record, and edit.”

Vikram wondered why there wasn’t a video version of Canva, a tool where anyone—regardless of technical skill—could go to easily create and edit simple videos.

By the end of 2019, Vikram attended a hackathon in Seattle and built his prototype for a simple video editing tool. He called this tool “Pictory” and won the hackathon.

Vikram spent the next eight months building out the product and validating it through early users. There was just one problem: Vikram couldn’t get customers interested. As the business saying goes, he couldn’t find product-market fit.

Partnering with AppSumo

AppSumo approached Vikram in Spring 2021. Pictory seemed like the type of user-friendly tool that’s often popular on the platform. “Have you considered launching Pictory on AppSumo?”

This was the first Vikram had heard of AppSumo. He explained to us some of the challenges he faced in bringing the tool to market. One of the benefits of launching on AppSumo is the ability to receive fast and honest feedback from customers about your product. It can be effective in helping founders discover their ideal customers—and by extension, find product-market fit.

Vikram was in.

The launch was scheduled for summer 2021. Now, it was time to prepare. The first step was to perform a test run with AppSumo users. AppSumo prepared Pictory for a launch to Beta-lings (AppSumo testers) to determine the best marketing approach and feature changes that should be implemented before launch.

The AppSumo team integrated Pictory with AppSumo. They did a soft launch to Beta-lings, who gave Pictory high marks. They loved it! They also had some feedback regarding features Vikram should add or remove to make the product even more compelling for Sumo-lings.

Then AppSumo’s marketing experts worked with Vikram to script and produce an introduction video. AppSumo wrote copy for the deal landing page and prepared the launch emails. Start to finish, the marketing prep took about a month of close collaboration.

AppSumo recommended Vikram set up a public-facing roadmap and add support staff and resources to assist during the launch. Sumo-lings love to know what’s coming down the pike. They also will have a lot of questions and expect fast responses.

Vikram took the advice.

Launch day (AKA the “App-Tsunami”)

Pictory went live on AppSumo. Almost as soon as the landing page was public, support tickets and Pictory’s help desk requests started flowing in. Sumo-lings wanted to know more about Pictory.

“We were slammed. Our entire team—all we were doing was answering questions and responding to support tickets,” Vikram said. “The questions we received made a lot of sense. It felt like we’d found product-market fit—within a day. It was insane and exhilarating and crazy and tiring.”

As requests came in, the Pictory team added new features to their roadmap. “People were making rewarding suggestions.” Pictory developers were also making real-time changes to the product as Sumo-lings suggested new features.

Sumo-lings told the Pictory team that they preferred Storyblocks over Shutterstock for content licensing, for example. Pictory made the swap. Sumo-lings requested a version of the app in Portuguese. The team quickly implemented the new language. Day by day, more sales came in, and the product improved in real time based on user requests and feedback.

Vikram worked alongside his team to answer Sumo-ling questions. As he heard from happy customers, he asked people to leave reviews on AppSumo and on third party review websites. The reviews quickly rolled in, which Vikram describes as having a “snowball effect” on additional sales.

The Pictory team was swamped. They couldn’t even find time to implement additional promotional tactics—and they didn’t need to. All hands were on deck to answer questions, implement new features, and onboard users.

Results: 6,000 customers, monthly recurring revenue, and more

Before launching on AppSumo, Pictory had 50 customers. After their two months on AppSumo, Pictory crossed 6,000 customers—and continues to grow.

It’s common for online businesses to run on a subscription model. One of the key benefits of shopping on AppSumo is the opportunity to snag lifetime deals on powerful software. But this begs a common question: how do lifetime deals affect founders and their products in the long term?

Vikram explained that AppSumo’s impact didn’t stop when the lifetime deal ended. Sumo-lings have become huge advocates for Pictory, helping the company multiply its monthly recurring revenue. The key comes down to the organic word of mouth that often sparks from successful AppSumo launches.

Vikram said, “AppSumo customers are telling their friends, telling their colleagues, how good the product is. Those new users now join on a subscription model.” Vikram even created an affiliate program to add fuel to the fire.

“The biggest [impact on monthly recurring revenue] was the network effect of the AppSumo campaign. We got a lot of Appsumo customers who provided great reviews about our product, in blogs, videos, review sites, etc.  Some of them became affiliate partners are started promoting the product to their base,” Vikram said.

Before launching on AppSumo, Pictory had $3,000 in MRR (monthly recurring revenue). After the 60-day AppSumo campaign, that number reached almost $12,000 MRR. By December 2022, Pictory officially crossed $100,000 MRR.

“We still get emails—I got three today—about buying our product on AppSumo. The AppSumo effect keeps up even 18 months later.”

The future for Pictory

Vikram has created a Facebook group for Pictory’s AppSumo customers. Right now, he’s continuing to grow the business as they pursue a Series A investment round.

Vikram said, “The product has continued to improve since our launch and we continue to add more customers. We got another bump recently because of ChatGPT. Someone posted a video about how ChatGPT and Pictory can be used together to create videos. That feels like another App-tsunami that we’re going through right now.”

Sounds like this is only the beginning for Pictory. It’s always exciting to hear how AppSumo Partners are achieving success.

Want to launch your product on AppSumo? Learn more about becoming an AppSumo Partner. Maybe your success story will be the one we write about next.

The challenge: Finding the ideal customer

Komodo Decks started as a hobby project in 2018. For Founder Khanan Grauer, the idea was to design a mobile app for recording and editing videos over digital programs like PowerPoint or PDF. Komodo Decks enabled people to easily record a presentation, explain a complex document, or even teach a course.

The first big break for Komodo Decks happened in 2020. Remote work became the norm in response to Covid. Komodo Decks gained traction among university professors and high school teachers across the world.

But this brought about a new problem. Educators didn’t have much money to spend on software. It was costly to maintain Komodo Decks. Khanan kept the company afloat by paying the bills out of pocket. Even though educators got a lot out of the tool, and Khanan was pleased to support them, he knew that his business was most likely to succeed if he focused on a different customer: businesses.

At the time, about 80% of Komodo Deck’s users were educators. The remaining 20% were businesses. If Komodo Decks would one day become a self-sustaining business, Khanan needed to flip those ratios.

Time for Komodo Decks to pivot.

Becoming an AppSumo Partner

Komodo Decks’ Cofounder Harry Brodsky had an idea to help with the pivot. What if they launched Komodo Decks on AppSumo?

Harry had followed the ideas and work of AppSumo’s founder, Noah Kagan, for a while and wondered how Komodo Decks might appeal to Sumo-lings.

Harry reached out to Noah and told him about Komodo Decks. Noah thought it might be a good fit for AppSumo and connected them with the Partner Success team. The rest, as they say, was history.

The AppSumo Partner team began with some onboarding to learn about the product and begin creating all the necessary marketing collateral for a successful launch.

There was marketing copy to write, product images to capture, and video scripts to draft and revise. “AppSumo did most of it,” Khanan said. “We let them take charge We just took a step back and thought they know their audience better than we do.”

During this time, Komodo Decks also had a soft launch to AppSumo’s QA team. This is a group of testers called Beta-lings who test and offer feedback on Partner products before every launch.

In this case, the Beta-lings gave tough reviews to the Komodo Decks team. The feedback centered around a single point: What makes Komodo Decks different from other products on the market?

Komodo Decks took the advice to heart as they prepared for launch day.

Launch day: Selling 6,000 licenses on AppSumo

Launch day arrived and Komodo Deck’s support lines exploded.

Harry said, “The AppSumo team gave us a heads-up about having enough support. And they weren’t joking. AppSumo told us, ‘Just be prepared to be very busy post launch.’ And busy we were.”

For Harry, launch day was “a confluence of emotions.” As soon as the landing page was launched, the team was flooded with questions from Sumo-lings. “It was excitement, nervousness, anticipation—because a lot of work had gone into the backend to get to this moment.”

Khanan, on the other hand, “didn’t even have time to be emotional. Of course, I felt excited. But really all I could think about was: How do I answer all these questions? How do I respond to every review? They were coming in every second.”

Komodo Decks followed AppSumo’s suggestion to bring on some additional support staff for the launch. But Khanan and Harry were equally involved. Khanan even said, “Don’t outsource this because this gives you a pulse on what’s happening, what problems people are facing.”

It soon became clear that answering questions one at a time was not the most effective way to work. Khanan wanted to scale their responses. “We learned quickly that number one, we had to scale. And number two, we had to set up a community on our site. If one person has a question, then that means 100 other people probably have the same question. When you answer the question within your community, you can help everyone at once.”

So, Komodo Decks quickly created a community. They also wrote multiple blog posts to answer the most common questions and cast a clear written vision for their roadmap.

The sales poured in.

After the first day, Komodo Decks started gaining traction beyond AppSumo. People started posting in Facebook Groups and invited Khanan into their niche communities to answer questions. YouTubers made videos reviewing Komodo Decks. As Khanan put it, “The conversations were everywhere.”

The dev team also kept busy. They were shipping new features during the campaign. For example, one of the most common feature requests from Sumo-lings was the ability to white-label the product. The dev team delivered.

Devs also fixed many bugs. The influx of an international audience also brought overlooked bugs to the team’s attention. One Sumo-ling in Tokyo reached out because he couldn’t access the tool. It turned out, the network Komodo Decks used was blocked in Tokyo, so the devs quickly fixed the issue.

But the impact of launching on AppSumo was deeper than license sales. Sumo-ling feedback changed Komodo Decks for the better.

Building the product customers want—from feedback

Komodo Decks exists within a competitive software niche. As Sumo-lings purchased, tested, and used the product, feedback and feature requests poured in.

Some of this feedback allowed Khanan and Harry to spot unique problems to solve within their competitive niche. Khanan recalled, “The AppSumo community opened my eyes to the fact that there are problems I didn’t even know existed. And those are very important. Because if you can solve these problems, you create value.”

The feedback also helped Komodo Decks become the best version of itself. As Khanan put it, “AppSumo customers are demanding. You can look at that as a negative thing, but we saw it as a positive. They push us to be better.”

The immense feedback reminded Khanan of a famous idea from the startup world. It’s the notion that nothing valuable gets built in a vacuum. It’s best to stop coding, step outside, and speak with real people. “AppSumo opens up that vacuum. They help you really understand whether you’re meeting customer needs or not.”

Want to launch your product on AppSumo? Learn more about becoming an AppSumo Partner. Maybe your success story will be the one we write about next.

You have clients that depend on you, deadlines to keep up with, and if you want to continue staying in business, growth goals to chase after.

When you’re pulled in many directions, the only way you can keep the balancing act together is by creating a productive work environment.

And that’s what we’re here to help with today.

Let’s take a look at 11 key ways you can make freelance work super productive.

1. Mind your work hours 

Set yourself up for success by creating a set work schedule and sticking to it. Use dedicated apps to keep track of your work hours, schedule projects, and set deadline reminders.

During work time, keep your head down and focused on one key task or project at a time. Limit distractions and interruptions by turning off background apps and setting your phone on Do Not Disturb mode. If you’re in a noisy environment, use noise-canceling headphones to limit noise pollution.

We also recommend logging the average time it takes you to complete each project type so you can allocate relevant time estimates in your work calendar in the future.

2. Focus on your ideal client

Many freelancers waste time chasing people and projects they don’t align with just to make a buck. Not only is this detrimental to morale and productivity, but it can also cause unnecessary client conflict.

Instead of speaking to everyone, get a grip on the project themes you knock out of the park. Then create a data-driven ICP (ideal customer profile) for each theme.

(Image Source)

An Ideal Customer Profile will help you identify your target audience’s key characteristics, buying habits, and preferences. With this information, you can tailor your work to meet their needs, which can help you create a more effective and targeted business model.

3. Reduce eye strain and screen fatigue

You might think that forcing yourself to work for hours on end without a break is productive, but if you’re harming your eyes or brain health, how productive can you be long-term?

When you’re freelancing, you’re likely working with multiple screens—your laptop, phone, and maybe even a dual monitor setup.

To prevent eye strain and screen fatigue, build in breaks to step away from your computer so you can give your eyes and brain some rest.

Eye strain caused by screens is called computer vision syndrome or CVS. In some studies, participants experienced some level of CVS after just two continuous hours of computer usage.

When possible, limit screen time to under two hours. When you’re in front of a screen, wear blue light glasses or use a filter like F.lux to warm up your screen.

4. Work during your peak energy hours 

Everyone has an opinion about what an “ideal workday” looks like. But truly, you’re the only one who can make that call.

Your ideal work day is whatever helps you actually get work done. So, if you have more energy from 12pm–4pm, work then. Or, if you prefer to take care of work in the evenings, work then. Forcing yourself to work against your natural energy flow can cause unnecessary burnout and productivity lags.

5. Create a supportive office environment conducive to remote work

Create a dedicated workspace that’s comfortable, ergonomic, and private. Limit distractions by securing a private room at a coworking space, renting an office, or choosing a quiet area in your home.

You can also work at a local coffee shop or library if the ambiance is warm and quiet.

At the very least, make sure you have a comfortable chair with back support. Keep your shoulders relaxed and your wrists straight by adjusting your desk so that your arms are parallel to the surface. Keep your arms and elbows at a 90-degree angle.

6. Take care of your mental, physical, and emotional health

Your health affects your mood, ability to focus, and overall well-being. That’s why it’s crucial to prioritize eating three healthy meals a day, getting enough sleep, and stretching and moving your body.

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Don’t forget to schedule routine check-ups with your doctor and dentist, too, to make sure you’re health is on track. You can even schedule an appointment with an online doctor if you’re pressed for time!

7. Use tools to get ahead 

Streamline your business by creating a system and process for everything you do. Secure tools that can help you automate these systems and save time.

For instance, if freelance writing is one of your tasks, consider using an AI Blog Writer to help beat writer’s block. While an AI writer isn’t a writer replacement, it’s a great tool to use for brainstorming or for when you feel stuck.

Other tools you might use to get ahead include:

• A Work Operating System (Work OS)  for project management and submitting client deliverables
• A task manager for daily todos
• A calendar tool for meetings, appointments, and online bookings
• An email marketing tool to automate segmented email campaigns
• A social media scheduling tool to plan, create, and schedule social media content

8. Consider outsourcing redundant tasks or tasks you don’t specialize in 

Whether you’re looking for jobs on the side to help pay for college or you’ve turned your hustle into a full-time business, consider outsourcing redundant tasks to virtual assistants or sub-contractors.

For instance, if you sell flower arrangements, consider outsourcing your flower delivery services so you can focus on running other important aspects of your business.

If you’d like to hire a team to help you scale your freelance business, you’ll need an HR system in place, too. In this case, consider outsourcing to an HR firm like Bambee or getting your hands on reliable HR software.

9. Plan your week ahead of time 

Get ahead of the week by carving out time every Friday or Monday to plan your week carefully.

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Be sure to schedule:

• Buffer time to prevent bottlenecks
• Uninterrupted time blocks to complete projects
• Free time
• Appointments
• Meetings
• Deadlines

Pro-Tip: Schedule something fun to do during your time off. Looking forward to something can help you stay motivated and nurture a healthier work-life balance.

10. Celebrate your wins, big and small

Whether you finished a typical 10-hour project in six hours or you just secured a major client, don’t forget to celebrate your wins, no matter how significant or minor they may seem.

Celebrating your achievements and being proud of yourself gives you the courage and motivation to stay the course which can encourage better productivity.

Recognizing your wins can also encourage you to continue setting productivity goals and business milestones, keeping you on track toward business growth.

11. Prevent feast-and-famine cycles 

Nothing curbs productivity more than living in a feast-and-famine cycle.

The good news? Since the movement of “quiet quitting” and “the great resignation,” there’s been a greater demand for freelancers than ever before.

In other words, there are plenty of clients you can secure to help you prevent steep increases and plummets in profitability.

But you’ll also have to prioritize other measures, such as:

• Focusing on building long-term relationships with soulmate clients
• Managing your cash flow with intention and strategy
• Creating a manageable business budget
• Securing clients on retainers and contracts
• Adding a termination clause preventing clients from canceling contracts without notice
• Creating a mutual value exchange

Build a more productive freelance business

While there’s more where this came from, these 11 tips can help you set yourself up for higher productivity and greater satisfaction in your freelance work.

So think about, what’s one action you can take today to become more productive? Pick one tip on our list to start with. Then choose another. And another.

Over time, you’ll build in healthy habits to keep you productive and on track, consistently.

That’s it for now, sumo-lings.

To your success!

PS: Need productivity tools? Stop overpaying for software and check out these AppSumo deals instead!