Project.co x AppSumo: 3,500 New Customers and $94K in 3 Weeks

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably too busy purchasing insane lifetime deals on software tools to ponder the magic behind how products make it to the store.

But c’mon, you can’t say that you’ve never been curious.

And it’s absolutely true: this insane deal rodeo would not be possible without our amazing partners. 

If it wasn’t for them, our 800,000+ list of early adopters couldn’t get world-class new software tools for a fraction of the price.

And our team would be… really bored. 

So today we wanted to zoom in on the results of a deal we ran back in July: an all-in-one client-facing project management software called Project.co.

(Sumo-ling Simon Rowe reviewed it for us on the blog.) 

Matt Byrom wrote about his experience as an AppSumo partner, so we wanted to do a quick recap to feature some of his quotes. But first, some numbers from the launch: 

• 3,713 new accounts created (2,282 free + 1,431 paid accounts)
• 1,700+ support conversations
• 130 site questions
• 4.65/5 out of 53 reviews 
• $93,884 total revenue
• 485 code stackers
• 47 🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5-taco reviews

How Project.co found AppSumo

AppSumo had been on Matt’s radar for several years. As a Sumo-ling himself, he had purchased several deals and saw AppSumo as an intriguing marketing channel for new products. Matt wrote:

“I’d already taken a sneaky look to see if AppSumo might be right for us in the future, but they actually approached me before I had the chance to take this further. (Incidentally, I almost certainly would have reached out to them eventually if they hadn’t made contact first.)”

As the Project.co team considered launching a deal with AppSumo, they were initially unsure whether running such an insane deal could have a negative effect on pricing their product later on. As Matt started to add up the benefits, however, he quickly realized the partner upside was well worth the investment. 

Here’s what he wrote: 

After minimal negotiation and beta testing, Project.co was officially approved as an AppSumo partner. They used Chargebee to create 10,000 unique codes and planned to do manual stacking for Sumo-lings who bought more than one code. 

Launch

Fortunately, Matt’s strategy for the launch aligned closely with what we advise our partners in our official launch guide: prepare yourself for a lot of support questions and product inquiries.

“There’s no other way to put it: it was hard work. I pretty much single-handedly dealt with support issues for the whole period, and this meant working non-stop for two weeks… We wanted to dive in at the deep end and fully test the product. Every support ticket, every customer conversation, was a chance to improve our understanding of what people wanted from the system – so that we could improve and make it better… 

“As a new product to market it’s essential to get committed people using the software as quickly as possible. It’s only with a significant amount of users that you can make quality decisions about what features the general consensus of people want.”

Here’s Matt’s advice for making the most of support questions: 

After the soft launch to AppSumo Plus Members and the full launch a week later, Matt found that 3-day final push about two weeks later — with the webinar and final FOMO email — resulted in about 35% of total sales.

Download the FREE Official AppSumo Launch Guide

Benefits of launching on AppSumo

Here’s a final recap of the benefits of launching on AppSumo according to Matt:

Boost traffic and buzz

 “Working with AppSumo helped us generate traction that would have been nearly impossible to generate any other way.”

Customer feedback on steroids

“Having a wider sample group meant that we were able to notice when 50-100 people were asking for the same thing – which gave us a much more accurate steer on what people wanted from Project.co. I believe has been a real bonus for the product.”

Foster your fanbase

“We also found the AppSumo experience helped us build our first ‘superfan’ audience. Again, not to be immodest, but some people don’t just like the product – they truly love it. This has helped us generate reviews and testimonials, with 50+ written testimonials and 2 testimonial videos in production.”

Watch the market come to you

“We had an awesome experience with AppSumo. They are a thoroughly nice team and 100% delivered on their promise of a flood of traffic and educated new users. They have a very slick process that has clearly been been tried, tested and refined over time.”

Benefit from the community

“Their ability to provide their community with what they want is also impressive. When the deal closed out we had received a ton of traffic, a lot of new account sign ups, a lot of purchases and we’ve been speaking with new customers non-stop. This provided us with a huge amount of exceptionally useful product feedback. So overall this was a huge win for us!”

Thank you, Matt, for writing such a kind and thorough review of your experience with AppSumo!

You can read Matt Byrom’s original post on the Project.co blog here: https://www.project.co/appsumo-experience/