Yes, Bubble.io Apps Can Get Listed on AppSumo (But Ours Flopped 😅) – ratio.dev

So we've got some good news. Bubble applications can actually get listed on AppSumo. Yeah, they can, to our surprise. Because the first thing that we found out when we tried, when we first approached appsumo about listing our bubble application, was that one of their sales reps said, no, we don't let bubble applications to get listed on appsumo.

True. But before we get into that, maybe we should give them just a brief heads up here. Bubble applications can also flop on appsumo.

In fact, our bubble application majorly flopped, which we're going to talk about.

You know, and the thing about was, I don't even think it was a very impressive flop.

It was not well defined impressive flop.

Well, let's leave that for later. Let's leave that for later.

Well, here's the thing. The process for getting your bubble application listed on appsumo is much easier now thanks to us. We did the difficult job of, first of all, pissing off Noah Kagan.

Yeah, well, you know, so you have to understand, okay, I mean, when they send you a message like, nope, we just don't list bubble applications, sometimes that can provoke a little bit of a.

Kind of like a frustration there. Something kind of.

Because for what reason? I mean, what is your reason for not allowing us to list bubble applications on AppSumo? And especially having seen the shitty applications that they've listed that were much. I mean, over the over years, applications that don't even exist these days, I mean, they get listed on appsumo, they make some money, and then six months down the road, oops, we have to turn the lights off.

Yeah, I mean, well, that happened. And that's part of their model is that. But, you know, I thought it was. I just almost took it like an insult and. Okay, so, you know, when you poke a bear, sometimes the bear growls.

I admit that my subject line to the email was a little bit clickbaity.

Let's actually go step by step. Okay, so here's how we listed our appsumo. The first thing that we did was obviously have we built an application that we could potentially list and that was OptionTrack.

Right. Which is a very niche application for options traders. Really cool app, by the way.

It's an amazing application. And being honest, one of the main reasons why it flopped on AppSumo is because it's not really an app that you want to list on appsumo.

Yeah, it's very niche.

It's very niche.

It's very specific to a very small group of people.

Appsumo is very marketing oriented.

You know.

Startup marketing, startup marketing, online marketing, that sort of stuff.

WordPress, digital businesses, you know, things like that. Not a whole lot of option traders are spending a whole lot of time on AppSumo.

Yeah, we found that out the hard way.

We found that out. And so of course, we didn't know that until, you know, three months down the road when we.

Well, let's just say we didn't even bother thinking about it.

Didn't even bother thinking about that. We were just. I think that what we really wanted to do just was experience. Experience the process of what does it feel like to list something on AppSumo? And even more importantly, how do you connect a bubble application to AppSumo's infrastructure of. Okay, make sure that you have codes being sent out to customers upon purchase. How do you do that sort of thing with bubble? And it's doable.

It is, it is. That was part of the learning process that we went through.

And if you need help, please reach out to us. Don't spend 20 hours trying to figure it out because we've done it before and we can help you out, obviously. Yeah. Now here's how the actual listing process functions and what we went through. Okay. So the first thing that we did is I was in charge of reaching out to appsuma and letting them know that, hey, we have this really cool application that I think we can offer as a lifetime deal for some users to try to, you know, help us out, get the apps started and try to get some funding. And of course, the first reaction from one of their sales reps was, no, if it's built with bubble, we just. One of this did. And I, you know, communicated that to. To the boss here and he, he had a bit of a. Well, how'd you feel?

You know, I felt like they were sending me to the back of the bus and. And it just didn't send it, didn't it? And okay, so it was clickbaity, the subject line.

No, but.

So I don't, you know, it was a little bit. No, I may have used a word like racist in there.

You're already talking about the subject line. But what happened is Dennis, trying to deal with that frustration that he was going through at the moment, decided to just reach out to Noah K Vi email. Which, by the way, that was exactly right after we had purchased his Million Dollar Weekend book, which is a fantastic book. We loved it. And we implement a lot of the principles that Noah talks about in his book pretty much on every app that we build and every business A lot of the business decisions that we make. And in his book, Noah and.

Intelligently or unintelligently shares his email address and he openly tells you, hey, reach out to us. Let me know what you think about the book. And well, we took that opportunity to reach out to him and Dennis.

Let'S just leave it at. I got a response. 10 minutes. I think it was 10 minutes from the time I sent the email until I got the response from Noah. Unfortunately, the response was not.

Very, how would I say, it wasn't a loving.

Oh, he hated you. Yeah, he hated you. No, but here's the thing, okay. I knew that Dennis had reached out to Noah and my expectation was that we were simply not going to hear back from Noah. And you know, Dennis one day reached out to me. I think it was like two or one or two days after we had spoken about reaching out to Noah to see if we could get OptionTrack listed on AppSumo. And he just sent me a slack message that said, hey, Noah reached out. He's not happy.

And of course that begged the question, well, why wouldn't be happy? I mean, the worst thing he could that could have happened is, well, guy just said, no, we're not listing bubble applications, but why wouldn't he be happy? And here's where Dennis forward me the email that he has sent to Noah. And the email subject was, is appsuma racist?

And of course that. But hey, now to my defense, once you read the email, it was obviously very tongue in cheek. It was not about race in any way. It was nothing about being racist. It was just about, hey, I feel like you're discriminating against bubble applications. And by the way, you're a great guy. I love AppSumo. It wasn't.

The tone was really friendly.

Yeah, but, but I think the subject line kicked him in the balls.

But I have to say, man, but.

I have to congratulate. He did read the email, eh?

And I have to say, man, it was a genius move on your behalf because no one must get 200 daily emails and he opened yours because of that freaking subject line. Now he hated your guts afterwards, but. Well, he didn't hate your guts because we're going to talk about what happened afterwards. But his initial reaction was not positive. But at least he got him to open the email.

He definitely opened the email.

He read the email and we found a solution to the problem.

Yeah, because he realized that his customer support team wasn't actually saying the truth because they do list bubble applications and they were willing and the truth is, despite being pissed off, Noah's a good enough guy that he didn't just, you know, shadow ban us or kick us off or, you know, say, never speak to these, you know, people again. No, he sent a message to his team or a guest or whatever. Anyway, they got back to us and they let us list option track on appsumo, so, you know, I haven't before had a chance publicly. Hey, Noah, if my email pissed you off.

I did.

That wasn't my intention. It was to grab your attention. It did work, but I still think you're a great guy. I don't think Appsumo's racist by any stretch of the imagination. And.

Here we are, the team that assumes complete responsibility for our epic Appsumo flop.

Yeah, we're going to talk about the flop in just a minute, but I really want to put, just before we wrap up this topic, some emphasis on how important the choice of words were. It was just super important for you to really get in his mind, and you managed to do so so cleverly. And I understand that Noah might be upset about the fact that, hey, he even told you. Don't you ever use that subject line ever again. I. I'm sorry, I'm completely against his reasoning. We are for sure gonna be using that again because. Well, maybe in not that exact way, but I do want to. It. It's a lesson for anyone watching who might want to be catching someone's eye and, you know, they might be thinking, well, this guy's never gonna open up my emails. Well, you have to make him want to open up the email. And that's something that you did really well.

That is you can't afford to be. Look, we already had to know, right? I didn't even really have much hope that we were ever going to get a yes, but I did know that you can't go through life being afraid of poking a bear. And they had poked me, so I poked back. Now, let's leave it.

That.

That was just. I think that's a good marketing lesson. You.

Sometimes you have to step on people's toes because that. If you have a belief, and there was an honest, authentic belief there, that bubble applications deserve to be considered on an equal level, as any other application or development platform could be. So in that sense, I felt morally justified in making a slightly outrageous subject line. That being said, that was only the. That was what got us in the door. But then we had to do the work.

That was my. My next question. So once we got Noah to talk to their customer support team and their sales reps about getting US onboarded into AppSumo and allowing us to list option track on appsumo. Now, we had a different problem, which is of course, all of our bubble applications follow somewhat the same onboarding process. We have a really good onboarding process developed here at ratio and we pretty much repurpose it over all of our bubble applications. But when you're listening on AppSumo, all of a sudden you have to create a new type of onboarding process.

Yeah, it's completely separate because.

You know, you. There's no subscription process there, there's no checkout process, but there are controls, obviously, to make sure that, you know, you're not just onboarding every random person who happens to find the page. So, you know, you have to generate a bunch of coupon codes, you have to submit them to appsumo, you have to keep track of them so that, you know when you've, you know, used one so that, you know, you can't, somebody else can't use the same code more than once. You. There's, there's, there's, you know, it's, it's not rocket science, but it's, you know, it's something that's work. It has to get done and we did it and you know, and then there's a lot of copywriting to be done and there's a lot of other steps that have to go through hoops you have to jump through before you can actually launch.

And I think that for a lot of bubblers out there, just knowing that there are people that have done this already that can help is kind of cool. Because, hey, we, we're more than willing to lend a hand.

And there are, I mean, I have my own personal issues with businesses that get funded with lifetime deals because depending on your business model, you could be shooting yourself in the foot. But if you're interested in doing that type of thing, like we were with option track, and I'm not saying we'll never run lifetime deals ever again. I mean, for some apps, they may be worth it for you to get some money.

Yeah. And it also gets you a little bit of a user base.

In user base, it gets your name out there as well, because all of a sudden everyone that's browsing through AppSumo is going to see your, your brand.

You get a backlink.

Get a backlink. Yeah. If your app does well, they'll even do some marketing around your application. Videos, emails, all of that. So let's talk about the embarrassing Part which is how not to run an app sumo campaign.

Look, I don't think that we really.

We weren't really ready. Maybe, maybe there's part of that was.

That I think we can. Look, we. I'll disagree with you there. I think we had the infrastructure ready. We actually put in the time to make sure that, hey, if we want to run another AppSumo campaign six months down the road with a different app, let's build this right. Let's get it right and make sure that we can easily do this again.

Yeah, that wasn't the problem. I think the problem was, well, twofold. First, we were fishing in the wrong pond because there aren't a lot of options traders on appsumo. Okay. That is what it is.

At the time. Option track wasn't a major priority for us either. So it was a side hustle, I think let's call it a side hustle.

Our hearts were not completely put into marketing option track at the time.

Yeah, we built it as a. Because we needed it.

We built it for us. It's a great application for cash based options traders and that's what, who we are. Yeah, that's something that we needed and there wasn't anything out there that could help us in that.

So I mean, if that's something you're interested in, then go check it out. Check it out. But you know, it wasn't really aligned with the appsumo audience that much. You know, I think that's. Those were the two biggest problems I think is, is what happened to us.

I think that, yeah, that's probably, I'll probably sum it up in making sure that once you're ready to go live on appsumo, that you've set aside some time to, you know, take care of questions, take care of making sure that the people that do buy some codes from you because you will see, you'll find people buying codes from you that don't even test the app immediately. They'll just, you know, just grab a code in case they want to use it a year from now. Make sure that you set up funnels and that you create funnels and you set them up in place to make sure that you push people to try out your app and to give you five star reviews on AppSumo, make sure that they're leaving those five tacos and.

You know, giving, engaging with the community on appsumo.

We didn't really, we didn't really do that much. I mean, I did go in and answer a few questions every now and then. But yeah, we weren't pushing people to, hey, give this a shot. We weren't. I mean, I don't even think we were sending out emails for people that were getting signed up. No, I.

We dropped the ball.

We dropped the ball and we were. I mean, we knew that the app is cool and the app still exists, which is something that I would say. 50% of apps that list Mapsima these days can't even say a year after they've listed. Yeah, they just disappear.

You know, and I think that's a cool thing about a bubble application, is.

That.

You know, regardless of the velocity of adoption that your app has in the marketplace, once you're up and you're running and you're moving, the costs of maintaining yourself alive are so much easier to absorb. And hey, they're cost. Obviously they are. And depending on how big your application is, it'll cost you a little bit more or a little bit less. But it is nothing compared to maintaining a development team, to maintaining an infrastructure, servers and databases and updates and systems administration. All of that you don't have to worry about.

About.

So it makes life easier.

It does. It really does. And it's really not that expensive. It comes down to, you know, the app that you build and how big is it and you know, if something breaks, you're going to have to fix it. And sure, if it's big, big, big.

And obviously if you want to grow your application, you need to be consistently improving, improving it, but still.

So I think that the biggest takeaway that people can walk away from, from this episode is if you're going to listen on appsumo, make a big deal out of it. Try to make a big deal out of it. Put your heart into it.

Definitely, definitely.

I was going to say it's probably one of the main things that we did not do. Make sure that the inference that your app work, I mean, that's step number one, make sure it works. I mean, if you're listing on AppSumo and people are successfully signing in and you've created a cool onboarding process, but then when the time comes to actually use the app, your app is glitchy or buggy or, you know, things break, then those people can get refunds. People and people will get refunds. So keep those things into account. You want to make sure that your app is in a proper place. And the other one is that your bubble application can actually list on AppSumo. Yes.

So that's a great thing for all of us out there to know that you can list on a bubble application on AppSumo, and you can probably still do it without pissing off Noah.

Yeah, that wouldn't hurt. Would be a cool thing. So, yeah, I think that's sort of touches on everything that I personally wanted to talk about. Yeah. And maybe perhaps we can do a case study around our next launch. If we ever launch something else on AppSumo and try to actually make a big deal out of it, that would.

Be a good idea.

Thank you, man.