MBA2104 Why You Should Run an AppSumo Deal

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 MBA Show. Powerful business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and in today's lesson you'll learn why you should run an AppSumo deal. AppSumo is one of the biggest deal sites out there when it comes to digital products. It's the Groupon for courses, software, downloadables, templates, books, guides, all kinds of digital products that are aimed towards business owners. And in today's episode I'm going to explain why you would want to run an appsumo deal to promote your product, to get more exposure, get more sales. I'm also going to outline some of the things you got to look out for the things you got to do right so that it's not a flop. AppSumo has gotten incredible reach with millions of people visiting the site every month, over a million email subscribers and a huge cult following. Now we've run an appsumo deal in the past for our software, but we're now running another deal for our course. So I'm going to walk you through the process of actually putting up a deal on AppSumo, what the revenue share is like, what you need to do to be successful, and showing you real examples of our deal so that you can do the same for your product or service. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business, guys.

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I want to begin this episode with full disclosure. The founder of AppSumo, Noah Kagan, is a friend of mine. That's how I kind of got to know AppSumo over the years. Also, former president of AppSumo, Ahmed Abdullah, is a friend and we're actually going to have him on the podcast. He's going to be joining us soon in an extended interview where I basically extract his best habits as a CEO. What are the things that actually move the needle and improve his performance? Look out for that episode soon. Now, why do I actually recommend AppSumo over other deal sites? There's a lot of different deal sites out there. There's a lot of options. Here's the bottom line. I just believe that AppSumo does the best job taking care of their vendors, of the people that are actually putting up the actual products. You, they're really fair when it comes to revenue splits and they're really fair when it comes to taking care of you in the process and making sure that you're doing everything correct to have success. So, like I mentioned, back in 2016, we ran a AppSumo deal for our software webinar Ninja, and we're not going to go too much into that because that was way back when and things were different back then. But recently we launched a course on AppSumo, our automated webinar challenge. And I'll walk you through that whole process. Now, launching a software on AppSumo is a little bit different than the other types of products that you can list. That's a little bit of a longer process. It takes approvals. You have to structure the deal a little bit differently. You and the process is just not the Same. Having said that, if you're trying to dip your toe into something like AppSumo and running a mega promotion through them, then a course or a tool or a template or a book or a guide is actually a good way to get started because it's a pretty straightforward process. And I'm going to walk you through that process right now. First of all, let's address the elephant in the room. How much money do you make? Well, AppSumo has a very generous revenue share policy. Anybody that buys your product via AppSumo as a new AppSumo customer, you get 95% of the revenue. But if somebody buys a product that is a returning AppSumo customer, meaning that AppSumo helped you get the sale, the revenue share is 70%. So you get 70% of the revenue. Still very generous. Now, how you acquire a customer actually matters a lot when you're promoting on AppSumo. And I'll explain why, because one will unlock the other. Now, when I was submitting our course, the Automated Webinar Challenge, and by the way, if you want to check it out and you want to see what it looks like on AppSumo, just go to webinar ninja.comSumo and it'll take you straight to our page of our deal site. We just launched it, so we haven't done much promotion, but it gives you a visual of what I'm talking about in today's episode. When you submit your course or your product on AppSumo, you're going to go through a process of giving the information that they need to approve you. This is like the course outline, what you cover, the benefits, how much it costs, how much you're going to list it for. At AppSumo, you'll also have to submit some marketing materials, like some images that represent your course and the benefits of it. And then you're going to have to show them how people are going to redeem their purchase. Now, remember, when somebody buys your course or your product in AppSumo, they're paying AppSumo, they're buying it from AppSumo. So once they buy it, they need to redeem what they just bought on your website or on your course platform or whatever you're selling. And what AppSumo recommends is that you actually create a bunch of coupon codes that give them free access. You make these codes unique and you submit these codes to AppSumo so they can give them to each person. You just kind of submit them in an Excel sheet. Later on, when it's time for you to get paid with Appsumo, they'll give you your revenue share, but you gotta explain in the process how somebody would redeem. What site do they go to? Where do they put in this code? What are the steps for them to redeem your product? Now, once you've submitted your product, it takes maybe a day or two for the team to approve you. They might ask you a few questions before they do and it basically just happens over email. Once they approve you, basically, they give you a launch date. They say, we're going to make this live on our site, this date. So you know when to start promoting. Yep. You have to promote the product before they start promoting you. And I really like this system because it allows you to use their power, their leverage, once you get a bit of traction with your product. Now, AppSumo is big on reviews. They want to make sure that your buyers review the product on the page once they do, because this gives your product credibility on appsumo. So much so that they will incentivize you to tell people to write you a review, an honest one, to so your page looks credible. They'll even incentivize you every time you hit a certain level of reviews. So like 5 reviews, 10 reviews, 20 reviews. And each level they will do some sort of marketing activity to promote your product, whether it's running Facebook ads for you to promote your product, sending out an email or mentioning you in their newsletter, which is huge, or even getting on their homepage and getting a lot of views. So the key here to be successful is you need to just sell your product, get some reviews on AppSumo. When you first launch, you need to leverage your existing audience and send them to appsumo because they only can review the product if they buy it from appsumo. And this is not too hard because it's actually a pretty good deal. And if you've been doing business for a bit, there are a core group of customers or potential customers you can call upon that will support anything you put out. So now that I explained the process and how AppSumo supports you as you get reviews and start growing your sales inside of appsumo, Let me explain why you want to run an appsumo deal. I already mentioned they have incredible reach and they have an incredible audience that you can tap into once you start growing. But when a customer buys your product, Appsumo, you get exposure to a new audience. You can show them other products and services that you offer in your value ladder. You get word of mouth marketing, you get traffic to Your site, you get people talking about you on social media and sharing your deal with others. It doesn't end there. Appsumo has got an army of affiliates, people that sign up as affiliates of Appsumo and sell their deals, sell their offers. So if your product starts to get some traction and it starts to get some reviews and it's, you know, getting some exposure, those affiliates are going to go after your product and start selling it to their list, allowing you to get even more sales. Now I'm going to stop here and I want to just make a point. I want to drill something home here. When you're running a deal on Appsumo, I don't want you to see this as some sort of gangbuster cash grab sales experience. You may not make six figures on your deal or anything like that, but it's one of the most powerful ways for you to market your business. People are buying your products, so you're going to make some money. But more importantly, people are going to be exposed to your product, exposed to your brand, your website and what you're all about. So I would kind of see this as more of a customer acquisition tool than a sales tool. And if you see it with that lens, then you'll definitely be able to optimize based on that. You'll understand, okay, I need to get some traffic over there, I gotta get reviews. I want to kind of get as much exposure just like you would do on social media. But with Appsumo's website, another thing is that for the most part, if it's not a software deal, if it's any other kind of product, it's an evergreen offer. It's not some sort of limited offer that is going to be up there for only five days. You have time, you can plan, you can promote, you can send people to your site. You can use this as sort of your entry level product and instead of selling on your website, sell it at Appsumo so that you can use their promotional tools as well to help you get more exposure. I'm referring to, of course, when you start getting reviews, you know, getting those Facebook ads, getting on the front page, getting to be a part of their newsletter. That's some powerful stuff.

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To wrap up today's lesson, if you are looking for a way to market your business, your products, but don't have a lot of money in your marketing budget, this is a godsend, right? It's an incredible, credible way for you to get exposure. It's such a win win for both you and Appsumo where when you succeed, they succeed. So therefore they want you to succeed more. And the cherry on the cake is that the team at Appsumo are incredibly supportive. They are super helpful and giving you the tips and the tools you need to be successful. On Appsumo, they're always available to answer questions. I've seen nothing but good things from them. And I'm not just saying that because I'm buddies with the founder. He's hired some incredible talent. Again, if you want to check out our Appsumo deal, our automated webinar challenge, the deal is $99 for 30 days of video training showing you how to build your own automated webinar with templates and SOPs and accountability and community and so much more. You can go to webinar ninja.comsumo to check it. Course, if you decide to buy it, leave us a review so we can get that app. Sumo Juice thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love it here, hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app. Right now, we're on every single app. Overcast, Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Radio, Spotify, you name it, we're on it. Your job is to hit subscribe so you don't miss a beat and so that you can get access to over 2000 episodes and lessons we have in our archives. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There's a little bit of upfront investment of time and energy you're going to have to do to put together this deal on Appsumo. In my experience, it took about, I would say in total 5 to 10 hours to do everything in terms of the copy and the images, the marketing materials, the redemption codes, all that kind of stuff, submitting it, you know, communicating with the team. It's a pretty low cost investment in terms of time for what you're going to get, the potential leverage you can have to through their network. Thanks again for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday where we answer the question, how much of a raise should I give my team members? We'll check you then. Until then, take care.

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