You're going to love this story.
We talk a lot about growth hacking here at Digital First AI, but today we are going to share how we made $200,000 on Appsumo Deals (from 18 users to 2000 users in just 2 months), and how that helped us grow our community of "DF AI Admirers" and customers.
We think it's a great example of how you can take advantage of new opportunities when they come your way—and then use those opportunities to build something bigger than yourself.
Since day one, we've always seen DF's customers as our most valuable investors and advocates. They trusted us and supported us in the earliest days, and gave us incredible feedback on how we could make a product that everyone would love.
So today we want to say thank you to all the 2000 customers who bought a lifetime deal from DF, and promise that no matter what direction DF takes in the future, our lifetime deal purchasers will always have equal opportunities as subscribers.
How We Created a Killer Product? Our Story
The first step to creating a great product is to figure out why you’re doing it in the first place.
Why are you creating a product? Are you trying to solve a problem for yourself, or maybe for your customers? There’s nothing wrong with this motivation, but if you can think about how your solution will help others too, then that's even better!
A good product solves one problem well and makes it easy for people to get what they want from it. A killer product solves two problems at once—and sometimes even three or four—but also does so in an elegant way that makes people feel like they're getting more than just an answer over time.
We've been watching the marketing rollercoaster for almost 10 years, as advertising specialists working at agencies. We've seen a lot of industry changes—the lack of standards, the hegemony of huge advertising agencies, the absurdly inflated Martech market—and we've seen entrepreneurs trying to keep up with all of it.
We took on the challenge of creating a platform to share our collective knowledge with other growth hackers, so we could all work together to inspire each other and make our companies stronger.
What is Digital First AI?
Digital First AI is your personal growth assistant that delivers personalised marketing strategy within minutes and helps you execute it using AI. It's like having a millionaire mentor in your pocket!
Digital First AI based on information about your business, will recommend (AI) a list of marketing tactics and lets you fit them into customizable digital marketing funnels to boost growth. If you want to grow your business, this is your MVP.
Why Did We Choose Appsumo?
Appsumo is a company that offers deals on software, webinars and services for entrepreneurs. The company offers a variety of products and services that can help you grow your startup or scale your business.
The Appsumo community has over 1 million members and offers over 150 deals every month. The deals range from $50 to $10,000 dollars and are typically only available for a limited time.
Appsumo has been around since 2009 and has helped small businesses grow into multi-million dollar companies all around the world.
They have won numerous awards including Forbes Magazine’s “Best Places To Work For Millennials,” Inc Magazine’s “Fastest Growing Private Companies In America,” Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Top 100 Brilliant Companies To Watch Out For In 2016,” TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Competition Finalist (2014), and many more!
So, How Much Money Did We Make?
Let's get to numbers as that’s probably why you are here.
When we started working with them, we thought it would be a great way to gain exposure and get people interested in our product. We were right! We saw a huge spike in signups and sales.
We made around $200,000 in sales on AppSumo Marketplace and AppSumo Select respectively. 2000 active paid users, 4.71 star ratings and tons of positive feedback.
It's not as much as you might think for the amount of work involved, but hey it's still a good number!
Also, It isn't easy to make money like this. You have to be prepared for sleepless nights and broken keyboards from answering too many questions from customers, who are sometimes not always willing to pay what your product is worth.
But we also want to share something with you. We want our users to be aware that we've had a partnership with AppSumo and the revenue share deal we had with them. We can't go into too many details about this because of legal reasons, but suffice it to say that without AppSumo's help, we wouldn't have made it where we are today.
Leveraging The User Base
AppSumo members are very engaged. They’re loyal, they’re active and they love to share.
AppSumo members are incredibly social. When you offer them a deal on your product, you can expect that it will be shared with their friends via Facebook, Twitter and email. This means you're reaching out to a much larger audience than just the people who bought your product through AppSumo—the users who liked it enough to share it with their friends will probably also buy something from you in the future!
One of our most successful sales strategies was leveraging this user base by engaging—and asking for reviews from AppSumo members after they purchased our codes.
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We were incredibly lucky to have Sumoling's feedback throughout and after the campaign of Digital First AI. Feedback was super helpful as it was pretty difficult to develop a product that nobody uses at the beginning.
It was just what we needed: validation and encouragement.
The Buzz Around & Beyond The AppSumo Campaign
Facebook Groups
We've always been a big fan of Facebook groups. We discovered that there are a lot of different communities on Facebook that are passionate about trying new tools, giving feedback, and recommending them to others. So we started posting updates about our campaigns in these groups and asking for help from other users.
People in these communities started asking questions, engaging as well as recommending us to their friends who might be interested in the products too! This helped us get more traffic than ever before—and it made all the difference in the world when it came time for us to close deals with new customers.
We also reached out to the people who commented on the post through a marketing automation tool and interacted with them personally. We asked them for their feedback about the tool.
This was our way of showing that we care about our customers, and that we're not just trying to sell them something. We wanted to get an idea of what they needed from us, and what their biggest frustrations were so that we could work towards solving those problems for them.
Youtube
The feedback we got from all the influencers and SaaS affiliate marketers who reviewed our tool on Youtube was amazing, and it helped us gain traffic to our Appsumo page. It's always great to see people excited about what you're doing!
Some More Metrics
We started getting organic branded searches on Google. People started searching about DigitalFirst AI on Google.
More than 90% of the searches are of our brand name i.e digital first ai
We are very excited to see that our brand is growing and we are getting more attention from the world.
Our domain authority jumped from 7 to 38. That was pretty exciting, but the most exciting part was all the good backlinks we got to our domain!
The Appsumo Launch Was a Success! Now What’s Next?
We've been working hard behind the scenes to get our message out there. After the success of the Appsumo launch, we have been posting regularly on different channels and building awareness of our product. By sharing how-tos, tips & tricks related specifically to using our app as well as anything else relevant that might interest potential customers.
We also love the community approach because it gives us an opportunity to connect with more people and help them solve problems in ways that aren't always possible through traditional marketing channels like advertising or sending out newsletters. We know that when you're looking for information about something new, you want it to be quick and easy—and usually from someone who understands what you're going through.
1. We've seen an increase in signups to our community by over 70% since we started actively promoting ourselves on social media.
2. Our community members are now sharing their own content - like blog posts about topics they think will interest other members - at a rate of 10% higher than before we started posting regularly
3. We've had hundreds of signups from people who signed up for our newsletter during the Appsumo launch.
Discord
We have built a community on the Discord server with 200+ people in, and we’ve found it an invaluable way to get to know our audience, as well as gather insight into what new features they’d like to see in the future.
One of the most important aspects of this process is that it helps us build relationships with the people who use our product, and develop a sense of camaraderie. This has helped us create positive connections that transcend just being a user of DF AI —it has created real relationships between our users and our team.
Join our discord community: https://discord.gg/KxPvC5tS2t
Facebook
In addition to Discord, we've also built a community on Facebook for our platform. With over 500 members (and growing), We post announcements, tactics and polls on our Facebook page, which has allowed us to interact with our customers in a way that makes them feel heard..
Join our Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/670081814156076
Growth Hackers Club
We've always believed in the power of communities. That's why we launched our new Gamified Community—a place where you can connect with other Growth Hackers and grow your skill set by completing quests (specific tasks) that help you earn EXP and unlock a Growth Hacker PRO badge.
The Growth Hacker PRO badge gives you lots of new possibilities inside DF.AI, including unlimited Funnels!
Join our club: https://www.digitalfirst.ai/gh-club
Product Updates
We recently released a bunch of new features that users have been asking for the most.
- The Tactics Library is now over 150 tactics strong, and we are continuing to add new ones every week. These tactics have been tried and tested by our experienced growth hackers, so you can be confident that when you use them as part of your plan, you're going to see results.
- Create your own personalised white label sales funnel in PDF. You can use this for any business and it's so easy!
- And finally, AI Content Generation means no more writer's block! Now you can generate content at your fingertips—we've even shown you some examples so you know what we mean by "content generation."
Was It Worth It?
We've learned a lot from our AppSumo launch, and we're so grateful to have had the opportunity to do it. It was a great experience, and we're excited to share our findings with you!
First, we want to talk about how important it is for startups to get feedback from active users early in their development process. As an early-stage startup, we were able to collect feedback from hundreds of customers in just two weeks. This is invaluable for any startup that has yet to establish traction or a clear product/market fit—and it's not something that happens easily or quickly as your company grows larger.
We also learned that the AppSumo community is diverse: from small businesses owners up through companies who have raised 100s of millions of dollars! This means there's something for everyone when it comes to the types of products you can offer on Appsumo. In addition, because this community is so large and diverse, there are many different types of customers within it—so you can tailor your marketing efforts accordingly if you choose to market elsewhere as well.
Finally, we learned that Appsumo can be an excellent way for startups to get initial traction to grow their business.
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