[Notes] How to prepare for the Appsumo interview (and see if AS is for you)

Hi friends, I prepared our AppSumo launch for Paperless in Notion, but we ended up not doing it 🤷‍♂️ 🤷‍♂️

I decided to share the document with the community instead of letting it rot in Notion archives. It's bullet points only, so hope you don't mind.

But how does this help me?

This should help you decide if Appsumo is for you, how to make a good case for it, and how to prep for the interview.

Ready?

About Appsumo

• 1 million subscribers
• Reach of 50,000,000 people
• 500k Appsumo followers across all social media channels

Audience

• AppSumo users are early adopters in North America and European markets. They follow all the hottest trends and are looking for bargains.
• Users look for social proof on products they can trust.
• Users are researching other platforms like Product Hunt before making a purchase
• Sumo-lings are experts on certain market segments and will always compare your product with others. These comments are very useful to find your strengths and weaknesses.

Success Factors

• Your product has a great English-speaking team with deep product and marketing knowledge
• Your product has a website and is stable, ie won’t go down under traffic waves from Sumolings
• Your product doesn’t have a narrow focus and can be useful to a great number of users
• Your team is prepared and ready to work late hours, evenings & night shifts

Tip: Add information about benefits for agencies that want to make money off the product. AppSumo is a land where a lot of agency representatives live, and if you can make them each buy a promo code for each of their clients, you can get additional income.

• Make the AppSumo offer disadvantageous for current customers. If you don’t, you risk losing regular paying customers. Or you can make the offer win-win: make the AppSumo offer even more profitable and attractive for current customers, but only if they buy it and stay on that same plan.
• Make an agreement with influencers about promo distribution on Quora, Reddit, and Twitter beforehand.
• Educational material to make product more valuable, ie. document automation course, templates
• Landing page with most common Q&As

Potential Downsides

1. Paid audience loss. Even if you haven’t promoted in your market, your audience will find out about your promotion anyway. Somebody will post in groups or Telegram channels and, voilà — some percentage of your current paid customers will transfer to the AppSumo plan.
2. Your standard plans can lose value for your audience. It’s possible, but not guaranteed.

Campaign fails, if

x Poor knowledge base
x Slow support
x Pricing and numbers don't make sense
x Wrong COGS (Costs of Goods sold)

Remember: Total Revenue - services - support - hosting - professional services - customer success - dev ops = gross margin

How to prepare for the Appsumo Interview

• What category does your product fall under?
• Five reasons why customers love your product and you?
• What are similar offers on Appsumo, ie competitors
• Is your team ready to launch? Make a list of who's responsible in your team for Content, Sales, Technical Support, Legal & Finance Support.
  Appsumo uses Slack to communicate with your team

Once you have an overview of the potential upsides and downsides, decide if Appsumo is for you, then prepare for the interview by focusing on the above points.

Let me know what your thoughts are. I also have a full checklist for the actual launch, but that's for another day 😊