2 years ago, we built our app. targeted Country A, there were some specific constraints in the market, and we couldn't sell for 3 months (just one client).
We found a channel partner in Country B, conducted 20 demos in 3 days. 5 of them said they would ABSOLUTELY buy it today. Perhaps 5-6 maybes, I am not even sure.

We told them we need just 2 weeks to adapt the software to Country B's requirements.

We went back in 2 weeks, 3 of them ghosted us. 1 postponed kindly, 1 bought the software.

Things change when buyers actually need to reach to their wallets.
Validation doesn't give False Negative. If they say "I don't need it", then yes, it works. However it gives a lot of False Positive. I get irritated to see compared to how many people defend it so heartfully, how many actually did it and became successful without any pivoting.

Fundamentally it is an extremely hard problem to tackle and I feel for you. I faced similar issue and I can’t say I could solve it, but below worked as quick wins for me:

1) stop caffeine completely. When I used coffee to get by during the day, my evening time was after 1-2 halving, which was like withdrawal. When I stopped caffeine, I was much more energetic within the day and the evening.

2) Stop sugar, basic carbs It created insuline spikes and resulted in more exhaustion, after, the key is stability in caloric intake and insulin levels.

3) not letting weight loss/cutting into the mix We get tempted to fix our life altogether. Caloric deficit that’s required for weight loss causes full drainage at the evening time. Actually I did the opposite, I realized a very small caloric surpluss caused by an afternoon snack helped me greatly through the night. Just watch your weight, some nuts in the late afternoon just boosts me in evening.

4) keep the most enjoyable part to the weekdays Willpower is a limited resource. If practical part is more fun than watching educational videos, focus on them instead.

5) just start no matter how tired you are, but don’t obsess about the duration or milestone I see this helped me. If I just starts some days I do just continue without feeling exhausted. Exhaustion is a mix of physical and psychological. If it is psychological, having the context switch may actually help sometimes. But I don’t fight if I still feel this way after 15 mins.

6) speech control at work If you do a lot of meetings, practice calming your speech and volume. I realized most of my headache was coming from trying to make myself heard in calls.

Of course I wish I could share tips on how to set boundaries at work to solve the core of the stress problem, however that would be a job of therapist. I just wanted to share things that rely helped me.

it is a very tough market, good luck!

From a German engineer, I would expect better foldering, indexing and categorization. Especially from one who can archive 35k pages of notes. Something doesn’t add up 🕵🏻‍♂️

Of course you should not have very high expectations. But life time deals in general is a good place to launch I believe, help you collect testimonials and product feedback and lets you decide how to steer. A lot of good companies’ paths go through life time deals and appsumo. But essentially it is a channel, not more.

Can’t really tell. But you can craft a professional but short and neat email to follow-up. Present some new facts and show your eagerness. They do appreciate professionalism which reflects how you will handle their customers (from support perspective).

Hello! We had received a set of (eligibility) questions via email and then and interview was set up. The call was also going around similar nature and particularly assessing if they want to take you as part of Appsumo Select. Once you receive the questions in any case you will have the time to answer. If it is the case, Be careful to let them know that you are working full time on this project. Of course if they see you have invested your capital and even worked as a team it adds credibility. But mostly they try to understand if you will deliver on your promise.

Wow! What’s the app. I actually believe amazing community managers can do well on social media. My negative bias is towards paid ads.

Let's hear from folks who actually did acquire; )

Thanks! I like the idea. Though I first thought it covered taxation but you focused on pdf generation with invoice info it seems. We as kiwilaunch.com generate invoices for our clients with their own brand and information. If I knew this was available, I might have considered not building it in house.
Good luck making it bigger.
Do you think adding the app to Zapier makes sense? some no code people could use it in their zap sequences.

Let's assume it is $50-$100, and the lifetime value is average $400. From these channels, it is still not easy to acquire clients for <$400 cost.

Did you actually apply this for a bootstrapped/indie product? if yes, could you share more details? what's the product, how much did you have to spend (at least) to actually make the mix work.

I wanted to try what you describe. Remarketing required a larger audience size. Google ads cpcs were around $3-$4. If I wanted to build big enough remarketing list and actually remarked to them, I would have to spend at least $6K-8K. I am not saying everyone will have similarly terrible numbers, but that's where my curiosity lies. I don't want to make this post about generic advice.

I am looking for genuine bootstrappers/indie developers who could make the mix work, and how was their numbers.

Thanks for your answer, it is informative for a person who didn't know about what api-first mean. I am more asking the community's opinion about trend. So it is less like "should i build api-first" more like, "do you think the number of new api-first saas products increase rapidly in the future".

And from folks who actually built that, more insights about their go to market.

Wow! Making domain renewal date a decision milestone, I now feel like I am mega rich.

I really really recommend hiring a similar minded young person whose company you would enjoy. A lot of times, bringing a cofounder at this stage has advantages and disadvatages. If they can shoulder this and bring it to a next level, it is different, but most of the times such exceptional people are not idle. In most cases you bring the cofounder (who you know from your past experiences or friendship circles) but it is obvious that you will always be the tiebreaker which at times get awkward.

Instead when you hire a younger person and you become companions, I guarantee you, they will close this gap more than you would ever expect.

They will not get anxious to share their opinions and they will even be more objective sparring partners. The negotioation of the relationship dynamic won’t get in the way of actual companionship and fruitful discussions, if it makes any sense!

Write a witty reply to the top ranking comment on a post;)

If you mean 2-3 months, I agree that they shouldn’t, that means they hid their financial difficulties and used appsumo campaign as a last resort.

I can fully relate! But in my case I found out that feeling is only good because it comes as a package with the caffeine😀. When I grind decaf beans, after 3rd or 4th week, it doesn’t feel as Zen anymore.

Thank you!

Hello👋🏻 we have built kiwilaunch and are currently selling lifetime deals in Appsumo. I can tell from experience they do fulfill their part.

After we were introduced to them, we had a call. The account representative asked a lot of questions like funding, current traction, team size and when the product was launched. They have checked our (founders’) linkedin profiles and past jobs/projects and validated we go for the long game.

To the extend that a marketplace can vet their vendors, I think they are quite good. 60 days refund policy feels even quite unfair but they enforce it. They are extremely careful with authenticity of the reviews/ratings.

They don’t even allow the first 10 reviews to be published before buyers with higher purchase history leaves at least 10 reviews.

I myself don’t hesitate while buying software from Appsumo.

But,

Startups fail🥺, and they do it a lot. When a software product fails, it leaves a lot of broken hearts. There are makers who put in tremendous efforts, investors, employees, suppliers who also believed in that could become something big. When they do, it is a bit harsh to blame the makers or appsumo to have done misconduct.

If a product is in Appsumo, the likelihood that there is venture capital funding is very low. So these businesses need to be able to make money.

What can you do? - during the 60 days, assess the product: Are they developing new features, how is support. - make an assumption about cost of one customer, and see if it looks viable to serve you for a lifetime:

.Is there too much storage used, .do you interact with the product too many times in average (indicates server cost) .Is there too much third party service API cost (most AI wrappers are at risk for example if OpenAI increases their prices)

If their costs are high, it doesn’t automatically mean they will fail, but you just need to know you are buying into an optimist’s vision and your service will be paid by future customers. It is like a micro ponzi scheme/pyramid scheme and your payment hopefully will give them enough ammunation to actually crack new revenues.

• Understand that you are making a very informed investment. If the product does well, and you use it for long time, you may get 50-100 times return from cost saving. If they don’t you may lose that money. And the good thing is, they allow you to call back your investment within 60 days! Imagine you buy a company’s share and you have guaranteed refund option within 60 days!

I get it now. I use the word watchlist for this scenario, perhaps I am not as familiar to e-commerce terminology. They don't have this feature.

Hello u/business-coconut-69
I like it. One question though: this is a Design agency, but design is more about coherency. Good heroes are good because they complement and introduce the whole design system while giving attention grabbing quick messages and call to actions.
So creating a standalone designed component as an HTML block every week might not be enough perk to drive a little traffic, at least by personas for who this product is actually relevant. So if I don't have a design system already in place, what will I pay 299 for? if I already have one, wouldn't I most of the times have a mainpage that already have the hero built in?

any ideas about this?

The reason this question caught my attention is, we are thinking of creating generic, reusable templates for the hero section for kiwilaunch.com clients (online booking and scheduling platform).

Here is a sample booking microsite for a newly created user: https://reddit.book.kiwilaunch.com/

Currently you can use rectangular or circular picture and on the right side a header and description. There needs to be a balance of design touch without too much branding identity. We could embed "Your Hero" templates as ready to use heroes. So the idea excites me for this use case.

If your wish is that a specific (type of) software to be available in Appsumo, it wouldn't do much change. Appsumo mostly doesn't scout software as to my knowledge.

If there are things related to their own marketplace platform, you can write to their support and they will surely listen to it.