The Ledger
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Kagan: Pair elite fractional advisors with hungry junior internal employees
“We go and look at who did the thing at this company that's ahead of us. And then we pay that person a lot of money per hour. And then we hire a more junior person who cares probably a little bit more about AppSumo. And then they, it's kind of a nice, nice merg…”
Al-Abdullah: Focusing on marketing agencies made AppSumo significantly more profitable
“We realized if we dive deeper, marketing agencies were our most profitable customer segment, and they were buying software to reduce their monthly spend on software. So let's just do more of that. We go way deeper with them. We build way more customer loyalty.…”
Al-Abdullah: AppSumo's affiliate program generates multiple eight figures in revenue
“Today that, that, that revenue channel does multiple eight figures in revenue for AppSumo.”
Kagan reveals AppSumo reached $80M in annual revenue as a bootstrapped business
“Once they start working, you know, for AppSumo, it was like, we did some of you, it worked right away. It was like first year, 300,002nd year, three million, but then it was flat, you know, for a few years. Like 4,000,004 1,000,005 1,000,004. Then it started p…”
AppSumo's TidyCal generates $3,000 per day in profit on lifetime pricing
“So we launched tidycal.com maybe two years ago, and that's doing 3000 dollars in profit a day at 29 dollars for life.”
Scaling AppSumo to 13,000 products dropped gross margins from 50% to 30%
“And so we went from 600 to 13,000 products within six months on the site and our revenue stayed the same, but our profit went down, right? Because now we have different margins. So some products have Better margins than others. So we went from normally like a …”
Kagan: All my successful ventures gained initial traction within a weekend
“And I've noticed with all of my successes, they have started fast. Like that's what I, you know, weekend, if not sooner.”
AppSumo has been profitable since day one without venture capital
“I think more with raising money, we never really had a good use for it because we did have capital and we were profitable from day one.”
Bootstrapped AppSumo generates annual revenues in the high eight figures
“Like, you know, our revenues are in the eight, you know, very high eight figures.”
AppSumo collects payments upfront and pays software partners 60 days later
“We don't have to hold any inventory on anything, and we promote a thing you created, someone else created, and some software creator. We get the money up front, and then we pay them 60 days later.”
Isenberg: Noah Kagan's AppSumo generates approximately $80M in annual revenue
“He has AppSumo, which is doing really well.
I think it's eighty million a year.”
Kagan pre-sold $3,000 of a DocuSign alternative in 48 hours
“And so in 48 hours, I was able to sell 3000 dollars worth without using any social media or any of my email list. And in pre-sales to a DocuSign alternative for life, which will launch in 30 days on AppSumo.”
Kagan: AppSumo uses Howdy.com to hire vetted South American developers
“We use howdy.com. Have you seen them? So they give you, they hire South American developers and employees, but they do all the vetting and they just make it stupid easy for you to have full-time dedicated staff in an area. So we're on our absolute originals pr…”
Kagan reveals AppSumo's roster of fractional advisors from top tech companies
“Almost everyone in leadership gets a person. So Anna who runs people, we have Christine, who's the chief people officer from Duolingo. Moody Glasgow was the CMO of Zapier and Glassdoor. He does marketing. There's a guy named Colin Gardner. He does revenue. So …”
Kagan spent $1M in cash promoting AppSumo's expanded product catalog
“And then I decided to also spend a million dollars cash to promote that we have all these new products on AppSumo.”
Kagan: Castmagic reached $1M ARR in less than a year
“There's a tool on AppSumo called CastMagic. I think in less than a year, they had a million ARR.”
Andrew Chen modeled the economics behind AppSumo's shift to individual deals
“AppSumo used to be bundled software deals. And then we went to individual daily deals and it's not just cause that's what Groupon did. It's cause we literally like had to go understand that we looked at the economics of bundles. Andrew Chen put it together. He…”