My Story to Cross $10k Revenue in AppSumo

How it all Started

When I launched Marvin XR back in 2021 as a bootsratepped solopreuner, I used to hear crickets. I tried to do some marketing across social media channels but frankly there was no customer around who was super excited to give it a try to the product. My goal was to build a side hustle which could bring similar revenue bandwidth like my job ($10k/mo).

Pretty soon I realized two things:

1. I maybe good at building stuffs but suck at sales. Simply because I never worked in core sales in my entire life.

2. I spent quite some fund while developing the product and there was a monthly expense for cloud infrastructure. I simply cannot start throwing money to paid ads and expect to see wonders.

So what could be the quick next steps to uncover? That’s when I discovered AppSumo from a blog of Guillaume Moubeche — Founder & CEO @ Lemlist.

The product surpassed $10k in Mar, 23

The Journey Begins

I wanted to push Marvin XR fast to AppSumo to see how it would work there. Frankly, I didn’t even know that deal like LTD (Lifetime Deal) even exist for SaaS products in an online marketplace. So I completed the check list within one evening and clicked the Submit button.

I won’t lie — after reading all the super success stories around AppSumo LTD products, I was kind of hopeful to get some clients quickly and use the money to enhance the platform quickly.
Pretty ambitious dream — huh! ;-)

However I was not completey dumb — never dreamt of being a millionaire on the first month. I knew that my SaaS was not even self-sufficient (needed a lot of hand-holding when onboarding a new client). Anyone looking forward to invest a minimum of $49 for LTD would need some real vision (and perhaps courage to trust).

Miracles do happen! I received my first paying customer from AppSumo after 3 days. At the end of April, 2021 — there were 5 paid customers who bought lifetime membership at $49. The sixth person took a refund — I’m sure that person missed the biggest opportunity of the lifetime ;-)

It was a moment of true celebration. I felt like a little bunny for a while.

First paying month for Marvin XR after launching in AppSumo

Apart from putting an AppSumo banner on website and sharing few posts on social media — I never spent much time on marketing it. Instead, I was focused on improving the platform and adding more features.

By the end of 2022, Marvin XR was growing slowly — not that exponential growth curve that I intended for it though. In 2022, Marvin XR collected a revenue of around $25k which was not bad at all. But AppSumo revenue was not growing much. By Sept, 2022 the gross AppSumo revenue was around $3,100 (that was after 17 months of launch).

The Aha Moment

Then something changed altogether. Suddenly since Sept, 22 a surge of customers started to purchase the LTD deals for Marvin XR. In last 5 months only, the gross revenue crossed $11,000. After reducting the 30% commission for AppSumo, for the first time AppSumo billing dashboard crossed $10k milestone in Mar, 23.

Learning from the Journey

Regardless of the long phased growth, I learnt a lot from this journey. Few of the takeaways from it:

1. The first year for Marvin XR was mostly spent on fixing and stabilizing product architecture and base features. Since the beginning of 2022, we started to put more new AR features in the platform. This created a cascading effect of more trusted users signing up and staying with the platform. It grew 430% userbase in the second year.
2. Exploitation is a common fact, some buyers try to find it within AppSumo too. Usually they used to buy higher level plans, use it massively, engage support at its maximum every alternate day and then on day 59, take a refund and disappear suddenly. They even were very pleased after 30 days of usage and changed their mind while credit card charge day came near. Beware of such users. They impacted the growth several times.
3. Respect the early on free trial users. Although these users often try out the beta phase product without buying upfront but lots of them keep an eye to the improvement cycle. Once the product has crossed a certain milestone, they are ready to buy from you. Most of them prefer to buy LTD offers from the SaaS marketplaces.
4. Try to hear out your customers from time to time. Some really good valuable feedback can change the portfolio of your product. But try to evaluate and filter them as much as you can. Some of them will perhaps never buy from you but insist you to develop things that can cost significant time and money. In the end, when it’s ready — they refuse to buy. Been there — done that ;-)

Let’s Move to the Next Milestone

From a one-person side hustle, Marvin XR has grown into a small team of enthusiast people. I never could thought of it at the beginning. People from over 60 countries have used or experienced our services, hundreds of businesses and agencies are using Marvin XR daily to launch creative campaigns — what can you ask more.

But this is just the beginning. I always think of Marvin XR as a product to sustain in a long run than to burst like a firecracker and disappear. Being a bootstrapped startup, it is growing steadily to become a trusted partner in the world of 3D and WebAR. I love web3.0 and I truly believe that the near future will be more web based as it’ll bring more fun, joy and engagement for all sorts of interenet using generations.

Conclusion

I wanted to write a blog about it for quite a while to make sure that my learning, mistakes and growth can help someone who is probably going through the same phase like me, can get a shorcut and achive success faster. For a startup founder, especially if the person is coming from a tech background, it is often a challenge to pursue sales (everyone knows sales is not for smart people) but it is the only thing to survive a startup from failure. 95% of all startups fail each year because often founders focus more on product than sales. This is a classic mistake but I believe everyone needs to learn this by going sort of a growth journey on their own (few things add better value when learnt from mistakes, than hearing advice).

Dear reader, if you have read this blog up to this, that means either you are an entrepreuner by heart or already part of this journey somewhere. I sincerely root for your success and wish a great success in coming days. I hope this blog was worth it. Nevertheless, I’ll wrap it up here with my last two words of wisdom — “Never Quit”!