We needed cash! ASAP! 😅
A few months ago, we launched a bootstrapped startup: vuzers.com. And in December, we needed a way to quickly generate revenue to cover our marketing expenses and hosting costs.
That’s why I wanted to experiment with lifetime deals. I read about the pros and cons and we decided to launch an LTD campaign. In fact, we had no other options! 😂
So I am going to share the process and strategy that I used to generate $12,000 in one week:
- Why we didn’t launch on Appsumo
- How did we find better alternatives
- What do you need to launch an LTD campaign
- Our results and feedback
Why we didn’t launch on Appsumo?
Appsumo has become the most popular platform for promoting LTDs.
They have two campaign programs. The Appsumo Marketplace and Appsumo Select campaigns.
For the first one, you are basically on your own. You submit your app on the platform, you are in charge of the marketing and they take a 30% commission.
For the second one, they create a video to promote your campaign, help you with the copywriting, run some ads and include your campaign in their newsletter. For this service, they take 80% commission. That’s a lot of money! 😅
While it is true that several SaaS products, such as Lemlist, have run successful lifetime deal campaigns, we were also aware that running an LTD can bring in a lot of traffic and new customers, which can potentially overwhelm our customer support. And I’m the only one doing support so it was a big “NO”! 🙅♂️
How did we find better alternatives?
I suddenly remembered a discussion that I had with a French indie hacker, Arnaud Belinga, who had successfully launched a lifetime deal campaign 🚀 for breakcold.com on a Facebook group.
So I decided to copy his strategy.
I contacted several admins of Facebook groups specialized in lifetime deal offers and marketing tools.
Those who accepted to promote our campaign were:
- Ankit Sharma from SaaS Warrior
- Atley Joseph from MarTech Wise
- Dan Lourenço and Tayshiro Kudo from LTD Hunt
There are plenty of LTD Facebook groups but I was happy with those one. All of the admins were very helpful, and they didn’t ask for any commission as they believed Vuzers was bringing value to their community.
Our goal was to sell 100 LTDs in a week and make around $10k.
What do you need to launch an LTD campaign?
The key to a successful campaign is creating an attractive and comprehensive landing page that not only provides potential buyers with all the necessary information to make a purchase decision but also establishes trust.
But before designing your landing page, it is crucial to understand what buyers expect from an LTD campaign and your product.
Analyze your competitors
To achieve this, I researched all of our competitors’ campaigns on Appsumo 🕵️♂️, analyzed their pricing strategies, the features they included, read all the questions and answers and of course the bad reviews from buyers to ensure that we did not repeat the same mistakes.
This process took a few days, but it was extremely helpful. By the end, I had a clear understanding of the features that my potential buyers would want, what they did not like about other similar products, and I was able to prepare a FAQ section that answered all of the questions I had read. ✅
Design
For the design of our landing page, I decided to adopt the same style as the Appsumo campaign pages to make LTD buyers feel at home. Smart! 🧠 Isn’t it? 😁
- A clear unique value proposition
- A demo video
- Screenshots of your product
- CTAs for buying!
- A list of all included features
- Testimonials
- A money-back guarantee program
- A transparent pricing plan
- A countdown bar
- A video widget!
Our secret sauce 🪄
To further establish trust with our audience, I implemented a video widget with Vuzers to greet visitors and offer support. I received 72 inquiries through our widget! So it really created engagement with potential buyers!
Ask for feedback
Ok, now that your landing page is created, share it with the admins of the Facebook groups you plan to promote your campaign on. They will provide valuable feedback and insights before you launch.
Offer a limited number of LTDs + discount + a few giveaways 🎁
To create excitement around our campaign, we decided to offer 100 lifetime deals only, a 30% discount for the community members and a limited number of giveaways in exchange for valuable feedback.
By offering these giveaways, we expected that people would engage more with our post, which would increase the visibility of our campaign on Facebook and attract potential buyers. It was a win-win situation where we wanted to get valuable feedback and increased awareness of our campaign.
Tease your LTD campaign
We didn’t do it but I saw others teasing their LTD campaign a few days in advance. It can help create hype around your campaign.
D-Day
When your launch post is live, introduce yourself, share your story, and explain why you built this product in the first comment. Tell the community members that you are available to answer their questions. Be ready, there can be a lot of them! 😅
Next, make sure to answer any questions in a timely manner in order to build trust and drive conversions.
Our results and feedback
We managed to sell all 100 LTDs within a week for a total of $11,730. 💪
We had 8 returns.
We can therefore say that our LTD campaign was a success! 😁
- We managed to reach our financial goal! We generated net revenue of $10,630 to help us continue to grow Vuzers.
- The campaign generated a lot of feedback and suggestions, which we can use to improve and develop new features.
- We made new friends along the way. I even went for a beer with one of our buyers! 🍻
So, if you are a startup and looking for ways to acquire new users, an LTD campaign can be an effective strategy.
Oh, and if you’d like to see how Vuzers can help you engage with your audience through personalized videos and collect video testimonials at scale, you can try if for free!