Watch live streaming video from leanla at livestream.com
Noah Kagan is the founder of AppSumo and has worked on marketing for 4-Hour Workweek, Facebook, and Mint. You can watch the video above, and the main things I learned are below. He's a funny, straightforward, and brutally honest speaker, and it was cool to hear about many of the specific tactics he used to get AppSumo off the ground in a lean fashion. He even included a couple deep life lessons in here as a bonus.
- Started AppSumo ("Groupon for software") with just a landing page
- Only had registration system at first
- Paid an outsourced developer in Middle East $50 for PayPal payment system
- Needed a deal, so sent an email to head of imgur (main site for images for Reddit)
- "The most valuable resource is your time."
- Just use email to solve your problems.
- Learn how to do things with just email lists.
- Took out guy from Reddit for breakfast and got free exposure on their site
- Do something nice and unique for someone.
- Sent running shoes, running magazine to someone who runs
- When someone sees something you give them everyday, they remember you and will listen to you.
- Send cookies to people
- Initially had ugly designs, just trying to validate as quickly as possible
- He emailed every single person manually their discount code by hand.
- After the business was validated, they started building the back end and then getting deals.
- "There's no way to optimize shit; it's still shit."
- Before you get 1000 unique's per day, you can't AB test.
- Focused on emails initially to get users
- "There's only 1 metric and 1 goal of your business."
- At Facebook, the only metric that mattered was growth.
- Only 1 metric at AppSumo is "# of emails"
- They have a daily goal and a monthly goal.
- This month's goal: 550,000
- Each day have a target of # of emails they need to hit
- Used Google Website Optimizer
- Hired an engineer whose sole job was AB testing
- Their view: profit and revenue today is short sighted
- Just focused on growing emails for later
- If they asked for email up front before showing deal, people were more likely to buy deal than if didn't ask for email up front.
- 5% difference in conversion at top of funnel makes huge change.
- Spent $6K for 4 iterations just on landing page
- Were bringing 3000 to site
- Biggest spammer in America: Facebook (recently changed policy)
- No one talks about them as big spammer
- People complained about Facebook but it increased retention and engagement.
- Now that Facebook's big, they turned off emails.
- "You'll get some backlash from 1% but will grow the 99%."
- When you travel, you remember just the abnormal stuff; no one remembers the normal stuff that happens everyday.
- Created AppSumo Golden Ticket ($100 credit for no reason whatsoever)
- Golden Ticket just emailed by a customer service girl daily
- If you're average, customers will never remember.
- Think Zappos customer service.
- Unsubscribe email sends sad photo that's just something different, memorable.
- At Facebook and AppSumo, they put Easter eggs everywhere, fun stuff people will remember.
- They have 3 developers.
- If they don't need to build something, they don't.
- Instead of building a 404 page, they used a Google Doc.
- Do minimal work and if result worth it, do it nicely later.
- Did first educational video to actually teach how to use the tools they were selling.
- Did it ghetto with minimal editing
- "Your business should look like shit in the beginning."
- Now have full time content and video people
RSS Feed
