First, thank you Rob for taking the time to share your experience and about how you feel regarding AppSumo. Feedback like yours—and that of everyone else in this thread—is painful but also important, especially considering many of the comments start with something like, "I used to love AppSumo."
I agree that the quality has declined over the past year, so I wanted to take the time to respond to you and explain that we have spent a lot of time in the past two months gaining insight and clarity into our situation. We came to realize that our copy is overly sales-y and many of the products we feature lack the substance necessary to really help entrepreneurs drive their businesses forward. That's not to say AppSumo is failing; we're still a profitable business and we have many fanatic customers who can attribute their growth and success to the fundamentals they've learned and tools they've found on AppSumo.
We've become beyond obsessed with customer happiness, with taking pride in everything we do (down to how clean we keep our individual desks), and with keeping the fun and quirky attitude we've become known for. Transparency about customer happiness is important to me personally, because it holds us accountable to make every experience with AppSumo memorable—for this reason we publicly display our daily stats on customer happiness at http://appsumo.com/happy .
I think this article, which Tommy was kind enough to surprise us with, is evidence of our new vision and a good indicator of the pride we place in our behavior and obsession with our customer and partner happiness. We're grateful that many here on Hacker News have become part of our community, and I am personally interested in hearing your experiences with AppSumo and how you feel. Feel free to share your thoughts with me at steven@appsumo.com or @stevenkovar on Twitter.
I used to love app sumo. There was interesting new apps and productivity/work/business programs that I could buy at a discount that allowed me to use the full apps without restrictive freemium controls. It was an excellent way for businesses to get new clients to trial their software IMHO.
Over the past year or two all the emails I get are either the same courses or offers over and over again or seem to be targeted at the hacker equivalent of a Nigerian Scammer.
I don't think that the copy is too sales'y, I think that the products you have for sale are generally shite compared to what you used to have.
People being happy will keep us on the mailing list for a while but in my opinion you need to improve the quality of the products you're selling.
My intention of this is that you get 100% true feedback. I think the people that work at sumo are great and I hope you guys get back to the top again. If you're profitable now then if you can do this then I imagine it will help the bottom line :D
Four paragraphs but not a single thing to really address the core, specific complaint about you carrying too many info products. Instead, you almost sound ignorant of the core complaint when you say that Tommy's blog post is an indicator of your new vision. The average customer here in this thread is not like Tommy; it's the guy looking to buy stuff from you. You do nothing to address their complaint.
Is your new vision only focused on people who create products? If not, what changes can we expect as buyers? Will you please address that? Thank you!
I think you guys have the right intention but honestly you are going overboard with being nice at the expense of delivering nice products.
Steven, thanks for responding - I'm glad to hear that you guys are open to listening to customer feedback. I may take you up on your offer and shoot you an email with some thoughts later this weekend. I think though, if I could point to one standout example of what's gone wrong with AppSumo in the past year its this: http://www.appsumo.com/course-about-building-a-course/
I'm horrified to see AppSumo selling a course on how to sell courses on AppSumo - to me this wreaks of the ebook marketing scams selling ebooks that teach you how to sell ebooks that teach people how to sell ebooks. I've always thought of you guys as a strong and respected brand, but that's pretty low.
First, thank you Rob for taking the time to share your experience and about how you feel regarding AppSumo. Feedback like yours—and that of everyone else in this thread—is painful but also important, especially considering many of the comments start with something like, "I used to love AppSumo."
I agree that the quality has declined over the past year, so I wanted to take the time to respond to you and explain that we have spent a lot of time in the past two months gaining insight and clarity into our situation. We came to realize that our copy is overly sales-y and many of the products we feature lack the substance necessary to really help entrepreneurs drive their businesses forward. That's not to say AppSumo is failing; we're still a profitable business and we have many fanatic customers who can attribute their growth and success to the fundamentals they've learned and tools they've found on AppSumo.
We've become beyond obsessed with customer happiness, with taking pride in everything we do (down to how clean we keep our individual desks), and with keeping the fun and quirky attitude we've become known for. Transparency about customer happiness is important to me personally, because it holds us accountable to make every experience with AppSumo memorable—for this reason we publicly display our daily stats on customer happiness at http://appsumo.com/happy .
I think this article, which Tommy was kind enough to surprise us with, is evidence of our new vision and a good indicator of the pride we place in our behavior and obsession with our customer and partner happiness. We're grateful that many here on Hacker News have become part of our community, and I am personally interested in hearing your experiences with AppSumo and how you feel. Feel free to share your thoughts with me at steven@appsumo.com or @stevenkovar on Twitter.