How SEO Buddy Made $90K Through 1,700 Customers Found on AppSumo

At AppSumo, we’re busting open the doors of entrepreneurship and giving you everything you need to build a life you’re passionate about. In this interview series, you’ll hear how some of our favorite partners are using AppSumo to sell their products and find their future raving fans.

Meet Romain from SEO Buddy

Today we’re sharing a conversation we had with Romain Brabant. He’s the co-founder and head of product and marketing for SEO Buddy, which currently has a product called The Link Chest on AppSumo.

SEO Buddy is here to help your business generate more organic traffic through efficient do-it-yourself SEO frameworks. Its product, The Link Chest, finds high-quality, easy-to-win backlink opportunities to grow your domain authority, so you can rank higher in search results. It’s essentially the smart way to kickstart your SEO journey and improve the rank of your website in search engines.

With over $90K in revenue from listing on AppSumo and over 170 reviews averaging nearly 5 tacos (AppSumo’s star rating equivalent) for The Link Chest, it’s easy to see SEO Buddy as an immediate AppSumo success story.

The problem SEO Buddy faced

But before the SEO Buddy team started using AppSumo, their story started the way it does for many entrepreneurs: they had the product, but not the audience. In Romain’s words, “we were busy building a SaaS SEO tool that nobody wanted to use.” They’d spent over a year developing the API for The Link Chest—a tool that was scratching their own itch and solving their own problem, without validating their business idea with potential customers.

Convinced that their software would be a no-brainer for their future fans, the team pressed on with minimal amounts of market research. That’s when they hit their first snag. They’d been so caught up in their sprints and heavy development cycles that they took a few shortcuts when it came to testing their product in beta rounds with potential customers.

Once the team realized they needed to get their product in the hands of their consumer, they discovered that finding their ideal customers through SEO wouldn’t be as easy as they thought. That’s because their competitors were also tapping into the same customer base through SEO, which meant the market was saturated. They were struggling to find actual people who’d be interested in their product and connect to reliable data as they continued their development cycle.

‍As many marketers know, it can be seemingly impossible to show up in organic search results for a product about search engine optimization when the competition is familiar with similar strategies. They needed to find a solution that their competitors hadn’t thought of. That way, they could get their first product, The Link Chest, in front of fresh eyes.

Along the way, the team at SEO Buddy went through the typical shortcuts that a company takes when selling digital products online. They listed their product on Product Hunt, BetaList, and BetaPage, had a campaign push on Indie Hackers, and even took to marketing on social media. But no matter what they tried, nothing seemed to give them the results and customer data they needed to bring the product to market.

Enter AppSumo

That’s when Romain remembered a digital marketplace that was growing in popularity and wasn’t as inundated with SEO products as the other places they’d already tried. He’d heard that you could sell products on the AppSumo marketplace, but he’d never anticipated approaching it as a way to connect with potential customers and to gather product feedback.

Romain ran a quick search query on the marketplace. His competitors hadn’t tapped into this market yet, and he’d be able to list The Link Chest with relatively low competition. He figured he had nothing to lose, so the team pushed to have their product listed on AppSumo as soon as possible.

“Since we already had an official sales landing page with a good pitch, it took us less than 24 hours to have everything ready for AppSumo.” - Romain Brabant

Because the team at SEO Buddy already had most of their marketing elements created and ready to go from other digital product marketplaces, it was more of an exercise in pulling everything together once they were ready for AppSumo. Their next steps? Write an SEO-friendly product description and create a short thank you page to start collecting feedback.

The SEO Buddy team would also end up utilizing reviews and questions from the AppSumo platform to answer inquiries about product specs with curious customers. Romain also used AppSumo as a way to directly source market research and create a punch list of enhancements to add to The Link Chest product roadmap.

They would also create a marketing strategy that would encourage customers to provide valuable feedback after their purchase. The team decided that 48 hours after a customer redeemed their product code, they would send over an invitation to write a 5-taco review on the product page if they thought it deserved it.

And if the customer thought the product didn’t deserve it? The SEO Buddy team humbly asked for direct feedback on how they could improve the product for future iterations. The team would then integrate what they heard wherever they could. Romain shares that this simple but effective strategy is how they collected over 90 customer testimonials in less than 4 months, and over 170 reviews to date.

Romain also shared that one of the biggest perks about listing your product on AppSumo also has nothing to do with the money. It’s really all about the community. He shared that there is such a wide range of entrepreneurs who use the AppSumo marketplace, there’s no shortage of quality feedback. Romain said that in his experience, these entrepreneurs are not only looking for a great deal but are willing to share useful and constructive feedback.

“Thanks to hundreds of prospective user interviews, we now have a better understanding of the tool we need to build to grow an MRR.” - Romain Brabant

So what’s Romain’s best advice for the entrepreneurs looking to list their products on AppSumo? Stage your products with a lower, introductory price, so you can gather feedback and testimonials. Once you have enough data after a few months and are really clear on what you’re aiming to create, increase your prices.

Romain says that this strategy has allowed SEO Buddy to show their massive results to potential investors who are interested in funding future digital products and other endeavors. They’ve also tapped into a customer pool that they can ask their questions and gather feedback from again and again.

What’s next for SEO Buddy

When it comes to the future for Romain and the team over at SEO Buddy, he says their focus is centered around one thing: creating for the customer. They’ve got hundreds of ideas on what products to build next, so they can continue to serve their passionate customer base. And the best part? Romain says you’ll find their next suite of products listed on the AppSumo marketplace, with plenty of tacos to go around.

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