ManyWaysQ: I have never heard of your company but am interested in your product and would like to request some more information before purchasing.
- How long has this product existed?
- Where is you team and support located in the world?
- How many people do you have on your team to support this product?
- How many paying customers do you currently have?
- Do you have a roadmap showing future developments and past developments that have been completed?
- Hypothetically if your income were to stop tomorrow, how long would your business be able to continue before closing?
- What do you plan to do with the funding received from the appsumo launch? (just keeping you alive/or develop more features).
Thanks for answering these questions - I have supported lots of new products on Appsumo and have lost lots of money (>$2000) as the companies have folded in less than 1-2 years. I am asking these questions to get a better idea of where you are on the development maturity arc and understand if your product and your team will stay the course. It takes considerable customer time to learn, internalise and leverage new software platforms and I am tired of investing intellectual capacity to learn a new platform and place it at the heart of my business processes for it to fall over.
Dear APPSUMO - these questions are about providing enough information for customers to determine the level of risk in purchasing a deal from a company that is a relatively unknown quantity to the majority of us. Appsumo should require all vendors from the start on this platform to provide this information to inform our decision making. I am seriously thinking of running a survey to find out what the current bust rate is for the companies providing offers on the Appsumo platform, my personal experience is it is running at ~10% of the deals I have purchased.
Great questions, this morning we got an email from Crystal AI that they are shutting down, so would be good to know how solid Jepto's foundations are.
Hi Glen,
I understand your concern and although I can't answer all of your questions in a public forum I will do my best.
1. Jepto as a Company was formed in 2018 and we have been working on the product since then. I took over technology responsibility in March 2019 and decided to rewrite the complete App from scratch to move away from the existing architecture and move to Serverless which provides us better scalability and meet our needs in the ML space. If you are interested you can see our changelog of development here: https://www.jepto.com/changes
2. We are based in Sydney, Australia.
3. We currently have 10 full time staff.
4. At this time we are not publicly disclosing our subscription numbers
5. See changelog above for past, for the roadmap I have shared a link in the pinned comment. I know there are not many details in the feature request board but we are trying to plan a quarter at a time as we gauge feedback. Obvious plans are to increase the data sources for each feature, more ML and more jobs in the Automation library. This particular deal was put together to ensure that our customer base and feedback is not focused too heavily in the large agency space and we can capture a wider audience.
6. I won't make public comments on our runway, but we are financially stable.
7. The AppSumo funding like all of our other funding goes into R&D and infrastructure. We believe that we are doing something different from other SEO/SEM tools. We were added to the MarTech 5000 list this year and are acutely aware of the competition in the space. Therefore our success is tied to our customers success and we believe that ML and Automation will be the differing factors in the years to come. We are open about where we see Google investing and actively steer away from those areas. Which is why we built a DataStudio connector and not our own reporting tool, and why we have not invested in campaign performance recommendations. In my experience tools often over promise in performance gains & are not able to determine the full context of your campaign structure and strategy. This paired with the direction Googles smart campaigns are heading means that there will be less work in campaign optimisation and you shouldn't try to fight against it. We actively embrace this & are looking at other ways to provide agencies and businesses value.
Having been in an Agency I know that time for staff onboarding to a new tool is not free and that plays a role in whether you switch or not. Which is why we built a Zapier connector in that we wanted to enhance your current workflows & processes. if you are interested I wrote a blog about it here: https://www.jepto.com/blog/fitting-anomaly-detection-into-your-workflow
I understand you have concerns that being an early adopter carries a risk in that you lose time and money, but the commercial reality is that all SaaS products futures are tied to its adoption. With the two commodities determining success being users or revenue.
Thanks for taking the time to write up the comprehensive responses, this says a lot about your ethos and transparency so that is a big tick in the box from my perspective. I am based in Australia too :)
Really good to see you have a runway and a strategy for where you are going and your staffing levels look good for support as well so the deck is stacking positively from my perspective. I wish you a very successful appsumo launch and I will buy a couple of codes soon.
Hey Glen,
There is an inherent risk in anything you purchase - and whether its stocks, real estate or venture capital, there is no investment that is 100% guaranteed to last forever. From the hundreds of products we launch on AppSumo every year, around 1-2% don't last forever. By industry standards, that is pretty great, as more than 90% of SaaS tools don't make it past 3 years. And up date, we have provided refunds for tools that didn't make it past one year, even though we didn't have to.
That being said, these deals are meant to help you grow your business and save you money. While other are paying monthly - you are paying once. Every month you use the service, you save money. If you got 2 years worth of use from Crystal, those were savings in the thousands - compared to regular customers that paid every month.
If Spotify shut down tomorrow, I would not see it as 8 yrs worth of lost investment ($1000+) - I used the product that I paid for and I got use from it! SaaS tools are monthly payments, and with AppSumo you only had to pay once!
That being said, the percentage of tools on AppSumo that go past 3 yrs is astronomically high - which is why many VC's fish in our pond...
We hope you find immediate value in your purchases and see the savings in all your AppSumo tools :)
Glen took a look at your account, and from 134 deals purchased, I'm seeing a high percentage of successes - over 95%. The savings for those tools are close to $100k..
Hi Olman thanks for chipping in with a response.
The finance aspect isn't my main bugbear, its the time and effort to learn, integrate and leverage a new product that in some cases doesn't last very long.
I understand that nothing in life is a certainty, but transparency and informed consumers prior to purchase on the maturity of a potential offering can only be a good thing - disgruntled customers don't build or sustain positive brand reputations. The more information that can be provided prior to purchase, the more informed and eyes wide open customers are when the put their money on the product.
I am not attacking Appsumo, the platform is great, the offers are generous and the community supportive. What I am suggesting is a bit more information to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions.
Verified purchaser
I think you're over thinking it bro. If you save money and time then it's not a waste.