Honest Actual User Review
Posting as an honest actual user. Read other reviews to see if the 5-star ones are people who've used it or bought in the 'hope' or 'expectation' that a roadmap would come to life. TL;DR: after 2 months it hasn't.
59 days ago, I bought Kepla on the Tier 3 "Unlimited client sub accounts", "White labelling and custom domain" deal. 2 days in and I was being asked to review the product. I'd only just had my onboarding walkthrough (great intention!), but a call on which there were bugs in the demo. Thankfully I held off reviewing, but it looks like others were less cautious, reading the number of 5-star reviews from November whose tone is based on 'hope' for future functionality instead of actual product usage.
I don't want to knock software developers 'giving it a go' because it's such a hard gig, but in the absence of more honest user reviews, I felt this one had to be written.
In those 59 disappointing days since handing over my Tier 3 plan cash, I've been an active contributor to their Slack channel. The product isn't client-ready. It doesn't work as intended and as might be expected for a SaaS product. Bugs raised on Slack go unanswered: you can't logout of the product, regular users can remove admins from receiving reports, the app reverts away from the white-label version to the Kepla branded one, you can add but not remove customer accounts etc. I didn't even get to the point of running campaigns for clients in this time. I'm not going to put such a patchy product experience in front of paying clients. Vision-wise, it should- and could have been the perfect entry-point for new advertisers. Missed opportunity.
In full transparency, here's the last feedback I shared in Kepla's Slack channel earlier this week:
"Bugs I raised on 7th December after the second (?) white label release still aren’t getting addressed. See #bug-watchtower. I’m cancelling and getting my refund on 5th January if this product doesn’t work. That will be my last day to cancel of the AppSumo 60 day refund window. Almost 60 days in since sale and it still doesn’t do what you promised in your AppSumo sales page. With each update, I’ve tested core functionality and provided detailed feedback and screenshots that you’d expect an in-house testing team to do and it seems like it’s gone ignored every time. It’s difficult to believe in your vision when all the evidence so far has been that you have no development momentum, a completely missing test plan, almost non-existent user engagement, and zero sales integrity to deliver on what you promised."
I wanted to be proved wrong because it's a great idea and solid vision, but this is going nowhere because of an under-resourced team, lack 1of proper functional and technical design, and non-existent test plan and user engagement.
Very disappointing experience and not worth the investment at all as it stands. Still not AppSumo launch-ready.
Jonty_Kepla
May 9, 2024Hey Gareth,
Really sorry to see that you and that we weren't able to live up to those expectations. We will continue to improve the product throughout the year and beyond and will look to improve on the core stability of the product. Most Sumolings will know of the previous tools that have been on here, which have since pivoted away from core functionality, or have shut down completely. A multi-channel ad management tool is very difficult to develop but we are working through what's come up in our roadmap and what's in our backlog. We've completed over 40 tasks in our dev queue since the launch of the AppSumo and will be gearing up for a big year. I just want to cover off some of the points you mentioned here and both in our slack.
1) Domain switching
We reviewed this issue a few weeks ago, tested, and was working across a number of custom domain orgs. Naturally there may still be some hiccups with this and more than happy to review these edge cases.
2) Reporting emails on client accounts
This is less of a 'bug' and more of a preference of not allowing people who have been invited to their account, the ability to modify weekly/monthly reporting emails.
3) Removal of sub-accounts
We initially had this, but removed temporarily to fix a bug. This functionality will be available again soon.
4) Logging out of the app (for white-labelling/custom domain)
Fix is going out this week. This was due to the complexity of adding in a 'custom domain'.
I'm sorry that it appears there appears to be low traction from a development perspective, albeit a lot of the work has been in the background as we saw a decent influx of customer sign ups and had to get out some critical infrastructure updates (e.g. Google/Meta/LI rate limiting was the biggest pain).
I do hope you keep in the loop of what we are up to and perhaps engage us in the future once you're satisfied with the platform.
All the best.
Jonty