Verified purchaser
My Fastest Refund Ever
I purchased 2 codes based on all the glowing reviews, just to find out the founder incentivizes with higher limits for 5-star reviews. This is not just a request for an honest review, but a direct demand for a 5-star review which I find very shady personally.
The wording of the offer is:
"
Please paste the public URL of the 5-star review so that we can verify & reward your account.
If your review is removed, please edit & re-upload it.
If the review link is not found later, we both will be sad :(
"
Very unethical to bribe Sumo-lings to drive up 5-star reviews like that. You can dress it up, but once you log in, all the fake glitter disappears. All this scheme does is increase refunds.
On to the actual customer experience with the tool itself:
The only option to signup was using a Google profile. I HATE that with a passion, I am not using my Gmail, and I am certainly not going to start now because of this.
The dashboard looks like it was hacked together in the 90s. It is not intuitive at all.
I saw the founder mention many times that he aims to add 250 (sometimes 350 new sites are mentioned instead), new sites with linking opportunities per month. I only saw around 400 total with my 2 code account. So I'm not sure what happened there. Somebody mentioned in the reviews, they have been using Linkly since August - so that would be 5 months of adding new sites?
I guess you can aim all you want, but aiming doesn't get the job done.
When adding your first site, you get hit by an invasive questionnaire with questions about who you are, your business, how many employees, your job role etc. All unrelated to the actual tool I purchased - so probably to use in some juicy marketing scheme now I was forced to sign in with Google. Not cool
So far I have used up 2 credits testing. Both times I clicked the button to connect with the link opportunity, I got a popup box saying "Something went wrong!" -there is no indication of progress or what happened. I have no idea if anything is going on in the background - all I can see are my 2 credits gone.
Other reviewers who did not sell their soul for higher limits have mentioned numerous other bugs and issues in their reviews.
TL;DR
This was my fastest refund ever on AppSumo. I found the practices shady and the tool lacking.
Div_Linkly
May 9, 2024Hey Botbrewmaster,
Sincere apologies for offending you with our messaging in the review submission form. It wasn’t intended that way.
While I mentioned about incentivizing reviews, I have also mentioned these points in the email.
“**If you find Linkly useful, can you please leave us a review on AppSumo?”**
“However, if you're not convinced we deserve the 5 Tacos just yet, please reply to this email and tell me how to make Linkly better for you.”
This doesn’t deny what you said, but there is another side of looking at things as well, where we wanted to know what users didn’t like & incentivize users to post a review if they liked it. I understand now that we should have conveyed it in a different way.
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It’s sad to see that you refunded the tool without even approaching us on customer support. Products like us come to sumo-lings to validate our idea and figure out what would work. The product might not be perfect yet, it’s a work in progress and we are making sure that we help you succeed. Then only we will be able to create a MRR worthy product.
If you would still want to give us a chance, let’s get on a call where I can onboard you better.
If you want, we can keep it completely anonymous, please book a call on [https://calendly.com/linkly](https://calendly.com/linkly) with an unrelated email ID.
If you’re serious about link building, Linkly would be worth a shot.
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Now coming to your issues one by one.
We had to stick to Google sign in option because we were seeing bad customer experience when we activated email-password sign in.
Users(Link Requester) would signup with a temporary email ID, start a link exchange process and then there would be no response. We send the email connecting the users of both the sites. When the Link Giver would reply to that email, the email (to temporary email ID) bounces and spoils the customer experience.
If you see the login screen, we just take your name, email & profile pic from google. Nothing else. We don’t sell your data or in any way reach out to you for services which are not part of Linkly.
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Regarding adding 250 new backlink opportunities. You are right that the product got launched in August but I promised that I will be adding 250 backlink opportunities in November mid (so 1.5 months). I am on my way to add around 380 more backlink opportunities.
It took more time to get some data points - Top 80% Country-wise traffic and monthly pageviews data took some time to add as it’s manually intensive.
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Regarding the questionnaire while adding your new site, that is aimed to understand the type of users who are signing up, how aggressively they build backlinks and if they are decision makers for their site.
Further, that questionnaire comes after you fill all the details related to website & links.
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