At AppSumo Originals, we’ve released nearly a dozen SaaS products.
Our success rate of a product generating $1+ million in sales is about 30% — 7.5x higher than the industry average of 4% (source).
A lot of people think this success comes from regular, predictable growth starting on day one. Even really smart people I advise get frustrated when their business isn’t up-and-to-the-right immediately.
But the real truth is much different.
For example, three of the seven products in the below chart reached $1+ million in sales. You can see the first five months of sales data. Can you clearly guess which ones became million-dollar products?
Every product grows differently. Some grow fast, and stay fast. Others start fast, but slow down. And others start slow, but end up building momentum.
But, even with different growth patterns, there are consistent actions that increase your odds of building a $1+ million product or business.
And today, I’m going to take you behind-the-scenes.
You’ll learn the real data, stories, growth curves, and details behind our $1+ million products.
Too many articles online talk about how business growth is consistent and reliable.
And these are articles are simply untrue.
Often, they’re SEO junk written by people who: A) Have never actually run a million-dollar business before; B) Were lower-level employees who think they knew, but didn’t actually know all the nuance and details behind-the-scenes of what it takes to generate millions in revenue.
To show you really how million-dollar products grow, take a look at this chart below.
This chart take shows the first 90 days for a couple of our million-dollar products (TidyCal and SendFox), a product that we think will hit the million-dollar threshold this year (BreezeDoc), and our newest product that launched last week (CustomerFinder.ai).
And then compare this chart to the actual results over the entire lifetime of each product. This data shows what happens well past 90 days — in some cases, 3+ years down the line.
Many products start the same, but do not continue the same. Some go better, and some go worse.
We can see in the charts above that the first 30 days are often similar (with SendFox being the outlier). But as time goes on, and the products mature… they go on wildly different trajectories.
In other words, there isn’t one pattern for growing a million-dollar SaaS product or business.
It isn’t always up-and-to-the-right hockey stick growth. As my friend and mentor Noah Kagan has said before, Silicon Valley’s obsession with “T2D3” is written by VCs who have never actually scaled a deca-million dollar business.
The key with products is a mix of consistent, planned actions and patience. The data shows we often don’t have a good understanding on what will be a “successful” businesses until months a year or longer.
A clear example of is TidyCal, our most successful product ever. Looking at the charts, you can see it flatlined from month three to month 21. That’s 18 months of flat growth! If we had gave up on TidyCal product, we wouldn’t have hit the inflection points at months 21, 35, or 47.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t see some type of growth during the flatlined periods, though. Revenue is a byproduct of upstream decisions higher in the funnel. This is why tracking and measuring key product metrics is critically important.
You can see this clearly with our product BreezeDoc in the chart below.
While revenue has been relatively stable over the past few months, our key lever for the number of documents created per day is going up. We’re confident this is an early sign that revenue will follow in the coming months.
With these product trajectories in mind, here are three learnings from growing actual $1+ million products.
Learning #1 – The best products start with SIMPLICITY
When we brainstorm new Originals products to launch, we look at the market opportunity and the competitive landscape.
Our modus operandi is building simple, affordable alternatives to popular B2C and B2B SaaS products on the market:
- When we built TidyCal in 2021, we were targeting Calendly users who wanted less features for less price — and we knew the market was rip because Calendly made $80+ million in 2021 (source).
- When we were building BreezeDoc, the market opportunity was even more lucrative — in 2024, DocuSign made $700+ million (source).
When we launched BreezeDoc in April of 2024, we were really confident it would follow the success of TidyCal and quickly become our second-best product ever.
But we made a mistake with BreezeDoc…
Our pricing was off from day one.
When we launched TidyCal, we had one, simple plan for $19.
We kept adding new features every week, and the $19 price lasted a year before we increased to $29. And then it stayed $29 for two years until we increased to $39, and then added a second tier at $79.
When we created BreezeDoc, we launched with multiple tiers that were confusing — and had strict limits that weren’t compelling for our users and customers.
Customers complained, people didn’t know what to buy for their needs, and even people who bought couldn’t use the product the way they wanted (and so they returned to DocuSign).
When we look back, this was an obvious miss — and we forgot a core principles we have at Sumo Group: “Great products, great price, great promotion.”
This vision for incredible products at no-brainer value goes back to Noah’s days working with Mark Zuckerberg as an early employee at Facebook. Noah would tell Mark his ideas for squeezing monetization in the early days of Facebook, and Zuck would tell Noah to just focusing on making the product really, really great. Revenue could be optimized later.
The simplicity doesn’t extend to just pricing either. It extends to the feature set, too.
When the team at Google was building Gmail, they focused on doing a few core things right. And when there’s alignment between what you build and what customers want, you grow.
When launching a new product, make it such a good deal that people can’t refuse.
Even if our margins are slimmer at the beginning, or we give away too much, it’s important to hit inflection points of growth so that your users share it with their friends and virality grows. You can always tweak your pricing later.
Remember: Great product, great price.
Learning #2 – Marketing is not very important in the beginning
Early-stage marketing is less important than you think.
In the early days, spending a lot of money on paid ads or marketing activities can be a way to quickly get feedback and data… but it often covers up larger issues.
While we do have a marketing plan for every product we launch, it’s simple and limits costs. We don’t focus on scaled marketing in the beginning.
In the early days, we do a lot of manual outreach, “unscalable” one-to-one-marketing, and being as close to the customers as possible.
Below is our marketing plan for the launch of KingSumo back in 2018. These were zero-cost marketing activities to get our first 1,000 customers.
I’m a big believer in product-led growth, and that ggreat products will grow naturally and organically. And we have the data to back it up.
In the below screenshot, you can see that a lot of sales to TidyCal comes from direct and word-of-mouth marketing channels.
Of course, there’s likely some crossover with people who see our paid marketing and buy at our larger scale nowadays. It’s not to minimize the impact paid marketing has over a more mature product. But most people start paid marketing too early.
Instead, focusing on getting people to share with their friends has been the primary growth lever for TidyCal and our other products.
In the early days, heavy marketing often covers up deeper issues. Find product-market fit (PMF) first — and optimize for product-led growth (PLG).
When you build great products that serve a need, people will want to tell their friends about it.
Learning #3 – Build based on what people want
You may not see growth right away, but you should be confident in the direction you’re building.
Even though TidyCal flatlined between months five and 21, we were constantly building and shipping new features. Our inflection point of growth at month 21 happened because we reached the tipping point of features that people started noticing.
We follow a 3-step process for building what people want:
First, we collect and organize user feedback.
We have a feature request site for our core products (here’s the one for TidyCal). We also get ideas from support tickets, comments on our “deal” pages on AppSumo, and my email has been shared publicly for people to email me their ideas directly.
Every week, this means we get dozens of pieces of feedback to consider and measure what people want the most.
Second, speed is our advantage. We execute fast.
We can do anything, but we can’t do everything. Part of speed is picking and choosing WHERE we go fast. And that means saying “no” to things.
Despite the dozens of pieces of user feedback we get every month, we only have the resources to do 10-15 key updates (not including critical bug fixes). We have to pick and choose what has the most value.
To keep us focused, we create a monthly sprint with core projects. And then, we further break our months down into weekly releases.
Here’s an example of a recent monthly project list:
We aim for 80% completion of key projects every month, knowing that a few projects might turn out to be harder or less important than expected.
Third, we execute CONSISTENTLY.
What people don’t see behind the curtain of TidyCal and our other million-dollar products is it’s not an overnight success. Looking at our codebase over the past few years, we’ve pushed 1,300+ improvements, new features, and updates.
Day after day, week after week, month after month… we’re releasing.
And ultimately, that’s the most important thing.
If you BELIEVE in a product or idea, keep going. Sometimes it takes years to hit the level of success that you want — but when it works, the rewards are worth it.
A consistent plan of improvement, tracking metrics so you’re seeing some type of improvement (even if it’s not revenue), patience, and persistence to keep pushing forward are what have helped us grow — and make our users happy.
