Avoiding Buyer’s Remorse - Smart Shopping on AppSumo

If you've ever heard of the software called Zapier,

it started on a website called AppSumo. And today, I'm

gonna give you some tips on how you can find ridiculously low

prices for some great software and avoid

any mistakes. Welcome to your podcast website, the

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Yeah. Believe it or not, Zapier now if you've never heard

of Zapier, it is a tool that you basically say, if this

happens, then do this. And you can basically

tie a bunch of software together. So for example, when

someone signs up at the School of Podcasting, it will then

automatically add them as a premium member in

Captivate, all that kind of stuff. If this happens, then

do this. And Zapier started

on AppSumo. So what the heck is AppSumo?

AppSumo is a website slash service

where they find up and coming companies that have

software, and they broker deals to where

you can get well, I'll give you an example. I just bought one.

It's a keyword tool called WriterZen. And

this was on AppSumo a couple years ago, and I remember when they went off

the site. So that's the one thing. There's a bit of a scarcity

thing going on where if you don't get it now, you might not get

it. But, Writer's Den is

something that came on, and everybody's like, oh my gosh. It's back. This is amazing.

And it's $79 once. You get

a lifetime deal. Now all the cool kids call that an

LTD because, you know, in America, we can't handle 3 words. We have to

abbreviate it. And so what I wanted to do was just

explain some tips because this is a great website. I've

never really been burned by any, you know,

website or a software that went out of business or they

ended up not honoring their deal because AppSumo is really

they they make sure that everyone is happy. And I'll give you an

example. I bought a software once, and it it

wasn't really anybody's fault. But I thought the software

did one thing, and it turns out it was really designed

to do something else. And I went in, and they have

a refund policy. And so I was like, you

know, a refund policy is only as good

as it's honored. And, for example, I just bought this rider's

den. I haven't really used it yet, so maybe I'll review it later. But it

has a 60 day money back guarantee. And I actually

went in once, and I had used the software for maybe a

day. And I could just tell immediately, this is not what I thought it was.

And I was able to refund it. Now how can you end

up avoiding that situation? Well, there are a couple of things you can

do. When you go to the website and you see

the product, you can go down and basically see

a couple different things. One is questions. And so you'll

see where, actual AppSumo

people have asked questions. And so this shows you how

attentive the company is to answering questions. And

so you have to remember that in some cases,

this company might be 3 people in a basement. And

so if you don't see a lot of answers, then don't

go crazy. Like, oh, I can't believe they did this, because they might be actually

answering their actual customers. And so I see here

they've answered most of the questions here. There was one

that I was like, oh. And they said,

here's one. For those questions that require a closer look, please email

our support team. And then there was another one where they

said, yeah. Our support team has already answered these questions via

email. And I was like, well, wait. Like, what was the

answer? Let us all learn together.

Now in addition to questions, and, really, I think my

favorite place is underneath the name of whatever you're looking

at, they'll show you where the owner

of AppSumo apparently really loves tacos. And so

where Amazon has their 5 star reviews, on

AppSumo, you have 5 taco reviews. And in this case, the thing

I actually bought was called Writer's Den, and it has 4 and a

half tacos. And when you click on that, I can see there are 249

reviews, and you can sort them by newest to oldest

by ranking. So if I look at the lowest rating here,

somebody says, hey. It's kind of like another writing

tool in a sea of so many, and

they're just not that difference. Well, okay. But if I go back

to the newest one, it says this is a very useful

tool for SEO research and content optimization, which

is really their bread and butter. So this is yet another company.

This they've added some sort of AI writing tool. I love in the,

the one video they actually show you. You

can write original content, and then AI writes it. And I'm like,

is that really original content when AI writes it?

The other thing I did is I went to

LinkedIn, and I saw that the actual

company has been around a few years. I can see where they were on

AppSumo. And so they had a lot of positive reviews

on that. And then I went to their website, and I

noticed this is where you wanna check out their support area because there's nothing

worse than I remember when companies used to do this. I

don't think they do this too often now, but they used

to have forums. And you'd go into the forum, and you could see where somebody

asked a question 6 months ago and never got an answer. So I don't see

many people doing this, but I did wanna see their support. And especially

with software, I want videos. Somebody to walk me

through. And what's cool in this case with writer's end,

they actually have a button at the bottom of their screen that says academy.

So if you wanna learn SEO, they've got a free course. You don't even have

to give them your email. They have, a brand

monitoring on search engine, kind of. They have a bunch of, you know, tutorials

here, and they're up to date. They look good. They

are in English, which is great for me because that's the language I speak.

And so that's another thing you wanna look at. So first of all,

check the questions to see how attentive they are,

keeping in mind that many times these companies have a very small

staff, then check the reviews because these are from people that actually

purchased the product. And you can see and and they're very good. This is

a little bit like YouTube where people are very open about why they don't like

a software or what they wish it did and things of that

nature. Then research the company, and this takes all of, you

know, 5 minutes to go over to LinkedIn, see when it was open, or or

check the about page on their website, and then check their

support. And that will usually give you a good idea of what's

going on with the software, what's going on with the company.

And, again, you have this insane

refund time. So if you buy a piece of software and you don't

like it, you can often return it. I've done that twice.

And no hassle. You get your money back.

So those are some tips, and I just wanna give you

kind of a disclaimer here. AppSumo is very

addicting. It really is. I have bought many

different products over the years, and many of them I still use. I can think

of a couple that I go, oh, wow. I remember when I bought that. Yeah.

I never used it. But I there is a program

called their plugins program that I think is a $100 a year,

and you get 10% off. Well, like, in this case, I

just bought this particular tool for writing,

and it was $79 for life for

life. And I saved $8. So if you buy, you know, one

piece of software a month, then you're gonna make up your

money pretty quick. And so that's just something I want to let you

know before you go ahead and over there. It can be

an addicting place to be. I I have the same problem with Facebook

Marketplace. When I was young, I'm a musician. I was

20. I had money in my pocket and no bills. And if I walked

into a music store, I often walked out with things that maybe I

didn't want. But as I was doing this today, I'm like, you know what? I

should talk about this on the podcast just to make you aware

of it and also help you choose things that really

fit your needs. I'll have links out in the

show notes, or they do have an affiliate program, which is kinda

cool. If you go to your podcast website,

And AppSumo is appsum0, and I'll

put a link to these in our resource section as well.

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Find this show and all of Dave's other projects at power of podcasting.com.