noahkagan

If anyone has trouble accessing the video email me Noah@AppSumo and I'll take care of you.

Fair point. We have the finer details section under each item. How can we make that more clear?

THANK YOU. Can someone ask a mod to change the link to this?

Sorry. That should only happen once per forever. Also, it is cause the link is to appsumo.com instead of to the deal (appsumo.com/lean) which skips the email page.

Fair point. My personal favorites are pivotal tracker ($100 credit), $50 for Twilio, $40 for Postmark and Geckoboard.

Only took us 5+ months to get this setup :)

Interesting. I've liked Sendgrid since when we've had issues of peoples email going to spam folder they are pretty helpful in tracking down why. (mostly saying gmail is a black whole (: )

Why did you choose critsend?

Most comments were about Aweber and Mailchimp.

I really like Mailchimp so I don't want the video to be taken the wrong way but a few of our challenges were with them.

Aweber (who we used first) on the other hand got hacked (twice!) and did not bother to mention that publicly. They did the first time, http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/12/22/aweber-makes-a...

We've moved to Sendgrid.

Good point. It's mostly for web or client (Mac / Windows). Might do deals on phone apps in the future. http://appsumo.com/faq

That's really true. It's funny that some of the changes we weren't expecting to make much of an impact have had the biggest results.

Anyone like "iterate or die?"

a few entries from kyle:

i got pregnant from customer development

i put the P in MVP

Hit me up, noah at appsumo. Maybe we can help get you going.

He interned at my previous startup.

I used to a/b test titles and all this micro stuff. Total waste of time but great mental porn. The global improvements from those tests are so miniscule it's not worth it.

Having my co-founder available for only limited time a week and tons of yelling from him have greatly improved my prioritizing ability.

Homegrown at this point. Nick built it :)

We were using kissmetrics, google site optimizer and google analytics. All great tools but as we are growing we didn't like the delay in the data and didn't trust all the data integrity.

He is thinking of open sourcing our optimization engine at some point in the future.

Any interest?

The two biggest surprises to me so far:

1- About 80% of tests are producing results that don't show increase / decrease

2- Assuming things will work better is completely off. I was convinced my lightbox idea from the article was easier for the user but turned out it was annoying.

One thing is a balance of making things too annoying vs getting features that help us grow. An on going challenge of always trying to do right by our visitors and customers.

Yea, he's not excused from checking in crappy code but he can basically push out any feature idea he has.

We have a master list of things to test, we prioritize weekly and pick the ones every Monday that he wants to do.

It's interesting where about 80% of our test don't produce any significant results. One test nearly doubled our conversion of email and another one that is on-going now has done about a 30% increase.

Love to hear any comments or feedback about what you guys think.

I compared it to how the $20 off $40 at the Gap did for Groupon which supposedly $10 Million in one day or something really high!

Sometimes I regret going to College. I hardly learned anything. The bigger thing I got out was how to organize myself and socialize.

In hindsight if I had momentum around an idea I'd have preferred to go work on that directly. Personally I learn way more through doing than reading.

Cool.

Can you link which script you use? When I use or try to share with dropbox it only allows for folders.

I like Dropbox but find it super inconvenient for just sharing 1 file. That's where I started using Crate.

Obviously, In-n-Out in Kettleman City off the 5. Its what I look forward to most on my drives.

Hey Arun.

Shot you an email to see where the disconnect happened.

Morning everyone, Noah from http://AppSumo.com here.

We love the WakeMate product and pulled them because the service they were offering was not public as expected.

Here's our emails confirming WakeMate wanted to be in the bundle: http://cl.ly/3p3u3T3I3e3p3e231c31

Wow. A bit surprised this is on HN. We are testing as usual...