u/lbdesign

My MxRoute account goes back 5 years. I think I am or was on the "old" software. I got the email today about the DirectAdmin transition. I understand there is good reason for a transition and it all sounds great, but I'm not sure what to do.

Will anything previously set up on the old software be moved over for us into the new stack? If not, is there a doc on exactly what I need to do to change settings or to migrate and make the transition? Do I need to change any DNS values at my server or registrar?

Thank you

I'm genuinely curious. I imagine that Appsumo keeps offering AI bundles and sales because they work — because people buy.

But there is a vocal group (me among them) who avoid AI LTD offers now.

So who's buying these? In what numbers? How small is this vocal minority (that I'm a part of)?

There is a disconnect here that I'm curious to explore.

Last year a SaaS founder came to me with a redesign budget…. the trial to paid thing was garbage, so obviously the product needed a new UI. Everyone around him agreed. Before touching anything I asked him one question. Out of the 100 people who signed up for this  how many actually used it to do what it is meant to do. For example did they create their report or send their first campaign because this is what the software is for so it is important to know. He didn’t know and infact no one knew. They tracked signups and they tracked payments and the entire middle was a black box.

So instead of designing screens we spent 2 days wiring up basic tracking. The number came back and it explained everything. Almost 74 out of 100 signups NEVER completed the core action. Not even once. They just signed up, poked around for 4 minutes, hit some wall, and never came back. They didn’t reject his product. They never experienced it. He was redesigning a restaurant for people who never got served food.

And this is not a him problem. There’s a reason that the most common SaaS stat you will ever hear is that roughly half of trial users log in once and never return. Every one of those signups cost real ad money. Founders obsess over CAC and conversion rates while the expensive part…. a human who already said yes, gave an email, showed up…. dies quietly in an onboarding flow nobody has watched a single user actually go through.

That’s the thing that bothers me. When I asked  a founder when they last saw a video of someone using their product for the first time they just went quiet... Everyone is A/B testing headlines on the landing page while user number 4,000 rage clicks a settings screen that assumes knowledge they don’t have.

What we actually did, and the first half needs zero engineering.

First we watched 10 session recordings of fresh signups. Most painful hour of that founders year. The users were getting stuck on step 2 of HIS flow, the one he thought was obvious. By recording 6 he was writing the fix list himself.

Then he personally emailed every signup that stalled…. plain text, from his name. "Saw you signed up but didn’t get to your first report, what blocked you?" that’s not a drip campaign but a question. The replies were brutal and free and better than any survey. A chunk of those people came back just because a human asked.

Then we built the version that doesn’t need his discipline. The core action became the number on his dashboard, not signups. Every new user gets nudged based on BEHAVIOR, not days…. stall on the connect step, you get the connect help, not "day 3 of your trial!" nonsense. High intent signups that go quiet for 48 hours ping his phone so a human reaches out while the lead is still warm. And we rebuilt exactly one screen…. the wall from the recordings…. so the first session ends with the user seeing a real result instead of an empty dashboard.

No redesign was done. We kept the product, the traffic and the ads same as it was. What changed was …trial to paid roughly doubled inside a quarter and his CAC effectively dropped in half without touching a single campaign because the leak was never the ads. It was everything after the signup. 

Try doing this today. Pull your analytics and count what percent of your last 100 signups completed your core action. If you don’t track it, that’s your answer already. Then watch 5 session recordings of first time users. You will cancel whatever feature you were about to build.

Signups aren’t customers. A signup is someone who is standing in your doorway. Most SaaS products leave them standing there in the dark and then blame the door.

Reviews posted on an Appsumo deal page that contain links to "reviews" on affiliate review sites — full of Appsumo affiliate links — should not be allowed, because they erode trust and cheapen the whole ecosystem.

Agree? Disagree? What are your thoughts?

(I'm seeing a lot of "read my full review here..." links and they are affiliates, with tracking links back to Appsumo, which means the review is likely biased.)

What's the difference between Select vs Launchpad vs 'regular' offers? Is Marketplace still a thing? Or is the old 'Marketplace' the new 'unbranded' offer?

The focus of my question is: are the revenue shares different? Does a founder get any say in which category they are placed? Do different categories represent different degrees of vetting, or a different level of faith Appsumo has in the offer?

I'm interested in the details other than the "We've Got Your Back" guarantee.

Thank you