Once a week, I break down what actually makes marketing work & how you can leverage your humanity to run your own business in a way that makes the self-aware robots jealous. Other times, I'm just in your inbox reminding you I'm in your corner and that community is our superpower (and also that swearing helps).
👵🏻 Back in my day, apps cost 99¢
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I get SO SICK of paying monthly for simple software like Zapier, even though it's super useful. I remember when iPhones came out, and we were all downloading apps that made it look like you were drinking beer (iBeer) when you tilted your phone. Paid apps, games, and tools were around 99 and that didn't seem like too bad of a deal at the time. Curiosity got the best of me, and you wanna know what the top paid app was in 2008? Koi Pond. The reviews? Magnificent. ​Here's a demo of Koi Pond 2.0 if you need to see the lack of farting fish sounds for yourself. I didn't remember Koi Pond, and while I had an iPod Touch, I was also super edgy and though iPhone was so basic and mainstream, and I resisted until 2011. So I went digging for my App Store receipts from when I first set up my own Apple ID. Imagine my surprise when I see purchases for SIMS coins, a Grade Calculator (like a regular calculator for people who have trouble with fractions maybe?), and 210 Pet Coins. The purchases were getting progressively weirder as I scrolled through my history, when suddenly it all made sense. The whole reason I even tried searching for old app receipts was to verify my subject line was factually accurate. I miss back in the day when you could buy an app once, own it forever, including the updates. Which is why I love Appsumo. If you're not familiar with Appsumo, it's a platform for new software to launch and generate revenue to continue development by selling lifetime licenses to their products before officially launching to the public. I've gotten SO MANY good deals on Appsumo. My favorite is probably TidyCal, which is $29 ONE TIME for a calendar software that completely removes the need for a paid Acuity or Calendly subscription. I used to pay $20ish/mo for Calendly, so this was a no brainer. But I'm most excited about a deal I saw when I logged in today, for a software called Albato, which connects apps without code just like Zapier. Helping students set up Lead Gen ads on Facebook and connecting them to their email marketing platform typically requires Zapier if they're on lower tier plans. ConvertKit is a common one. I grabbed a Tier 2 license for Albato, and had to share. I went ahead and grabbed an AppSumo Plus membership, which is $99 and comes with $100 in credits ($25 immediately, then every quarter) while I was at it. When you have a Plus membership you get 10% off all software, plus access to exclusives AND free SendFox - an email marketing platform built and owned by AppSumo. It pays for itself, and I am nothing if not Paid for the Plus membership, got my $25 coupon, then added Albato to my cart and got 10% off plus my $25 credit. Talk about a dopamine rush. Even though I love everything Zapier does for me, all the SaaS I use to run my business monthly adds up like crazy, and I love being able to pay for a product once. Zapier is one I've been looking to get rid of, and couldn't quite pull the trigger on Pabbly Connect (I missed it when the lifetime was way cheaper on AppSumo, womp womp.) Albato has 120 licenses left (it was 124 when I started writing this email) and I didn't want you to miss out if you could benefit from it! Even better than my new business tax write-off, is that now I get to endlessly tease my now 21 year old brother about scamming me out of $3.20 for 50+ AMAZING and AWESOME Big Fun Sounds effects to take pictures with. Olivia ​ ​ There's hella affiliate links up in this bitch. It costs you nothing, and I kinda earned it for putting you onto such a good deal, amirite?? |
Business & Other Bad Words
Once a week, I break down what actually makes marketing work & how you can leverage your humanity to run your own business in a way that makes the self-aware robots jealous. Other times, I'm just in your inbox reminding you I'm in your corner and that community is our superpower (and also that swearing helps).
Introducing a morbid and informative segment I'm excited to call... Today's cadaver: The Duolingo Death Stunt You know you're out of marketing ideas when you resort to killing off your mascot for attention. This week, we're slicing open Duolingo's recent "kill the owl" campaign to extract whatever wisdom we can from the digital equivalent of faking your own death to see who shows up at your funeral. In case you've been blessed with better things to pay attention to, in early February Duolingo...
This morning, I stumbled upon a quote, one sentence from Dan Savage's podcast (someone I'd never heard of until today) about how activists fought during one of America's darkest chapters. "During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for." - Dan Savage They were fighting a mountain of lies, that AIDS was a "gay...
After 5 days in Puerto Vallarta with the best community a girl could ask for, I hopped on a flight to Portland (at my husband’s encouragement) to visit my sister instead of heading straight home. “Thank you Jameson,” we say in unison. No visit to Portland is complete without also spending 3 hours in Powell’s. Powell’s is the world’s largest new & used independent bookstore, and is actually dubbed “Powell’s City of Books”. It’s absolutely enormous and ridiculously fantastic, with over 68,000...