How KingSumo grew to nearly $1M with minimal effort

Executive overview

A side tool built for internal use can become a standalone business without heavy investment. KingSumo started as AppSumo's in-house giveaway software and earned close to $1M over four years with an outdated website and almost no marketing. The process of formalising and growing it reveals a repeatable playbook: mine existing customer feedback, prioritise by ease and impact, run weekly sprints.

The best businesses start as something you already built for yourself.

Launching from what you already have

• KingSumo was built to run giveaways for AppSumo — it was never designed as a product first
• The site looked poor but the product worked; that was enough to generate revenue
• Pricing started high deliberately — discounts could always come down, not up
• A developer licence (same product, multi-site rights) sells at roughly 1-in-4 relative to the standard licence

Mining customer feedback before changing anything

• Review all support tickets and live-chat logs to find recurring pain points
• Send a short survey: how did you find us, what results have you got, what would you improve?
• Add a persistent feedback link on the site — KingSumo accumulated hundreds of submissions over three years
• Survey insight: most buyers never ran a giveaway — activation, not acquisition, was the real problem
• Competitor research is worth a brief look, but don't over-index on it

Finding where customers come from

• Check Google Analytics acquisition → referrals over a long date range to spot traffic sources
• Ask customers directly in a survey — word of mouth and existing networks dominated for KingSumo
• Use SEMrush or Ahrefs to find "best giveaway software" roundup posts, then get listed in them
• Identify which channels already work and do more of the same before inventing new ones

Prioritising ideas and running weekly sprints

• Dump every idea — product and marketing — into a single list
• Score each idea on two axes: ease of execution and expected impact
• Take the highest-scoring items into a weekly sprint board assigned to specific people
• KingSumo's first sprint priorities: redesign landing page, set up email automation, simplify checkout, test pricing, run free weekly giveaways

Building your audience before you need it

• Existing contacts — LinkedIn, email, communities — are a larger starting audience than most founders realise
• If you have no audience, start building one now: email list, LinkedIn, Facebook group
• Educate and help people consistently so the audience exists when a product is ready

Open questions worth thinking through

• One-time pricing vs. affordable yearly subscription — test what customers prefer
• WordPress-only vs. platform-agnostic — a fundamental scope decision that shapes the product roadmap
• Define success in customer outcomes, not vanity metrics: how many companies accomplish a specific result