Archive by Author

March Mid-Month Stats

Posted on March 17, 2007 by in stats

My stats through the 15th.  Same disclaimer as always.

Capsule summary: I’m having my best month ever.  If I didn’t get another sale through the end of the month it would still be respectable, and unlike most months the sales are not in fits and spurts — every day when I wake up its BAM! You’ve got money!  I attribute this success more to organic growth (and, partially, to a rejiggering of my AdWords campaign which has helped it substantially) than anything I have done.  Also fixing bugs with demos people downloaded in February has probably caused some sales to trickle in.

Sales: 19 (+1 which was refused by Google — I gave the customer a key and asked them to fix their info with Google, never heard from them again.  C’est la vie.)

Gross Income: about $475:

429.15 USD
12.95 GBP
19.95 EUR

Expenses: $108

GoDaddy: $7

e-junkie: $5

AdWords: $90 budgeted

CDs: $6 so far

Profit: ~$360

I think by the end of the month I will probably have in excess of $800 worth of sales and possibly, knock on wood, I will make my $1,000 sales target in March rather than in April.

Web stats will come in another update.  I was inspired by Nick Hebb (you might know him as the flowcharting software tycoon) to try making a graph in OpenOffice to chart my growth in, e.g., downloads over the last 9 months.  Wow, its been 9 months already… where has the time gone.  This will have to wait as I have other commitments today.

Super-minor update on my next project: Its mostly on hold for the moment due to the amount of work I’ve been doing trying to find my next day job.  I plan on releasing the name and some comments on market selection this weekend.

Free Bingo Cards

Posted on March 16, 2007 by in bingo

I run a small business which distributes a program that creates bingo cards, appropriately named Bingo Card Creator. Google has since picked up on this and that sends a lot of folks here who are looking for many types of bingo cards, and as it happens you can find them on my website for free or make them with the free trial of Bingo Card Creator.

Christmas bingo cards

I sort of went hog-wild and made a whole darn website about these.  You can see it here.

Valentine’s Day bingo cards

It being February already, most folks are preparing for Valentine’s Day, and some of them might be looking for a fun activity for classes. If that sound’s like you, you can get some free Valentine’s bingo cards over at my other site. If you’d prefer to custom-tailor a set for your family or class, try out Bingo Card Creator for free.

Harry Potter bingo cards — Yep, I made a set of Harry Potter bingo cards (you’ll want to scroll down, there are many sets on that page). You won’t find them in Bingo Card Creator as I have moral qualms about profiting from J.K.Rowling’s work. The direct link to a set of 32 of them, which should be more than sufficient for any purpose, is here (warning: PDF file).

St. Patrick’s Day bingo cards — For over a year, this post said how ironic it was that despite being named Patrick I didn’t have a set of St. Patrick’s Day bingo cards.  Well, I finally fixed that by makign a set of them.  You can either use that set or, if you want one which is custom made, you can write one yourself in approximately 3 minutes with the free trial of Bingo Card Creator. Have a wonderful holiday with your families.

Musical Bingo Cards — These are sort of tricky to make by yourself, so I’ll save you the trouble. You can download a free set of musical note bingo cards, also in pdf format. They’re mostly for teachers who need to teach students the values of common notes, rests, and what some annotations (treble cleff, bass cleff, etc) mean. If you need to make more complicated musical note bingo cards you can read my instructions for doing so with Bingo Card Creator.

Sight Words Bingo Cards — The absolute quickest way to make these is to download the free trial of Bingo Card Creator, go up to the Wizards menu, select Reading as your subject, and click on your grade level. That will give you the list of all the Dolch sight words for that grade level. If you want to see what the cards look like when printed out you can take a gander here.

Most Popular Bingo Cards — I keep a constantly updated track of which of the 200+ bingo cards are recently the most popular with my customers. You can see it at http://www.dailybingocards.com/popular . The Top Five are usually a mix of holidays in the near future and a smattering of subjects that teachers find consistently useful — cellular biology bingo, anyone?

How Much Time A uISV Spends On Customer Support

Posted on March 13, 2007 by in customer service, support

“Not much.” 

I often hear a bit of grousing from folks who don’t quite understand selling B2C software that you’ll spend all your time telling people how to find the start menu, end up getting McDonalds-esque wages, live in a van down by the river, and have to beg for change from passerby.  Presumably you’d use that change to buy a latte at Starbucks and stay for using their WiFi to answer your support mails.  This is a slight exaggeration of the amount of work involved in supporting customers, even customers who are less than technically proficient.  Trust me, I do my fair share of instructing people in basic computer concepts (OK, to install a program you double click on the …), and I don’t spend all of my day doing this.

My uneducated estimate prior to starting Bingo Card Creator was that 5% of all customers will require support, ever.  However, given that I’ve got eight months of history to work with now, why go from an uneducated estimate?  I used the not very scientific method of iterating through all the emails in my outgoing mail folder (I follow the rule that the CS rep should always reply to every email) and subtracting the ones which were to myself or to peers instead of prospects and customers.  I did this for the period from February 1st through March 14th (Japan time), which is approximately 6 weeks of time and which includes the discovery and resolution of two major issues which escaped my notice and generated numerous customer emails.

During this six week period, I have in excess of 600 confirmed unique installations of Bingo Card Creator, at least 2,000 downloads, and 32 sales.  And how many emails did I write?

Twenty-seven.  Thats about .84 per sale, 4.5% of confirmed installations, and a percent and change of downloads.

Thats not support emails, incidentally.  Thats everything: pre-sales inquiries, support emails, “Thank you for bringing that to my attention” for folks who mentioned that I habitually butcher the word “convinient [sic]” on my blog, outbound inquiries to people who had purchased Bingo Card Creator multiple times asking if that was a mistake or not (someone wanted an extra CD for his sister), and outbound emails saying that an order was being held up by Google/Paypal for verification and asking if they would please accept this CD key with my apologies for the delay.

The breakdown:

Pre-sale inquiries/How do I do X inquiries: 10

Support (The program is broken!): 8

Payment Processor Issues: 4 (I initiated 3 of them)

Are you sure you wanted to buy two copies?: 1

Thank you for your comment: 3

Registration Key Not Received: 1

So lets talk about how return-munching this support burden is: The median mail takes me 3 minutes to write (registry key inquiry — 1 minute to check e-junkie for their key, 1 minute to write up a brief paragraph, one minute to type my key-issuing Direct Access autotext and check to see that the mail meets my standards) , with the most demanding email being 20 minutes and a significant number being 15 seconds (“Thank you for your interest in Bingo Card Creator.  Unfortunately, Bingo Card Creator does not support using pictures on bingo cards.”  — I have this macroed, too.)  If you assume my average is about 4 minutes an email, which is pretty close to accurate, then I am paying myself roughly $370 an hour, give or take, to support Bingo Card Creator.  This is slightly more than I made as a CS representative at Quill. 

Other ways to contextualize how little customer support actually costs me:

Its approximately 5 mails per 6 customers.

Its approximately 2 emails every 3 days.

If it scaled linearly with customers and I was selling 5,000 units a year (income in excess of $100,000 USD) I’d be writing a backbreaking 11 emails a day.  (Do you think that its a given that a real business generates many more emails than that?  Apparently somebody didn’t give these four major web apps the memo.)  I have strong doubts, incidentally, that support emails scale linearly with customers: my intuition says its actually closer to constant or perhaps logarithmic.

Will everyone have experiences like this?  No.  There are a couple of factors which make me send more email than other people, and a couple which make me send less. 

What makes me send more:

  1. My niche is one of the least computer-savvy available on the Internet.
  2. I am fanatical about customer service.  If Google Checkout holds up an order for 1.5 hours in authorization that customer gets an apology whether they’re miffed enough to write in about the incident or not. 
  3. I twice introduced critical bugs into my program/business which generated multiple repetitive emails.  (One build disabled a key feature of my software for about two weeks.  I shipped a handful of CDs with defective graphics on them.)

What makes me send less than other people:

  1. I sell a very simple application.  There are not too many things which can go wrong.
  2. I give very explicit directions to my customers at every step in the process.  My application’s main window includes a step-by-step how-to guide for the most common use case.  If you buy a CD from me you get your CD key and instructions on how to input it at the confirmation page for your order, in your email confirmation for the order, stamped on the envelope your CD arrives in, and printed on the face of the CD itself. 
  3. When I get multiple inquiries about a single subject I figure out how I can avoid getting them again.  Example: I got multiple inquiries about CD keys and implemented the above-described defense-in-depth.  I got multiple inquiries about Music Note bingo and made a blog post about it that I can just point people to now.
  4. I make judicious use of auto-text and templates to make the process of writing support mails quicker and more useful to the customers.  For example, I have an auto-text which inserts my “Thank you for buying, here is your key” template, which has instructions which I have endeavored to make as simple as possible.  This is an improvement to ad-libbing the directions every time I issue a key, which could result in some customers getting less optimized directions and me wasting my time rewriting the wheel, so to speak.  The key here is being judicious.  People aren’t paying you money so that Direct Access can have a conversation with them.  You need to read, understand, and resolve their issue rather than skimming, classifying, and auto-replying to their issue.
  5. Customer expectations for support for a $24.95 program are pretty low.  Suffice it to say that no school district has ever contemplated a Service Level Agreement for their mission critical bingo card needs.

A Happy Milestone

Posted on March 13, 2007 by in Checkout, Paypal

Its March 13th in Japan and my profits for 2007 just exceeded my profits for 2006.  March is shaping up to be my best month ever (I’ll, knock on wood, probably hit $800 to $1,000 in sales, with expenses in the $150 region depending on how many folks decide to buy CDs).

Always Dangerous Making Predictions Early…

Posted on March 6, 2007 by in Uncategorized

… but I think I’ll hit $800 to $1,000 in sales for March, smashing my previous records.  This is on the strength of what appears to just be natural growth in traffic from Google and apparently a higher conversion from trial to purchase rate (my number of confirmed downloads relative to recorded downloads is up 10%, too — maybe folks like Inno Setup or some software site I don’t know about is ranking me highly?).  I’ve gotten 6 orders in the last 3 business days where a more typical number would be 2 to 3. 

I have a plan in place for a promotion around Easter which I was decently sure was going to help me achieve my $1,000 target for April.  While I’ll still do it, I rather doubt I’ll need to just to make that target.

Note to those using Inno Setup…

Posted on March 6, 2007 by in bugs

… don’t forget to set the working directory for the shortcuts you create.  I had assumed Windows would automatically default to the program directory.  This is apparently not the case on some systems, and its been causing some extraordinarily quirky behavior for some of my users.  (v1.05 and 1.051 use Java’s facility to locate the working directory rather than using the directory the .exe is in, because that logic was causing problems for the Mac port.  Unfortunately, on at least some systems they’ll default to somewhere else instead.  I hadn’t noticed this problem because Inno Setup actually does set a sensible default working directory when you execute the program directly from the installer.)

*sigh* Time for a 1.052.

Luck of the Irish

Posted on March 4, 2007 by in Uncategorized

After a day of St. Patrick’s festivities in Nagoya, including dinner at a quite nice (and incredibly not Irish — cheese tofu, though, deserves to be) restaraunt and clubbing (not something I frequently indulge in), I was wondering whether my budget was going to stretch to the end of the month or not.  I just woke up, checked my email accounts, and the @bingocardcreator.com box was stuffed.  One support request, about a dozen order confirmation emails (depending on how they buy it I get about 2-3 per order, so its less impressive than it sounds).  I kind of like the feeling of making more money while spending the evening out than the evening out actually costs. 

It seems that support request was related to a corrupted file, so I’ve got to keep an eye on GoDaddy to see if they’re not mangling my EXEs again.  I suppose it always could be a problem on the customer side or perhaps whatever download site they got it from, and I’m hoping it is, but with the frequency that I break my software I can’t afford for my hosting provider to break it, too. 

February Stats

Posted on March 2, 2007 by in stats

Capsule Summary: Owing to my carelessness sales are quite down this month.  Profits are down quite a bit, too, but a bit less thanks to improvements on Google AdWords spending.

Sales:

Gross: $454.15 (17 total, 6 CD, no refunds of consumated sales but lost 1 to Google verification, not included)

Expenses:

E-junkie: $5

GoDaddy: $7 (I prepayed for 2 years so technically its about 10% less than that now, but a few cents either way aren’t going to kill me.) 

AdWords: $45

CDs: ~$50 ( covers more CDs than I actually needed for customers, due to some replacements and proof copies)

Profit: ~$345

 Website-wise, I had my best month ever by a significant margin, and if I hadn’t borked the download most of my visitors were getting and my conversion rate had remained steady I would have hit about $800-900 in sales without breaking a sweat.  D’oh.  Oh well, thats what March is for.  I’d break out the actual stats but I have a St. Patrick’s Day parade to attend in Nagoya today and need to get ready (yes, they’re two weeks off, but the notion of Japanese people throwing a St. Patrick’s Day parade is so charming as to forgive the fact that they miss the actual day by quite a margin every single year).

Google vs. Paypal — Customer Preference

Posted on February 26, 2007 by in Checkout, Paypal

This is mostly anecdotal but someone asked me for the numbers today.  I figured other people might like them so I’ll promote this to a post instead of a comment.  Note that the sample size is fairly low because I made a major error 2 weeks ago and that resulted in my sales declining about 80% over the period (d’oh!).

From a universe of 29 transactions, 13 were Google checkout and 16 were Paypal.  (This excludes one additional transaction which would have been Checkout if not for Google denying it for, ostensibly, security reasons.)  The presentation of the Checkout and Paypal buttons is fixed and exactly symmetrical unless folks choose to buy directly from lower on the page rather than from the cart.  Most (80%) of my transactions come from the cart.

Interestingly, none of my Google checkout customers had their account prior to signing up to do business with me.  Back when I accepted primarily Paypal, a rather high percentage of my customers had existing Paypal accounts (its inefficient for me to check exactly how high, but I have quoted 60% at previous times so lets call it 60%).  The percentage of Paypal users who have preexisting verified accounts has gone up significantly since I began offering checkout.  My interpretation of this data point is that people who already use Paypal are likely to seek it out as an option when given comparable alternatives.

I should note that my cart interface always presents Paypal and Checkout in the same order (Checkout on the left, Paypal on the right).  If I had my druthers that order would be randomized for every load of the cart.   I suspect many customers are just mashing on any button that they know is in the contextually accurate place for Continue This Transaction Darn It rather than making a conscious decision for or against either provider.  Thats fine by me, incidentally, since I hate having customers have to decide things prior to giving me money.

I should note that my demographics are probably vastly more accepting of Paypal than some demographics.  Many software developers, for example, hate Paypal like the plague for some reason.  I think this viewpoint is rather less prevalent among middle aged ladies, who make up a good deal of my customers.  eBay is a big hit with them, and Paypal acceptance among eBay users is extraordinarily high.

SEO Trick I Hadn't Known About

Posted on February 24, 2007 by in SEO

I don’t know if this is actually useful or not, but I tried it a few weeks ago and my traffic is up.  Correlation != causation and all that aside, it only cost me about $8 so maybe you want to try it too.

WebsiteGrader, a project of Dharmesh Shah and the rest of the team at Hubspot, suggests that if you have a website domain registration which will expire in a year or less, then you may be penalized by search engines, which think you might be a fly-by-night spam site operator. 

Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a committment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website has not been setup as a temporary spam site.

Up until a few weeks ago, I had about half a year left on my registration.  When I read their inducement I went over  to GoDaddy and got myself another 2 years, plus prepaid my hosting for a year for a wee discount.  My rankings on Google et al are indeed up.  Again, I have no way of knowing whether that was caused by this tweak, and I have never heard this SEO tip on other sources of SEO information which I trust, so take it with a grain of salt.  That being said, if it isn’t true the most you are out is about $8 which you were going to pay eventually anyway, right?

Older posts
Newer posts