Kalzumeus Software

I’m expecting to start this summer, and have narrowed it down to two candidates (with the option of adding another at any time, naturally).  Budget is estimated at $1,500 to launch and several hundred per month in advertising.  I think I can have version 1.0 of the app saleable within 1 month of opening my IDE.  Income projections for the two candidates are pretty disparate.  The better option of the two, from my current research, would (with rather modest assumptions made about customer volume) probably exceed my current salary within a year of launch.

What is it?  A web app (uh oh!  I’ve drunk the Web 2.0 coolaid!).  I anticipate using about zero Web 2.0 cruft, probably developing on LAMP (which is why I’m giving myself a full month, since its not conceptually harder than Bingo Card Creator), and having a 100% subscriptions revenue model, probably with 1-2 months free trial.  The selling proposition is the same as e-junkie’s but targetted at a completely different vertical — “I’m going to make it easier for you to make a lot of money.  You’re going to pay me a trivial amount every month and be happy to do it.  We’ll be doing business together for YEARS.”

Issues: this app has money involved and there will be a lawyer brought in as insurance.  I will probably need the design done by a professional.  (There’s the budget, incidentally.)  I’m not a web programmer (as a matter of fact, I hate it) and so I will have to learn a bit to do this.   I am not as intimately aquainted with this vertical as I am with teaching, but still think I get it enough to do a fairly decent job.  I have competition offering services which can accomplish the same general goal for cheaper, but I have at least three ideas why my method is uniquely superior, in a way which is readily apparent to the customer.  I will be unhealthily dependent on a major corporation whose name, for once, does NOT start with G.

I anticipate being as open on this project as I have been with Bingo Card Creator, which means that after I have something to show you’ll be able to see it.  Until then, this is sort of a memo to myself to not spend summer on videogames.

In the last six months I have had several music teachers write in to ask me if Bingo Card Creator can create cards with musical notes on them.  The answer is “yes”, but the process is rather difficult. 

1. Download a font which is capable of displaying musical notes.  I recommend Bach (free for academic use).
2. Open Bingo Card Creator.  Select Font from the options menu, and switch to Bach.
3. Turn off Free Space (it will not display correctly in Bach font).
4. Open the sample document which came with Bach, and copy the musical symbol you want.  Paste it in the Add New Word box in Bingo Card Creator.  Hit enter.
5. Repeat step 4 until you have the number of musical notes required for the card (25 for 5×5 bingo cards). 
6. Print however many cards you require.  Note that you cannot at this time save a list of musical notes, as it will be corrupted when you attempt to load the list.  This is a limitation of how Bach represents notes internally.

As this process is rather arduous for many teachers to perform, I have made 32 musical note bingo cards myself.  These use the Bach font described above, which is only free for academic and personal use.  Accordingly, please be honest and only use them for academic/personal purposes.  You can download them here in .pdf format. 

For my part, I do not and will not distribute Bach with Bingo Card Creator, and accordingly you will not find the word list used to create this in the Bingo Card Creator download.  If you wish to have musical bingo cards but not quite the ones found here, you can create them yourself using Bingo Card Creator and the above instructions.

I haven’t really spent all that much time on my installer, which is somewhat silly because its the first look people get of my software and I should really want to nail it.  Especially in the consumer market, looks sell software — this is yet another reason why I love my stock icons, as they make my software seem bright and happy, like a Fisher-Price toy.  I just switched from NSIS to Inno Setup for a similar reason.  Here is the very first screen shown by each of the two installers — take a wild guess which is the one I’m going with. 

 vs.

 Ironically, the second one requires two mouseclicks more than the first.  I’ll see if I can’t reduce that by playing with the setup script, since additional mouseclicks are also something I really hate forcing on my customer.

I was convinced when I woke up this morning that it was Wednesday, because yesterday was The Big Presentation and I had thought that was a Tuesday.  Turns out today is Friday, because TBP was on Thursday.  It went pretty well, incidentally, and my month of 12 to 16 hour days is now over.  There is now a functional spam filter where there wasn’t before, and within the month it will be OSS for all the world to enjoy.

You know what I really like about the prospect of self-employment?  No months of 12 to 16 hour days, and no forgetting what day it is.  (I still like my day job, incidentally.)

Ben Yoskovitz of StartupSpark has posted his interview with me.  “Bingo!  Patrick McKenzie lays his cards on the table.”  What can I say, that title warms me to the core of my bad-pun-loving soul.  (You may not know this, but 37  states and the District of Columbia require loving bad puns as a prerequisite for getting a teaching certification.)  This interview is largely focused on my experience as a uISV and thoughts on the field in general.

My personal favorite quote:

If I wanted to make a splash, I would say that it is more important that your ordering pathway be flawless than your application be the best in its class. Do you have a design document for your ordering pathway? Why not?

I could certainly do a better job of that myself, incidentally.  Getting better, bit by bit and month by month.

There has been a wave of interviewing going around in the uISV community, at least from my distorted perception of it. The recently relaunched MicroISV Show at Microsoft has an interview with Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame. It is worth a listen and even more worth a read (transcript available, thank goodness), since you can probably process the information much faster when reading than while listening. I love oral communication as much as the next guy (in fact, probably more than the next guy, since I did forensics activities for about a decade) but for technically dense material its sub-optimal.

Separate from that interview, no less than three people have interviewed me in the last two weeks. I imagine it will be a couple more years before I get over being flabbergasted that people apparently think I have something valuable to say. One word of caution when you’re reading/watching any interviews: remember that everyone speaks on the basis of their own experience. Joel Spolsky, for example, runs a company with millions of dollars a year in sales, has multiple employees, transparently enjoys his situation, and is of the opinion that it is impossible for a uISV to succeed with less than two employees. I am a sole proprietor with thousands a year in sales (and not many thousands at that!), neither have nor particularly desire employees at this point in my life, transparently enjoy my own situation, and am of the opinion that you can be successful under almost any configuration for the appropriate definition of “successful”. Even if that definition of successful is “go to sleep on a mattress packed solid with dollar bills you’ve made”, I know a number of one-man shops who qualify.

(Other things I diverge on: the reports of desktop applications being dead are greatly exaggerated, “80% of your business is non-code” vastly overestimates the importance of the code, and a few minor niggles.)

Similarly, you should keep in mind when reading any interviews with me that I have more experience being a paperboy than being an entrepeneur, and that I was a total failure as a paperboy.

Anyhow, the first interview to go up was here. The interviewer was very interested in my experiences in Japan, so if the prospect of working in IT in Japan interests you and you’d like to see one take on it, you may find those answers interesting. If you are a regular reader of this blog, or have read the about page, the bits about my uISV will probably not contain much new information for you.

The other two interviews were more focused on my uISV experience and thoughts on the field in general.  These interviews are not publicly accessible yet.  When they are I will update this post with links to them.

(Note: I don’t normally describe my software as shareware, but it appears someone on a rather large European shareware developer board has linked to me in a discussion of refund policies. I’m using this post to answer the question asked, and using the title to make sure anyone can find the same information from Google. Why I don’t call myself a shareware author is a good discussion for another day.)

Anyhow, the story in a nutshell. I sell a program which creates bingo cards for US$24.95. My primary customers are teachers or parents of elementary school aged children in the United States. My typical customer is female, in her thirties and is not very technically proficient or very trusting of the Internet. Since the day my business opened on July 1st, 2006, I have had a 100%, no questions asked, moneyback guarantee. I publicly make the guarantee for a period of 30 days past purchase — between you and me, if any customer were to ask for their money back after that period, I would go to any length of effort up to and including mailing them a personal check to get them their money back. I have previously commented on my reasoning for a moneyback guarantee here and am additionally strongly supportive of Steve Pavlina’s rationale.

OK, the part of the post you’ve all been waiting for: in the last six months, roughly 5% of my customers have requested a money-back guarantee. I consider this figure to be abnormally high, as it counts rough patches in my program’s development (version 1.0, the first rollout of the Mac version, and two after-upgrade shakeout periods) which do not happen on a regular basis. For the most mature version of my software (v1.04, which was sold constantly for a period of approximately 4 months without any significant change to the codebase), my refund rate was under 2%. The most common reason cited for people excercising their right to a refund is a variation of “I tried it out and it doesn’t quite do what I want” (I don’t ask but many people tell me anyhow).

Note that that reason is an excellent empirical demonstration of another mechanism by which the guarantee can make you money: it means that at least some of your customers are buying your product when they are not yet convinced that it will meet their needs. The guarantee thus provides a safety net, allowing the customer to externalize the risk of their extended trial period to you, the developer. They think “Well, if it doesn’t work out, I can always return it”. You should be happy to bear this “risk”, as a return costs you little or nothing to process, meaning that this is pure upside from your point of view. (I have never paid a penny as a result of processing a return. Paypal refunds my transaction fees when I initiate a refund.)

I have been using CD Fulfillment’s default CD image since I started issuing the CDs.  While its utilitarian, it doesn’t exactly present a great image of my software or help my technically-disinclined customers through the process of getting the software to work.  I have just gotten done creating an image which will be hopefully slightly more helpful in this regard.  This won’t be the final edition, as I’m concerned that there is too much text and that it will cause folks’ eyes to glaze over.  (If you have suggestions for alternate wording, please, fire away).

Note this image is not the uncompressed BMP that CD Fulfillment will actually use to burn the CDs.  You can click it to see it in its 927×927 several megabyte full-sized glory.)

 Incidentally, I have been thinking of moving my CD fulfillment away from  cd-fulfillment.com to SwiftCD.  I have resisted doing it so far because the reason is inherently selfish — SwiftCD integrates with e-junkie, which means I would no longer have to type order information into cd-fulfillment.com’s interface.  The downsides are that the CDs would not look quite as nice, the price to me would go up from $4.50 (with shipping) to $4.99 (without), and I rather prefer cd-fulfillment.com’s ability to put customized instructions on their invoices to SwiftCD’s inability to do so (at least when going through e-junkie). 

I suppose I *could* go ahead and create a Perl script accepting information from e-junkie, then firing off an email to cd-fulfillment to get them to create and mail the CD…  But that will have to wait for another weekend when I have some time to kill…