… I am extremely busy at the day job at the moment. Today was a deliverable for the project I am working on. There are at least two deliverables to go, and final acceptance testing was supposed to start on, oh, August 31st? Yep, you could say we’re under a weeeee bit of pressure to get things finished. As a result my time on my uISV consists of responding to an email or three a week, and the odd transfer from Paypal to my bank account. I hope to get “caught up” with it after we’re out of the woods at work. I have the data from Oct. 1st through 15th stored for folks who are interested in stats, and will try to get that posted tonight or tomorrow night.
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Blatant Plug For A Program I Like
I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I like Direct Access, and use it on a daily basis (and by “daily” I mean “I type in a Direct Access shortcut about every 30 seconds to five minutes while working, but I do this every day, so thats daily”). You can see my full review of the program earlier on my blog. Actually, perhaps review is the wrong word to use: that implies objectivity, and I’ve got none here: I love the program like I love chocolate. Anyhow, the reason I’m mentioning it out of the blue is that another site I rather like, Bits Du Jour, is running a one day 50% off sale on it. So, if for some reason you’re still fence-sitting, you can get it for $20.
As usual, when I plug something here I’m not paid to do it.
Accounting For Lazy Programmers
I spent quite a bit of time in the last two weeks getting my personal finances in order (I generally do this once a year around tax time, and since I have an extension for living abroad tax time is October for me). My situation, which is already a wee bit of a mind-bender as a result of having accounts scattered in Japan and the US, is going to be made a wee bit more difficult next year as a result of the uISV I set up. Here is what I am doing to make this as easy as possible:
I got myself a credit card. I have always been a cash-only person in my dealing with American companies (interest! ick!), but I am starting to see the value of having a paid-in-full-monthly credit card. For example, I have dreams of eventually owning a home, and that is going to require some demonstration that I am a responsible credit risk. From the perspective of the American consumer finance industry my financial health is like that of a corpse, since the only activity for the last few years has been student loan payments. Anyhow, I got myself a nice little Visa to help that out, and since all of my business expenses are dollar-denominated I’ll have something to charge every month. Additionally, and crucially, with all of my business expenses and nothing else on one card it becomes very easy to file my Schedule C-EZ next year. Schedule C is the form American small business owners report their taxes on, and it essentially asks you for your sales and expenses (capped at $5,000). You pay taxes on the difference, at your individual income tax rate.
Its crucial that you be able to account for every dime you spent on your business, so that you can properly claim every dime worth of business expenses. Back when I started out I paid for my business expenses on my Japanese credit card, my American debit card, and through Paypal, and as a result my record-keeping was a mess. (I will seriously be reading my own blog when filling out my Schedule C, thats how bad it is to reconcile my credit card statements.) With everything on one card, all you have to do is pull your statements online and sum. This ensures that you don’t miss a single expense, because any expense you miss costs you money in taxes you pay but don’t owe. For example, if I forgot come next October that the previous October I had paid $29.95 for stock icons (clearly a deductible business expense for me), then I would end up paying my tax rate (call it 25%) on $30 of income that those stock icons should have offset. Thats $7.50 worth of idiot tax for forgetting a single transaction. Don’t pay the idiot tax, keep copious records in an easy-to-access place!
The credit card also allows you to smooth out cash flow issues. I get paid at odd times throughout the month, whenever someone buys my program and I transfer the money out of Paypal. My bills, however, come both at set times during the month (web hosting, e-junkie), variable times during the month (Goooogle), and periodically (software/services purchases). Having a credit card around lets me essentially reschedule those bills to come after I have had the sales to pay for them. (N.B. I have a day job, and the day job can easily cover all my business expenses without blinking an eye. However, the day job and the day job’s paycheck are on the wrong side of the ocean, and if my American checking account is dry when the Google AdWords bill comes that would be less than fun. I would eat an insufficient funds fee, a week of below-minimum charges on my checking account, and a bank transfer, wire transfer, and currency conversion fee for fixing that. So my credit card gives me a lot of piece of mind.)
I’m keeping paper files, too: I have always been a direct-to-digital person when it comes to dealing with my finances. However, to keep myself organized, I got myself a folder marked “BINGO TAXES” and have started feeding it three pieces of paper a month on the 31st: my copy of e-junkie’s sale tracking page, my copy of my Paypal account statement, and my copy of my credit card statement. That allows me to reconstruct income and expenses in about 3 minutes per month. Even if I were selling 10 times what I am now (wouldn’t that be nice), it would still be trivial. I also keep PDF printouts of these documents on my hard drive (side note: if you don’t have a virtual printer which exports to PDF, can I recommend PDFCreator, it saves me from having to have a printer at all) and will soon be backing them up somewhere else in event of a catastrophe at my residence.
Selling Software To People Who Don't Buy Software
Roughly 80% of my customers do not buy software. I don’t mean this in the sense that they are pirates, who grab software which they want without paying for it. I mean this in the sense that their relationship to their computer is not primarily mediated through applications. Many of them do not particularly like using their computers, and use only the programs which do what they need to do, rather than seeking out new, exciting things that they can do with their machine. And what they need to do is generally simple: they need to create documents, they need to write emails to their nephews and coworkers, and they need to check the status of that lovely knickknack they are secretly hoping to snipe on eBay. (Side note: about half of my customers have used eBay. Yep. It is that mainstream.)
Now, if I do say so myself, I’m pretty decent at selling software to these people who don’t particularly buy software. You might be, too, if you’re wandering off the well-trodden “I am going to sell to software developers like myself” uISV path. (Not that there is anything wrong with that, by the way, but it has its own challenges: you’ll be forever worrying about OSS coming along and eating your lunch, and your customers are in general loathe to spend money to accomplish something they think they can just whip up themselves… if they had a couple months free.) Here are some of the things I have learned over the last few months of this.
The look of your program is critical. Since release, I have upgraded my program with precisely three new features worthy of bullet point: a font selector, word wrap, and stock icons. Before the upgrade (which, off the top of my head, I think was v1.03), I was getting two emails a week asking whether there was any way to do font selection, and perhaps one every two weeks regarding word wrap. Do you know how many people ever mailed me saying “Your program looks kind of drab”? Not a single one. Do you know how many compliments I get in the average week now that my program looks bright, inviting, and the perfect thing for Grandma the bingo enthusiast who runs Windows98 and types her emails in ALL CAPS because that shift key is too difficult for her? More than I have gotten for every feature request, ever. The amount of space download sites allocate to screenshots is tiny, and mine having a splash of color in them instead of looking like a spreadsheet probably gets me some clicks I would not otherwise have gotten.
They want to know someone is home. A certain segment of my customers needs a little hand-holding before they are willing to part with their credit card information over the Internet. Typically, what they do is send me a single email asking a question about features: “Can I print a call list?” “Yes, ma’am, go to the File Menu and select Print Call List.” And then I go to sleep for the evening and wake up to You’ve Got Money. My theory on this is that people want to know that the program is being actively maintained by a real live human being, and they want to know that if there is a problem somebody will be on the case. Which is why I have my email address plastered to nearly every page on my website and in the program itself. Some people say that if you’re selling at my price point ($24.95) you cannot afford to offer personalized customer support. I say you can’t afford not to: your skittish prospective customers seeking reassurance will run away. (I also write reassurances into my web site copy: your credit card information is safe, full money-back guarantee, upgrades available forever, free support from someone fanatically dedicated to making you happy, etc).
The ordering pathway needs to be failure proof: I have taken significant steps towards making my ordering pathway failure proof: it is the same for PC and Mac, there are extremely few options and I bury all the ones except the most common (single copy of the software available via download), I ask for no additional information besides what I need to process the order (telephone numbers and shipping addresses? Why?), and all roads lead to Rome from my purchasing.htm page: practically anything you click within the main body of the page will take you directly to the ordering page. (Side note: purchasing.htm is NOT the ordering page because people who hit it typically have come from a link in my application. Many of them are just interested in seeing what the link does or checking out the price. As a direct consequence, I use purchasing.htm to make my “Close the deal” sales pitch to wavering prospects while simultaneously allowing folks who have their credit card out to consumate the purchase in 15 seconds or less. My average is actually 42 seconds, most of it spent waiting for Paypal’s site to load by my guess.)
Stock Market Bingo, or, Investing for the uISV
Here’s something a wee bit off the beaten path for this blog: so lets say you’ve got a consistent cash cow, or at least a cash calf, of a program? Well, I’m a) just not a very spendy person and b) have no efficient method of spending dollars on physical goods and c) have hideous tax and exchange consequences if I ever turn dollars into yen. So basically my Bingo Card Creator earnings have sat in my US bank account and every month when I send home my transfer to my student loans I tack on the earnings. Which is saves me 7% a year, and 7% times my lifetime earnings from Bingo Card Creator can buy a whole muffin. ;) (I actually sort of pre-spent the money I saved from September: it gets me a Wii bit closer to a certain Christmas-present-for-me come December 12th, since I won’t have to transfer that amount of money home to my loans.)
However, as of next month, my student loans are going to be totally paid off (this has been my singleminded financial obsession since I got my current day job). Hip, hip, hurray. So I need to do something else with the money rather than let it languish in my checking account. I considered opening a savings account with my American bank (Bank of America, naturally) but their .5% annual interest makes me wonder if they are sane. I opened a wee little savings account at ING Direct which pays I want to say 4.4%, and after I figured “Eh, I’m not going to actually touch the money anytime soon” moved it to a 9 month 5.05% CD with them instead. But investing in CDs is painfully boring and low-return.
Of course, generally as your return goes up so does your risk. I’m perfectly OK with that, since I’ve been happily living within my means thanks to my day job and have always treated my uISV and the income it produces as an intellectually stimulating hobby. If I were to sock it away in a portfolio that lost 20% of the value over the next year, it wouldn’t cause me to blink financially. So I decided to fulfill a lifetime financial goal and become an investor. (Note for those not in the know: I’m rather young. I’m honestly embarassed to admit how young, because I have given people advice despite them having been professionals in this field when I was in swaddling clothes, but suffice it to say most people my age aren’t thinking of retirement yet. Then again, most of us don’t have software companies, either.)
So here’s the question: what to invest in. I’ve been reading the Wall Street Journal since the age of 8 and this is what I have learned from the experience: the market aggregates information with efficiency and scale which makes Google look like a single-celled organism. I am not terrible at investing in the way I am terrible at art. No, I am worse than terrible: I had a mock portfolio in 8th grade and managed to lose 15% of it in an up market in 6 weeks. So I’m going to do the same thing with stock picking that I do with stock icons: outsource.
So some people would guess “Ah hah, mutual fund, huh”. Well, yes. Except not an actively managed mutual fund. Paying 2% of my investment every year to somebody who has about a 1 in 4 chance of matching the return of the market does not appeal to me. So instead I’m going with an index fund: pretty much a mathematical guarantee of being about a point below the market, as measured by whatever the tracked index is. Since my job prospects are heavily, heavily dependent on the health of the Japanese economy, I decided to pick a US index: it lowers the risk of me having a catastrophically negative job market and a catastrophically negative investment market at the same time, and if those two countries are ever both down simultaneously then the world as I know it is pretty much screwed anyhow. :) And since my job prospects are similarly very intimately entwined with the tech field I decided to go with something broader (i.e. not NASDAQ): S&P500 sounds good.
Now, when there are billions of dollars to be made doing something there are a million ways to do it, and there are billions of dollars to be made in index funds. I picked two vehicles based on convinience and a wee bit of research. The first is a lightly managed large cap S&P500 index fund available through ING, which I figure is good enough for government work. The second is buying shares in spiders (if you don’t know, pretend its a mutual fund which implements the Stock interface, it will save you pain) on Sharebuilder. Both are relatively friendly for teeny-tiny little investors like myself, and extremely cheap on the fees (nothing for ING aside from the fairly low management fees on the fund, $4 a trade on Sharebuilder and I plan on making probably one trade a month).
I should also note that I anticipate getting $25 for signing up for Sharebuilder, which ought to improve my annual return a weeee bit :) I signed up for them after logging into ebates.com, which is essentially an affiliate site that splits their affiliate commission with the customers. Sharebuilder pays them a $50 affiliate commission or whatever and they Paypal you $25 of it eventually. (There are also instructions online for abusing Sharebuilder promotion codes to get money from them, but I’m honest. Besides, this blog gets hit enough by people looking for promotion codes, typically for free Mrs. Fields cookies from Quill, which I mentioned in a few of my posts about customer service. Oh, if you were searching for a code to get cookies out of Quill, try JUSTFREAKINGASKFORTHEM.)
Object Lesson on Blogging for your Business
Previously, every time someone has posed the question “Should I make my blog part of my business domain, on a subdomain, or as a different domain altogether?”, I have said “Put it on your main domain, this will allow you to share pagerank between your blog and your business”. What can I say, I really wish that circa June, 2007 I had known enough about my own advice to take it. :)
Steph of real estate software fame recently posted a link to a tool which will tell you your pagerank for different domains after the currently-in-progress PageRank update gets pushed to all the Google clusters. At present, it seems that Bingo Card Creator is a PR4, which is neither terrible nor anything to write home about after I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to build up some links for it. This blog, on the other hand, is PR5 — solely due to people deciding what is here has value and linking it from their blogs (and other content aggregators which are spiderable, such as Slashdot or the WordPress front page).
The difference between PR4 and PR5 is a whole lot of searches, particularly for low-competition niches like, well, Dolch sight words. I now get an absolutely insane number of people who search for my very favorite search terms and come *here* first, then follow the link to my actual product site. This is utterly insane not because of the magnitude, but because I know I must be losing a huge percentage of the potential traffic there. Ah well, lesson learned. Don’t let it happen to you!
Undergoing Massive Spam Attack Today
After my first post today I apparently triggered some insidious bot lurking in a dark corner of the Interweb: within 45 seconds of bringing my blog back from the dead I got over 200 spam comment submissions, mostly to old posts. More distressingly, 180 of them sailed right past the spam filter. All of them were about gambling. As a result, to prevent me getting repetitive stress disorder from hitting the “mark as spam” button and keep this blog easy to comment on without requiring registration or anything intrusive, I’ve banned the following three words from comments: poker, casino, and gambling. I don’t anticipate anyone needing to use them, but if for some reason you do you may want to write c@sino or you’ll have your post discarded transparently.
Bleg for my Mac using friends
I recently released Bingo Card Creator on Versiontracker.com, a Mac software site that is apparently pretty popular. And by recently I mean less than 12 hours ago. I’ve already got multiple sales (!) and also multiple bug reports that it doesn’t work on various versions of Mac OS X. I know it works on at least some Mac machines because I have happy, satisifed customers from the other download sites and I can see successful requests for the check-for-updates page in my HTTP logs which identify themselves as coming from the Mac version.
Two users reporting problems are using Mac OS X 3.9 and 10.4.7. These numbers might as well be Greek to me since I have no experience using Macs. The symptom they describe is that the application dies on startup due to Java being unable to find the main class. This is behavior I am unfortunately distressingly familiar with on Windows, and it is generally the result of a faulty manifest file. To my knowledge the Mac doesn’t actually read the manifest file (which is in order) but rather uses a special Mac-only pinfo.list file to specify the main class. However, I have checked and rechecked and the special Mac file which points to the class which is to be executed *appears* to be in proper order.
Thus the request: if you’ve got a Mac OS X lying around, could you please download the software (www.bingocardcreator.com) and tell me exactly what, if any, error message it produces on your particular version of Mac OS X? I’d be indebted if you had any suggestions as well.
September Stats
Its that time again. Same disclaimer as all of my stats releases: its tough resolving the edge cases on the 1st and 30th of the month due to time zone issues, I roll out multi-month expenditures so that if I paid 3 months of web service in August I charge myself one month’s worth in September, and I take no responsbility for the accuracy of these figures until it comes time to chat to the IRS and zemusho at the end of the year.
Capsule review: My first two weeks went like gangbusters, my last two weeks have been pretty limp. Google AdWords has thrown me for a loop and I haven’t had the hours in the day to spend to recover from it yet. Text Link Ads were not a very profitable expenditure. Tucows, on the other hand, a direct PR9 link plus significant download traffic means a very happy uISV.
Sales: 22 (+2 refunds: one customer error, one less-than-totally-happy). 2 sales were at a discount through Bits du Jour
Gross sales: $533.90
Net sales after Bits du Jour and Paypal fees: $505.96
Expenses:
Hosting (GoDaddy): $10.02
E-junkie: $5
Tucows Expedited Submission: $52
Google Adwords: $90
Text Link Ads: $35
Total Expenses: $192.02
Profit: $313.94
Three Cheers for Tucows
I mentioned previously that I was in Tucows purgatory for three weeks after paying them $52 for an expedited submission. I’m currently out of that, thanks to a recommendation from a fellow developer at the Organization of Independent Software Vendors to contact Greg, their webmaster, and stunning customer service of the type which I always advocate giving. It included an apology, an offer to give me a total refund, a choice between the refund and a $100 credit against further services (smart move: it keeps me invested in my business relationship with them — I took it), and listing the software immediately. Yay. I’m going to post my letter to them later because its, in my opinion, a good example of how to phrase a customer support request to get what you want, and succeeded pretty brilliantly. Even business owners are customers roughly half the time, right?
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