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What Should Starbucks Do

Posted on September 1, 2006 by in advertising, marketing, support

I spotted this on Seth Godin’s blog.  Starbucks had an incredibly ill-conceived promotion where they mailed some fraction of their employees with an email coupon for a free iced drink, then told them to mail friends and family members.  Oh boy, a chain letter, no possible way that could get out of hand, right?  Well, it did, and as a result Starbucks canceled the promotion.

Seth opines that, were it his call, he would have notched the driver’s license of anyone who used the promotion and given them the free drink.  The business problem this solves is that it prevents someone from going to the 46 Starbucks within walking distance from, say, the Sears Tower and getting 46 free ice lattes or whatever it is Starbucks sells.  His rule #3 (“We never accept online promotions.  However, if you were scammed by one, have *a free premium which the company can give out almost at will*.”) is, in my opinion, a brilliant solution to this problem for a chain which doesn’t have it yet.  But it doesn’t help Starbucks since they can’t force the cat back into the bag.

Here’s my solution: for every customer who comes in asking for their free iced fraparamadingdong, tell them “We’re very sorry, that promotion has been abused so we have to ask you this: what’s your first name and the last four digits of your telephone number?”  Then make a show of writing it down, and give them the product.  The only purpose of this system is to keep honest men honest and to remind folks that there is no presumptive right to free Starbucks, the way that many college students have come to believe that there is a presumptive right to free music.  The information collected can’t be enough to make a person hesitate for fear of their privacy, but that plus the fact that it is recorded is just enough to make them remember “Oh, thats right, I’m being watched”.

Here’s the rationale: the impact of one scammer who realizes he can beat the system (and, if you think of it, there is no system to beat here) is one ice drink per store.  The stores are franchises so you basically evaluate the damage to their profits on an individual level, where 1 or a 100 ice drinks is pocket change (here’s the secret to Starbucks: no matter how much they charge you, making the drink didn’t cost more than 10 cents!).  The damage to the brand from having to put that sign up everywhere, on the other hand, is at literally many orders of magnitude above the individual store.

How NOT to do your license key checking

Posted on September 1, 2006 by in Uncategorized

Proving once again that encryption/hashing by itself will not make your system secure.

August Numbers

Posted on August 31, 2006 by in stats

First, a disclaimer: Due to my own lax recordkeeping, the issues with running a business with the International Date Line between me and most of my customers/suppliers, currency exchange issues, and other reasons, these numbers may be off by a little bit.  I’m sorry to give you analog accuracy in a digital world, but its the best I can do without spending too much time playing accountant.  And, after all, I have a release to finalize :)

There’s a recurring issue here: do I count expenses based on when they are charged or when they are incurred?  i.e. if I prepay for 3 months of GoDaddy, like I did, do I count that whole expense in August or spread it out?  Where possible, I’m going to divide out recurring costs over the length of the term.  While this means you can’t see my exact bank statement/cash flow, suffice it to say that it stays positive and thats all you really needed to know, right?

Sales:

Through Paypal: 13 (+1 return)

Through eSellerate: 1 (didn’t trust Paypal)

Gross sales:  $349.30

Net sales:  $333.54 (subtracted out payment processor charges: $1.02 for each Paypal, $2.50 for eSellerate)

Expenses:

Recurring expenses:

Web site hosting: $10 (Linux hosting + Traffic Facts through GoDaddy)

e-junkie (payment processing): $5

Yahoo Search Marketing: $30 (since canceled)

Google AdWords: $90

Subtotal recurring expenses: $135

One-time Expenses:

Stock icons from icons-icons.com: $29.95

RoboSoft Registration: $99

2 postcards to RoboSoft authors: $1.50 (the first got returned today due to my atrocious handwriting, so I have to resend one)

Allume’s Stuffit: $29.99 (thought I would need it for shipping Mac orders.  My mistake.  Whoops.  Ah well, I feel better about using their Stuffit Expander for the last 10 years now.)

Rentacoder port to Mac version: $40 ($25 bid + $15 tip)

Subtotal for one-time expenses: $200.44

Total expenses: $335.44

Profit: -$1.90 (Wahoo!)

Well, honestly, I thought I was going to post a minor paper profit.  Hmm, I guess thats why we write things down.  In terms of cash flow, as mentioned above, I am minorly positive, because this shows me booking about $50 of AdWords expenses many weeks ahead of being billed them (weeks in which I will, obviously, have additional sales).

If I knew earlier what I do now, I would have gotten the Mac thing done for free by an microISV contact, and not paid for the Stuffit registration.  Ahh well.  Small beer, in the opinion of somebody who can’t drink for fear of killing himself.

OK, back to the fun statistics:

I’m going to discontinue giving the Yahoo stats.  I just don’t find them credible after doing the auditing for the last month, which is the proximate cause of me discontinuing my subscription with them.  That plus the fact that I’ve finally succeeded in pushing my AdWords spending down to my target.

As with last month I have two AdGroups.  The first is pitching vocabulary bingo, the second Bingo Card Creator itself.  I’m going to show you the full monthly stat summary and also the last week’s stat summary so you can see an indication of how things are improving through periodically shifting bids, ad texts, and landing pages.  Unfortunately I can’t tell you exactly how effective they were at driving sales because I just realized the last time I touched my thanks-for-your-purchase page I borked the Javascript on it, costing me the last week work of data.  D’oh.

Incidentally, results for the vocabulary group are heavily depressed by the long experiment with that “give teachers free lists” thingee. It worked great for getting me inbound links but not so great from a conversion perspective (that one add has like a 10% CR and 20% CTR, costing me a lot of money for not a lot of gain.  Basically it ended up being $30 given to charity for PR value.)

This Month / This Week:

Vocabulary Bingo:

Impressions: 27,000

CTR: 2.54%

Avg. Position: 2.7
CR: 16.86%

CPA: $.34

Bingo Card Creator:

Impressions: 7,700

CTR: 5.80%

Avg. Position: 2.0

CR: 22.76%

CPA: $.45

 

Although you can’t tell it from the whole month’s stats at a glance, recently I have made my $.30 a download target.  Yay me.  The secret: continuous improvement of ad texts and landing pages, plus a recent ruthless culling of every keyword which wasn’t performing well enough to justify keeping.

Alright, how about some website stats:

Visits: 4,175

Trial downloads (from site):670

Trial downloads (download sites which hotlink, so they show up in server logs — this is a guesttimate at best due to the cruddiness of my logging): 500

Confirmed trial downloads (someone selected a link within the application): 100

Download.com trial downloads: 150

Major sources of hits (trial demo CR in % following):

Google CPC:1,000 (21.6%)

This blog:  894 (5.7%) — N.B. I was Slashdotted once, which accounts for most of them.

Google Organic: 587 (16.18%)

Microsoft Organic: 526 (17.3%)

Single Post On Teacher Bulletin Board: 150 (27%) — I love my adoring fans.

Major Download Sites:

Download.com: 130

AllApp: 40

SurfPack: 40

FreeDownloadCenter: 25* (also sent a good deal of traffic directly to site — in the hundreds)

FreeDownloadManager: 25

Incidentally, the next 40 download sites on the list sum to about 60% of the total of these.  Yep, Long Tail in action.

How much content does your website have?

Posted on August 31, 2006 by in advertising, SEO

Sometimes I visit uISV websites which are very minimalist: they have about 5 pages total.  One page about the product, one for ordering, one for support, one about the company, etc.  My website isn’t exactly a monster (probably on the order of 25 pages at the moment), but I have significantly more content than websites organized like this.  And it makes me probably $50 a week, which is not a bad return for writing a few extra pages about elementary school bingo variants.

Why do these free articles and free resources make me $50 a month?  Because they bring in traffic and, more importantly, they bring in my niche on generic search engine terms.  I currently do obscenely well on MSN and Google in terms of organic search traffic, and the overwhelming majority of it is for Long Tail queries which you just won’t get if you don’t have the content to justify it.

For example, I wrote about 200 words on one of my pages about icebreaker bingo.  That content was picked up by 12 searchers in the last seven days and generated 4 downloads.  Four downloads is worth in excess of a dollar to me (at my current CPC prices, about $1.20 actually), and that content keeps paying me a dollar week after week.  (Yeah, minor niggle: if folks never buy, then its not really worth a dollar.  But they do.  I got two sales this week from customers who came in from organic search traffic.)  However, without the search engine being told a couple of times that icebreaker bingo is a use case for Bingo Card Creator, it won’t infer it on its own.  Which is why programs which trounce me on the search engine rankings for generic queries like “Bingo Card Creator” (grr, Google, how long until I can be the #1 result for the name of my company?!) show up exactly nowhere.

Another thing content does is that it performs SEO for keywords you haven’t thought of yet.  In the last 7 days, I got approximately 400 hits and 80 downloads from organic Google and MSN.  The most common search term there was Bingo Card Creator, with approximately 5% of the total queries.  The rest were, in general, a veritable deluge of once-in-a-lifetime queries… the kind that natural English snaps up like hotcakes and all the SEO in the world won’t get you.  You know, queries like “free download word bingo literacy” (sidenote: she evidentally cared a lot more about “word bingo literacy” than “free”) or “dolch preprimer home cards”.  (Quick comparison: I also spent approximately $20 for 260 hits and 50 downloads from AdWords.  Which has not generated a sale yet this week, I think.  D’oh.)
Content also has a nice property called linkability.  Very few people are going to say “Wow, check out this trial demo download” (if they do about your software, mazeltov, you are going to be rich like a king).  However, if you put up, say, a page about how to use bingo to assess reading difficulties, teachers will swap it via email, link it on their blogs, and chat about it around the water cooler.   Which brings in more eyeballs, more PageRank, and more downloads.  Yay, a positive cycle.  Plus you’re providing a service of use to people and thats always a good thing, even if they don’t end up buying from you.

A suggestion, though, since you do want to encourage people to eventually buy from you: aside from the obvious Download Free Trial link that you should have on every page of your website, have the text of your content plug your product wherever it is natural to do so.  If its not natural to do so, maybe you should be writing different content.  I like plugging Bingo Card Creator once early in the text (“If you don’t have a set of bingo cards, you can generate one in seconds with the free trial of Bingo Card Creator”) and then once after the end (“Looking to do something else with sight word bingo?  Why don’t you make yourself some cards with the free trial of Bingo Card Creator”).

So, if you’ve got a website which looks spartan at the moment, consider sprucing it up with some content of use to your target user.  More of them will come visit your page, and hopefully some of them will stick around to see what you have to offer.  (And remember, serving pages is essentially free at the margin.  For the 80% of folks who visit my Dolch sight word lists and leave without viewing another page on my website I pay, well, absolutely nothing.)

Feature Creep!

Posted on August 30, 2006 by in Uncategorized

A customer convinced me to throw another one on the barbie, as it were.  Here’s whats coming in version 1.04.

  • A fresh new look (stock icons and changing the preview card to more accurately reflect the actual printed card).
  • Choice of fonts.
  • Choice of word wrap (or not).
  • Choice of where to position the printed card on the page (not sure this will make it in).
  • Printing calling cards.
  • Column headings (Doubtful that this will make it in in time but we’ll see.)
  • Card titles (Doubtful that this will make it in in time but we’ll see.)
  • Some minor improvements under the hood.

One of the features on this list took 4 solid hours to implement.  Another took 5 minutes.  Any guesses which was which?

Another Hosted Services Success Story

Posted on August 30, 2006 by in Uncategorized

Sorry, just nearly had a laughing fit at work:

There is a recent fad for Japanese schoolgirls to send each other messages in basically Japanese schoolgirld l33tsp34k.  The problem is that, despite this being very trendy, its very annoying difficult to do well on a cellphone.  Enter a web service which, if you send it a mail, will l33tify it for your friend without having to do any work.  They then charge your phone bill about 5 cents.  (Figure on 2 cents going to the phone company, incidentally).

Sounds like a complete waste of time, right?  Yeah, probably… unless you process 20 million messages a month.  Which apparently one of these companies is doing.  For a service which is, approximately, a 15 line Perl script and a 100 line Japanese-to-gibberish table of rules.

I was *particularly* impressed by the for-pay option to decrypt what your friend was trying to say to you in case you were in no mood to parse it yourself.

Porting to Mac OS X

Posted on August 28, 2006 by in Uncategorized

Roughly a month and a half after I first, foolishly, promised to have an OS X version of Bingo Card Creator, I’m actually close to releasing one.  Two major factors propelled me towards this:

I have one extremely dedicated customer who absolutely had to have Bingo Card Creator to teach her son reading.  She asked me whether I would have the Mac version done soon and I told her “Well, I certainly hope so”.  And then she went ahead and bought it, sight unseen.  I tried to refund her money because I can’t take money for a product which doesn’t officially exist yet but she would have none of it, so I quickly cobbled together a distribution which would work on a Mac (which basically meant zipping up my install directory and including instructions on how to double-click a JAR file) and rushed it out to her.  Apparently it worked pretty well, aside from a few niggles (not being associated with the file types it creates — the Windows version isn’t, either, as thats been somewhat low on the totem pole), and she sends me updates on how her son is loving reading and math nowadays.

So, given that I’m about to release v1.04, I thought it was as good a time as any to officially roll out the Mac version.  This is problematic because I wanted Bingo Card Creator to function as a native program does (i.e. no “find the coffee cup icon, then double click!” business).  I could accomplish that in about an hour of research and tinkering with the Mac Java SDK but, whoops, no Mac to actually use.  So I decided to outsource.

Enter RentACoder.  I offered the project up at $25 to port Bingo Card Creator (where “port” means “spend five minutes creating a native wrapper”).  It got accepted by somebody in Western Europe (I was sure it was going to be Eastern Europe or India at that price, as even if it is 10 minutes of work its not enough money to wake a programmer up in the West), and he’s busily working on it now.  He even managed to figure out how to do it such that I can do the update from v1.04 to 1.05, etc, on a Windows PC, which is great because it saves me money having to request the same service again (and will earn him a bonus).

Is there a market for Bingo Card Creator on the Mac?  Well, even if there wasn’t, I’ve got one customer who bought it already and so I’m rather committed. :)  Roughly 2% of my site’s visitors are using Macs, and every once in a (long) while I get a Mac specific search string.  I know a good portion of teachers and parents use Macs, although I suspect their share in that market is falling over time, so we’ll see if it generates any significant amount of sales.

Side note: Number of lines of codes changed for the Mac version?  Erm, zero.  I like being a Java Success Story (TM).  I will need to change my download page, though — probably use Javascript to detect whether its a Mac or PC and then redirect to the distribution as appropriate.

Version 1.04 is otherwise humming along.  I’ve got roughly 3 of my 5 slated features completed, and added 3 word lists (US presidents, states, and state capitals).  If anybody has suggestions for more word lists which aren’t math related (thats features 4 and 5), feel free to post them in the comments or drop me a line.  I’m thinking of including about 10 new ones concentrated outside of math/reading since my program should have those two fairly well covered.

Minor SEO Updates

Posted on August 26, 2006 by in search, SEO, Uncategorized

Long time readers of this blog will probably remember me describing MSN as a very cheap date in terms of SEO.  Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so dismissive: she’s now my #3 source of hits (after Google AdWords and, er, this blog oddly enough) and my #1 source of sales for last week.  Apparently she’s rather popular with non-technical audiences, just judging from the search queries I’m getting.  I’m flabbergasted that I get the rank I do for some of these: you would think “bingo cards” would be a fairly competitive search (cough gambling cough) term but somehow I’m still on the first page.

In other news, I think the Google Dance has begun.  I got a sudden spike of traffic from them yesterday, far higher than my previous peak, and its mostly for people *not* searching for “bingo card creator” so it can’t be a warez release or something.  Maybe I got moved up in the PageRank or something for all these minor searches.  Ironically, my conversion for Google organic searches is terrible (10%) because most people are looking for Dolch sight word lists and get them and leave without trying my software.  Sigh.

Speaking of search engine results: for the 5 people who found this blog looking for “Bingo Card Creator registration key”: you’ll find it in the mail you got after you purchased the software.  If you didn’t get that mail and expected to, send me a quick email (my first name @bingocardcreator.com) and we’ll get you squared away in a jiffy.  Oh, and if you didn’t know where you can get a registration key, that would be here.  Try the big red button on the right side of the page, you can’t miss it.

The Art of Apologizing

Posted on August 26, 2006 by in customer service

In a post which made many excellent points about customer service in general, TryBeta.com said the following about offering apologies:

2) Take the blame for ALL mistakes
Did a bug in your software crash your customers computer or was it an error on their part? Who cares! Apologize for anything that goes wrong and offer to fix it. Tell them how important this issue is and get it fixed ASAP.

They don’t want to deal with your company anymore? Give them a refund before they get the chargeback and bad mouth your product. Never take money from a customer who can not use your software as advertised, whether or not it is your fault or theirs.

This obviously sounds a lot like advice I’ve been giving for a while.  If I can expand on it: apologizing literally works magic on people, particularly sincere apologizing (not “I’m sorry you’re too stupid to use our software but thats the way it is”).  Its also free.  I would generally counsel apologizing for just about any unfavorable experience your customer has, and then immediately telling them what you’re going to do to correct it.  If you want to earn extra bonus points, give them options, because people often like being in control.  For example, if your program doesn’t have a particular feature and they mail you saying “Hey, where is this feature?”, you could say something like “I’m sorry, we don’t have that feature at present.”  If you’re planning on implementing it soon, great, say so.  If not, don’t.  Either way, suggest a work around and perhaps remind them that you’re totally committed to them being happy and if they’re not happy you’re happy to refund their purchase.  Very few people will actually take you up on that offer, but they will remember you making it for the duration they do business with you.
Apologizing can be difficult if you’re not used to it.  I would advise trying to minimize how much your ego is involved in the process.  My software is my baby, but its not so much a part of me that I can’t count to five when someone says they can’t use it (even if thats because they’ve purchased something clearly not designed for their use).  After you’ve gotten used to it, it really just rolls off the tongue.  For example, at my job at Quill, I would frequently have to do a bit of customer-service magic to find the records for customers who filled out forms incorrectly.  Often times this would happen with them actually on the phone, and the process takes about 30 seconds.  There are a couple of options for dealing with this smallest of inconviniences: snippily asking the customer to remember their customer number next time, saying “Please hold” and leaving 30 seconds of dead air, or a quick apology.  My set script for this was “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.  The computer seems to be acting up a bit.  You know computers, can’t live with them, can’t live without them.  *pause for chuckle/commiseration from customer* *finds records*  Aha, here we go.  So, how can I help you today, Mrs. Smith?”  Its a little thing, but excellence is getting the little things right.  (To head off the objection at the pass: There are some sort of lies which I don’t consider all that troublesome.  “The computer is acting up” is the “No, honey, that dress looks great on you” of customer service.  Inanimate objects which you own rarely resent being blamed for your customers’ mistakes.)

Japanese people are, to make an overgeneralization, great at using apologies as a social lubricant.  For example, when I went to the grocery store yesterday, I spent 15 minutes looking for tacos.  After 15 minutes I flagged down one of the employees, who talked to who supervisor, who called the guy who knew where the tacos were (in the Chinese food section… naturally).  I was completely nonplussed, but I got apologized to profusely by all three people involved for wasting my time.  Does this make me happy to come back to the store in the future?  Yes, certainly.  If I had been irked about wasting 15 minutes of my day, would this have made me feel better?  Yes, a bit.  And it costs absolutely nothing to do.

The Visual Impact Stock Icons Make

Posted on August 26, 2006 by in Uncategorized

I posted earlier this week about how I took advantage of icons-icons’s August sale to get a pile of stock icons for $29.95. I just wanted to post why I’m thrilled with my purchase. Here are two screenshots from my program. The first is version 1.03, which is the newest version which is officially available. The second is a sneak peek of version 1.04, which I hope to have out sometime next week. This is the screenshot which directly sells my program more than any other (with the possible exception of the printed output scan): its my interface looking at its best and brightest and it hints to the teachers exactly how much use they can get out of my program. Accordingly, its placed prominently on my website (above the fold on my main page).

Here’s the old version (click to enlarge):

Bingo Card Creator 1.03 interface

And here’s the new version (thumbnail):

Bingo Card Creator 1.04 Main Interface

Now doesn’t that look more colorful and vibrant?

Incidentally, the change to whites in the card preview is a side-effect of changing that to more accurately reflect what things will look like when they are printed. I hope to have a Print Preview feature ready for 1.04’s actual release, but will keep that interface element because it makes my program look more substantial and because it greatly simplifies the workflow if you’re making your own word list.

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