Kalzumeus Software

On a weekend.  That was quite unexpected (I had almost turned off my ads for the weekend on the assumption they would not lead to money).  For full price, from my website.  Unfortunately, a misconfiguration kept Google from recording it as a conversion (so I’m not sure exactly how this particular customer found me), but I get paid just the same.
For those keeping track, thats two weeks and a day after launch.  At the moment (with a free Payloadz account until I get, hmm, 3 more sales), that means I clear 24.95 – 1.02 (paypal fees) = $23.93 profit.  Thats about 80% of my advertising budget for my first month, which is now half completed.

I got my eSellerate account approved a few days ago and haven’t gotten around to actually setting it up for the website yet.  That will be one of my priorities for this weekend.  The actual mechanics of getting the product up and running are smooth as silk, and I estimate that I have played around with them for about 4-5 hours and could get a product listed in under 30 minutes if I really wanted to, start to finish.  The main difficulty is skinning the site to make it look and feel like your website.

My one complain about eSellerate — the number of pages you have to click through just screams “Abandon this software purchase!”.  The lowest I’ve been able to force it to is about 5 steps.  Yeah, egads.

I just got a customer who needed a particular feature which Bingo Card Creator doesn’t support (she wanted to be able to write something other than BINGO on top of the cards — note that I’m not even finished with code to write BINGO, although that is scheduled for the next version).  Unfortunately, she needed it by (literally) tomorrow, so I wasn’t able to help her.

I ended up pointing her to one of my competitor’s products which appears to have the feature she needs (I even installed their trial to make sure, and it appears it will work for her).  This makes me happy-sad: happy I was able to give her at least an option, very sad it wasn’t me.

I’m going to end up making a Japanese version of Bingo Card Creator “one of these days”, and sell both the English and Japanese versions in the Japan market.  This would be sort of ambitious for a uISV with no sales to date, if I weren’t Japan-based myself.  Why?

1)  I built the program from the ground up with localization in mind.  I am absolutely positive that there is exactly one string in the program which would need to be changed for the Japanese version, and thats a web address which I was too lazy to externalize.  Everything else is in a resource file like it should be.  (Incidentally, anyone making an application for external distribution in Java should do it this way.  Its a major feature of the language, and the amount of additional hassle is very minimal IF you do it from day one.  Integrating late in the project cycle is a pain in the keister.)

2)  Ahem, free money.  My market is underserved in the US, but it just isn’t served at all in Japan.  (Incidentally, the market is mostly teachers of English — many of whom in Japan have no formal training as teachers and who arrive every year with a minimum of instruction from their superiors and/or employers and a room full of kids who need to be taught and entertained.)

3)  Low advertising costs.  Think of it: how many people are bidding on English teaching keywords in Japan?  Answer: not really that many, except folks recruiting for jobs.

The challenges: I’ll have to spend two hours localizing my program, and a heck of a lot longer localizing my website.  This will likely include reevaluating my payment processors to find somebody who can offer both Japanese and English interfaces to the customers.  Ideally I’d use a Japanese payment processor because credit card penetration is not quite 100% here (there are a witches brew of microcurrencies and alternative payment methods).

The bigger problem will be localizing my website.  I do not look forward to that one little bit, as I’m a lot less confident in my ability to market in Japanese than in my ability to write a Save As dialog in Japanese (and, going by the results of my marketing in English, I’ve not exactly got natural talent for it).   I might settle for writing one or two pages in Japanese and linking them to the English ones, and putting a price in yen fairly prominent somewhere ($24.95 or 2500 yen…).

Speaking of which, I may have to rethink that price point sometime…  oh well, silly to do it during the middle of summer vacation when demand for the product is a close approximation of zero at any price…

I’ve made some improvements in getting more conversions for my ad dollar: I now track them in a (marginally) more reliable fashion (I count them as converted when they open the page which automagically starts the download), I have discontinued some keywords which just weren’t generating results, and I’ve been continuously optimizing website design (observation #1: having a graphical button increases your visitor’s propensity to download by 100% versus having an understated text link).

This puts my conversion to trial download at approximately 15% for Google and 10% for Yahoo.  This number varies wildly based on landing page/ad campaign: I convert at close to 40% for “make your own bingo card” and ~5% for generic elementary school teacher words (not unexpected).  Also not unexpected: my cost per conversion is about a dollar.

At $1 per trial download, I need to convince 5% of buyers to pay up to make a profit at my price point.  Thats, eh, possible I guess.  We’ll see.  Constant tweaking will continue.

One of the nice things about running an uISV as opposed to, say, a fast food franchise is if you decide to take the weekend off to go camping the “store” keeps happily running by itself.  Of course, unlike your local McDonalds I have neither billions and billions served, nor actual sales :)

Priorities for this week:

1)  More Wizards for the product.  I had expected Dolch Sight Words to be a killer app for this but apparently not — only one teacher has downloaded the trial after coming to my page looking for a sight word list, and while that keyword is cheap as anything its still not cheap on a per-action basis relative to Make My Bingo Card and variations.  (My clickthrough rate on those advertisements is above 10%, and roughly 25-50% of clickers go on to download the demo).

2)  More editing of the Dolch landing page.  I think I’ll actually put the Dolch word lists up with conspicuous “click here to get it in bingo card form” buttons to induce people to try.  At the worst I’ll get some people to link to me just to get the word lists, and perhaps some minor search engine traffic.

3)  Update my sitemap to be ready for the Goooogle crawler’s imminent return.

4)  Start plugging the uses of bingo for things other than reading.  This entails writing word lists and/or Wizards (the math wizard should be doable in less than 30 minutes, so thats on the agenda for tonight — all it requires is a GUI and a for loop).
5)  Rewrite eBay advertisements, make them attractive HTML this time, launch 5 buy-out listings at $14.95.

Previously, I had a 5 second nag screen at the start of every execution of the program and another 5 seconds at the end.  On reflection today, neither of these sounded like they would ever be of use to me.  I have a much, much better sales mechanism built in: every time the user tries to do one of my forbidden actions they get the error message and a gentle prompt that takes them straight to my purchasing screen.  With that in place, why annoy people so much that they never get to the main screen?

I also put an easy-breezy button on my help menu to visit the website… which handily also lets me know via which URL they come by whether they’re registered or not.  That way I can see if anybody is actually using my software, which is hard to tell now unless they’re one of the two people who routinely click the “purchase this now” button and then do nothing.

Well, I’ve been flogging my software on eBay for the past week.  The first auctions will be ending tonight, we’ll see if anything sells.

Since eBayers are rather notorious for being accutely price sensitive I dropped the price to $12.95, then on reflection moved it to $14.95.  $12.95 puts me at right in the region where a single pack of Dolch Sight Word Bingo cards costs, when you factor in shipping (please, eBay users, please show me you know how to do addition).  Of that, I pay $.60 for listing plus 5.25% + 2.9% + … darn it, it adds up quickly doesn’t it.  Oh well, shipping cost is still zero and production costs are still zero, which means I still clear ~9-10 profit per sale.  Needless to say, this is a lot less than $20 per sale on my website, but as my website is not generating many hits or demo downloads yet (averaging one a day from folks actually interested in the software) and my auctions on eBay are seeing traffic, watchers, and probably bids starting tonight…

At the moment I’m still experimenting with my presentation, which is just plain text at the moment.  I figure for eBay less is more, although I’d prefer having a testimonial or three to throw in there.

Why am I even bothering selling on eBay?  At current volumes, there is no way it will ever be worth my time.  Mainly, its because it lets me quickly try out selling copy (although users on the general internet are going to be different than the eBay folks, I’m guessing, especially as they’re more likely to be teachers and eBayers are rather more likely to be parents/homeschoolers) and because it provides me with some cash to spend on more advertising and server fees for the next couple of months.  Sure, I could fund this project with my day job until the sun goes nova, but whats the fun in that?