Kalzumeus Software

A place in history and obscene profits to the first microISV who can clone the service provided by

Payloadz except using Google Checkout as the underlying payment processor instead of Paypal.  I would gladly opt for Google Checkout over Paypal if customers could be convinced to use it, for one reason and one reason alone: its going to be 2% extra profit on every sale because of their tie-in with AdWords.  The deal is that normally you pay 2% + 20 cents, but AdWords eats at your bill: for every $1 spent on AdWords you get to charge $10.00 free.  I’d prefer if they just gave you AdWords credit for Google Checkout transactions but, hey, its a living.

Seperately, I’ve been investigating the possibility of doing away with Payloadz in my current setup, which is easy since I don’t have any actual customers at the moment.  The question is: does saving perhaps $15 a month justify the amount of effort it will take me to hack together some Perl scripts to do exactly the same thing Payloadz does?  Answer: No.  The next question: is the hacking justified by it letting me get around stupid limitations in the Payloadz UI, like being unable to redirect my customers to my site after the order has completed?  Answer: Quite possibly.  I think I’ll keep my account around just for the additional exposure on Google, though.

*sigh*  I think if this ever becomes successful it will be as much because I successfully adapted to The Big G as because I have a quality piece of software.

Since launch I’ve probably spent ~10 hours (some of them at work — sorry boss!) obsessing over the project and doing various tweaks here and there.  I really need to chill out, at least during work hours, and get some work done on my “real” project.  Ahh well.

Expenditures: $5 for Yahoo Search Marketing (got a $25 freebie), $3 on eBay listing fees for an experiment.  Total expenditures now $43.22, I think (I’ll count in the Google ads once they’ve actually been billed).

Other places I promoted the program/site:

• I put out a PAD file which causes lots of the non-main download sites to automagically list my program.  That was a great deal of exposure for not a penny and not a lot of effort.  I highly recommend anybody who writes consumer-oriented shareware to give this a whirl.
• Teacher bulletin boards. Not web forums in the sense an internet user would think of — there are lots of sites dating back to the mid-90s which just collect resources in bulletin board format.  Title, link, text.  Many of these have places where you can, for free, post a notice about commercial software.  Completely on the up and up and got me several nice inbound links from sites with obscene PRs (a handful of 7s and a bag full of 6s).  One of them even got actual people to send in inquiries (people actually read advertisements when they are classified as advertisements?  That amazes me, but it really shouldn’t seeing that I’m paying for folks to do it every day.  Its heartening to know you can still do well for yourself by being honest with folks)  .

I’ve been soliciting some links from education sites to my home page.  There are any number of sites which collect links for teachers, and some of them include links to commercial software, too.  For those that had a convinient method of submitting new links, I put my name in the ring.  I’m aiming for 100% honesty in the process so I always picked commercial software and made it clear the link was an advertisement.

Apparently that just paid off, because my daily search for Bingo Card Creator puts my home page at #4 on the Internet (!) after that domain has been registered for approximately two weeks (!!).  Now, thats not quite my target search term (“make bingo cards” gets searched far, far more often, as I’m gradually learning from paying for people searching for it) but I expect I’ll be much higher on the organic lists after I get a pagerank assigned by Google.  That could take a while.

Incidentally, for those not already using it, Google Sitemaps is your friend.  Seriously.  You want to get crawled without any errors — make it easy for Google to do so as soon as humanly possible.

I slapped together a button using some open-source clip art (if it isn’t totally obvious, I love the open source movement — particularly since they haven’t killed bingo software yet) to give my Download Free Trial some visibility.  My little brother, no computer slouch, asked to see my website and couldn’t find the download button.  Thats a bug, not a feature.  I’ve rolled this out to only index.htm at the moment because frankly its 2 AM and I’m too tired to get busy copying and pasting, but I expect I’ll be buttonizing my trial and buy links.

While I’m at it the links for the two things which are currently broken are going away until they’re not broken anymore.

Enjoy the Fourth everybody.  Particularly any of you grade school elementary teachers out there.  While I won’t exactly be celebrating it up in Japan it will give me some time to do actual work (imagine that) and polish the website some without accidentally cutting off any current visitors.

Lets see.  Since I added my conversion checking code roughly 6% of all visitors (and 10%ish of the ones I pay for) actually download a trial.  That means I’m paying about $1 per trial download.  To make any money at that rate at all, I need to have a conversion of trial downloads to purchasers above 5%.  Thats doable but challenging — I really need to work on my landing pages I think.

If you search “bingo card creator”, I’m now result #8 through my download link at Payloadz, one of the folks I’m using as a payment processor.  Whee.  Its not that useful to me, though, because the web store design is not so hot.  I’ll have to get work on optimizing that.  Unfortunately, there is a limit to what I can do, and they link back to my main site in a way that is Google friendly.

I wasn’t exactly happy with the amount of steps it took to get people to use my pre-loaded word lists. You had to learn how to open a file, then navigate through two directories, then pick the list. Sure, four steps is nothing for a computer programmer, but my users… aren’t. So I just put in another, simpler way to do the same thing — a Wizards menu. It automagically parses my data directory and extracts the available templates, then puts them in easy-breezy menu form. Plus it makes for a great screenshot.

[Edit:

The screenshot in question now leads my screenshot page: check it out.

Incidentally, total development time for this feature was about 20 minutes of planning, 20 minutes of coding, and 20 minutes of testing.  This was mostly because I started at 10 PM at night and lost 30 minutes to the JMenu.setName and JMenu.setText *not* being equivalent, which isn’t a mistake I would make in daylight hours.  If you start with extensibility and code reuse in mind, Java or any other OO language can be used to rapidly code in new features almost as quickly as Rails or the other new hotness these days.  If you don’t, you end up with hundreds of classes full of totally unmaintainable spaghetti code.  Here’s an example: I spent an extra 10 minutes during this part of the project coding a Factory class.  Why code a factory when I could have just subclassed JMenuItem for a single purpose?  Because with a Factory I can decide tomorrow to make another type of wizard that isn’t just an alias for “read this file” — for example, I can make ones to autogenerate math problems.  Hey, wait, I think there could be a market for that one…

]

Oh boy, how I have come to love and hate Google Analytics.  Love, because it offers me incredible amounts of information about my business.  Hate, because I can’t resist the urge to check it every five minutes during the business day (i.e. when I’m working the job that, oh, pays a salary).  But its given me some preliminary stats which I’ll share with you all.  Note that these are for approximately 48 hours during the weekend in summer, which is about as cruddy a time as you could possibly pick to meet my customers.

I’ve got two ad groups.  One is carefully targetted at people searching for something very much like my product — typing “make my own bingo cards” and the like.  I’m willing to pay a bit of money to reach them — we’ll have to wait to see conversion rates over the long run, but at the moment they’re costing me 20 cents per click and that sounds fair.  Over two days, I served these folks 115 ads and got a CTR (click-through rate) of 4.34% (5 clicks).  Thats a bit of a multiple of the industry average, probably because I’m giving them exactly what they want with my ad text, which is something like this:

Print Custom Bingo Cards
Your own text or use our lessons.
Download our free trial now!

Last night I added conversion checking — i.e. I hear when people go from the ad to download my demo or buy my software (hasn’t happened yet).  I expect these folks to eventually convert at some multiple of the folks brought in by ad #2.  However, the results aren’t even close to accurate yet.
Group #2 is focused on teachers/parents looking for sight word lists.  One of the features my software comes with out of the “box” is making sight word bingo cards.  So I pay for folks looking for words like “Dolch word lists” (n.b. Dolch is an education bigwig from the 50s who came up with the eponymous list of 220 most common English words, and if you’re not an elementary reading teacher you will NEVER hear his name in your life but if you are he has name recognition approaching that of Einstein).   I only pay $.04-10 a click for these customers because a) surprisingly, folks trying to sell to first grade reading teachers don’t speak First Grade Reading teacher (they bid up “sight words” but not “Dolch words” despite the fact that the two are synonymous to my customers) and b) there is money in gambling, which drives up the price of any string involving “bingo”, but there is a lot less money in teaching first graders to read.

Anyhow, my ad text.  I’m very happy with this one, since it works in my price advantage and my main selling point (save you time) while appealing to every teacher’s sense of Purpose:

Sight Word Class Games
If you prep more than you teach,
try out a better way for free.
www.BingoCardCreator.com

And here we go with a variation:

Sight Word Class Games
Paying $10 a set for vocab cards?
Try out a better way for free.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

That second variation is getting no hits whatsoever, but oh well.  Its not costing me money, and Google will automagically optimize in favor of the one getting the clicks.  I’m going to periodically try out lots of different ad phrases and landing pages to see which ones work best at getting clicks and, ultimately, conversions.

Cross your fingers for me: I live in Japan so the US work day for Monday starts right after I go to bed tonight.  When I wake up in the morning we’ll see if the mass of teachers returning to work late in the school year or early in the summer break (what, you thought teachers actually stayed home in the summer?  Ha, ha, ha, good one) are interested in buying.