Kalzumeus Software

I posted a classified ad (hey, it was free) on a large message board teachers collect at (and collect they do — PR 8!).  I wasn’t seriously expecting anyone to drill down two levels to get to my software, but hey, what could it have hurt?  Plus some decent profile links will help the spiders find me.  Well, not 2 hours later I got a letter from somebody.  They needed a little handholding, so I handheld.

I just got done all the conversion tracking code for the web site.  Conversion means when somebody takes the action you desire when you market to them.  There are two seperate conversion worth noticing for me: every time somebody downloads the trial version, and every time somebody pays me money.  The second hasn’t happened yet (not surprising, since I’ve been open for 30 hours in the middle of the time my target audience is least likely to be at their computer).  Demo downloads have been happening, but I expect thats mostly from the Joel on Software people wanting to give advice (keep it coming guys!).  So now I can track whether demo downloaders are me (doesn’t count ;) ), sent in by my Google AdWords ads (which is a percentage I’m *keenly* interested in, for obvious reasons), or whether they came in from “organic” (not-paid-for) searches or even links.

Google made this all stupidly easy to set up.  Hats off guys.  I really hope they continue to make boatloads of money if they can continue to drive quality leads for me for so cheap (my cost per customer is sort of hard to estimate after 24 hours and no actual sales, obviously, but the kind of words I’m targetting typically cap out at about 10-15 cents with many in the sub-nickle range, with my most expensive ones being about a quarter.  Doing the math, I’m profitable with my most expensive words at a final conversion rate of slightly over 1%, and I’m profitable at my least expensive words with a conversion rate of, well, anything really.)

Ever heard the old saw “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”  This has a lot of wisdom for uISVs, who often are their own worst competitors.  We’re all sitting by the side of the road with a big sign saying “Get your free milk!”  Sometimes somebody ambles down, sees our sign, and says “Sure, I’ll take some free milk.”  And then he drinks it and leaves before we can even tell him how well-tempered of a cow she is.

I am not in the business of giving away milk, or selling cows.  My philosophy with Bingo Card Creator is that I give away cookies.  Because really, milk is a lovely drink but few people get up in the morning and say “I think I’ll go take a stroll around the neighborhood to find an independent farmer to buy milk from”.  Now cookies, on the other hand, put up a sign saying free cookies and you’ll be out of them before you can say boo.  So here’s me, sitting by my free cookie sign, with constantly pulling more out of my infinitely deep cookie jar.  And along comes a customer.  “Did I hear right about the free cookies?”, he asks me.  Yep, certainly sir, chocolate chip and absolutely delicious.  Have four, they’re small.

My customer spends several minutes going through my assortments of free cookies.  He can’t get enough of them.  And then he starts to get thirsty.  Pack down 3 dozen cookies and you’d be thirsty too.  Then, he notices a sign next to one of the cookie plates: “Feeling thirsty?  I bet you’d love some free milk.  Happens we have that, too.  Its right around the shed.”

So the customer runs around the shed and meets Betsie.  Betsie is wearing a sign saying “Hideho, looking for milk?  My name is Betsie and I’m your free dairy cow.”  And the customer has died and gone to heaven.  Not only is he stuffed full of cookies but he now has a free cow.  All he needs to do is sit down and milk her to finish his immediate need, then he can take her home.

So he sits down on the stool, and then realizes “Uh oh, no pail.”  Then he looks up and sees “Need a pail?  $24.95, less in quantity.  Ask the Cookie Guy.”

The cookies are the free sample cards I give out.   My target user is out on the Internet looking for an activity to do to teach something: maybe sight words, maybe phonics, maybe multiplication tables.  She (and she’s almost certainly a she, because she is teaching grade school) came to my site because I offer free activities to do exactly what she wants to do.  One mouse click later and she’s got a bingo card in front of her (I love you, Adobe Acrobat, thank you for being installed on every computer I’ve ever seen).  She can get eight the same way, and the last four all come on a single page so she realizes that I have that key feature.

Then, I ask her if she wants more cards from the same set.  Of course she does, because she has more than eight students.  Thats where she meets the cow — my free download.  A cow is a much bigger commitment than a cookie — my customer might even have to install the Java runtime (a 20 minute process if she’s on dialup).  But its a free cow, and it promises over a dozen cards to a thing which she was looking for and which she knows I can deliver (she’s got the proof literally in her hands by this point if she printed the PDFs).

So she sits down through my install process (if you’ve got Java, thats somewhere in the vicinity of five mouse clicks.  The program opens up directly into a free trial notice, then the main screen gives her instructions on exactly her use case — click open, click this folder to find your activity, click print.  She probably immediately prints one card to test and, sure enough, it works perfectly with no configuration.  Then she clicks print again and schedules one for everybody in her class.

And thats where she realizes that she has no pail.  A popup hits and says “This trial version is limited to printing 15 cards from any particular list.  You have printed 1 card, so your request of 22 cards puts you over the limit.  Would you like to register your software right now to be able to print as many cards as you want? YES / NO”.  Clicking on yes takes her straight to purchasing options, where I tell her for $24.95 I’ll sell her a pail that will hold all the milk she can handle.

I anticipate this process will generate a heck of a lot more conversions over time than actually selling to people who know they’re in the market for “make my own printable bingo cards”.

Hours worked: 47 hours (programming 31, website 10, payment processors 6)
Lines of code:  2226

Classes: 14 major classes (.java files), ~25 named classes, ~50 total classes (anonymous inner classes used for input listeners add up quickly)

Most expensive line item on budget: $17.20.  One 10 page fax of a contract from Gifu Prefecture to Nebraska.  My bosses would be so proud I’m helping to digitalize two rural regions at once :)

I got out of this morning and started making some improvements to my site suggested by the Joel on Software crew (thanks guys!), especially fixing one critical display bug with Internet Explorer (that required me to remove a nice visual effect but the jarringness of it was worth taking the hit).  I also tinkered a little bit with my AdWords campaign.  Then my phone rang and a friend of mine invited me out to the mall.  I haven’t seen the sun in seven days, so I figured, “Let the business run itself for six hours”.  And while he came over, I wrote some Google ads.  I was sort of proud of one of them — its almost guaranteed to hit either a reading teacher or a homeschool mother because nobody else knows one of the words in it. The text offers a freebie in the ad title, and the next two lines are “Tired of paying $10 each for vocab cards?  Try out a better way for free.”

Six hours later, none of my other adds had been displayed yet.  Not totally unexpected, since the US has only been awake for about 30 minutes.  That ad had been a few times — not a statistically significant number or anything.  And the click through rate?  Holy mother of God.  Now I just need to keep optimizing the web site to get my reading teachers to convert… and then start figuring out obscure words known only by elementary math teachers.

Well, unfortunately, I succumbed to a bit of a crunch time mentality even though this is supposed to be a non-crunch activity.  I just had a burst of energy (partially due to the drugs I am taking to stave off this cold, I think), and ended up working 9 hours on Friday instead of the 6 I have been allowing myself.  This brings the total time spent on this project to something in the vicinity of 45 hours, not including the daydreaming I have been allowing myself at work.

• The windows version is good to go, including all data files.  You can test drive it right now if you want.  I quashed three bugs discovered in last minute testing (user interface things that I hadn’t realized *could* exist because I generally use certain interface elements in a consistent way — I always type extensions out by hand, for example, and didn’t realize they aren’t forcibly included when you don’t until late in the game).
• The website is “complete ” except for the links to the payment processors.  I may still tinker with some advertising copy.  If I do say so myself, the Free Resources page is my best single idea in this entire project.  I detailed the plan for it in a post below and it worked out better than I could ever have hoped for… I hope.
• My Paypal/Payloadz system is all ready to go.  The eSellerate system is at about 80%, and they haven’t upgraded me to a real account yet so they may miss launch day.  Oh well, I wasn’t expecting a large stream of site licenses to start pouring in.
• A basic Google AdWords campaign is awaiting the start button, and I’m going to spend a good deal of launch day playing around with it and also Yahoo (which is offering a $25 free credit if you sign up now, which costs a $5 deposit which you’ll get back in clicks anyhow — such a sweet deal).

mv -f directoryOne/*.* directoryTwo

is NOT the same thing as

mv -fr directoryOne/ directoryTwo

One of puts some critical data files into the directory I’m about to zip for deployment.  The other puts some critical data files into the directory I’m about to zip for deployment… and clobbers the identically named data files already there.  Can you spot the difference?  This addled Windows programmer did about two seconds too late.

Despite the three hour minor setback I believe I’m going to make my launch target.  Yay for building some slack into the schedule.

Well, I faxed in my contract to eSellerate today.  Unfortunately, the convinience store charges for the fax by 12 second increments and their positively ancient fax machine took 8 minutes to transmit the 10 page document.  2000 yen = $17.20!  Thats almost a third of my budget, and while I’ll make it up on my first transaction it was rather irksome.  This brings my total expenditure to date to $32.22 (I also paid Google’s non-refundable $5 deposit for an AdWords account the other day, and the first payment was $10.02 to GoDaddy.)

Oh yeah, my brilliant marketing scheme.  I was making samples for my website and wanted to include some bingo cards for holidays, because teachers often want to do a more fun lesson around those days and what is more fun than a quick game of Halloween bingo?  Plus, if you check the search engine results, you get crazy spikes around all major holidays for exactly those seasonal bingo games — strange but true!  Unfortunately, there are no holidays American teachers would be naturally interested in in the middle of summer.  Of course, there’s that whole Fourth of July thing, but most schools are out of session and few teachers will be running any lessons that day.  And it would only leave people three days to buy between launch and the holiday.

Hey, wait a minute.  Short time frame for one-use impulse-purchase Americana… I SMELL EBAY!  eBay routinely sells bingo card sets for $8 with $5 shipping, and almost all the users are home consumers, which isn’t my target market.  They probably will only play one game of bingo in the year.  But millions of them are going to be searching for Fourth of July activities over a three day period.  I can’t even buy that kind of traffic, and if I price it to move (say, at $9.99) for a special Fourth of July edition its not like I’ll be depriving myself of any sales in my core market.  Take out the eBay fees and Paypal fees and I’m looking at making about $7 per sale.  And if it turns out to have been a stupid idea, oh well, I’m out the price of about five clicks from Google AdWords.  $7 per sale times even five sales means I am officially cash-flow positive.  And wouldn’t that be a funny thing to announce on day two of owning your own business. :)

You might want to refer to Bingo Card Creator’s web site as you read this.

Suppose, for the moment, I am able to find some effective way to drive qualified traffic to my website.  Before they leave the website, probably never to return, I need to get them to convert in some way.  I’ve got a variety of strategies that I’ll be trying out.

My Free Resources page has (as of this writing, “will have”) pre-rendered ready to go bingo cards with no software download required.  I made literally hundreds of the suckers while testing.  Since I don’t own a printer, I installed a virtual printer which output to PDF files — and then it hit me today that there are people Googling right now for exactly those kind of files.  Well, I figure I’ll give it to them, in a format similar to this:

Free alphabet bingo cards: Card A, Card B, Card C, Four Cards On One Page.  Want even more cards?  You can print random cards using all the letters of the alphabet with our free trial — they’ll look just like the PDFs featured here! Want even more activities?  For just $24.95, upgrading to our full version will give you access to all of our pre-made activities (dozens in early childhood, literacy, arithmatic, foreign languages, ESL, and class activities) PLUS the ability to create and save your own activities!

The Free Resources page naturally drives organic search traffic up the chain for me — from getting them to download one of my print samples (which are not exactly beautiful but certainly clock most free generators out there), to getting them to download the trial version (because no teacher has any use for 7 bingo cards on a particular subject), to…

… getting a minor roadblock thrown in their way by the differences between the full version and the trial version.

Here they are:

1. You can’t save your own lists with the trial version.  This has a relatively low nuisance value and is mostly a way to defeat attempts to casually bypass the other restrictions.
2. You don’t get truly random cards from the trial version — the first card you print for a given list after turning on the program is always the same, as is the second, as is the third, etc.  I suspect most users won’t even notice this one.
3. You can *see* some enticing lists installed on your machine but the program won’t let you open them (I keep them seperate into two directories — free samples and otherwise, further subdivided by subject).  Most of my “Wow, that would be useful” lists are in there, such as sight word reading lists, the 1-12 multiplication table, etc.  The free lists are ones which I think demonstrate the possibilties but aren’t quite so attractive: the alphabet, subtract facts involving the numbers 5,6, and 7, the US states (home of Massachusetts, the data entry that gave me fits, as described below), and etc.
4. The program will only let you print X pages.  After you print X pages, further attempts gently tell you that X is the limit and direct you to my ordering page if you so choose (lets see, what is the prompt: “The trial version of Bingo Card Creator is limited to creating X cards, of which you have printed Y.  Your Z requested cards puts you over the limit.  If you purchase this software, you can print as many cards as you’d like.  Would you like to go to our website right now to purchase?” with Yes/No buttons).  I’m currently indecisive on to set X to 10 or 15.
5. I present the user with the option to register for 5 seconds before they can enter the main screen of the program and remind them of it for 5 seconds again after the main program window is closed.  Thats marketing speak for “Nag Screens Ahoy!”

Now, why have I limited the program in this manner instead of, say, a 30 day trial version?  First, because one of my key selling features is saving the user time.  Every time they are in a crisis and turn to my program for a fun, rewarding lesson whipped up in a jiffy, thats another opportunity for me to make a sale.  X cards is plenty to verify that my program does indeed print as advertized and my word lists should spark teachers to think “Hey, if I can do this, I bet I can make a list for my own activitity!”  But so long as X is significantly below the number of students in the average classroom, X unique cards is *absolutely useless* to the teacher.  You can’t go to your room of 25 3rd graders and say “Sorry kids, I know we were supposed to play bingo today but you’re going to have to share 15 cards”.  This is the primary way I make sure I’m not competing with myself.

Another thing: I’ve got an ironclad no-questions-asked guarantee.  Here’s my thinking on that, which was heavily informed by this article: A guarantee costs me *absolutely nothing* if I’m not already making money.  If I am making money, a guarantee costs me approximately $2 per dissatisfied customer (I eat the payment processor charge).  Thats roughly 10% of my profit from a single sale.  It will never be a significant cost of doing business for three reasons:

1. My software doesn’t have any showstopper bugs in it (with the possible exception of “It won’t load because I don’t have Java” — working on that!).  There are some places it could be improved on, certainly (I’m not exactly happy with how fonts gyrate at the moment to try to fit into cells of the bingo board, particularly when you’re printing many cards per page, and at the moment it automatically chooses your default printer), but the core functionality is rock-solid.
2. Supposing there were an absolute deal breaker for a particular customer, they would almost certainly find out about it during the free trial.  Customers can be finicky — I know and respect this (“I don’t like gunmetal backgrounds!  I want polka dots!  Polka dots in version 2.0 or I’ll never buy!”), but the maximally finicky ones will self-select away from sending me money.
3. My mother has a talent for being totally unembarassed to ask businesses, bureacrats, service workers, & etc to do something which is strongly out of the ordinary and deterimental to them.  My mother is also the only person I have ever met in my life like this.  For the vast majority of people, asking for “special treatment” is unsettling.  You want to do a psychology experiment to prove this?  Next time you go out to dinner with friends, tell one you’ll pay him $10 if he asks the waitress about Windows vs. Mac when she comes to order and can keep the conversation going for more than 60 seconds.  Most people recoil at the thought of doing this — its very meiwaku* to the waitress, and people feel a deep sense of shame in causing meiwaku for other people.  (* meiwaku is a Japanese term for which there is no handy English equivalent.  Its a type of imposition or nuisance which is not socially appropriate.  Not shaving before you come to work is meiwaku with regards to everyone you have to deal with.  Coming late to a meeting and holding everyone up is meiwaku.  That sort of thing.  What can I say, I’m still a teacher at heart and love words.)

Anyhow, back to the guarantee. Handing over your money to a no-name stranger on the Internet can be a scary experience.  The guarantee reduces the perceived risk of that action to very close to zero.  If it motivates more than 1 marginal person to convert for every 10 people who excercize their right to return the software, the guarantee has made me money (*and* cut support costs by severing my relationship with 10 customers who are likely to be difficult — although I pray I never do anything to tick off substantial number of people.0