Always Dangerous Making Predictions Early…

Posted on March 6, 2007 by in Uncategorized

… but I think I’ll hit $800 to $1,000 in sales for March, smashing my previous records.  This is on the strength of what appears to just be natural growth in traffic from Google and apparently a higher conversion from trial to purchase rate (my number of confirmed downloads relative to recorded downloads is up 10%, too — maybe folks like Inno Setup or some software site I don’t know about is ranking me highly?).  I’ve gotten 6 orders in the last 3 business days where a more typical number would be 2 to 3. 

I have a plan in place for a promotion around Easter which I was decently sure was going to help me achieve my $1,000 target for April.  While I’ll still do it, I rather doubt I’ll need to just to make that target.

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Note to those using Inno Setup…

Posted on March 6, 2007 by in bugs

… don’t forget to set the working directory for the shortcuts you create.  I had assumed Windows would automatically default to the program directory.  This is apparently not the case on some systems, and its been causing some extraordinarily quirky behavior for some of my users.  (v1.05 and 1.051 use Java’s facility to locate the working directory rather than using the directory the .exe is in, because that logic was causing problems for the Mac port.  Unfortunately, on at least some systems they’ll default to somewhere else instead.  I hadn’t noticed this problem because Inno Setup actually does set a sensible default working directory when you execute the program directly from the installer.)

*sigh* Time for a 1.052.

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Luck of the Irish

Posted on March 4, 2007 by in Uncategorized

After a day of St. Patrick’s festivities in Nagoya, including dinner at a quite nice (and incredibly not Irish — cheese tofu, though, deserves to be) restaraunt and clubbing (not something I frequently indulge in), I was wondering whether my budget was going to stretch to the end of the month or not.  I just woke up, checked my email accounts, and the @bingocardcreator.com box was stuffed.  One support request, about a dozen order confirmation emails (depending on how they buy it I get about 2-3 per order, so its less impressive than it sounds).  I kind of like the feeling of making more money while spending the evening out than the evening out actually costs. 

It seems that support request was related to a corrupted file, so I’ve got to keep an eye on GoDaddy to see if they’re not mangling my EXEs again.  I suppose it always could be a problem on the customer side or perhaps whatever download site they got it from, and I’m hoping it is, but with the frequency that I break my software I can’t afford for my hosting provider to break it, too. 

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February Stats

Posted on March 2, 2007 by in stats

Capsule Summary: Owing to my carelessness sales are quite down this month.  Profits are down quite a bit, too, but a bit less thanks to improvements on Google AdWords spending.

Sales:

Gross: $454.15 (17 total, 6 CD, no refunds of consumated sales but lost 1 to Google verification, not included)

Expenses:

E-junkie: $5

GoDaddy: $7 (I prepayed for 2 years so technically its about 10% less than that now, but a few cents either way aren’t going to kill me.) 

AdWords: $45

CDs: ~$50 ( covers more CDs than I actually needed for customers, due to some replacements and proof copies)

Profit: ~$345

 Website-wise, I had my best month ever by a significant margin, and if I hadn’t borked the download most of my visitors were getting and my conversion rate had remained steady I would have hit about $800-900 in sales without breaking a sweat.  D’oh.  Oh well, thats what March is for.  I’d break out the actual stats but I have a St. Patrick’s Day parade to attend in Nagoya today and need to get ready (yes, they’re two weeks off, but the notion of Japanese people throwing a St. Patrick’s Day parade is so charming as to forgive the fact that they miss the actual day by quite a margin every single year).

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Google vs. Paypal — Customer Preference

Posted on February 26, 2007 by in Checkout, Paypal

This is mostly anecdotal but someone asked me for the numbers today.  I figured other people might like them so I’ll promote this to a post instead of a comment.  Note that the sample size is fairly low because I made a major error 2 weeks ago and that resulted in my sales declining about 80% over the period (d’oh!).

From a universe of 29 transactions, 13 were Google checkout and 16 were Paypal.  (This excludes one additional transaction which would have been Checkout if not for Google denying it for, ostensibly, security reasons.)  The presentation of the Checkout and Paypal buttons is fixed and exactly symmetrical unless folks choose to buy directly from lower on the page rather than from the cart.  Most (80%) of my transactions come from the cart.

Interestingly, none of my Google checkout customers had their account prior to signing up to do business with me.  Back when I accepted primarily Paypal, a rather high percentage of my customers had existing Paypal accounts (its inefficient for me to check exactly how high, but I have quoted 60% at previous times so lets call it 60%).  The percentage of Paypal users who have preexisting verified accounts has gone up significantly since I began offering checkout.  My interpretation of this data point is that people who already use Paypal are likely to seek it out as an option when given comparable alternatives.

I should note that my cart interface always presents Paypal and Checkout in the same order (Checkout on the left, Paypal on the right).  If I had my druthers that order would be randomized for every load of the cart.   I suspect many customers are just mashing on any button that they know is in the contextually accurate place for Continue This Transaction Darn It rather than making a conscious decision for or against either provider.  Thats fine by me, incidentally, since I hate having customers have to decide things prior to giving me money.

I should note that my demographics are probably vastly more accepting of Paypal than some demographics.  Many software developers, for example, hate Paypal like the plague for some reason.  I think this viewpoint is rather less prevalent among middle aged ladies, who make up a good deal of my customers.  eBay is a big hit with them, and Paypal acceptance among eBay users is extraordinarily high.

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SEO Trick I Hadn't Known About

Posted on February 24, 2007 by in SEO

I don’t know if this is actually useful or not, but I tried it a few weeks ago and my traffic is up.  Correlation != causation and all that aside, it only cost me about $8 so maybe you want to try it too.

WebsiteGrader, a project of Dharmesh Shah and the rest of the team at Hubspot, suggests that if you have a website domain registration which will expire in a year or less, then you may be penalized by search engines, which think you might be a fly-by-night spam site operator. 

Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a committment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website has not been setup as a temporary spam site.

Up until a few weeks ago, I had about half a year left on my registration.  When I read their inducement I went over  to GoDaddy and got myself another 2 years, plus prepaid my hosting for a year for a wee discount.  My rankings on Google et al are indeed up.  Again, I have no way of knowing whether that was caused by this tweak, and I have never heard this SEO tip on other sources of SEO information which I trust, so take it with a grain of salt.  That being said, if it isn’t true the most you are out is about $8 which you were going to pay eventually anyway, right?

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AdCenter Actually Performs Quite Decently

Posted on February 24, 2007 by in advertising, AdWords, marketing

Volume?  Low.  Interface?  Annoying.  Work flow?  Terrible.  Cost per download?  Half of what Google is, and this required no tweaking whatsoever.  I’m buried under about four ads for places like Amazon which apparently bid on every word in the English language, but with no effort the following ad got about 4% CTR and, much more importantly, costs less than 30 cents per download it drives.  That is my target for reasonably profitability with advertising. 

 Print Custom Bingo Cards

Be ready in minutes using our software.  Download our free trial now!

http://www.bingocardcreator.com

 

 This might do a bit better if I did some optimization.  I don’t know if the time invested is worth the volume, though.  We’ll see.

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Laugh To Keep From Crying…

Posted on February 23, 2007 by in bugs, customer service

I just found this morning, through ironically the same customer that was having difficulties yesterday (this must be karma), that a key feature of my software has been disabled in the build on my website for the last 2 weeks.  I had been seeing traffic higher than ever, double the number of confirmed downloads I had in January, and was wondering “Why am I seeing 20-30% of my usual sales?  Well, it turns out the reason was that I was performing an involuntary A-B test: A with the feature,  and B without, based on what day you had first downloaded the software.  A wins by a longshot.

Here’s what happened: I ship Bingo Card Creator with about a dozen preprogrammed word lists.  Since I’m skeptical of my customers’ ability to do the Open File -> Navigate To Folder -> Select File routine, I make this very easy through a Wizards menu.  Click on the Wizards Menu, click your subject, click the menu item which describes what grade level/skill you are working on.  I had known this was a crucial feature when I included it in 1.02 because it alleviates the “empty screen problem” (I essentially can’t sell to someone who hasn’t seen a card printed out, and if you have to type in 25 words before you can print a card then you’re much less likely to invest the time).  I hadn’t known it was quite so crucial though.

Here’s what happened.  The Wizard menu is autogenerated, and unlike the vast majority of my code the logic is pretty smart.  It spiders a particular subdirectory in the installation, doing a breadth-first search of the file system tree, and making every directory a submenu and every properly formatted file an entry in the submenu it appears in.  This lets me add new items to the Wizard menu without tweaking anything in the Java code.  If a directory is empty, it doesn’t get shown.  If no files are found at all, the Wizard menu doesn’t show, because nothing ticks people off like non-functional programs, right?  (Grumble grumble.)

Anyhow, this feature has worked since 1.02 and I test to make sure it works every time I make a build, because its just so critical and because without the feature I’d actually have to type in word lists to type printing and that is slow.

I test in Eclipse and it works fine.

I test after exporting my JAR and it works fine.

I test after wrapping the JAR in the EXE and it works fine.

I test after building my installer and installing and it works fine.

My customer downloads the installer and sees no Wizards menu.

Can you spot what edge case my testing missed?  Oh, its fun — I accidentally introduced a single extra character into my Inno Setup script.  Since my setup script is not in my Subversion I never even noticed that I had made the change.  This resulted in the setup program copying the SampleLists (where the wizards reside) folder into the application directory, not into the application/SampleLists directory.  On my machine, since I was installing without uninstalling (clobbers identically named files but DOES NOT DELETE files not present in the new installer), I still had the old C:\Program Files\Bingo Card Creator\SampleLists directory with the proper structure, and things worked peachy.  Then my old, loyal customers who were doing updates installed and everything worked peachy.  Then new people downloaded the installer and, boom, no Wizards for two weeks.

After work today I’ll release a .01 “upgrade” to bugfix Download.com and all the other places that cache installers.

Lessons learned:

  • Setup script goes into the Subversion repository so that at any time it is either known-good or marked as changed since the last known-good.
  • Uninstall before installing to do final testing.  If I had another machine lying around I’d even do a virtual machine or something so that I was guaranteed of a fresh test environment.
  • Keep the lines of communication open with customers.  They can save you from yourself.
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Am I Fanatical About Customer Service?

Posted on February 22, 2007 by in customer service

Dear redacted,

Thank you for your interest in Bingo Card Creator.  There appears to have been an issue with your credit card on Google’s end.  I believe they have contacted you about it, but they do not tell me about your credit card details, in order to protect your financial privacy.  It appears that you put the transaction through three times when this issue resulted in you not promptly receiving your software, which would ordinarily result in you getting billed three times if they accept your credit card pending review.  I am almost certain that this is not what you intended, so I took the liberty of canceling the second and third orders. 

I do not know how long the process will be to resolve the credit card issue with Google.  Accordingly, I’m going to trust that Google will resolve it to our mutual satisfaction, and deliver the software to you now.  If Google cannot resolve the issue and we are forced to cancel the order, feel free to keep the software, and accept my apologies for the inconvenience. 

Your Registration Key is redacted  Please find below instructions on how to input this into your trial version to unlock the software, if you require them.

Thank you for your business.

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie
Bingo Card Creator

*snip of canned instructions*

Heck yes I am fanatical about customer service.  Are you?

That is incidentally far from the best email I’ve ever written… what can I say, I just got back from the gym and was too tired to be writing.  There should have been a reminder that she had ordered Bingo Card Creator earlier that day in the first paragraph (oblique references to “transactions” are shop-talk and should be avoided), and the apology was clumsy and conditional.  Clumsy is forgivable but conditional apologies are the worst thing ever — they make it seem like you’re trying to avoid fault.  That was not the purpose of the excercise.  I’m guessing you understand that the point: when circumstances beyond your control make your customer interaction less than absolutely perfect, control the freaking circumstances.

Sidenote to Google: I love Checkout but I love my customers more.  If this sort of thing happens on anything more than a once-in-a-blue moon basis, that will severely impair my ability to love Checkout.

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Timetable For Next Project

Posted on February 20, 2007 by in microISV

I know I said the next project was supposed to happen in the summer, but unfortunately I’ve drunken deeply from the Rails koolaid and am now afflicted with an acute condition known as programming fever.  The plan remains to actually launch in the summer, but I want to see if Rails lives up the the (substantial) boasts of its evangelists, and frankly I really want to get my hands dirty with something because after doing several months of crunch going coding cold-turkey makes me feel bored.  (We’ll see if the resurgence of carpal tunnel syndrome I’m feeling doesn’t cool my desire.) 

So here is the plan.  I want the application to be ready, in the full functional sense of the word, by April 1st.  I plan to devote no more than 20 hours per week on it, and to be reasonably diligent about tracking time that I spend.  This will include any time spent in design, learning Rails, and actual IDE time.  On April 1st, I will evaluate where I am (which should be done), and bring in the outside experts (principally a web designer — I’m going back and forth on whether I need to bring in the lawyer or not) to take the first few steps to make the application into a business.  That will also give me a month and a half or so to save my pocket change to pay for their fees.  (Memo to self: carry really big coin purse.)

I’m decided on developing this semi-publicly — I’ll be publishing the market, the spec, the thinking behind it, pretty much everything but the source code.  This will include sales figures for at least as long as I have a day job.  However, I’m not totally naive in the ways of the world and in particular I don’t want someone domain-name camping me for the project code name or obvious misspellings of the actual name (which I already picked out and registered), so I’ll be keeping those under my hat for a while.  I like the project code name so much I think I’m going to use it as the name for my LLC.  I suppose I should get that filed soon too.  The little bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through to make money are so annoying.

Anyhow, the plan:

Two weeks from now or so: Announce project codename and add category to this blog so people can track the development.  Ideally, establish US-side LLC and transfer Bingo Card Creator to it, which will give me instant business history as a software developer with that name, which will be useful for a trademark application. 

Some time after that: After I’ve got enough of the application done to be reasonably sure that I will indeed launch it, post the problem domain, the spec, and the reason why I chose this market to enter.

April 1st: Alpha showing of website (won’t be feature complete or pretty, but should give rough idea of scope).  Bring in web design guy, get the heck out of his way.  Begin dedicated blog (I’ll be keeping this one as my main web presence for the time being, naturally) devoted solely to issues facing target market.

Some time before summer: Launch.  Suffer through a few weeks of catching corner cases which I hadn’t anticipated before.

Summer and beyond: Grow business.  This is the most important part and so naturally I have given it the smallest section of this post and have not done much writing in my design notebook about it.  D’oh.

Budget:

Hosting: $125 for the first year.

Domains: $20 for initial two domains (product and LLC name), possibly $30 for additional ones.  First $20 is spent already.

Ruby Books: $90.  Got them today, they are fascinating.

Logo/Business Identity: Heck if I know.  I have a pretty good idea who I’m going to use for it.  Probably in the $250 range I’m guessing.

Web Design: Heck if I know.  I may do something outside the usual for getting this, we’ll see.  Currently I’m figuring that I’ll need a skin for the application, a simple template for the website outside the application (on the order of complexity of Bingo Card Creator’s, but prettier and thematically coherent with the application skin), and a blog template.  I’ll be blogging on a hosted WordPress blog.

Icons: Not sure if I’ll need them (I already own two sets which may be adequate, but this will largely be up to the web designer).  $100 budgeted. 

Legal: If I hire a lawyer, he is going to be put on a strict $500 leash.  I may not hire a lawyer.

LLC Filing Costs: Owwwwch.  Figuring on $500 for my American LLC and I just weep at the anticipation of having to apply for a Japanese one (suffice it to say that I had to count the number of zeroes in the filing fee a few times to make sure it was correct).  I will file for the Japanese registration after I have achieved significant profitability.

Total Initial Costs: $1,500 to $2,000, probably. 

On the plus side, monthly costs (absent advertising: not budgeting for it yet) are going to be pretty low, so I should be cash flow positive almost instantly again and, I’m hoping, profitable fairly quickly.  I expect revenue growth to be a significant multiple of Bingo Card Creator’s.  More on that at a later date.

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