Bingo Card Creator 1.03 Released

Posted on August 5, 2006 by in Uncategorized

Well, seeing as how I had some time free today I decided to finally get off my duff and start distributing Bingo Card Creator 1.03. The main changes:

  • Vastly improved memory usage while printing. Customers who try printing 50 cards on individual pieces of paper will not see the program die on low-memory machines anymore (I hadn’t anticipated anybody would try to do this and so didn’t test it… doh?)
  • Printing is now threaded. This means that for folks with printers which are getting a little long in the tooth, the interface won’t appear to lock up for two minutes at a time. Its mostly a cosmetic improvement since I’m guessing after printing most people will go straight to the printer, but app responsiveness is generally a nice thing to have. For 1.04 I’ll consider putting in some sort of dialog to indicate the printing is actually currently taking place — maybe popup a progress bar somewhere.
  • No more flickering — I render all the pages to get printed just off the screen in a JWindow, which means that there won’t be an ugly gray flicker in front of the main application window, and it won’t lose focus.

While at least two of these had been on the back burner for a while (“Hmm, that code is ugly and inefficient… I should fix it… sometime…”), they got kicked to the front burner directly after being cited as reasons for my first return. Yay for useful feedback, especially useful feedback that doesn’t technically cost me any money (did you know that processing a return through Paypal is totally free? Yeah, I was pleasantly pleased, too, but they refund your fee after you do one.), although it did cost a sale.

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Fie Upon You, YSM

Posted on August 5, 2006 by in Yahoo, YSM

I decided to check my Yahoo Search Marketing stats today, which is always an ordeal.  And I was pleasantly suprised to see a weekly conversion rate in the 60% region, spiking to 80% on many days…

80%?!  No, sorry, something is rotten in the land of Denmark.  So I started drilling around…

My main ad terms looked somewhere in the realm of plausibility, and then I got down to the Long Tail of searchers, the kind that get clicked on once in a week… and which had 300% conversion rates.  Some bug in Yahoo’s CR tracking has been causing them to pick up multiple hits nearly every time somebody visits my download page (possibly because folks visit the download page multiple times — this is especially easy to do if you’re running IE and double-click links by habit instead of single clicking them).

So now I’ve got to figure out some way to test whether YSM is actually performing decently or if its entirely a mirage caused by poor data analysis.  Boo.

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Single Minute Exchange of Dies

Posted on August 4, 2006 by in Uncategorized

I studed Toyota way back during my study-abroad year in Kyoto as a college student, but hadn’t heard about Single Minute Exchange of Dies. The idea is very relevant to uISVs, but we might understand it better as “implementing scaleable systems”.

Briefly, a die is a big nasty piece of manufacturing equipment. As with all equipment, they have faults and failures. As with all equipment on an assembly line, when they are down the assembly line gets held up. As a result, there is a strong temptation to let the faults go to avoid killing the line, which results in slightly malformed components, which results in lower quality of output. Toyota had (and, to my knowledge, has) a corporate culture which was absolutely intolerant of defects, and they invented a system for system improvement. The system improvements they got from their system let them change dies in minutes instead of in days, which gave them the flexibility to yank them any time they performed sub-optimally, which lead to Toyota cars being some of the highest-quality in the world, which helped lead to US politicians campaigning in Michigan being the only people who really enjoy American cars. (OK, I suppose Japanese mobsters count, too.)

This is very relevent to the article which I posted yesterday regarding support and scalability. That is the beautiful thing about systems: systems scale. If you sell a car and the car breaks down, you get to have somebody fix it, and every additional break-down costs you additional fixing. Or, you could just sell cars which don’t break down. If you sell a piece of software that crashes, you have to answer an email “Why did my software crash?” Or, you could stop your software from crashing. Do you have systems in place which make this easy for you? Because you should: work on your system once and you keep getting value out of it for an extended period of time, without inputting more work. Here’s some systems you should probably have working for you (the 3rd one is directly responsive to “Uh oh, I spend too much time on support”, and its something that I could use some serious improve on myself):

1) Order management: For a B2C company I cannot imagine a reason why you would not totally automate the order process. Customer pays you, customer gets license key, you wake up in the morning a little richer. I use e-junkie for this and the service is brilliant: for $5 a month and Paypal fees they take care of the entire problem for me. Setting up e-junkie took an initial investment (about an hour of my time, plus time to research the tradeoffs & etc) and pays me dividends for every order: customers get instantaneous service, which is a selling point, and when my order volume (hopefully) increases from the current one-per-week I won’t be wasting my time checking that Paypal payments were received properly and manually mailing out CD keys.

2) Systems to support marketing: How easy is it for you to get a link to the most linkable page on your website? You’ve probably gotten most of yours from hustling for them — find 5 pages in a related niche, pitch your idea to 5 webmasters, get maybe one link from a PR2 site? Well, thats certainly one way to do things, and when you’re bootstrapping you’ll need to do it. But you can implement a system to get yourself links in 5 seconds. Watch:

Hiya, I hope you like my blog about uISVs. If you do, please feel free to share it with your friends! If you have a web page, blog, or want to send a link via email, just copy and paste the following: <a href=”http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com”>MicroISV on a Shoestring</a> . That will create a clickable link which your friends can follow back to my site. Thanks much for your interest!

One page on my product’s site offers some information of interest to elementary school teachers. It has an exhortation very similar to the one above. 20% of the people who land on that page convert so I rather like it when people see it. Roughly one out of every 200 visitors sends the link out. Multiply that by 1000 visitors per week and I get 5 links, some of them from decently influential sites, for free. Did I have to hustle and write 25 emails? No, the day I got a link from a PR5 ESL site I was busy doing the important things for my uISV’s success: drinking cocoa and reading the best series of books about the Napoleonic Wars fought with dragons ever written.
If you’re willing to spend more than 5 seconds, you can incorporate scripts to mail a friend, buttons which submit your site to digg or one of the other social-bookmarkers, Javascript buttons to bookmark a site automagically, etc etc. I lack the technical skill to do some of these and my target audience does not quite live in the Valley’s Web 2.0-induced echo chamber, but my two sentence HTML tutorial worked wonders.

3) Build systems: Here’s one place where I’m woefully inadequate. Suppose I get it in my head to change the text in a single dialog box in my program. I hit Ctrl-S to save the resource file. Now here’s what I have to do:

1) Run my program and verify that the dialog has not broken (5 clicks).
2) Export the JAR from Eclipse (roughly 6 clicks).

3) Run my obfuscation program on the exported JAR. (4 clicks)

4) Run my wrapper program to turn the JAR into an exe (4 clicks)

5) Copy the exe into the distribution directory (4 clicks).

6) Run my installer build script (2 clicks).

7) Install my program (4 clicks).

8) Visually inspect that nothing has broken (~10 clicks).

9) Copy the new installer to my web server (4 clicks).

10) Delete one file from the webserver and copy two. (6 clicks).

Thats in the vicinity of fifty mouse clicks, taking 15-30 minutes, to make a one-character change to my published executable. As you can reasonably expect, this forces me to make my changes in bunches, where there’s even more likelihood that something goes wrong, and where neat new features which are tested and done sit on my local machine for a week (3 at the moment and counting, include one which fixes the poor architecture choice which caused my first return and which is continuing to spoil customer experiences) because I can’t spare the time at the moment.

What I really need to do is break down and learn how to actually use an ANT build script and unit tests to do this whole thing in one-tenth the time. Build in one click, observe unit-tests function, give it a visual inspection myself, deploy in one click. Then I won’t be producing the computer equivalent of overly-expensive breakdown-prone cars with the fuel efficiency and aerodynamics of aircraft carriers*.

*This metaphor has been brought to you by Dave Barry, in his seminal work Dave Barry Does Japan, which won’t teach you very much about Japan but will cause you to bust a gut laughing.

[Edit: I tweaked a paragraph to make the connection between SMED and the software support scenario more explicit, and linked Dave Barry Does Japan.]

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Seasons Change, Ads Get Borked

Posted on August 4, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, Yahoo, YSM

(If this is your first time reading a search post from me: DSW are a very business-related keyword which unfortunately this blog manages to rank higher than my business on.  Apologies for the obfuscation: D01ch S1ght W0rds.  In queries and ad text its always spelled out normally.)

Well, the upcoming return of teachers to school has apparently massively shifted the number (waaaaaaaaay up) and the behavior of people searching for my search terms, and my previously decently performing ads have sunk to about 10% CR (Yahoo has also sunk, although the magnitude was a lot less).  I’m trying a couple of things to get them back up:

1)  My most common search term is a variation on “DSW list”.  I always hit that person with DSW bingo instead, which gets about a 1.5%ish CTR and formerly had a pretty decent conversion.  I decided to test actually giving them the lists, since I have them on my website and the page they are on tries to “upsell” people to the free demo about every other word.  The only problem is that for any of these search queries the #1 organic result is just as good as my site (although slightly less navigable).  So I decided to make my add stand out in the crowd:

DSW Lists
Free lists.
No kidding.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

Given that almost everybody is using the full character allotment in every line, the white space immediately catches the eye.  That plus the fact that this very closely matches their query has caused the CTR rate on the ad to jump to about 6%ish (triple to quadruple my best previous performer for this ad group), and (this was the major shocker) the conversion rate is higher, too!  Its a shade below 20% after two days (umm, boo) but given that the rest of my ads have been at 5-15% for a week I’m considering keeping it (this means my CPA has shot past 60 cents — egads!  Call the medics!).

Also, I noticed that every single ad on Google AdWords is the same: “We sell X.  Come get it!”.  Boo for lack of creativity.  I know the character limit is a little constraining but surely there is a way to get meaningful copy in four lines — the Japanese have been writing sub-17 letter poems from what is effectively a 200 word vocabulary for 500 years and they haven’t gotten bored of them yet.   (This is even more impressive if you understand how they are constrained in subjects — autumn, for example, “leaves” you with radiant colors, dragonflies, and thats about it.)

So anyhow, with poetry as my inspiration and an appreciation for the corny-goofballness that a lot of elementary school teachers appreciate:

DSW Bingo
Roses are red, violets are blue,
Bingo makes students love you.
www.BingoCardCreator.com

The early results suggest that I am a better programmer than a poet.

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Support Does Not Scale. Customer Service Does.

Posted on August 3, 2006 by in customer service, popular, support

I’m a big fan of all things scaling, because thats what takes you from having to scramble for money on an hour-to-hour basis and gets you to the whole “Making money while drinking pina coladas on the beach” (or, in my case, iced tea in the shade) ideal uISV existence. Two of commenters recently left well-reasoned comments to the general effect that “Support costs a lot of your time and most users don’t need it. Don’t go overboard. Instead, help out the vast majority of your customers who don’t need support.” My comments:

Cutting a customer off: There is a certain school of thought that says you should have a maximum level of tolerance for any particular customer using support resources, and after that point you say “No more”. I actually think this is (potentially, depending on execution) a decent idea, which might suprise people in light of my recent paen to excellent customer service posts. You might also be suprised to learn that I’ve described someone doing it in the last 24 hours.

Here’s the cruel math of telephone customer service: the average cost of servicing a phone call is $12. The average profit of a small order is less. You cannot afford to absorb a support call for every small order. Class poll: who caught the fact that when the the representative offered free shipping and cookies to a minor no-profit-in-this-transaction customer it terminated a (potentially hostile) support incident in under a minute, totally obviated the need for a second call or an escalation to the supervisor, and still got the sale? And that that customer was so ecstatic to be brushed off he came back bearing hundreds of thousands of dollars? Thats the difference between support and customer service. As a support incident, that call was a waste of time/money. As an opportunity for demonstrating you’ve got an unparalleled dedication to customer service, that call is as good an opportunity as every other customer contact you make.

Saving Money/Time on Support: Your first line of defense against “wasting time” (never, ever, ever think of talking to a customer as a waste of time: see below) in support is producing a quality product. I sell to a rather non-technical market. I could be spending the rest of my life fielding calls on how to use the product — and I rather don’t want to, so I coded the project to be immediately usable by anyone who is capable of finding the Internet. The handholding starts at downloading/installation (clicking enter until you can’t anymore works and will dump you at my program’s main screen) and continues to my main screen (which doesn’t just explain what you need to do, it reads my app’s typical use case out to you, step by step). Improving your application is probably one of the best-scaling support investments you can make: if you consistently find yourself copy-pasting a canned “That feature is in the Tools Menu, 3rd from the bottom” response, you should probably go about making it more obvious. If you have a work-around for that annoying printing bug, fix the annoying printing bug.

How to Think of Support: I would generally advise against thinking that you’re wasting time doing support. Most people are rather poor actors — heck, most actors are rather poor actors. If you’re annoyed by the incident thats likely to come across to your customers. Think of it as an investment if it helps you — you’re investing in your reputation as a customer-service powerhouse. Against a reputation like that, firing off a few emails every day is cheap. (Think of it: suppose that 5% is an accurate accounting of the number of “needy” customers you have. Suppose you’re rolling in the dough at 1,000 orders a month. 5% of 1000 is 50, multiply by say 4 inquiries each is 200, averages to 7 per day. 7 emails a day is nothing — you can take care of that while brewing coffee.)

Politeness and a smile are free: You can’t always say yes to a customer request (although I’d strongly suggest defaulting to yes and requiring good reasons to say no, rather than the other way around). You can, however, have 100% of your customer-facing communications be polite and positive. For instance, compare the following two emails.

Bob,

You emailed me about this support issue 4 times this week. I’ve done what I can for you. Its obvious things aren’t working out. I’m refunding your purchase price.

Sincerely, Peevish uISV

Thats the wrong way to do things.

Dear Bob,

I have done some research regarding your support request. As it turns out, our product is regrettably not the best on the market for your needs. In our professional opinion, MicroFoos’ Foozle 2006 is a closer fit for your requirements. While it pains us to have not been able to help you, here at Pleasant ISV we are totally dedicated to customer satisfaction. Accordingly, we could not in good conscience accept your money with these issues outstanding, and have instructed our credit card processor to refund you.

Thank you for choosing Pleasant ISV and we look forward to the opportunity of serving you in the future.

Sincerely, Pleasant ISV

Content-wise, these emails describe the exact same set of circumstances. In terms of customer perception, these two emails are worlds apart from each other. Peevish ISV’s mail is, well, brusque and strongly leaves the impression that there was something wrong with the customer. Pleasant ISV’s mail doesn’t blame anyone (no, really, read it again — it doesn’t say or imply a single negative thing about Pleasant). It screams “we’re competent, we’re professionals, and we don’t accept anything less than the best”, and it leaves the door open rather than slamming it on your customer’s fingers.

An inspirational quote: “ We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — I have seen this one variously attributed to Aristotle and Adlai E. Stevenson. In any event, if you make excellence the routine in your customer service, people will know the difference. Promising good support/promising good customer service scales very well for your business. Think of it like the guarantee: you can’t afford for everyone to ask for their money back, but you know in advance that the overwhelming majority of people will not ask for their money back. And you know that the number of customers reassured by having the guarantee outweighs what you’ll spend on it. Support is exactly the same. Most people won’t need it, but lots of people are reassured by the fact that it is available if they do need it. Your customers have been trained for years to distrust software, despite the fact that most customers will not have any problems: software is impersonal, software gets in the way of them doing what they need to do, software breaks, and when software breaks they spend 10 hours in tech-support heck talking to people who hate them and don’t have any answers.

What if you could reassure customers? What if you had a deserved reputation for *not* blowing up in people’s faces, and for being a joy to work with? So beat the drum and beat it loudly:

If you have any problems, or just want to ask a question, talk to us. We have an actual human here. Even better — not just an actual human, you’ll get all your support emails answered directly from the head engineer/company president! (Try that with your other software vendors some time!) We care about your concerns and will work to make them right. Take a look at what Mary Sue of Normal, IL and Bob Smith of San Fransisco had to say about us: “Wow, I had expected to get a canned reply but they got back to me within 15 minutes and kept working until my problem was solved.” and “Pleasant uISV is the best in the industry, bar none. Once I bought one of their products and it wasn’t working out for me. They gave me my money back without me even asking and referred me to a competitor! It was more important that I be happy than that they make a buck. I’ll never stop using Pleasant and I recommend them to everyone I do business with.”

Or, you could say something like

Support incidents: Every customer has a maximum of four support incidents, after which they must pay a non-negotiable charge of $24.95 per incident. We do not answer requests about generic computer configuration problems, setting up web pages, etc etc.

Which of these two companies would you rather do business with? Which sounds like a risky investment? Which sounds warm and inviting?

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Semi-Offtopic: The Passion of the Customers

Posted on August 2, 2006 by in customer service, popular

I haven’t worked at Quill in years but I just remembered my favorite thing about the place: there is a wall right next to the breakroom which is devoted to customer service (have I mentioned that they’re fanatics about this?) It has daily metrics (I was never quite sure how they were gathered, but I suppose there must be a combination of phone surveys and automagically collected data) covering all the usual suspects: what percentage of customers are very satisfied, satisfied, etc; what percentage of orders had errors and where in the chain that error was localized to (one summer there was a spike on that graph, from “absurdly low” to “industry standard”, directly attributable to my team. You can draw your own conclusions as to how many of us kept our jobs.)

But my favorite part of the wall was letters. Quill had, to my knowledge as a lowly worker bee, two policies regarding letters: first, they were all collected and any workers individually singled out in them had the action noted on a publicly-visible board and in their file (and Quill would FIND you: there was at least one letter addressed to “that lovely Spanish woman with the Texan accent” and, by God, she got the credit for it). Second, the letters and/or copies (some people couldn’t bear to part with them) were posted on the bulletin board next to the numbers.

Anyhow, my favorite letter wasn’t a letter at all. It was a prayer card from a convent in, as I recall, New York. For anonymity’s sake we’ll call them the Sisters of Perpetual Gladness. Oh, they were a happy bunch, and it was contagious. Do you know why we had a prayer card from the Sisters of Perpetual Gladness? I don’t, because the people named on the card (whom the Sisters had dedicated a novena to — thats nine days of prayer, for you non-Catholics in the room) wouldn’t say exactly what they had done. Thats my personal metric for customer excellence: Nuns Praying For You (NPFY). Paypal, yeah, there’s a NPFY-0 business if I ever saw one. Quill probably has the highest NPFY of any any business I’ve ever been associated with. Keep in mind we were earning NPFY60+ for, well, prompt delivery of paper and pens.
But the Sisters were loyal customers and in Order Entry we lived for their call. I got one once — it made my year. And the Sister blessed me, too. I blessed her back, which was probably technically against company policy (although if you’ve been reading closely you know that when stacked against customer satisfaction policies were more like guidelines and guidelines were more like advice and advice was more like suggestions and suggestions were more like comments). Anyhow, for the Sisters, if they had asked Order Entry “We’d like an 18-wheeler filled full of printer paper and the most we’re willing to pay is, hmm, nothing. Oh, overnight delivery, too.” the only thing we would have said is “But Sister, where will we put your cookies?”

There was only one problem with the Sisters. We had some heavy-duty CRM (customer relations management) software at Quill. It supported locking a customer to one particular desk or extension — for example, if you’re the Big Important Government Account with a 6,000 page bid request your order is probably too important to be handled by $10-an-hour me, so you got locked to a specialist. The Sisters did not require any special handling like that. As a matter of fact, they required a specially-written rule to ban handling like that for their account. The reason was that every lowly worker bee could put a special handling restriction on an account, and everyone could take off a restriction from someone at equal-or-less access level, which made the Sisters’ account history look like a Wiki revert war (“They’re MINE!” “NO, they’re MINE!” “My family is from New York! I should get to call them*” “But you’re Jewish!” “So are you!” “Yeah, but I dated a Catholic once!” etc, etc)

* The Sisters’ order always had a problem requiring calling them, immediately. Typically, it was that they had missed an opportunity to get free cookies. At any given time, you see, Quill had hundreds or thousands of promotions running. Dozens of these ended in the punch-line “Free Mrs. Fields’ Cookies”. We got a very stern notice every month “Here are a list of the new promotion codes, in case a customer forgets. Remember, Mrs. Fields’ Cookies are NOT appropriate as a we’re-sorry and the customer must specifically mention the promotion to receive the premium.” An exceptionally morally upright employee would phrase the phone call something like this:

“God bless you. This is Sisters of Perpetual Gladness, Sister Mary speaking. How can I help you?”

“Hello Sister Mary, this is Bob for Quill Corporation Office Supplies. I was wondering if I could speak to you about your order of *checks watch* two minutes ago?”

“Oh, certainly.”

“Well, Sister Mary, we reviewed your order and there seems to be a problem. The last 47 times you’ve ordered with Quill, you ordered one free tub of Mrs. Fields’ Cookies. We see there are no cookies on this order, and wondered if there might be an omission.”

“Oh, thats certainly kind of you, but we didn’t see the free offer…”

“Didn’t see? Why, no problem, we can look it up for you. Do you know what catalog you were using?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t have it in front of me.”

“Hmm, I’ll bet it was the *check premium list* California july legal small offices circular.”

“Err, are you sure?”

“Well, did your catalog have the word Quill and some brightly colored office supplies on the front cover?”

“Yes, yes, it did.”

“Well, mystery solved! So did the circular. The promo was on page 437b. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll go right ahead and get this order and your cookies you to you. You don’t have to do a thing.”

“Why, thank you very much young man. God bless you.”

“God bless you too, Sister Mary.”

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More Business Firsts

Posted on August 2, 2006 by in customer service, popular

Processed my first refund today (um, yay?). Can I give a piece of advice for everyone who has a money-back guarantee (which should be everyone): any time your customer asks to invoke the guarantee, process the refund immediately, then write back to your customer.

Minimally, you should thank them for choosing your software then inform them you have refunded their purchase at their request, and sign off gracefully. If you feel the need to ask why, you can then ask why, but phrase it in such a way as it sounds like a favor to you rather than a business request. People will generally respond pretty favorably to requests for a 10 second favor after you’ve just given them money.

I learned this lesson through my first real employment, which was as an order entry operator at Quill Corporation Office Supplies. Quill is outwardly fanatical about customer service: without violating any confidences regarding their internal guidelines, suffice it to say they would rather have some customers get away with murder than inconvinience another customer to the tune of 5 bucks. I have seen their customer satisfaction metrics and the comparison to other companies in the industry, and the fanaticism works.

You might be inclined to ask why the person is returning the software, and then process the return pending a reasonable explanation. This is a mistake. There is no question that your customer can get money from you: the question is whether they go through you or they chargeback. I can scarcely find words to describe how much better for you it is that they go through you. Well, OK, here’s an attempt: if they go through you, it costs you either “nothing” or “very little” depending on your payment processor, if they chargeback you will frequently get hit with a large fee ($25+) on top of paying your payment processor fees, and frequent chargebacks will get your account yanked.

You might be inclined to write off a customer who has requested a refund. From a support perspective, this is correct. From a politeness perspective, wrong move. You’re not Quill with 6 figures worth of customers, but you are in a niche market, and your niche talks to each other. The next time your ex-customer is chatting with his friend and his friend expresses the same need he had, he will always, invariably, talk about his experience with you. Since he’s your ex-customer, this will not be a maximally positive conversation, but you can choose whether its “Well, I bought from Bingo Card Creator. It didn’t do exactly what I wanted but when I asked for a refund I got it in 10 minutes and I was impressed by his professionalism” or “I bought from those “#$”#%”$#!s at Bingo Card Creator. What a scam. It crashed my computer three times and when I demanded my money back I had to fight him three days for it. Burn in “#$#”$”, “#$”#%”#%”. So, Bob, how are your kids doing?”

Big deal, you think, how many people are going to buy or not buy on the basis of a quick conversation with a co-worker? Answer: this is the most influential form of advertising you will ever get in your life. I remember getting an all-hands memo when Quill gained a $X00,000 a year account because the purchasing officer had a good experience seeking a technically-out-of-bounds accomodation when ordering a single cartridge of toner for his wife. He wanted free shipping on a $Y order. We didn’t offer free shipping until $45. The representative he spoke to said “No problem sir, we’ll make an exception for you. And have a box of Mrs. Fields’ Cookies as our thanks for calling in”. Do you know what a box of Mrs. Fields cookies and eating a shipping charge costs us? Suffice it to say that its more than the amount of profit the company made on a $Y order. Do you know how much profit a $X00,000 account makes in a year? It pays for a whole lot of cookies.

(P.S. If your uISV ever requires office supplies, I heartily recommend my old colleagues at Quill. You will find no better service in the industry than you will get at Quill. If I’m wrong, the cookies are on me.)

Stupidly simple thing to keep in mind as a uISV: always leave enough money in your account to cover the most damaging single return you’re currently liable for. If you have a 100% money-back guarantee policy for 30 days, and you’ve sold $1000 of product in $25 increments, keep minimally $25 in your account. If you’re using Paypal, this will decrease the amount of time it takes to get your refund authorized. Even if you’re not, if you have to do account-balancing tricks to get your customer their refund (in my case, that could possibly require an international wire from Japan to the US, followed by funding my Paypal account and then processing the refund), it will take a while and peeve off your customer. What if two people request refunds? In this case, you’ve probably done something wrong. :)

Oh, why offer a refund? In a nutshell, because the marginal number of customers the refund offer will get you outweighs by many orders of magnitude the amount of charges you will eat processing refunds. Steve Pavlina covered this better than I ever could (search for “guarantee”, although the rest of his advice is decent, too).

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I Hate Typos + PAD Files Work

Posted on August 1, 2006 by in advertising, Analytics

After my surge in sales today I was wondering “Hey, why didn’t Google pick up any of these?”  Turns out I had marked my conversion page as http::/foo instead of http://foo .   Haha, regular expression FAILURE.  D’oh.  As those of you who use Analytics probably know, Google won’t go back and rerun data after you fix filters like that, so the information is lost forever… but given the microscopic number of conversions I have its pretty easy to get manually.

Incidentally, one of my customers found me through a PR5 shareware site which automagically lists anyone who submits a PAD file to the ASP.  Considering that file took all of two minutes to generate using their free tool and that PR5 site ranks higher than me for some keywords thanks to the advertising copy I included in the PAD file, thats not a bad idea for people bootstrapping up a mISV.

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A Month Worth Of Stats

Posted on August 1, 2006 by in Uncategorized

Might as well give out these stats, although since they include rapid ramping up of a business and ceaseless experimentation they don’t mean quite so much going forward.   But if folks wondering if they can make the leap or not want to see some actual numbers, here they are.  From opening my business on July 1st through August 1st (Japan time):

Business stats:

Sales (gross): $74.85

Sales (net): $71.79 (I pay Paypal $1.02 per transaction)

Expenses (subtotal): $68.02

Signup costs: $22 ($5 Google, ~$17 international fax for eSellerate)

Website: $10.02 (that technically pays for 2 months)

Advertising: $35 (I technically haven’t been billed yet)

Profit: $3.77.  Take that, Bill Gates! :)

Labor stats:

Development week: 50 hours (all tasks)
Post-launch development: 5 hours

Post-launch marketing: 25 hours

Post-launch support: 15 minutes (easy-to-use, mostly bug-free program = I write “Thank you for saying thank you” a lot)

Website stats (for my main site, not this blog):
Visits: 1,873

Page views: 4,704

Trial downloads: 270

There should be an asterix on these data: I got a large spike of hits from pirates when my software was cracked.  They accounted for roughly 120 downloads and a couple of hundred visits.

Advertising stats:

Google AdWords campaign:

Cost: $30

Clicks: 315

CTR: 2.45%

Conversion (to demo): 17.61%

CPA (to demo): $.61

Yahoo Search Marketing Campaign

Cost: $5 (its actually $30 but I got a $25 free coupon)

Clicks: 262

CTR: 2.28%

Conversion: 24.8%* (* its actually higher — Yahoo conversion tracking was off for a week or so)

CPA: 44 cents* (* its actually lower, for the same reason)

Organic search stats:

 Google: 154 hits, 17.5% conversion

MSN: 85 hits, 13% conversion

Yahoo: unknown, doesn’t disaggregate well from CPC campaign.

My goal for the rest of August: I’d like to see 10 sales and would be very pleased with 20 (10 sales a month makes this an amusing hobby, 20 sales a month is a meaningful change in my standard of living).  Aside from that, continuous improvement in marketing (.30 CPA and breaking in the top 5 organic results on my favorite 10 keywords), and getting Bingo Card Creator to be as good a product for teaching math (and potentially other subjects) as it is currently for teaching elementary reading.

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I'm Profitable

Posted on August 1, 2006 by in Uncategorized

I was worried for a little, particularly after increasing my advertising budget (sure, its only 5 sales worth per month, but was I overly optimistic?), but I got some orders today and I’m now profitable and will continue to be for the forseeable future.  Yay me.  I also like that its one month to the day after opening my business.

Big credit to my friends at JoS (especially those who chipped in with good advice) and the other businesses and software developers without whom none of this would be possible.  And, of course, to all the teachers out there.  I hope you enjoy the last of your summer vacation and have a bang-up school year.  (P.S. If you’re looking for an activity for your first day, can I humbly suggest icebreaker bingo?)

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