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?

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.