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

If you’re wondering how good of a website you can get accomplished with Notepad, a free design from www.oswd.org, and about four hours of tinkering… well, here’s your chance to find out!  My website is about half finished and half is good enough to slap the word “beta” on and shove it out the door so, without further ado, I give you Bingo Card Creator.  I was hoping to have the Free Resources section done by tonight but I worked less than I usually do on account of having come down with a severe cold.

OK, where’s my checklist.

For the website, to be done tomorrow:

1. Add in Free Resources, Screenshots, Support, About Me pages.
2. Use Bingo Card Creator and my printer emulator to export some PDFs to add to the Free Resources section.
3. Write thank-you page for customers who have made a purchase.
4. Create popup page to detect if JRE 1.4 or above is installed, and create page to automagically install it for IE (this uses an ActiveX control — soooo evil).

Other than the website, how does the schedule look.

• The program: I believe it to be of shippable quality, at least on PCs.  The installer is no-frills at the moment but I can juice that up a bit tomorrow.
• Mac version: Not going to make it in time for release.  Its going on the back burner for the moment.
• Data files for the program: I have about 12 and I want to ship with “dozens”.  Making them is relatively quick but I want to choose fairly carefully which are available on the website, which are available in the unregistered version, and which are available only in the registered version.
• Payment processing.  Payloadz will be up within minutes after I have an executable ready.  eSellerate’s response time has been superb but I forgot to sign and fax in their contract today, so I’ll have to do that tomorrow and hope my account gets unlocked before launch.  If not, oh well, unlikely I’ll be getting many registrations on launch day.
• Unexpected difficulty: It just hit me about three hours ago that I should probably include a license.  I’m mildly panic stricken as to the prospect.

When I told my parents about my plan to make Bingo Card Creator my father was very skeptical.  “Patrick, you know I love you, but how many teachers are there that play bingo?”  You’ll likely have to answer a question similar to this for your own product idea.  Here’s how I would go about answering it (although not to Dad, at least until I have a paycheck in hand — he ran his own business for years too, and while he’s not interested in software he has a deep appreciation for results).

One method of estimating a market starts with identifying your minimum qualifying feature and winnowing from there.  Suppose for the sake of argument I sell only to teachers.  How many school teachers are there in the United States?  Hey, that sounds like a Microsoft interview question… but since I’ve got the luxury of thinking it over (and having access to Goooogle), I can come up with a much better answer than a number pulled out of my hindquarters.

There are a few places that keep fairly accurate numbers of the number of teachers there are.  One obvious source is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  There are 1,486,650 elementary school teachers in the United States.  Well, that was certainly easy.   So I’m going to sell 1.5 million copies?  No.

Now we winnow down from that 1.5 million.  First, how many of them play bingo?  I’ll be conservative and say thats no more than 10%.  (This is a number pulled out of my hindquarters).  We’re now down to 150k teachers.  Of this, how many are hooked up to the Internet and have access to a computer when they prepare for classes?  For a low-ball estimate, lets say 50%.  We now have 75k teachers who meet the minimum requirements for being interested in a bingo card creator.  75k sales, yaaaaay!

Not quite.  You see, there are free alternatives to buying bingo software or buying bingo cards, such as making them yourself or using my free competitors.  Free is probably good enough for most teachers — call it 60% that would never spend a penny on bingo software.  Of the remaining 40%, lets say half would theoretically like to spend the money but don’t have it in the budget and/or don’t have purchasing power at their school district or the will to spend their own cash.

So 20% of 75k means there are 15k American elementary school teachers who run bingo games regularly and could potentially be convinced to buy software.  If I can sell to 1 in 10 of them, my market size is about 1,500 users.  And there we go.  (That is, incidentally, not a sales projection – there are other gates they have to make it through, from not buying from a competitor first to finding my software exists to installing it to handing their credit card numbers over to a barely trusted party to…).
Another method of estimation is to figure things out from the bottom up.  For example, Yahoo receives about 10k searches for bingo cards every month (they will happily inform you of this at Overture).   If we assume that only 20% of those folks are actually interested in teaching with bingo (as opposed to gambling), thats 2k searches per month from qualified buyers.  Somebody probably has decent statistics on this but I’m guessing people are calling it quits after about 2.5 searches on an item, so thats 800 unique users searching per month.  If Yahoo holds 40% of the search market, then there are give or take 2k unique users per month searching for educational bingo software.

So, anyhow, long story short: There does indeed exist a niche to target.  Can I do it successfully?  Well, we’ll find out soon.

(If you haven’t read it yet, you might want to hear about my product first.)

I’ve mentioned previously that my original inspiration for Bingo Card Creator was hearing a teacher ask for it after searching fruitlessly. I also searched. There are direct competitors to my product, but even the ones targetted at the education market fail to provide key features to my users (or I’d better pray they do).

I wish them the best of luck in their endeavors, incidentally: I’m setting out to do one thing very well and intend to do so, but my product won’t be right for everybody and I would be genuinely pleased if everyone continues to have whatever successes they are looking for. That being said, I’m playing at being a businessman at the moment so I’m going to offer my opinions on why there exists a niche which is being under-served, so my evaluation is necessarily going to sound critical.
The Top Search Result In Google For “Bingo Card Creator”: they’ve got a free version and a paid version.

Free version: A CGI script which generates 3×3 or 5×5 bingo cards. You must supply your own words. The output can be printed from your browser , but a coding error makes it look less than spectacular (your word list gets printed after your bingo cards, the selection to make a free space is not respected). No customizability.

It lacks a core feature for my target audience: printing multiple cards at a time. After you have entered your word list (which you can’t save), printing 25 copies (a classroom worth) requires *seventy five* (next page, print button, OK, repeat x 25) additional mouseclicks and 25 page loads. They can’t offer an entire lesson in 5 minutes like I can.

There is also no option to print multiple cards on a single page, which is important for saving your paper budget. Do you know how much money the average school spends on paper every year? I used to work for an office supply company. Our educational orders would boggle your mind. Teachers are big believers in “reduce, reuse, recycle” for a reason.)

Paid version: $29.99 a year. Creates “advanced” bingo cards, which is a feature bundled with a lot of much more broadly useful features: ability to print rubrics, worksheets, etc. I don’t have $30 in the budget to test out what the advanced cards look like, but I assume it involves saving cards and probably respecting the “free space” button. This is quite possibly an excellent resource for a teacher seeking a package of instructional aids which includes a passable bingo creator, but isn’t attractive just for bingo.

Most free web-based bingo generators suffer for the same flaws as the above so I won’t review any other ones.

The Best Solution I’ve Seen: You have to hunt for this one on the search engines, but if you assume my customer has infinite time to research they will eventually land at a site like this. 2 to 4 cards for a page, 5 pages at a time, the interface offers flexibility and respects user choices, and outputs to PDF for easy printing. You can choose font size which a) is important to teachers (little kids and old folks get big fonts, its just the way of the world) and b) lets the user, with a little effort, avoid edge cases like the one I was talking about yesterday.

For $10 you can upgrade to a premium version which is pretty hard to differentiate from free: it will let you make a call list but this is a luxury item, not a necessity, for a teacher (you can always just use another bingo card or pick items psuedo-randomly — remember, you will be using lists that you have taught every year for your entire career, its not like you’re going to forget that the letter “Y” exists or that “the” is a sight word).

There’s no ability to save word lists in either version and they only offer ~10 custom word lists, and you can’t make a list with a number of words not equal to 25 (thats, well, problematic — try doing “countries of Latin America” bingo some time).

Typical Software From Mainstream Educational Publisher: $35 ($45 on CD). Their site licensing is also more expensive for most schools than just buying multiple units from me, although I should probably include a site licensing option at some point to handle orders which come from the administration and not directly from a teacher. Free trial limits you to basic math facts (I think that might be a tad overfocused). Functionality similar to my program, with customizability for the header (Name Date Class etc). Although the linked publisher doesn’t, many publishers sell the software by the year.

Non-software solutions: You can just buy bingo sets from many educational publishers, and many teachers do (the fact that they do proves the existence of a market). The main value is from the cards themselves. You get one set of cards (which teachers frequently photocopy) restricted to a single subject or word list, are limited to what the publisher has in stock, and can expect to pay about $10 for every unique bingo game you run in a year.

My own trial version (no link yet): All uISVs with a free trial need to understand that they compete with themselves for their customers. I’m going to talk strategies for dealing with this most dangerous of all competitors in the next post.

It seems unreal that something like five days ago I had no code and today I have a fully functional program to do what I set out to do.  While its still being fine tuned and the website, payment processing, and marketing campaigns are in their infancy (keep checking back, though, because this baby is growing fast), I feel absolutely confident that I will be able to launch this software at some point in time.  And if you’re still reading this, you are probably interested with what I am doing. Well, whats the harm:

The title: Bingo Card Creator (short, sweet, currently unused, and will hopefully work well for organic search results)

In a sentence: Bingo Card Creator lets you print custom bingo cards on your own PC or Mac.

The elevator pitch:  Bingo Card Creator lets you print custom bingo cards on your own PC or Mac.  You can use your own word list or pick from one dozens we provide you with, covering subjects ranging from early childhood, phonics, elementary vocabulary, ESL, basic numeracy, math facts, geography, foreign languages, and much much more!

The market niche: I made a decision very early on that I was going to target primarily educational users.  My advertising copy and web site reflect this.  There is obviously a gigantic market out there for bingo as a gambling product — it is well served, has high barriers to entry (including, as I discovered accidentally while trying to make my first Google AdWords ad, the fact that many search engines don’t let you use paid search to promote gambling — I’m applying for a dispensation as we speak), and doesn’t interest me.