Kalzumeus Software

Sales for 2007 just passed sales for 2006.  Profits are better than double due to not having to pay startup costs twice and smarter spending on AdWords.

Same disclaimers as always.

Capsule summary: Best month ever.  Would have done better had I not disabled CD orders inadvertently for most of it.  I’m giving myself about a 50-50 chance of hitting my $1,000 target for April.

Sales: 30, including 2 CDs (instead of 15 — d’oh), 1 purchase in Euros, 1 in pounds, and 0 refunds.

Gross sales:  ~$760

Expenses:

Paypal: $10.50

SwiftCD: $10.76 

e-junkie: $5

AdWords: $54.02  

GoDaddy: $7

Total: ~$87

Net Profit: $673

Commentary:

AdWords has been working really well as of late ($.34 per demo download sustained over the entire month.  Close to my best ever.)  With $90 budgeted I could pay for more traffic but I haven’t found the keywords yet to bring it in without costing an arm and a leg — there is not too much play in $24.95 to go crazy with keywords costing, e.g., 15 to 25 cents apiece. 

SEO continues beatifully, and I’m slowly but surely climbing the ladder on some key terms.  A big thanks to everyone who linked by Free Bingo Cards post, without me even asking.  Its great when the community helps each other out like that.  I have been using the features in the Google webmaster console and have been noticing more links this month from school districts, including several direct to AdWords landing pages.  Thats just beautiful — they put my software in front of hundreds of prospective customers AND they give me an authority link.  Content, its the gift that keeps on giving.

Speaking of gifts which keep on giving, this blog will hit its hundred thousandth page view before I get up tomorrow.  I nearly went googley-eyed when I saw the counter.  The majority of my readers continue to be uISVs or folks thinking about taking the plunge, but I’m getting increasing mentions from folks as diverse as librarians and customer advocates, and the blog is fighting hard with MSN and Yahoo to be my third largest source of downloads (after Google and download sites).  I’d like to take a moment to say “thank you” to everybody who reads, RSSes, links to, comments on, etc, this blog.  I’m overjoyed and humbled by your support, and couldn’t do it without you. 

Happy Palm Sunday.   A funny story from Mass this morning: first, to hit the highlights of Palm Sunday for those who aren’t Catholic, Jesus comes back after fourty days in the wilderness (Lent) to Jerusalem, where he is welcomed as a king.  He rides in on a donkey, and people throw their clothes and palm fronds in the front of his donkey to honor him.  As we are heading out of church, one of the little kids says to his Mom “Its not fair, you know”.  “Oh whats that, honey?”  “Palm Sunday.”  “Why do you say that?”  “All the palms did was get stepped on.  It should really be Jesus Sunday.  Except every Sunday is Jesus Sunday.  So we should make it Donkey Sunday.  Poor donkey, he does all the work.”    I love kids.

My stats through the 15th.  Same disclaimer as always.

Capsule summary: I’m having my best month ever.  If I didn’t get another sale through the end of the month it would still be respectable, and unlike most months the sales are not in fits and spurts — every day when I wake up its BAM! You’ve got money!  I attribute this success more to organic growth (and, partially, to a rejiggering of my AdWords campaign which has helped it substantially) than anything I have done.  Also fixing bugs with demos people downloaded in February has probably caused some sales to trickle in.

Sales: 19 (+1 which was refused by Google — I gave the customer a key and asked them to fix their info with Google, never heard from them again.  C’est la vie.)

Gross Income: about $475:

429.15 USD
12.95 GBP
19.95 EUR

Expenses: $108

GoDaddy: $7

e-junkie: $5

AdWords: $90 budgeted

CDs: $6 so far

Profit: ~$360

I think by the end of the month I will probably have in excess of $800 worth of sales and possibly, knock on wood, I will make my $1,000 sales target in March rather than in April.

Web stats will come in another update.  I was inspired by Nick Hebb (you might know him as the flowcharting software tycoon) to try making a graph in OpenOffice to chart my growth in, e.g., downloads over the last 9 months.  Wow, its been 9 months already… where has the time gone.  This will have to wait as I have other commitments today.

Super-minor update on my next project: Its mostly on hold for the moment due to the amount of work I’ve been doing trying to find my next day job.  I plan on releasing the name and some comments on market selection this weekend.

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).

Sales for the entire year, 2006: $2,100 or so (I subtracted out returns and eSellerate sales, which I never actually received.)

Sales from January 1st, 2007 through February 15th, 2007: $1,050

Still got quite a bit to go if I’m going to make my $1,000 in April and $10,000 in 2007 targets but I think I can do it.  (Profits are, of course, another matter.)

Profits in 2006: ~$1,250

Profits YTD in 2007: ~$825.  I have this funny feeling I will do better than last year.

I know its not technically the 15th, but I’ve been busy. 

Sales this month started out strong and then Valentine’s Day rolled around and smacked me.  I really need to start anticipating holidays and releasing special versions/ads for them, because otherwise my sales tend to decline to zero around them.  Note that the following numbers are not quite contiguous with the last stats update, because I gave that on the 30th in a month that has more than 30 days, plus I reach the 30th a day before my market does.  Oops.  So you could increase these numbers by 3 sales if you want to have a full accounting of how much money I’ve made since last time.

Gross Sales: $294.45 (11 total, no refunds.  4 CDs requested)

Fulfillment costs:

   CDs: ~$42*

   Paypal: $7.64

Other Expenses (through end of month):

    AdWords: $45

    GoDaddy: $7

    e-junkie: $5

Total Expenses: ~$108

Profit: ~$195

 *Note: This number includes 3 CDs more than customers actually ordered.  One of those is a proof copy of the SwiftCD CD for myself, so that I can see what the customers get their hands on for the purpose of being able to explain it better (sidenote: I would oh so appreciate a live preview feature for making changes — cd-fulfillment doesn’t have one either but they do include some simulated sample invoices, etc, so you have a general idea).  The other two are replacement CDs for two customers who got CDs from cd-fulfillment.com with a graphic that I had sized correctly, resulting in labels which are below my quality standards.

Other statistics: my traffic, number of downloads, and number of confirmed downloads have been at sustained peaks for the last week and a half.  (Wish me luck — typically, my sales peaks trail download peaks by about a week.)  I know average over 400 visitors on weekdays and about 200 on weekends, whereas my comparable figures for, say, November were about 100 and 50.  This is after discounting traffic which I receive from my blog, which has been far higher than usual recently after I had a few high traffic posts.  (The one immediately below about dealing with problem customers has had about 5,000 views and, to judge by the email responses I am getting, has rocketed far out of my normal English-teacher-or-uISV-owner demographic.  I’m getting notes of commiseration from people as diverse as real estate agents and medical malpractice attourneys.)

Executive summary: January was my best month yet. I’m on target for making my goal of $1,000 a month sales by April. The redesign of my purchase page has been extraordinarily effective, particularly at moving people towards buying CDs. Google Checkout is saving me a not-insubstantial bit of money. AdWords, on the other hand, is borked and has a heavily negative ROI.

Sales:

Total Sales: 28 (includes 5 CDs, 1 refund due to showstopper bug in Mac version)

Gross Income: $698.65

Income Less Fulfillment Costs (Paypal, CD fulfillment): $655.70

Expenses:

GoDaddy: $5

Web Hosting: $7 (I turned off Traffic Facts, wasn’t using it anymore on a regular basis)

AdWords: $90 budgeted

Total Expenses: $102

Total Profit: $553.70

Time accounting: I estimate I spent approximately 6 hours of work on Bingo Card Creator in January. Roughly half of that was development (finishing touches on v1.05, which has been in the works since about October, and also some hunting for bugs in the Mac version discovered after release) , 20 minutes answering emails and fulfilling those CD orders, and the remainder blogging, keeping track of AdWords, firing Robosoft to submit v1.05 to the major sites, and performing various and sundry tasks. I also spent approximately 4 hours working on my 2006 taxes, a major portion of which was caused by Bingo Card Creator.

Selected Key Statistics:

Number of sales directly attributable to Google AdWords: 1. (Yes, Virginia, that IS equivalent to taking $65 out my my wallet and setting fire to it.) Yep, need to get AdWords under control or cancel it, sooner rather than later. No reason to pay Google a tax just for the privilege of paying them a tax. Also intending to look into AdCenter when I get the time to do so.

Number of hits on typical weekday: 300.

Number of hits on typical weekend: 100. This is roughly equivalent to my typical peak performance back in November.

Visitor to download conversion rate: Steadily falling, to 16% overall. A major contributor to this is the fact that I’m getting insane traffic numbers from the search for “bingo cards” on Google, and that traffic is relatively poorly qualified (12% or so conversion rate). Highly qualified traffic, such as people responding to my CPC ads, continues to convert at about 25%. Yahoo and MSN are in the 18% range. I hope to improve my conversion rate later by making a fairly significant design change related to how the Download Free Trial button works… we’ll see if that helps.

Downloads: Google Analytics reports 1,100, up 200 from December and 300 from November. Hard to believe that back in September I was ecstatic when this number hit 200. I receive a major but probably declining portion of my total downloads from download sites, and I have stopped counting those exactly since the number they provide me is not actionable (regardless of whether it goes up or down I still submit all new version to every site that will take it automatically, and don’t see myself changing that policy anytime soon).

Confirmed Installs: 235. This has not been keeping pace with my increasing download numbers. I’m not entirely sure why. Interestingly, digging into the logs shows me that no less than a quarter of my paying customer base is checking for a new version at least monthly. This gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Priorities for February:

1. Get a handle on AdWords and AdCenter. AdWords needs to have positive ROI or it needs to get cut, it is as simple as that.
2. Redesign download and download confirmation page. I don’t like the lack of user friendliness for the download on some browser/OS combos, particularly IE7, which will only gain in market share in my segment in the coming months.
3. Add more content to website. Need to find a new method of attack to get some more sales growth rather than just resting on my laurels, which candidly is a fairly accurate description of my marketing for 3 months now.
4. Re-ship 1.05 on Mac after bugs are squashed. Build shrine to Andrey, my beleaguered Mac testing department.
5. Start using source control software (I nearly had a heart attack trying to revert to a Mac version that was known to be good).
6. Redo internal model of a bingo card. I realized when adding one of the key 1.05 features that I am passing 6 arguments through about 4 different classes because my abstraction that captures what a bingo set is is a poor abstraction for capturing what a bingo card is. The printer cares rather more about the card and less about the set. Time to add a new abstraction, which will greatly simplify changing the presentation of the card in the future, hopefully allowing me to add new features for printing and get Print Preview working. (That would make a decent 1.051 release.)

Yeah, I know, I’m a wee bit late on these.  But on the plus side my project at my day job is close to three months late, so if you grade me on a curve I’m almost two and a half months early… or at least thats the math I try to use with my manager.

The same disclaimers apply as every other stats post.

 Summary: November was a bad month for sales, principally due to Thanksgiving I think (I got essentially nothing after the 20th.)  December I also predict is going to be terrible.  I’ll cover the Google costs but not much more.

 Sales: 20(+ 1 refund — customer ordered twice)

Gross Sales: $499

Net Sales After Paypal: ~$479

Expenses:

GoDaddy: $10

e-junkie: $5

Google AdWords: $90

Amigo: $25

Net Expenses: $130

Net Profit: $349

 I don’t think I ever commented on how Amigo turned out for me.  Well, to put it mildly: not well.  I finally was successful in getting newsletters to take my ad after Carson Systems started promoting Amigo heavily (incidentally, this was AFTER I had forgotten about it — must remember to cancel such things in the future).  Unfortunately, there is no geotargetting or language targetting in Amigo, and I only received clicks from principally two large Spanish (i.e. the country, south of France) newsletters.  They don’t play bingo in Spain.  Average time spent on site by those visitors: 3 seconds.  My advice, and I have the utmost respect for Carson Systems and was very impressed that they actually sent me a mail inquiring about my experience when I put in a feature request for targetting, is to stay away from this service for now.

OK, time for some website stats.  You are going to notice these are substantially above normal — I recently started ranking for some very common queries on Google (including for bingo cards , which gets some SCARY search volume relative to the Long Tail queries I usually rank on) and as a result the amount of traffic I have from Google is literally double what it usually is.  I don’t know if this will be sustained (hope so) or if this new traffic will eventually convert to sales (hope so), but I’ve seen the increase in downloads and update requests I would expect from it being legitimate traffic.

Visits: 4,700

Average: 2.25 views per visitor

Major referrers:

Google (organic): 1,600

Google (AdWords): 750

Direct: 750

MSN: 465

Yahoo: 300

this blog: 180

Every other site (BoS, download sites, pirate sites, teacher forums, etc): <100 each, 600 or so in aggregate

Conversion Rates:

Google (organic): 16% (my lowest conversion — not suprising as some of the recent search terms are not exactly targetted traffic)

Google (AdWords): 29% (remember, Analytics overstates this — I think the true number is about 25%, mostly because I focus on CPA like a maniac)

Direct: 21% (not bad, not bad — and remember, an additional 20% of them followed the update link from within the app so you wouldn’t expect them to need the trial download, so the true CR is closer to 25%)

MSN: 19%

Yahoo: 21%

In historical terms, I consider visitors-to-download conversion of 20% to be acceptable and 25% to be my goal.

Downloads:

My site: 890

Offsite: Uh, clueless, sorry.  I’ve got no desire to spend enough time to grep for this data today.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say its probably about 500-800.

Confirmed Successful Installs: 225 (Customer opts in to a “check for updates” from within the app)

Estimated Trial-to-Purchase Conversion: 1.25% to 1.5%  Some uISVs would consider this successful.  As stated, for me, this month was a bit of a disappointment.  I would feel better about that number if it were in the 2% region somewhere.  It is possible that if Google continues sending me weakly qualified visitors relative to my usual focused traffic that I may have to adjust to the reality and lower my expectations.

Conversion Given That Customer Has Entered The Funnel: In excess of 60%.  Ahem, booyah.  There are some major merchants who would die for a 40% cart abandonment rate.  I like to think this is because I keep the process as easy as humanly possible (enter your info, click confirm, congratulations you’re done) and use a name which is quite trusted in my market, Paypal.

Fun Navigational Trivia: You may want to take a look at my purchasing page to make sense of this.  All of my customers this month who purchased purchased through Paypal.  I’m going to tell you what exactly they clicked on the page to get to Paypal, and what I can essentially count on earning for any given click on that interface element (i.e. rate of conversion * sale price).  In order from most popular to least popular:

1. The sidebar “Purchase Now $24.95″ button.  Expected Value: $5.98 
2. The words “Purchase a single copy”.  Expected Value: $15.95
3. The credit card button directly adjacent the “Purchase a single copy” hyperlink.  Expected Value: $5.98
4. The credit card button following my paen to Paypal’s security.  Expected Value: $11.97

I wouldn’t draw any very deep inferences from 3/4 since they’ve got very, very low sample sizes.