Kalzumeus Software

Its that time again. Same disclaimer as all of my stats releases: its tough resolving the edge cases on the 1st and 30th of the month due to time zone issues, I roll out multi-month expenditures so that if I paid 3 months of web service in August I charge myself one month’s worth in September, and I take no responsbility for the accuracy of these figures until it comes time to chat to the IRS and zemusho at the end of the year.

Capsule review: My first two weeks went like gangbusters, my last two weeks have been pretty limp. Google AdWords has thrown me for a loop and I haven’t had the hours in the day to spend to recover from it yet. Text Link Ads were not a very profitable expenditure. Tucows, on the other hand, a direct PR9 link plus significant download traffic means a very happy uISV.

Sales: 22 (+2 refunds: one customer error, one less-than-totally-happy). 2 sales were at a discount through Bits du Jour
Gross sales: $533.90
Net sales after Bits du Jour and Paypal fees: $505.96

Expenses:

Hosting (GoDaddy): $10.02
E-junkie: $5
Tucows Expedited Submission: $52
Google Adwords: $90

Text Link Ads: $35
Total Expenses: $192.02

Profit: $313.94

I seem to have fallen into the pattern of doing these every two weeks or so.  Seems reasonable.  Same disclaimers as all the other stats: these have analog accuracy in a digital world, my customers are across the date line from me so there might be edge effects with other stats updates, my accounting practices are horrific, yadda yadda.

Sales:

Full price: 14, +1 refund (customer purchased twice)
Bits du Jour promotion (40% off): 2

Gross sales after refund:  $354.25

Net sales after Paypal/Bits du Jour commission:  $332.06

Expenses:

Hosting: $5.01 (half of $10.02, my GoDaddy bill every month)

AdWords: $37.47

Subtotal: $42.48

Profit: $289.95* 　

Well, that’s certainly a sliiiiiight increase from my last two months ($25 and -$2, as I recall).  And the month isn’t over yet.  I also expect to spend approximately $50 on getting my software onto Tucows, but they seem to be having verification trouble with my credit card at the moment so I suppose I’ll have to sort that out first.

My goal this month is to break $600 in sales and profits of about $450.  This might be a little on the aggressive side, but I think I can do it if the Mac version gets up on the major download sites inside of a week and starts kicking booty.

Oh, here’s a fun progression for you: my sales every two week interval since launch.

1, 2, 6, 8, 16.

Unfortunately, I think the “it will continue increasing geometrically!” assumption you might have from high school algebra is a tad aggressive.  But I think I’m well below the maximum amount of sales I can get with reasonable effort — I’ve got more promotions to try (getting my Halloween bingo page ready this weekend so it gets search engine rankings in advance of the actual day), more advertising campaigns to run, more tricks up my sleeve, more products to launch (I’m rolling out Bingo Card Creator on a CD this week — you can actually buy it now if you want), and more optimizations for my website (the purchase page is not as much of a tour-de-force as I want it to be, so that will be getting changed).

* While normally I’m not a very spendy person this is already earmarked: I’m increasing my payment on my student loan by $300 so I can afford to pay $300 less in October (when, incidentally, I will be paid off in full — yaaaaaaaaaaay, debt free).  Then that $300 which would have been transferred home in October gets to stay in Japan with me until December 2nd, when I will exchange it for a Wii.  So expect blog posting in December to be very, very light.  :)

First, a disclaimer: Due to my own lax recordkeeping, the issues with running a business with the International Date Line between me and most of my customers/suppliers, currency exchange issues, and other reasons, these numbers may be off by a little bit.  I’m sorry to give you analog accuracy in a digital world, but its the best I can do without spending too much time playing accountant.  And, after all, I have a release to finalize :)

There’s a recurring issue here: do I count expenses based on when they are charged or when they are incurred?  i.e. if I prepay for 3 months of GoDaddy, like I did, do I count that whole expense in August or spread it out?  Where possible, I’m going to divide out recurring costs over the length of the term.  While this means you can’t see my exact bank statement/cash flow, suffice it to say that it stays positive and thats all you really needed to know, right?

Sales:

Through Paypal: 13 (+1 return)

Through eSellerate: 1 (didn’t trust Paypal)

Gross sales:  $349.30

Net sales:  $333.54 (subtracted out payment processor charges: $1.02 for each Paypal, $2.50 for eSellerate)

Expenses:

Recurring expenses:

Web site hosting: $10 (Linux hosting + Traffic Facts through GoDaddy)

e-junkie (payment processing): $5

Yahoo Search Marketing: $30 (since canceled)

Google AdWords: $90

Subtotal recurring expenses: $135

One-time Expenses:

Stock icons from icons-icons.com: $29.95

RoboSoft Registration: $99

2 postcards to RoboSoft authors: $1.50 (the first got returned today due to my atrocious handwriting, so I have to resend one)

Allume’s Stuffit: $29.99 (thought I would need it for shipping Mac orders.  My mistake.  Whoops.  Ah well, I feel better about using their Stuffit Expander for the last 10 years now.)

Rentacoder port to Mac version: $40 ($25 bid + $15 tip)

Subtotal for one-time expenses: $200.44

Total expenses: $335.44

Profit: -$1.90 (Wahoo!)

Well, honestly, I thought I was going to post a minor paper profit.  Hmm, I guess thats why we write things down.  In terms of cash flow, as mentioned above, I am minorly positive, because this shows me booking about $50 of AdWords expenses many weeks ahead of being billed them (weeks in which I will, obviously, have additional sales).

If I knew earlier what I do now, I would have gotten the Mac thing done for free by an microISV contact, and not paid for the Stuffit registration.  Ahh well.  Small beer, in the opinion of somebody who can’t drink for fear of killing himself.

OK, back to the fun statistics:

I’m going to discontinue giving the Yahoo stats.  I just don’t find them credible after doing the auditing for the last month, which is the proximate cause of me discontinuing my subscription with them.  That plus the fact that I’ve finally succeeded in pushing my AdWords spending down to my target.

As with last month I have two AdGroups.  The first is pitching vocabulary bingo, the second Bingo Card Creator itself.  I’m going to show you the full monthly stat summary and also the last week’s stat summary so you can see an indication of how things are improving through periodically shifting bids, ad texts, and landing pages.  Unfortunately I can’t tell you exactly how effective they were at driving sales because I just realized the last time I touched my thanks-for-your-purchase page I borked the Javascript on it, costing me the last week work of data.  D’oh.

Incidentally, results for the vocabulary group are heavily depressed by the long experiment with that “give teachers free lists” thingee. It worked great for getting me inbound links but not so great from a conversion perspective (that one add has like a 10% CR and 20% CTR, costing me a lot of money for not a lot of gain.  Basically it ended up being $30 given to charity for PR value.)

This Month / This Week:

Vocabulary Bingo:

Impressions: 27,000

CTR: 2.54%

Avg. Position: 2.7
CR: 16.86%

CPA: $.34

Bingo Card Creator:

Impressions: 7,700

CTR: 5.80%

Avg. Position: 2.0

CR: 22.76%

CPA: $.45

 

Although you can’t tell it from the whole month’s stats at a glance, recently I have made my $.30 a download target.  Yay me.  The secret: continuous improvement of ad texts and landing pages, plus a recent ruthless culling of every keyword which wasn’t performing well enough to justify keeping.

Alright, how about some website stats:

Visits: 4,175

Trial downloads (from site):670

Trial downloads (download sites which hotlink, so they show up in server logs — this is a guesttimate at best due to the cruddiness of my logging): 500

Confirmed trial downloads (someone selected a link within the application): 100

Download.com trial downloads: 150

Major sources of hits (trial demo CR in % following):

Google CPC:1,000 (21.6%)

This blog:  894 (5.7%) — N.B. I was Slashdotted once, which accounts for most of them.

Google Organic: 587 (16.18%)

Microsoft Organic: 526 (17.3%)

Single Post On Teacher Bulletin Board: 150 (27%) — I love my adoring fans.

Major Download Sites:

Download.com: 130

AllApp: 40

SurfPack: 40

FreeDownloadCenter: 25* (also sent a good deal of traffic directly to site — in the hundreds)

FreeDownloadManager: 25

Incidentally, the next 40 download sites on the list sum to about 60% of the total of these.  Yep, Long Tail in action.