Kalzumeus Software

Now tell me, back in my father’s day, what were the odds that you would find someone translating the meat of a wee little article about a wee little company run by an American in Japan into Spanish?  I saw somebody link to me today, and was quite amused.  If you ever want to comment on or translate anything you see here in Spanish or any other language, please feel free to.  (Although if it isn’t Spanish, Japanese, or English I’ll have a devil of a time talking back.) 

Si los hispanohablantes estan leyendo este, por favor, no se vacilen hacer comento o e-mail.  Siempre me gusta practicar mi espanol y oir la opiniónes de personas en qualquier pais, particularmente las sobre software.  Disculpeme, ha sido como seis anos hasta que estudi el espanol y ahora no puedo escritarlo por salvar mi vida.  (Ni puedo escritar los acentos en un OS japones tampoco.  Lo siento.)

Terminemos con una nota positiva. Uno de los blogs que sigo sobre micro ISVs ha contado recientemente la siguiente y curiosa historia. Patrick McKenzie, que es como se llama el blogger y dueño de la micro ISV, vende un software para la creación de bingos educativos. Yo tampoco sé lo que es. El caso es que esta señora era cliente registrada (es decir, había pagado) por un software para lo mismo pero no podía recordar ni la clave del software, ni la forma de contacto con la empresa que lo vendía. Buscando en Google, había dado con McKenzie y le pedía si podía mirar a ver si por un casual el programa que tenía era de su empresa, en cuyo caso le pedía que le volviera a enviar la licencia ya que no quería pagar dos veces por su producto. McKenzie consultó sus registros y confirmó sus sospechas: la señora era clienta de alguna empresa de software para bingos educativos, pero no de la suya. El correo de respuesta de Patrick McKenzie a la señora no tiene desperdicio:

Me temo que no es [clienta] mía, señora, pero le adjunto una copia gratuita con mi agradecimiento por su continuado apoyo al pequeño negocio.

Desde un punto de vista puramente comercial, es un reacción fantástica: este hombre acaba de conseguir una clienta de por vida, y una clienta que a buen seguro cantará sus alabanzas en cuanto tenga ocasión. Leed el artículo, que no tiene desperdicio. Bob Walsh, que de micro ISVs también sabe lo suyo, se hace eco de la noticia.

Let me try seeing if I remember how to speak Spanish or whether the last few years has caused it to totally atrophy:

We end on a positive note.  One of the blogs which I know about micro ISVs recently recounted the following interesting story.  Patrick McKenzie, the blogger and owner of the micro ISV, sells software for the creation of educational bingos [sic].  I don’t know what that is, either.  What happened was that a lady has registered (i.e. had paid for) a software which did the same, but couldn’t remember the name [?] of the software or how to contact the company which sold it.  Looking on Google, she thought it might be McKenzie and asked him if he could take a quick look in his records and, if she had purchased the software from him, send a new license so that she would not have to pay twice for the product.  McKenzie consulted his records and confirmed his suspicions: the lady was a customer company making bingo card software, but not his company.  His response to the lady was not wasteful [not sure that is the most faithful translation]:

I’m afraid you are not my [client], ma’am, but I am sending you a free copy with my thanks for your continued support of small businesses. 

From a purely commercial point of view, this is a fantastic reaction: this gentlemen has just found himself a customer for life, and she is a customer who can be counted on to sing his praises at every occasion.  Read the article, which is not wasteful [same word, still not sure of translation].  Bob Walsh, who about micro ISVs also sabe lo suyo [idiom which I know I learned but have forgotten — it might mean “knows everything”], echoed the message.

Rizal, who made the little widget that folks use to read this blog from beginning to end, remarked that

Patrick McKenzie used to post daily but I guess his business has stabilized and he’s moved on to other things

There is a nugget of truth there, but to give the rest of the story:  The business is mostly stable, but I keep tweaking things and, when I have time to both tweak and talk, I try to talk about them.  Hopefully later this week I’ll be able to talk about why I just paid $12 for one day on the Content Network and tentatively think I liked it.  (That should be Hopefully #2.  Hopefully #1 is that the positive ROI continues for longer than a day.)

The big reasons my posting has slipped:

#1 — Went home for a month and spending time with my family was much more important to me than the uISV.  (I typically only get to see them once a year, and don’t know when the next time I’ll have a month of leisure is.)

#2 — I came back to Japan and immediately got thrown into the salaryman thing, which I got back from today at about 9:00 pm — unseasonably early!  (This is what I get for joining the private sector and leaving my cushy government job.  Oof.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to bed to make it up at 6:30 in the morning to get to work on time and do it again…)

#3 — I generally don’t like posting to say “Well, I’ve got nothing to say”.  When I have more stuff to say, rest assured, there will be more and (God and day-job business conditions permitting) more regular posting.

 P.S.

Rizal praises me as a “hero of the MicroISV blogging community”.  I’m not a hero by any means, but I’m glad folks find some of the ramblings around here to be of use.  That is one major reason I keep writing them.

Courtesy of Paypal I now have some bright new Paypal buttons to attract visitors with.  Take a look at the difference (which you can see in context on my purchasing page for Bingo Card Creator).

We replaced this frumpy old standby:

with this larger, more descriptive, and infinitely cooler looking button:

Now, personally, I kind of liked having the credit card icon logos above and slightly dominating the call to action but, hey, this is what CrazyEgg was made for.  (Yep, I have my test set up and ready to go.)

I also replaced the old Paypal logo:

with the new one:

Again, larger, bolder, more descriptive.  (It also matches the colors of my site, which is a happy coincidence.)

Finally, since I couldn’t bear to leave Google out in the cold, I updated their image as well.  Its a little smaller than the Paypal image, and I would fix that except the brand-building wizards prohibit me from doing so in the license for their image.  Thanks a lot, guys, I’m only trying to make you money…

vs. 

Not very uISV related, but I’m flying back to Japan today to return to my new contract.  As one of the purposes of this blog is networking, I thought I would mention it so that folks would mentally fill in the “Hmm, he might have the right experience for this opportunity…” box. 

Where: A software consultancy in Nagoya.  No, I won’t identify it.  (Honestly, though, “The one with the white guy” really cuts down the field substantially.  White guys are so rare where I live that letters from the Social Security Administration to Patrick McKenzie @ my prefecture get to me, no address necessary.)

What: Half Java server programmer (I’m going to get very, very familiar with the J2EE stack, finally), half being interface with the Indian outsourcing team which doesn’t speak any Japanese.  I’m always willing to learn new things and it looks like I’ll be getting some much needed management experience, too.

What vertical: Enterprisey stuff.  Folks familiar with the Nagoya area might wonder if I mean automobile manufacturing.  I can neither confirm nor deny, but I can confirm that of the 20+ positions I looked at approximately 18 involved automobile manufacturing.  (Nagoya is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Toyota group.)

How much: More than I make with Bingo Card Creator. :)

Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years: I have always hated this question.  Ask me in five years.

One decision you’ll have to make about your uISV is where you send all your hard-earned money.  This gets a bit more complicated if you’ve got an international operation, so hopefully this will be of use to some folks in that circumstance.

Can I Get A US Bank Account Without Residing In the US?  This is easily the most frequent question on the Business of Software boards about banking.  The short answer is yes.  The long answer is “America didn’t become the world’s largest economy by saying no to greenbacks, and billions of dollars passes through millions of foreigner-controlled accounts every day.  Forget what you’ve heard about the Patriot Act, if you’re not on a watchlist this actually isn’t that hard, provided you can find a bank which will let you.” 

 The key obstacle you’ve got to overcome is called Know Your Customer, a regulation that requires that banks know who they are doing business with (i.e. that their account holders are not fictitious fronts for Bad People).  Many banks interpret that as meaning you need a branch visit, but that is hardly universal.  Citibank, for example, will take a driver’s license number over the phone as sufficient for KYC.  That doesn’t help you if you’re in Romania, of course.  What does is banks which are controlled by a non-banking organization, such as E-Trade Banking, which is a financial services arm of an online brokerage.  You can open an E-Trade investment account from just about anywhere.  Then, if you call their customer support line and ask to have banking services added to your account, they’ll take the existence of your investment account as sufficient evidence that you actually exist, and you’ll just have to fax over a copy of your passport to get a checking account, check card, and online banking activated.  E-Trade isn’t the only institution that will do this — many American brokerages have US accounts available worldwide, because one of the biggest reasons to have a US account if you are not US-based is to invest in US assets without paying an intermediary lots of money.

Got a recommendation for a bank for the rest of us?

Everyone wants different things in a bank.  I like decent interest rates, good online banking, and easy access to ACH payments (Automated Clearing House — when you receive money from Paypal or pay bills online, that is what you are using).  My top recommendation is ING Direct’s Electric Orange (its a checking account), for three reasons: Paypal and Google ACH payments credit within 1-2 business days, which means you get extra interest, you actually do earn interest on the checking account (3% unless you’re loaded), and they have a very responsive website.  They don’t have branch offices but I could literally go the rest of my life without needing teller help for simple transactions.  You need to have a checking account at a bricks and mortar (US) bank to open an Electric Orange account.

I also recommend that all uISVs get a credit card which pays cash back.  There are a billion providers here, take your favorite.  While I don’t recommend ever carrying a balance on your credit card, paying all of those recurring monthly expenses and software purchases on a credit card makes for easy record keeping, 1% off your expenses every month, and gives you some protection should a transaction go sour.  If you’re using Paypal the Paypal debit card gives you 1% back, but you’d have to keep sufficient amounts of money in your Paypal account to cover all purchases, and that requirement doesn’t sit well with me.

In honor of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I thought I would point out that there are some Harry Potter bingo cards (scroll down or search for Harry Potter) available for free for teachers, parents, or other Potter enthusiasts who want to use them.  They don’t spoil any plot points of the books. 

The book, by the way, took me about 8 solid hours to read and got me a little weepy at points.  It has weak points and seems rushed by the end, with a few loose ends not resolved as definitively as I’d have liked them to be, but all in all is a fitting capstone to the series.  I am indebted to Ms. Rowling for inviting us to share in the magic, and in the very real good she has worked for the cause of children’s literacy.

For other software small businessmen, don’t worry, regularly scheduled content will resume in about a week or two.  In the meantime, there is a really good book out there if you want to take your mind off of conversion rates and SEO for a while.

… I have been absorbed in preparations for temporarily returning to the US, moving jobs, moving apartments, and etc.  Try imagining the stress of planning a month-long vacation, a job hop, and a move at the same time — now add in the wrinkle that it is all done in a second language*.  I will be back in the US on the 27th with my brand-new Dell laptop (on which I am writing this post) and about a solid month of time to hang out with the family and work on Kalzumeus.  Then it is back to the daily grind, this time at a OSS-based computer consultancy in Nagoya at a decently higher salary than my last contract. 

 See you all then.

* Just when you think “Oh, it can’t be so bad, I am a qualified translator after all” Murphy’s Law says that the travel agent’s database will forget you exist, the landlord will try sneaking a rider onto page 8 of the contract to charge 10% extra, and the immigration bureau will erroneously tell you that their visa guidelines have changed to disallow your trip.  Ahh well, all fixed now, although I will have to give my landlord a piece of my mind when I get back.

I got an email from Rick Brewster the other day, fixing a spelling mistake on my website.  Rick noticed it after a link from my blog, which he apparently reads and comments on, although I haven’t noticed it before.  The reason this has a strangers passing in the night feel to it is that Rick wrote Paint.NET, a fairly powerful freeware image editing program which I am a major user of and contributed to, and so we have been unknowingly supporting each other’s businesses for months.  Funny how things work like that.

Anyhow, he has an interesting post on the economics of completely free-as-in-beer software.  Apparently, it is making him a fair bit of money, although is hesitant to disclose the exact figures.  And, hey, that is certainly his right.  If you’d like to see them, I suppose you could express encouragement in his comments.

As an amusing sidenote, he had some advice for me on what to do with my Bingo Card Creator profits:

 That’s pretty good supplementary income which can then be used to pay down debt, increase retirements savings, or for the monthly payment on a very nice BMW. C’mon Patrick. Go for the BMW.

1)  Did it already.  Bingo Card Creator paid off my last bit of student loans in December.  (I have an irrational hatred of debt and had paid essentially all of my surplus salary since graduation towards the loans.  This is part of the reason why I was so big on starting the business on a shoestring.)

2)  Doing it.  Saving is my favorite use of money.  What can I say, I’m a boring guy to shop with.

3)  I actually don’t have a driver’s license where I live.  If I did, while I’m sure the BMW is a nice automobile, I would get myself an itty-bitty used Japanese car for about $500, run it into the ground, and repeat.  Like I said, I have an irrational hatred of debt.  To the extent any of the Bingo Card Creator money gets spent rather than saved, I suppose you could say it helps pay for my plane tickets to visit my family and perhaps my new laptop.  (My first laptop ever, as a matter of fact.  Its a Japanese Dell, should be really useful for getting some work done on plane flights and, naturally, includes a better graphics card so if I fall off the MMORPG wagon I can do so in style.)

If you are running Mac OS X 10.3.9, could you please run on over to http://www.bingocardcreator.com, download the free trial, and see if you are able to run it?  A user of mine is reporting a quirky Java error on that operating system but not on another OS X 10.4 box they have access to, and I’m trying to isolate whether it is their machine that has the issue or whether Bingo Card Creator has a hidden incompatibility with something on a particular version of OS X.

I launched Bingo Card Creator exactly a year ago today.  It has been a great year, and I succeeded wildly beyond my expectations.

Bingo Card Creator is currently being used by over a hundred paying customers (an extrapolation from how many paid versions are pinging me for updates every fortnight).  Over 270 folks purchased from me.  The overwhelming majority of them are happy with their purchase, and every last person who wasn’t got a refund delivered with a smile on the same day.

Bingo Card Creator has been used to teach a six year old to read, run nutritional lessons for old folks’ homes, do icebreakers at retreats for a half dozen Fortune 500 companies, teach English to adult learners in China, put a little more colour and a few more u’s in the writing of Aussie schoolkids, and been put to the paces by many, many educators.  My best estimate is that somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people played a game of bingo this year using a card printed on Bingo Card Creator.  (And I saved American educators upwards of $20,000 relative to buying bingo cards by the set.)

Sales for the first year were a hair under $6,500.  That wildly exceeds my original expectation/goal, which was about 10 sales a month (~$250).  Costs are somewhere in the $2,500 region — you can take a look at this post for a month by month breakdown.  My costs relative to sales have plunged over the last few months, largely a result of only having to pay startup costs once and the fact that I’ve finally gotten over the AdWords learning curve(s).  Without giving away my day job salary, suffice it to say that while my standard of living is identical my monthly retirement contribution is hundreds of dollars over what it used to be.  But the money was never my big reason for doing this.

In opening a company (OK: still haven’t filed that paperwork) I joined the quirky worldwide community of uISVs,  centered around the Business of Software forums and elsewhere.  I got a lot of good advice and, hopefully, managed to give a bit of it too.  The folks who I owe thank-yous to are too numerous to list here, but suffice it to say that drinks are on me should you ever find yourself blundering around central Japan.  Folks demonstrably appreciate real live sales numbers, small though they might be, and I’ve been contacted by three folks who said I inspired them to take the plunge.  What can I say: its a bit of work, a lot of fun, and beats spending your time on World of Warcraft.

As for this year, plans are to finish up finding a job/moving/etc, which is consuming most of my time at the moment, launch Kalzumeus eventually, and continue constant tweaks and improvements on Bingo Card Creator.  (I was tantalizing close to my $1,000 sales goal in June, which is almost disturbing since school is out for summer and my core market shouldn’t be buying now.  This makes me cautiously optimistic for sales in August, when the new term starts.)