Kalzumeus Software

… but the CrazyEgg guys do, and I wish them the best of luck.  They have a very, very Web 2.0-y analytics and split testing program.  Well, its not a full-featured analytics program — it basically tells you whats being clicked on, and thats it, with an extraordinarily cool (er, is that hot?) heatmap visualization of it.  It is amazingly easy to get started on their free trial, so amazing that they could teach Google a thing or three about it.  Put in email address, put in password, fill out two line form about page to test, copy one line of provided HTML into page, upload.  30 seconds or less to the shiny.  If I get nothing else out of my free trial, I’ll have gotten a good usability example for Kalzumeus.

Here’s my concern: while they are much easier to use than Analytics (they will, for example, track clicks on my links offsite or to setup files without any special work on my part), I have already climbed Mt. Analytics Learning Curve and can now bask in the awesome view — such as dicing visitors down by where they came from, watching search terms trends, and tracking click paths around my site.  For free.  Their free trial (5,000 visits tracked a month) will work for a few more weeks for me, but then I’ll go over the traffic limit and it comes down to the “Do I really want to pay more than my web hosting budget for an analytics program?” question.  Which would be “Oh, heck yes!”… if I didn’t already have Analytics. 

Then they have this split-testing option, where you can have them run, say, the stats on 2,000 consecutive visitors.  Then you twiddle the page a bit and rerun the test, getting 2,000 new consecutive visitors, and compare.  That is both great and, again, inferior to the free Google Website Optimizer*.  Now, if they could just bring their considerable usability chops to solving the biggest problem with Website Optimizer, which is that it is a freaking pain in the keister to use, I’d give them $9 a month and a gold star.  I have been meaning to start using Website Optimizer for months but every time I do I get to the start of the process, figure its going to take me two hours to get anywhere, and then get distracted by other demands on my time.

 * Note that the key problem here is that Website Optimizer does actual splitting — for example, if I get 4,000 visitors they get parceled out to the two alternative pages randomly instead of first 2,000 to one and next 2,000 to the other.  That is fairly key for me, since my business has very definite cycles in it, and I’m doing all sorts of things in the background.  If, for example, 2,000 visits happen Monday through Friday, and then the next 2,000 visits happen Saturday through Wednesday, then I naturally expect the “Download a Free Trial” link to get less activity anyhow in the second half because my best customers (teachers) aren’t typically on the Internet on Saturday or Sunday.  That throws off the results of the test.

I’m glad you found the article on customer service interesting.  Feel free to leave comments on it, or here.

Note to usual blog readers: Neat New Things is a newsletter sent around by a librarian named Marylaine Block who runs a little side business on the Internet.  I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and say you probably haven’t heard of it.  My site was listed for the customer service article from a while back, with the comment “Both the initial article and the comments provide valuable ideas and perspective.”, in the middle of about a dozen links about various topics.  Now, personally, if I wrote a post with about twelve links in a row like this one I would guess perhaps 1% of the readership would visit a link in the middle.  Given that literally one thousand readers (!) have come to take a gander at that post over the last 24 hours, most attributable to that email newsletter, I would estimate that librarian’s reach at probably in the high five to low six digits worth of extraordinarily dedicated readers.

Ponder that for a moment.

I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark and say that my post probably caught Ms. Block’s attention after it was mentioned on Librarian in Black, a high traffic librarian weblog.
Librarians, like school teachers, are quite smart folks who are not typically described as being on the leading edge of the technology curve.  However, apparently there are an awful lot of them out there, and they have their own little pocket of cyberspace which is actually not little at all.  They are an addressable audience on the Internet (or somebody wouldn’t have a mailing list of five or six digits worth of them, least of all one which is read actively), they read blogs at least part of the time, and they almost certainly have problems which can be solved by software.

Two takeways from this:

• Do you have a blog that 1,000 potential customers of your software could be reading tomorrow?  If not, what exactly is keeping you from writing one?
• Would you have written librarians off as a potential niche for a uISV, because they probably don’t buy software anyhow?   Often uISVs have a mindset which is overly informed by being quite techy people, and they forget that the rest of the world uses computers, too.

… but I think I’ll hit $800 to $1,000 in sales for March, smashing my previous records.  This is on the strength of what appears to just be natural growth in traffic from Google and apparently a higher conversion from trial to purchase rate (my number of confirmed downloads relative to recorded downloads is up 10%, too — maybe folks like Inno Setup or some software site I don’t know about is ranking me highly?).  I’ve gotten 6 orders in the last 3 business days where a more typical number would be 2 to 3. 

I have a plan in place for a promotion around Easter which I was decently sure was going to help me achieve my $1,000 target for April.  While I’ll still do it, I rather doubt I’ll need to just to make that target.

After a day of St. Patrick’s festivities in Nagoya, including dinner at a quite nice (and incredibly not Irish — cheese tofu, though, deserves to be) restaraunt and clubbing (not something I frequently indulge in), I was wondering whether my budget was going to stretch to the end of the month or not.  I just woke up, checked my email accounts, and the @bingocardcreator.com box was stuffed.  One support request, about a dozen order confirmation emails (depending on how they buy it I get about 2-3 per order, so its less impressive than it sounds).  I kind of like the feeling of making more money while spending the evening out than the evening out actually costs. 

It seems that support request was related to a corrupted file, so I’ve got to keep an eye on GoDaddy to see if they’re not mangling my EXEs again.  I suppose it always could be a problem on the customer side or perhaps whatever download site they got it from, and I’m hoping it is, but with the frequency that I break my software I can’t afford for my hosting provider to break it, too. 

I just got my SwiftCD in the mail (I ordered a copy myself so that I could take photos for the website) and, I must say, it looks rather slick.  In my haste to get a picture I used my cameraphone, which while 2 Megapixels (did I mention I live in Japan?  Phones here can practically perform brain surgery) is not quite the ideal platform for taking a picture of a flat surface.  The green bit is the notebook I was using for a backdrop, which ironically is currently filled with notes for my second project.  Anyhow,  the printing is astonishingly clear (even the teeny-tiny text on the CD is easily legible) and in person it looks very professionally done.  Even the Bingo Card Creator bee is recognizable in all his 1/4th of an inch wingspan glory.

Anyhow, the timestamp on this order was sometime on the 9th (America time).  It shipped on the 12th (America time) and arrived on the 19th (Japan time — approximately the 18th US time), which I would consider pretty good since there was a weekend which got in the way before order shipment.  What an age to be living in where you can get a package to a little ricefield on the other side of the world in about a week for 84 cents.

When folks ask me “So how exactly did your uISV come about?”, I generally tell them to go to the start of the blog and start reading.  Unfortunately, blog software is generally designed to be read from most recent to oldest.  Anyhow, a gentleman named Rizal mailed me today and said he created a “MicroISV on a Shoestring Reader“, which is a mashup that displays the blog organized in chronological order.  Its simple and effective.  Thanks a bunch, I’m sure some folks will find it useful.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been contemplating switching to SwiftCD for a while for CD fulfillment over cd-fulfillment.com.  I just completed the transition yesterday and had my first order with the new system processed while I slept.  Yay.

The reasons I made the switch

1. My recent retooling of my purchase page has made roughly half of my customers reuest CDs.  That means that I get to do a manual order entry nearly every day, and that if I miss checking email someone has paid me meney but is not getting their product.  I did order entry for two years and hate it (love talking to customers, hate typing addresses).  This literally quadrupled my support burden (I get four CD orders for every email that requires a response) and added no value to the customers.
2. When I posted to this blog that I was considering switching to SwiftCD, they contacted me and pulled out all the stops trying to get me to switch.  Full disclosure: I think that is probably because they think I would probably write up a positive evaluation of them, and hey, thats what I’m doing, so discount this report to whatever degree you think appropriate.  (Its certainly not so they can capture my awesome volume.  10-20 CDs a month or so times thin margins = not a lot of money.)  When I say “Pulled out all the stops” I’m not exaggerating: they had a company designer redesign my CD label to demonstrate their printing prowess, the CEO mailed me a half dozen times asking on my progress, and they even worked with e-junkie to make sure the integration went well.
3. Easy integration with e-junkie.  After finding the instructions and setting up my CD on the SwiftCD side integration took about 15 seconds on e-junkie’s site and about 30 seconds replacing two links on my purchasing page.  Now rather than waking up 30 minutes early and checking my email to see if any CDs were purchased so I can copy, paste, copy, paste, copy paste name, email, address, transaction number, etc etc, e-junkie forwards the shipping details directly to SwiftCD and I can get some extra sleep in the morning.
4. The Registration Key gets automatically printed on the mailer (called Product Key or something).  I can live with that.

I also had a slight difficulty with cd-fulfillment.com in the last week.  I uploaded a label using a template of theirs, it ended up printing very badly, and as a result I shipped two products which were not up to my quality standards althought they would run without difficulty.  This was totally unrelated to my decision to switch — cd-fulfillment did exactly what I would expect, which was shipping the order and telling me there was a problem.  I contacted the customers myself to make amends (“I’m sorry, I goofed, I will ship another CD at my expense”, at paragraph length).  cd-fulfillment has been pretty good to me for the duration of our business relationship, and I think they’re still a wonderful service for many people (and cheap, holy cow — just eating international shipping charges is amazing).  If they had easy e-junkie integration, I would have probably stayed with them, and I’ll keep them around as a backup in case SwiftCD suffers any hiccups.

Anyhow, since I don’t intend to hold SwiftCD to their price matching guarantee, I think I’m probably going to be on the hook for slightly more than the $5 I charge for the majority of my CDs.  $5.38 or so for US customers, for example.  I will happily underwrite the difference for the moment, since the convenience is important to me and many of my customers won’t buy without the CD option.

Speaking of prices… I have been considering a $5 price increase for both versions, probably tied to the 1.06 release.  We’ll see if I implement it or not.

I’m expecting to start this summer, and have narrowed it down to two candidates (with the option of adding another at any time, naturally).  Budget is estimated at $1,500 to launch and several hundred per month in advertising.  I think I can have version 1.0 of the app saleable within 1 month of opening my IDE.  Income projections for the two candidates are pretty disparate.  The better option of the two, from my current research, would (with rather modest assumptions made about customer volume) probably exceed my current salary within a year of launch.

What is it?  A web app (uh oh!  I’ve drunk the Web 2.0 coolaid!).  I anticipate using about zero Web 2.0 cruft, probably developing on LAMP (which is why I’m giving myself a full month, since its not conceptually harder than Bingo Card Creator), and having a 100% subscriptions revenue model, probably with 1-2 months free trial.  The selling proposition is the same as e-junkie’s but targetted at a completely different vertical — “I’m going to make it easier for you to make a lot of money.  You’re going to pay me a trivial amount every month and be happy to do it.  We’ll be doing business together for YEARS.”

Issues: this app has money involved and there will be a lawyer brought in as insurance.  I will probably need the design done by a professional.  (There’s the budget, incidentally.)  I’m not a web programmer (as a matter of fact, I hate it) and so I will have to learn a bit to do this.   I am not as intimately aquainted with this vertical as I am with teaching, but still think I get it enough to do a fairly decent job.  I have competition offering services which can accomplish the same general goal for cheaper, but I have at least three ideas why my method is uniquely superior, in a way which is readily apparent to the customer.  I will be unhealthily dependent on a major corporation whose name, for once, does NOT start with G.

I anticipate being as open on this project as I have been with Bingo Card Creator, which means that after I have something to show you’ll be able to see it.  Until then, this is sort of a memo to myself to not spend summer on videogames.

In the last six months I have had several music teachers write in to ask me if Bingo Card Creator can create cards with musical notes on them.  The answer is “yes”, but the process is rather difficult. 

1. Download a font which is capable of displaying musical notes.  I recommend Bach (free for academic use).
2. Open Bingo Card Creator.  Select Font from the options menu, and switch to Bach.
3. Turn off Free Space (it will not display correctly in Bach font).
4. Open the sample document which came with Bach, and copy the musical symbol you want.  Paste it in the Add New Word box in Bingo Card Creator.  Hit enter.
5. Repeat step 4 until you have the number of musical notes required for the card (25 for 5×5 bingo cards). 
6. Print however many cards you require.  Note that you cannot at this time save a list of musical notes, as it will be corrupted when you attempt to load the list.  This is a limitation of how Bach represents notes internally.

As this process is rather arduous for many teachers to perform, I have made 32 musical note bingo cards myself.  These use the Bach font described above, which is only free for academic and personal use.  Accordingly, please be honest and only use them for academic/personal purposes.  You can download them here in .pdf format. 

For my part, I do not and will not distribute Bach with Bingo Card Creator, and accordingly you will not find the word list used to create this in the Bingo Card Creator download.  If you wish to have musical bingo cards but not quite the ones found here, you can create them yourself using Bingo Card Creator and the above instructions.

I haven’t really spent all that much time on my installer, which is somewhat silly because its the first look people get of my software and I should really want to nail it.  Especially in the consumer market, looks sell software — this is yet another reason why I love my stock icons, as they make my software seem bright and happy, like a Fisher-Price toy.  I just switched from NSIS to Inno Setup for a similar reason.  Here is the very first screen shown by each of the two installers — take a wild guess which is the one I’m going with. 

 vs.

 Ironically, the second one requires two mouseclicks more than the first.  I’ll see if I can’t reduce that by playing with the setup script, since additional mouseclicks are also something I really hate forcing on my customer.