Kalzumeus Software

(Actually, the person I learned that from said “Third time is enemy action”. But thats neither here nor there.)

Recently, I’ve had a number of customers who have had some difficulty with receiving their registration keys, which are automatically emailed to them when they complete the transaction. The page they are redirected to states this pretty clearly, and also states what they’ll need to do in case they don’t receive the email (contact support@ etc). I had been expecting to deal with one or two of these mails a month. My first arrived two weeks ago.

Then I got another this week, only when I attempted to respond to it my @bingocardcreator.com address got bounced by an incredibly restrictive school district spammed firewall (505 — “This message will be archived and *may* be presented to the recipient”, surely one of the least informative error messages of all time). I ended up having to use my @college.edu account to try to ensure delivery of the registration key she hadn’t gotten. Strike two.

Then today, I woke up to You’ve Got Money (1 sale on a Saturday is a very good Saturday given my target market) and… wait a minute, didn’t this gentleman already purchase from me? A quick check of paypal records said, yep, he had bought Bingo Card Creator from a different email address 48 hours ago. I can imagine a couple of reasons for doing that: the first is being conscientious about licensing and needing a new copy for whatever purpose, the second is “Maybe my transaction didn’t go through, I never got that email with my code”. Thats obviously a critical event for me to catch because if I don’t I’ll be humming along happily to myself until about a month from now and then BLAMMO double chargeback to my Paypal account. So I sent him an email asking which of the two it was.

If its the first one, I’m going to retroactively credit him $6 because I do have a purchasing-in-bulk discount. (If this ever happens to you, trust me on this, aside from being the right thing to do this is the right call from a business perspective. Every additional copy of my software sold is free money. A customer who has already demonstrated their willingness to purchase *two* copies from you, on different days no less, has a huge likelihood to purchase a third, which will pay for that $6 discount 3 times over. And the jawdroppingly excellent customer service you’ve just provided them makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside and likely to drive a fourth, fifth, seventy-second purchase along your way.)

So in any case I want to rely less on the automated email reaching my customers, which means displaying their registration key inline in my website. This is going to actually take some web programming, which I hate with a burning passion (Perl still gives me hives). But I feel that over the long-run it will decrease customer discomfort and save me time supporting stuff that has nothing to do with the quality of my product.

End result of the Bits du Jour promotion: 2 sales, which was exactly what I had been expecting. Ahh well, I am a wee bit niche, after all. I also had 5 sales from “regular” customers on the same day, which is an all time record, and I’m not sure some of them weren’t caused by a) downloading my executable straight from Bits du Jour b) using the purchase now button within the executable and c) neglecting to notice the fact they were getting charged $24.95 instead of $14.95.
I’m going to give it a day or two for Google Analytics to catch up with all the conversions (its been crazy slow this week for me) and then decide whether to credit all the ones I don’t have a positive identification of the source for or just credit them all.

Oh, incidentally, I got perhaps 60 hits from Bits du Jour during the promotion. For those of you who sell a somewhat less niche product, Bits du Jour could potentially make you a nice bit of money.

Wow, the pressure of getting through a deadline at work this week made me completely forget: its now (barely) Friday in America and that means the Bits Du Jour promotion will be going on today!  (I talked about how I ended up saying yes to this promotion after an e-mail out of the clear blue sky several weeks ago.)  I was reminded of this by a sudden anomalous order in my mailbox — who orders Bingo Card Creator at 2 AM in the morning local time?  Apparently, someone who saw the 40% discount and just said “I gotta have it!”

I think Ellen did an absolutely superb job of writing the advertising copy.  She originally started with what I had on my website as a base, then made a slight addition at my suggestion, and then went on to “embrace and extend” my market to places where I hadn’t even considered it would be useful (and where it might not have been useful at $24.95, but was swingable at $14.95 — yay for smart market segmentation).

Let me take the liberty of reproducing this copy here since I guess its probably going to vanish into the ether after today is over.  Its, as I said, excellent (if a little more aggressive about getting the sale than I would be — then again, I guess that makes sense with the time-sensitive format).  I had originally been expecting about 2 sales but given that I got one of them at 3 AM in the morning I’m thinking Bits Du Jour is going to significantly outperform my expectations.  Its a pity I don’t have a bit wider of a niche, but for folks who do I recommend taking a half an hour one day and seeing whether you and Ellen can’t come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.  I’m always willing to take total losses on 30 minute experiments.

Check back tomorrow for the gory details of how many copies were sold exactly.  Maybe I’ll even make a chart — I’m very interested in whether these customers are going to look like my normal customers (teachers generally buy on their lunchbreak, shortly after school ends when planning lessons for the next day, or between the hours of 9 and 11 pm at night which I think is shorthand for “after I have put the kids to sleep”) or not.

Roll Your Own Bingo Cards

Bingo Card Creator

Regular price: $24.95
Bits du Jour Today Only price: $14.95
You save: 40%

If you’re a teacher – especially if you’re teaching younger children, or if you’re teaching a language – you’ve probably used Bingo playing as a great teaching aid.

But if you’ve ever tried making your own cards, you know how tedious it is. And if you’ve tried buying cards, you undoubtedly haven’t been able to find all the cards you wanted, or haven’t wanted to buy a whole set just for a limited-time use.

But you don’t have to be a teacher to enjoy this great program. If you’re a parent, you’re probably always on the lookout for a good game to play with your kids. But how great would it be if you had a game specifically tailored to their interests, or to recent vacations or upcoming activities? And daycare providers, retirement community workers and other professionals can almost always use a fun, personalized activity for their groups.

Bingo Card Creator lets you easily make and print your own Bingo cards.

• Save time: Print Bingo cards for your entire classroom with your own computer and printer in mere minutes. Writing cards by hand takes hours. Let your PC do the tedious work for you.
• Save money: Why spend $10-$15 on buying single activity sets from traditional publishers, when you can make an infinite number of your own.
• Tailor your activities: There’s no need to limit yourself to stock Bingo card sets. Make your own cards, matched exactly to your lesson plan and your students. Teaching math? Make cards where the numbers are the answers to the questions you’re asking. There’s no limit to what you can do.
• Keep their interest: What’s harder than competing with TV and computers for your students’ – or childrens’ – interest? But what about animal Bingo right after a trip to the zoo? Or landmark Bingo for that upcoming road trip? Or Christmas Bingo for that long week before the holidays?
• Teach any subject: If you can type it on your computer, you can put it on a Bingo card. Answers to questions, vocabulary lists, translations, math facts, social studies facts, student names (great for first day jitters), famous people — the choices are unlimited.
• Not just for parents and teachers: Use Bingo cards in retirement communities, at parites, or for corporate events. Read sample uses.

Who Needs Bingo Card Creator?

• Teachers – It’s a great tool for teaching young children, languages (including ESL), and even older ages. You don’t have to call out words on the cards; you can have the answers to questions, translated words, or even class members’ names.
• Parents – Do your kids get bored in the car, or shopping? Make cards they can fill in during trips and events. And make your own party game cards for birthday or other parties. Play Harry Potter Bingo, SpongeBob Squarepants Bingo or BratzBingo!
• Daycare Providers – Here’s an activity you can do with a whole group, but tailored to their specific interests, the time of year, or anything else you think of.
• Retirement Center or Group Home Workers – A Bingo Card Creator customer who works in a retirement community wrote that the residents are “absolutely thrilled to be able to play a brand new game of bingo every week”.
• Corporate Event Coordinators – Get people introducing themselves quickly with Bingo Cards with attendees’ names. Or keep them paying attention in sessions with “Buzzword Bingo”.

I just got an idea for it yesterday and I’m quite excited, although I still have some design and thought to do before I greenlight the project.  Ah, its nice being my own boss.  As opposed to Bingo Card Creator is, well, radically different in just about every way.

Its much more ambitious than Bingo Card Creator, and would probably take 2+ months of development if I go ahead and do it — likely more, as there is no possible way I can or would do the “full time job on top of a full time job” deathmarch for that long (it nearly hospitalized me the first time).  The budget is still hyper-low, since I get to reuse a lot of what I learned on (and bought for) Bingo Card Creator: I think I can do this for probably $500 for the first 6 months.

This is aimed at a much less price-sensitive customer (although its primarily B2C rather than B2B, although some of my prospects are chucking around close to $500,000), and the target user belongs to a community of 4,000 which is currently experincing a Web 2.0-type growth curve, so I’m guessing by the time I start writing there will be 10,000 prospects or thereabouts.  I’d probably start writing in January, since I’ve got a major ongoing time commitment between now and December (I’m going to get JLPT level 1 this year or perish in the attempt*).

Speaking of Web 2.0, this application screams “Make part of me a web service and charge by the month”, so I’ll probably release a couple of versions targetting various segments within the community: free forever, freemium (free trial for paid version), premium, and premium + subscription.

If course, given that I’d be scarily dependent on a third-party not totally wrecking me by either a) failing or b) radically altering their own software/business to eliminate the pains I’m going to solve, this might not exactly be a sedate experience.  Ah well, its so fun breaking out ye olde project management package (I’m a big fan of Paper v1.0) and sketching out some specs.

Maybe I’ll do this one in Visual C# .NET.  It would be great to add another skill to the list before I go back on the job market at the end of my current contract.

* Explanatory note for the peanut gallery: JLPT stands for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.  I already have a sufficient oral skill and certifications of oral skill to work pretty much anywhere I darn well please, but I’m functionally illiterate.  I can get myself around a train system, buy a cellphone, navigate Visual Studio, and understand a letter from the apartment super about the water being off on Wednesday… but a memo about the recent accounting scandal in my prefecture might as well be written in Ancient Greek.  (At least I think it was about the accounting scandal… might have been someone’s favorite cookie recipe.)  Note only do I really, really hate it when I get a memo passed around the office and actually have to look at the individual words to understand the meaning (try to recall what it was like for you reading when you were 7 and had to sound out words like “dif, diffy, difficult — what does difficult mean, Mommy?”, now try imagine doing the same as a grown professional in real time with the boss standing over your shoulder), but it will greatly increase my chances that my next job will be one I really enjoy.

Anyhow, the JLPT comes in four flavors, level 4 (“I can order a beer”) through level 1 (“I can read Kirin’s annual shareholder guidance and scoff at their inadequate protection against currency fluctuations”).  Currently, I hold the level 2 certification (“I can tell a hostess that I can’t order a beer because a hereditary condition would make that potentially fatal”
).

Its actually going out right now (go go gadget Robosoft!  I love not having to submit to half a zillion places by myself)

New features of note:

• Mac version (side note: make one PAD file for Windows, one for Mac.  It will make submitting with Robosoft a lot easier for you.  Trust me on this.)
• Beautiful new look and feel courtesy of stock icons
• Word wrap within cells
• Font family and size are now selectable
• Ability to center a single card on the page (Remember Sally?  She asked for this.  What Sally wants, Sally gets.)
• A few minor bug fixes (all display related).

If you want to try out Bingo Card Creator 1.04 why don’t you mosey on over to my website or check your favorite download site over the next couple of days.

Proving once again that encryption/hashing by itself will not make your system secure.

A customer convinced me to throw another one on the barbie, as it were.  Here’s whats coming in version 1.04.

• A fresh new look (stock icons and changing the preview card to more accurately reflect the actual printed card).
• Choice of fonts.
• Choice of word wrap (or not).
• Choice of where to position the printed card on the page (not sure this will make it in).
• Printing calling cards.
• Column headings (Doubtful that this will make it in in time but we’ll see.)
• Card titles (Doubtful that this will make it in in time but we’ll see.)
• Some minor improvements under the hood.

One of the features on this list took 4 solid hours to implement.  Another took 5 minutes.  Any guesses which was which?