4 ms·

Seems I commented on this last year, so what the heck: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-mont

by patio11 14y ago

Seems I commented on this last year, so what the heck: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month Sales are up by about 40% year-to-date over last year, owing to a combination of increased AdWords spend, organic growth in the business, and a successful redesign (and related conversion optimization) right before summer. Appointment Reminder is doing fairly decently -- monthly recurring revenues (on the publicly available plans) are up about 4x versus the last thread. I've recently gotten some time to actually work on it (my wedding kept me busy for much of the earlier part of this year). My run rate is currently up about 50% since, oh, two months ago? (Why? Interesting question -- re-did pricing, tweaked my marketing knob to "slightly more than zero work", and started getting a wee bit serious about e.g. my use of email to people in their trial period.) The enterprise pipeline, which is not tracked in those figures, is... well, like all enterprise sales operations ever, I cry a lot and dry my tears on stacks of money. Not terribly relevant to folks who like recurring revenue because it feels like avoiding work, since Enterprise Sales is pretty much exactly what work always felt like, but it is work you get to bank in the past and then get a fairly motivational check from monthly for the present and extending into the future. I guess consulting doesn't count as recurring revenue, at least not on my model, so I'll skip it. I'm productizing one of my consulting offerings and should be releasing it later this month -- we'll see if that works out.

cmaxwell 14y ago
patio11 is a god...can't imagine his consulting offerings will fail.
- patio11 14y ago
  While I appreciate the sentiment, I would appreciate it even more if you that that I was impressive for shipping stuff and gradually doing process tweaks targeted at things that actually matter. People jump directly from "X is a god" to "I am mortal, and therefore, cannot be like X." Pretty much all HNers capable of shipping product are equally capable of doing the sort of things I do to tweak those products' success upwards. There's not really any secret sauce or black magic involved, and to the extent that I'm better at it than other folks are, that's largely a function of a) having six years of practice and b) actually using the bag o' tricks. (Most common process failure with A/B testing: not A/B testing. Most common failure mode for lifecycle emails: sending 0 emails. Most common pricing mistake: doing no work on pricing whatsoever. etc, etc)
  - cmaxwell 14y ago
    Now that I have your attention.. my site: http://www.golfingstat.com http://www.golfingstat.com Should I quit it (brokeback style), spend some time making it mobile + setting a annual fee and trying to find the magic adwords amount to grow my userbase without losing money or keep on keeping on (trying to make some ad revenue with my current userbase of 150ish)
    - patio11 14y ago
      I know little about golf. I know a bit more about selling software -- I can tell you, for example, that "Facebook integration" is not a benefit for most people (you mention it prominently like you believe it solves problems, but no golfer wakes up in the morning and goes "You know what was missing from my last golf game? Facebook!"). You're not making economically rational decisions trying to sell ad networ ads against a userbase smaller than X00,000 to X million. (You can have one-off ad deals which are viable much smaller than that, but that gets you into ad sales.) You're probably not going to have success with AdWords unless you can get people to a 3 figure LTV -- "make it mobile" does not strike me as getting you there given what I know about app store economics. But help me on the golf front. Does this solve an actual problem real people actually have in their lives? Have you talked to avid golfers and have gnashed their teeth about how not knowing Average Score By Hole Distance is just crushing their enjoyment of the sport? Are these customers willing to pay for better golf scores, for example because it helps them invite more clients to more golf games and hence close more real estate sales, which is the reason they golf in the first place? Talk to your customers. (Or the people who should be your customers if you were actually charging for this, which -- by the way -- is a great discipline to have from day 1 since it focuses you on reality.) If they're not wildly hair-on-fire enthusiastic about this, I don't know that I would spend lots of time on this when for the same effort of getting you from 150 non-paying users to 300 non-paying users would let you write software people that people would passionately care about.
      - orangethirty 14y ago
        Agreed. He should make sure people actually want to use this, and if not, then just move on. Seems he built the software before testing if there was a market for it. Golfers spend lots of money on the actual game and equipment, though. So maybe he could use this as a channel to sell some golf equipment. Maybe he can test different golf balls and then have the software tell people which to buy from his website. Though this would require more resources to be invested into it.
xjones 14y ago
Patrick, big fan of your writing and projects like most others here. Any new Kalzumeus Podcasts coming down the line? I'd love to see some more posts on Appointment Reminder too. I think many of us could benefit from your insights on selling B2B SaaS products.
- patio11 14y ago
  Any new Kalzumeus Podcasts coming down the line? Yes, we're recording one in next week or so. I think many of us could benefit from your insights on selling B2B SaaS products. If that subject is interesting to you, join my email list, as it seems to get most of what I write on that topic.
cageface 14y ago
I'd like to hear your thoughts about mobile. Everybody seems to be stampeding in that direction right now but you seem to have ignored it so far. Is this a deliberate decision or just a question of sticking to tools/platforms you're more familiar with?
- patio11 14y ago
  I don't love the kingmaking economics of App Store distribution and don't know how to work them to my advantage. Price points for mobile apps are two to three orders of magnitude lower than software I routinely sell. The stores seem to be dominated by design, something that I am not good at. I prefer writing Rails to Java or Objective C. My consulting clients largely sell B2B software, and fairly little of that is currently mobile. That said, there is literally infinite software that I personally will never write. That doesn't necessarily mean I would recommend against HNers looking at those projects either.
  - cageface 14y ago
    Good answer. I've been doing mobile for the last 18 months or so but I'm strongly considering going back to my roots on the web for a lot of the reasons you describe. The lack of insight into user behavior and acquisition is really crippling. It seems to me that people have gotten a little too caught up in the momentum of mobile. Certainly it's a very important and rapidly growing platform but I also think, as you say, there's still plenty of room for viable businesses on the "traditional" web.
    - sycren 14y ago
      Do you feel that there is more value making a desktop web app and making it responsive to work with mobile devices, rather than making a straight mobile app?
      - cageface 14y ago
        I don't feel particularly qualified to answer this question, but my opinion is that these questions should be secondary. The most important thing is identifying your target market and figuring out how to most effectively meet its needs and if you understand that well then that will probably dictate the details of your strategy. What I think is pretty overdone at this point though are approaches that revolve entirely around a mobile app. Unless you're going for an aqui-hire or your potential customers just happen to all be entirely on one mobile platform I'd think twice about betting the farm on an app.

by patio11 14y ago

cmaxwell 14y ago

patio11 is a god...can't imagine his consulting offerings will fail.

patio11 14y ago
While I appreciate the sentiment, I would appreciate it even more if you that that I was impressive for shipping stuff and gradually doing process tweaks targeted at things that actually matter. People jump directly from "X is a god" to "I am mortal, and therefore, cannot be like X." Pretty much all HNers capable of shipping product are equally capable of doing the sort of things I do to tweak those products' success upwards. There's not really any secret sauce or black magic involved, and to the extent that I'm better at it than other folks are, that's largely a function of a) having six years of practice and b) actually using the bag o' tricks. (Most common process failure with A/B testing: not A/B testing. Most common failure mode for lifecycle emails: sending 0 emails. Most common pricing mistake: doing no work on pricing whatsoever. etc, etc)
- cmaxwell 14y ago
  Now that I have your attention.. my site: http://www.golfingstat.com http://www.golfingstat.com Should I quit it (brokeback style), spend some time making it mobile + setting a annual fee and trying to find the magic adwords amount to grow my userbase without losing money or keep on keeping on (trying to make some ad revenue with my current userbase of 150ish)
  - patio11 14y ago
    I know little about golf. I know a bit more about selling software -- I can tell you, for example, that "Facebook integration" is not a benefit for most people (you mention it prominently like you believe it solves problems, but no golfer wakes up in the morning and goes "You know what was missing from my last golf game? Facebook!"). You're not making economically rational decisions trying to sell ad networ ads against a userbase smaller than X00,000 to X million. (You can have one-off ad deals which are viable much smaller than that, but that gets you into ad sales.) You're probably not going to have success with AdWords unless you can get people to a 3 figure LTV -- "make it mobile" does not strike me as getting you there given what I know about app store economics. But help me on the golf front. Does this solve an actual problem real people actually have in their lives? Have you talked to avid golfers and have gnashed their teeth about how not knowing Average Score By Hole Distance is just crushing their enjoyment of the sport? Are these customers willing to pay for better golf scores, for example because it helps them invite more clients to more golf games and hence close more real estate sales, which is the reason they golf in the first place? Talk to your customers. (Or the people who should be your customers if you were actually charging for this, which -- by the way -- is a great discipline to have from day 1 since it focuses you on reality.) If they're not wildly hair-on-fire enthusiastic about this, I don't know that I would spend lots of time on this when for the same effort of getting you from 150 non-paying users to 300 non-paying users would let you write software people that people would passionately care about.
    - orangethirty 14y ago
      Agreed. He should make sure people actually want to use this, and if not, then just move on. Seems he built the software before testing if there was a market for it. Golfers spend lots of money on the actual game and equipment, though. So maybe he could use this as a channel to sell some golf equipment. Maybe he can test different golf balls and then have the software tell people which to buy from his website. Though this would require more resources to be invested into it.

xjones 14y ago

Patrick, big fan of your writing and projects like most others here. Any new Kalzumeus Podcasts coming down the line? I'd love to see some more posts on Appointment Reminder too. I think many of us could benefit from your insights on selling B2B SaaS products.

patio11 14y ago
Any new Kalzumeus Podcasts coming down the line? Yes, we're recording one in next week or so. I think many of us could benefit from your insights on selling B2B SaaS products. If that subject is interesting to you, join my email list, as it seems to get most of what I write on that topic.

cageface 14y ago

I'd like to hear your thoughts about mobile. Everybody seems to be stampeding in that direction right now but you seem to have ignored it so far. Is this a deliberate decision or just a question of sticking to tools/platforms you're more familiar with?

patio11 14y ago
I don't love the kingmaking economics of App Store distribution and don't know how to work them to my advantage. Price points for mobile apps are two to three orders of magnitude lower than software I routinely sell. The stores seem to be dominated by design, something that I am not good at. I prefer writing Rails to Java or Objective C. My consulting clients largely sell B2B software, and fairly little of that is currently mobile. That said, there is literally infinite software that I personally will never write. That doesn't necessarily mean I would recommend against HNers looking at those projects either.
- cageface 14y ago
  Good answer. I've been doing mobile for the last 18 months or so but I'm strongly considering going back to my roots on the web for a lot of the reasons you describe. The lack of insight into user behavior and acquisition is really crippling. It seems to me that people have gotten a little too caught up in the momentum of mobile. Certainly it's a very important and rapidly growing platform but I also think, as you say, there's still plenty of room for viable businesses on the "traditional" web.
  - sycren 14y ago
    Do you feel that there is more value making a desktop web app and making it responsive to work with mobile devices, rather than making a straight mobile app?
    - cageface 14y ago
      I don't feel particularly qualified to answer this question, but my opinion is that these questions should be secondary. The most important thing is identifying your target market and figuring out how to most effectively meet its needs and if you understand that well then that will probably dictate the details of your strategy. What I think is pretty overdone at this point though are approaches that revolve entirely around a mobile app. Unless you're going for an aqui-hire or your potential customers just happen to all be entirely on one mobile platform I'd think twice about betting the farm on an app.