I launched my product a year ago, but so far haven’t had much luck selling it. I desperately needed advice from a person that could take a look at my situation and help figure out what’s wrong and how to move on. Andy Brice has been through all this and knew exactly what I was struggling with.
Simon Strandgaard, www.GraphicDesignerToolbox.com
GraphicDesignerToolbox is a Mac OS X application for creating computer generated graphics. It allows users to snap together generative and filter blocks to create a vast range of different types of images, without any drawing or programming. It is an impressively slick and well engineered piece of software. But sales were unsatisfactory. I did some consulting for the author, Simon Strandgaard, focussed on improving the marketing and the user’s initial experience of the product. As a result he has made a lot of changes, including:
- Re-thought the product positioning, marketing message and target customer.
- Renamed the application to GraphicDesignerToolbox (from the less descriptive ToolboxApp).
- Moved the website from ToolboxApp.com to GraphicDesignerToolbox.com.
- Commissioned a new application icon.
- Completely rewritten the website.
- Improved the initial user experience with a quick tour and easy to load samples.
- Improved the product documentation.
- Changed the trial model.
- Increased the price.
- Released version 1.0.
You can see captures of old and new versions of the website below:
Old home page - click to enlarge
New home page - click to enlarge
It is has been very rewarding to see the product and marketing improve so much in just three months. Especially as someone else was doing all the hard work! I think the changes are a huge improvement all round and I wish Simon and GraphicDesignerToolbox every success. v1.0 was released today and Simon tells me he has sold as many licences today as in the previous 5 months.
If you have a Mac you can head over to GraphicDesignerToolbox.com and download the trial.
Successful Software 
Looks much cleaner, I can believe the new design sells better.
Well done Simon!
As a MicroISV, we were in the same position as you a number of years ago – too many things we wanted to try to improve sales, not enough time to try them and not enough experience to know how to prioritise the list of possible things to do!
We went through a similar process as what it sounds like you’ve been through and things started looking up…
What we did after that was something that really turned our life around and made the business grow exponentially…
We hired a good (at the time) search engine expert. Now, because our product had a very specific use (PDF conversion of documents), our expert created a targeted campaign of optimizations and articles etc for marketing. It took about a month to implement (I think it cost around US$500 from memory).
Boy was it worth it – sales really shot up in the following month and continued to double almost every month for about 8 months until they naturally reached a plateau and stayed there for about 2 years.
What was great (as a really small business) was that we were able to focus on the software and business from there and stop worrying about how we were going to put food on the table.
I’m not 100% sure this would be as easy now because the search engine market is more competitive – but it seems like you have a great product and it has a clearly defined niche. I’d recommend you have a good look at it and hopefully it’d have successful results for you to.
Thank you Andy for this great article. Its a pleasure working with you. With you help im now heading in the right direction. Soo happy.
@Mike yeah, spreading the word takes away precious time that could have beens spend on programming. A thing that I believed was evil until recently. I wish I had people to do the whole communication part with future customers, so I could code. I can’t possible master all these skills, but it never hurts learning something new.
Give me the choice between a SEO expert and Andy Brick.. and I will pick Andy :-)
Simon,
I was glad to help. It was very rewarding to see how far you have come since then.
Congrat’s to Simon on both the app and the improvements paying off.
Congrat’s Andy on posting the results of a positive experience. It’s nice to see some good news first thing in the morning – not everything is doom and gloom.
Best wishes to both of you.
What was the price before the changes?
@kcw, first it was supposed to be sold at a price of 10 EUR. but when I started selling it in early 2008 I chose 20 EUR. Now the price is 30 EUR. Dunno if I will change the price again and what it should be.
how cost before change ?
@صور و معلومات: the price was 20 EUR before the change. Now it’s 30 EUR. CNet cannot figure out that my price is in EUR, and list it as USD. I’m considering switching to USD since the exchange rate is going up/down a lot lately.