I have my email client set up so that it makes a cash register ‘ka-ching!’ noise every time I make a sale. I found this a real morale booster in the early days of Perfect Table Plan. Even now, several years later and with considerably higher sales volumes, I still haven’t grown tired of it. I particularly enjoy hearing ‘ka-ching!’s coming from my laptop while I am not working – it is wonderful to be able to earn money while drinking a glass of wine in front of the television.
If you are running Mozilla Thunderbird you can set this up quite easily with a message filter and the Mailbox Alert add-on:
- Install the Mailbox Alert add-on.
- Create a Thunderbird message filter to send emails denoting incoming sales to a specific folder (‘Tools’>’Message filters…’).
- Set the Mailbox Alert add-on to play an appropriate sound whenever a new email arrives in this folder (select this folder, then select ‘Tools’>’Mailbox Alert Preferences’).
You shouldn’t have too much problem finding an appropriate .wav file to play. I use C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\MEDIA\CASHREG.WAV.You can also find some online here.
Thank you to whoever wrote Mailbox Alert and to Nick Hebb of FlowBreeze Flowchart software for pointing me at it originally.
Successful Software 
I like your style Andy!
Nice! We happen to use Thunderbird, too. This is a great tip. :)
I did it thanks to you! Great motivator!
Really nice!
So you leave thunberbird open 24/7? That may be too distracting for me personally.
I have the something similar set up in Outlook, and it never gets old. I seem to remember that the founder of Amazon had something similar when it started, but had to remove it eventually as it rang constantly.
What are you going to do once youre selling one every other minute? That ka-ching may distract your development time!
That would be a nice problem to have. ;0)
Here is set of sale sounds exactly for mISV sales :)
http://icons4swrus.com/SaleSounds-v-1.0r.zip
I have done the same thing! Except I’ve set it up on my Android phone using Gmail Label Notifier. Like you say, it’s a huge morale booster, and I get this even when I’m out and about. It means that I’m raring to get stuck in once I get home!