My seating planner software, PerfectTablePlan, is now at v7. Major upgrades are paid (discounted 60% compared to new licences), which means I have done 6 cycles of paid upgrades. I was curious about how long it took people to upgrade, and what percentage of sales are upgrades. So I took a few minutes to crunch the numbers direct from my licence key database, using my data wrangling software, Easy Data Transform.
Here are the number of upgrade licences I sold for each week after the major upgrade. Each release is in a different colour. The values are normalised so that the peak is the same height for each release:
Upgrade licences sold per week after a major upgrade, across 6 upgrades
That looks rather messy. So here it is with the values for the 6 upgrades summed:
Upgrade licences sold per week after a major upgrade, summed across 6 upgrades.
There is a long tail of upgrades. Even when the gap between releases was 6 years, I was still getting regular upgrade purchases.
With the v5 to v6 upgrade it took:
23 weeks before 50% of the upgrades were sold.
74 weeks before 75% of the upgrades were sold.
So it isn’t a neat exponential decay.
This table shows how many users actually upgraded from v5 to v6:
Edition
Upgraded
Home edition
12%
Advanced edition
31%
Professional edition
45%
Most of the Home edition purchasers are buying a licence for a one-off event, such as a wedding. So it is not surprising that they are much less likely to upgrade. But I think it also shows that less price-sensitive customers are significantly more likely to upgrade, even when the upgrade is more expensive.
This graph show the percentage of PerfectTablePlan licences sold each month that were upgrades, over the 20 year life of the product:
Percentage of sales that are upgrades per month.
You can see that upgrades are still increasingly important over time. Upgrades are worth less than new sales, so selling 80% upgrade licences in a month doesn’t mean 80% of revenue is from upgrades. However, upgrades are still an increasingly significant source of revenue for us. I’m glad I never agree to free upgrades for life.
Could I have made more sales with more frequent major upgrades? Definitely. But I was also working on other projects. And I am not out to squeeze every last penny out of my loyal customers.
Could I have made more sales with a subscription model? Possibly. But subscriptions weren’t really a thing for desktop software, when I started 20 years ago. And I never felt like making a major change to a licensing model that had worked well for me, so far.
I am always on the lookout for cost and time effective ways that I can market my software products. Previously, I have had quite a lot of success with Google Adwords Pay Per Click ads. However, the law of shitty clickthroughs means that advertising platforms generally get less and less profitable (for the advertisers) over time. And Google Adwords is a case study of that law in action. As Reddit is a less mature advertising platform, I thought it might still offer opportunities for a decent return. So I decided to experiment with advertising my data munging software, Easy Data Transform, on Reddit.
[By the way, I understand that nobody goes to Reddit because they want to see ads. But commercial products need to market themselves to survive, and Reddit probably wouldn’t exist without ads. Yay capitalism.]
Setup
The basic process to get started with Reddit Ads is:
Sign up for a Reddit Ads account.
Enter your details and credit card number.
Create a campaign.
Create one or more ad groups for your campaign. Choose a bid for each ad group, which countries you want it shown in and who you want it shown to.
Create one or more ads for each group.
Add the Reddit tracking pixel to every page of your website.
Set up conversion goals.
All pretty standard stuff for anyone who has used Google Adwords. The twist with Reddit is that you can advertise to communities (sub-Reddits), rather than based on search keywords. For example, Easy Data Transform is a much better tool for most data wrangling tasks than Excel, so I can bid to show ads targeted at Excel users in communities such as: reddit.com/r/excel/ and reddit.com/r/ExcelTips/.
Like Adwords, there are various ways to bid. I don’t want the advertising platform to set the bid prices for me (because I’m not insane), so I opted for fixed price bids of between $0.20 and $0.40 per click. Some of the ad groups suggested much higher bids than that. For example, the suggested bid for my Excel ad group is $0.79 to $4.79 per click!
However, Easy Data Transform is only a one time payment of $99. Paying more than $0.40 per click is unlikely to be profitable for me, especially when you factor in support costs. So that is the maximum I was prepared to bid. Also, the suggested bids are just the ad platform trying to push up the bid price. Something that anyone who has used Google Adwords will be all too familiar with. I was still able to get clicks, bidding significantly less than the recommended minimum.
I also set a daily maximum for each ad group, just in case I had messed up and added a zero in a bid somewhere.
I created multiple ads for each ad group, with a range of different text and images specific to the communities targeted. Here are some of the ones I ran in the Excel ad group:
I didn’t try to use edgy images or memes, because that isn’t really my style. There is an option to turn comments on below ads. As Reddit users are generally not well-disposed to ads, I didn’t try turning this on.
Based on hard-won experience with Google Adwords, I only set my ads to run in wealthy countries. I also restricted my ads to people on desktop devices as Easy Data Transform only runs on the desktop.
When Easy Data Transform is installed, it opens a page on my website with some instructions. So I used this to set up the Reddit conversion tracking to count the number of times a click ended up with a successful install of either the Windows or Mac version of Easy Data Transform.
I monitored the performance of the ads and disabled those that has poor click through or conversion rates and made variants of the more successful ones. Darwinian evolution for ads. I ended up creating 70 ads across 15 ad groups, targeting 50 communities.
I wasted an hour trying to get Reddit to recognize that I had installed their tracking pixel. But, overall, I found the Reddit Ads relatively simple to setup and monitor. Especially compared to the byzantine monstrosity that Google Adwords has become.
Reddit advertises a deal where you can get $500 of free ads.
But the link was broken when I clicked on it. Someone else I spoke to said they had tried to find out more, but gave up when they found out you had to have a phone call with a sales person at Reddit.
Results
I ran my experiment from 08-Jul-2025 to 31-Jul-2025. These are the stats, according to reddit.
Spend
$851.04
Impressions
490,478
Clicks
3,585
Windows installs
177
Mac installs
63
Total installs
240
Click Through Rate
0.73%
Cost Per Click
$0.24
Click to install conversion rate
6.59%
Cost Per Install
$3.55
I generally reckon that somewhere around 10% of people who install are going on to buy. So $3.55 per install would mean around $35.50 cost per sale, which is reasonable for a $99 sale. So that all looks quite encouraging.
But, comparing the Reddit number to the numbers I get from Google Analytics and my web logs, I think the Reddit numbers are dubious. At best. In a week when Reddit says it sent me 1174 clicks, Google Analytics says I received 590 referrals from Reddit and my web log says I received 639 referrals from Reddit. Some of the difference may be due to comparing sessions with clicks, time zones etc. But it looks fishy.
The discrepancy is even greater if you look at conversions. The total installs per week reported by Google Analytics and my web logs didn’t go up anything like you would expect from looking at the Reddit conversion numbers. If you dig a bit further, you find that Reddit uses ‘modeled conversions‘ to:
“Gain a more complete view of your ads performance with modeled conversions, which leverages machine learning to bridge attribution gaps caused by signal loss.”
Uh huh. Sounds suspiciously like ‘making shit up’.
And then there are the sales. Or lack of. I don’t have detailed tracking of exactly where every sale comes from. But I estimate that my $851 outlay on ads resulted in between $0 and $400 in additional sales. Which is not good, given that I don’t have VC money to burn. Especially when you factor in the time taken to run this experiment.
The top 5 countries for spend were:
Italy
Spain
France
Germany
Singapore
The US only accounted for 0.28% of impressions, 13 clicks and $3.81 in spend. Presumably because the US market is more competitive, and I wasn’t bidding enough to get my ads shown.
You can look at various breakdowns by country, community, device etc. This is helpful. But some of the breakdowns make no sense. For example, it says that 41% of the click throughs from people reading Mac-related communities were from Windows PCs. That sounds very unlikely!
But the worst is still to come. Feast your eyes on this Google Analytics data from my website:
Average engaged time per active user (seconds)
Engaged sessions per active user
Google / organic
33
0.75
Successfulsoftware.net / referral
31
0.74
Youtube.com / referral
27
0.86
Chatgpt.com / referral
24
0.69
Google / CPC
16
0.65
Reddit / referral
8
0.25
8 seconds! That is the mean, not the median. Yikes. And 75% of the sessions didn’t result in any meaningful engagement. This makes me wonder if the majority of the Reddit clicks are accidental.
I had intended to spend $1000 on this experiment, but the results were sufficiently horrible that I stopped before then.
If I had spent a lot of time tweaking the ad images and text, landing pages, communities and countries, then I could probably have improved things a bit. But I doubt I could ever get a worthwhile return on my time and money.
If the lifetime value of a sale is a lot more than $99 for you, or your product is a good fit for Reddit, then Reddit Ads might be worth trying. But be sure not to take any Reddit numbers at face value.
I develop a data wrangling tool, Easy Data Transform. It not really a ‘data extraction service’. Also, they are implying that they will put you in the top 5 for whatever category you want. If you pay, presumably. Sounds sketchy. I decided to email them back, to find out a bit more.
I got a long reply. But the key bits are:
So basically ‘Top 5’ is actually ‘Top 5 most willing to pay’. Ugh. I feel dirty just reading the email.
Bear this in mind next time you see a ‘Top X of Y’ article. They may not all be pay-to-play. But I suspect a lot of them are.
And it only took me 18 years! I know some people wouldn’t get out of bed for 3 million views, but that isn’t going to stop me bragging about it.
I haven’t really done much to promote the blog, apart from occasionally posting links to Hacker News.
The yearly hits have gone down over time. Mostly because I have been writing less often. These days I have 3 products to keep me busy. But also blogs are less of a ‘thing’ than they used to be.
Here are the 20 most visited posts:
Probably the high point for the blog was the software awards scam post getting a mention in the Guardian newspaper.
Power laws are very much in evidence, with the top 1% of the posts accounting for 18% of the hits. I have been consistently wrong in guessing which posts would be popular.
Was all that effort, writing articles worth 35k (of untargetted) clicks throughs to my PerfectTablePlan website? Probably not directly. Even when people did click through to my product websites, the engagement was often very low. But I am guessing that the improved domain authority from links to my seating plan software website has been helpful in improving search rank (see what I did there?). Promoting my products was never the only aim of the blog anyway.
Some posts I have written were mostly notes to my future self. And there have been several cases where Googling for an answer sent me to an article on my own blog that I had fogotten having written.
I have accepted a few guest posts. But I have been extremely picky about which guest posts to accept. I have also turned down plenty of offers for paid links.
Here is where the traffic came from, by source:
I was quite suprised by how much traffic has come from stumbleupon.com.
Digg.com, remember them?
Google completely dominates the search engine results, with Bing managing a pitiful 2.6% of search engine hits. Presumably from people too lazy or ‘non technical’ to change their Windows defaults.
Here is the traffic, by country:
Very little traffic came from Africa, South America or Asia:
Of course, it is hard to know how much of the traffic is humans and how much is bots.
There have been some 37k non-spam comments:
Quite a lot of the comments are responses by me. I have also learnt a lot of useful stuff through feedback on the blog and discussions, when links were posted to places like Hacker News. But the number of comments on the blog has markedly decreased, even taking account of the overall decrease in traffic. On the plus side, I have a lot less comment spam to deal with. It was quite overwhelming at one point. This is a comment from the blog in 2008:
I have given up looking through the spam logs. There is just too much of it and one can only read so many spam comments about Viagra and bestiality without becoming profoundly depressed about the human condition.
Thankfully WordPress seem to have greatly upped their game on spam detection since then.
Here is the top 20 sites where the traffic went:
The ‘social capital’ from the blog has been useful for promoting my consulting services and the training course I ran. Also for promoting various charitable and other causes I felt worthwhile.
I have a vague idea that I might, one day, write a book about starting a small software company. If I do, I will certainly mine the blog for material.
PS/ No, tiresome ‘SEO experts’, I still don’t want to put your boring, crappy guest post ‘articles’ with their dodgy links on my blog. So please don’t waste both our time by asking.
This is a guest post from fellow software developer, Simon Kravis.
It’s sometimes said that software development is only 10% of what’s required to earn money from software and I can attest to that. Since 2018 I have been developing photo captioning and related software, more as a retirement diversion than a serious source of income (after a career mostly involved in writing scientific and engineering analysis software), in the hope that sales income would at least cover running costs. My best marketing tool has been writing reviews of the class of software that I produce, and the hosting site (Hub Pages) provides some useful analytics on how often these are accessed and for how long. Below is the graph for an article on tagging.
The decline since early 2022 is hard to explain – the article is periodically updated so the steady decline is not due to diminishing ‘freshness’ – which for Google is probably a file Modified date.
Here is another review article profile (Scanning Multiple Photos) showing a similar decline:
But another (Best Photo Captioning Software) has held up, though at a low level.
I offer digital photo captioning software (Caption Pro) on Windows and Mac platforms, and an iPhone captioning app (CaptionEdit), with the Windows version dating back to 2017. I also offer part of the functionality of Caption Pro on Windows for auto-cropping scans of multiple paper photos (ImageSplit). On Windows neither Caption Pro software downloads or sales seem to correlate with review accesses, despite about 1/3 of web site accesses coming from the review. However, downloads do show some correlation with Caption Pro web site sessions, as shown in the graph below.
Sales do not correlate with downloads, which perhaps explains why most advertising for niche products is not successful – it may increase downloads but this does not appear to increase sales. The observed proportion of downloads resulting in sales for ImageSplit and Caption Pro are 6% and 9% respectively. The lack of correlation between sales and downloads may be due to the small number of sales per month, which results in random fluctuation dominating the results.
The decision to enter the Apple “Walled Garden” of software was partly at the prompting of friends rather than a commercial evaluation. Apple Developer membership (costing ~US$100 per year) is required to prevent software being blocked from installation through being from an unknown publisher. Further costs were purchasing a fairly modern Mac on which to perform development, as the App Store will only accept software developed using recent versions of the Xcode development environment, which will only run on fairly recent hardware. The App Store takes a commission of 15% on sales, which is quite reasonable when compared to the difficulty of implementing e-commerce on Windows, where a PayPal account eases the problem of low-value foreign-currency transactions, but e-commerce plug-ins may stop working after years for no discernible reason. The review process for software acceptance into the App Store is generally fast, but seemly trivial issues can require resubmission. Features which have passed one review may be rejected in a later one. The review process is generally fast, but on one occasion took 4 weeks.
Caption Pro for Mac has been available (via the App Store) only since Sep 2021.It appears within the top 6 results for a search using “Caption Photos”, which is the source for most downloads. About 3.5% of downloads result in sales. This figure is much less than the Windows version of the same app, despite Mac users’ reputation for being more willing to pay for software. The iPhone app did not appear at all initially when searching for “Caption Photos” in the App Store. After 6 months it began appearing as result number 140, after it had 360 downloads. This poor ranking performance is probably because “Caption Photos” is a very popular keyword used by many apps, including those that only caption videos. It has had very few downloads and sales, despite Apple Search Ads and Apptimizer campaigns. The number of downloads increased dramatically during the Apptimizer campaign between Jan 24 and Feb 2 (as they were purchased) but the change in ranking from these downloads did not result in any sales, perhaps because no installs were purchased. The Apple search ads campaign (which resulted in the app being shown as an ad 1 in 50 times when the search phrase “Caption Photos” was used) did not greatly affect downloads or sales. A Facebook ad campaign to show a link to the app whenever “Genealogy” or “Genealogy Software” was searched for was also unsuccessful, and very expensive, as Facebook charges by impressions rather than clicks. Additional backlinks to the web site were purchased in September 2022 from Links Management in an attempt to improve the web site Google ranking, but this did not appear to have any effect on web traffic.
Mac and Windows users contacting me with problems have had a wide range of experience level – from completely naïve to former programmers. Most have been from the US, which reflects the geographic distribution of sales. There have many downloads to non-English speaking countries but very few sales.
Some results from the Mac and iPhone Apps are shown below:
On balance, developing for Apple platforms was not a good commercial decision, as the advantages of a mostly captive audience (completely captive in the case of the iPhone) do not seem to result in higher rates of downloads or sales. Competition for iPhone apps is so intense that niche products without massive advertising budgets are unlikely to succeed. The same is likely to apply to Android phone apps, which anecdotally have a less rigorous review process. My experience is that advertising and backlink purchase for any platform are not effective in increasing sales for niche software.
Simon Kravis runs Aleka Consulting, a small software and consultancy company in Canberra, Australia specializing in information management and offering a number of software products. He has mainly developed scientific and engineering programs, starting in the era of paper tape.
Back in 2011 I created eventcountdown.com. It had a snazzy downloadable, PerfectTablePlan-branded countdown clock for Windows and web-based countdown clock with ads for PerfectTablePlan. Both free. The idea was people searching for countdown clocks for events (such as their wedding) would find the site via Google, find out about PerfectTablePlan and a certain percentage would then buy my event seating planner software.
I paid other people to create the Windows and web versions of the countdown clock. The web-based clock was updated from time to time to add pre-built countdowns for events like superbowl, the olympics, christmas, thanksgiving etc. And I fielded the occasional support emails related to the Windows countdown clock.
This is the total traffic to the site from 2011 to 2023:
The peaks are mostly due to superbowl. The site got 38k hits in a single day just before superbowl 2019! The free Windows countdown clock also drew quite a lot of traffic. In total the site got some 1.7 million page views over 12 years. Only a small percentage of these visitors clicked through to PerfectTablePlan.com, but still a useful number. Perhaps some people were also prompted to investigate PerfectTablePlan by the branding on the downloadable clock. The site might have also had some SEO benefits for PerfectTablePlan.com. Who knows.
The eventcountdown.com website is now gone (the domain redirects to PerfectTablePlan.com). It didn’t seem worth the effort to keep adding events to the web countdown clock with the traffic now so low. Also both the website and windows clock were looking dated. But I think it was a worthwhile investment of my time and money.
I have also created various other contents pages and mini-sites over the years: articles on table planning, font collections, free clipart, place card templates etc. You can see similar trajectories for some of those.
The traffic seems to reach a peak after 3-7 years and then slowly decay away. Although I have shown them with the same vertical scale here, some generated a lot more traffic than others.
I did some basic on-page SEO for these content pages. For example, looking at Adwords keyword data to choose the page title and H1. But nothing beyond that. No paid promotion or backlink building campaigns.
I tried paying people to write articles related to events. But none of these ever generated any worthwhile traffic. Google could somehow smell the insincerity.
For my data cleaning software product I have been concentrating on ‘how to’ pages and supporting videos aimed at specific topics. These are intended to both help existing customers and to attract new traffic. For example, how to clean data. I have also been posting these videos on the Easy Data Transform YouTube channel. The numbers of hits monthly on the Youtube videos are relatively low, but they are quite targeted and hopefully will be generating traffic for years to come.
So content marketing take-aways based on my experience are:
Free content can be a useful way to bring free traffic to your website.
The amount of traffic you get is quite hit and miss. Some content has generated a lot more traffic than expected, some a lot less.
The content needs to be well targeted if you want to have any chance of converting it to sales.
Google will grow bored of it eventually. You might be able to increase the longevity by updating the content. I’ve not been very diligent with this, but even neglected content pages can generate useful traffic over 10+ year lifespan.
Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan Professional edition are both on sale for 25% off at Winterfest 2022. So now might be a good time to give them a try (both have free trials). There is also some other great products from other small vendors on sale, including Tinderbox, Scrivener and Devonthink. Some of the software is Mac only, but Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan are available for both Mac and Windows (one license covers both OSs).
This is a guest post from serial software entrepreneur Dennis Gurock.
Thinking about product positioning (and matching branding) is especially important if you build a product for a crowded market with many established competitors (and there are many reasons why this can be a good idea). We were in exactly this situation when we initially thought about building and marketing our new test management tool.
Positioning will allow you to better focus on a specific market segment to target, it makes it easier to build a clearer and stronger message to reach customers, and it helps develop the initial product vision and feature set.
What does successful positioning mean for software products? It can mean identifying a unique angle to focus on so you can stand out with your product among other products and competitors. Especially if you are entering a crowded market, this allows you to better communicate the key benefits and features you have to offer. It will help you reach the right customers and ensures that customers remember you when they look for a new product to try.
To come up with positioning for your new product, you can focus on a specific customer segment or niche that you think will be easier to market to or that you think is underserved by existing offerings. It can also help you limit the initial product scope, so you can go to market faster. Then rigorously optimizing for this initial customer segment allows you to establish a market presence and expand to other segments more easily later.
Why is positioning useful?
There are many benefits of coming up with and deciding on positioning for your new software product early on. Once you decide on the positioning, many marketing, product management and sales decisions become more straightforward.
Clear message & benefits: it is not easy to stand out in a crowded market. Positioning allows you to come up with clear messaging so you can explain and highlight unique selling points in few words.
Target and identify niche/marketing opportunities: it can be difficult to decide which marketing options to try, which campaigns to book and which niches to target. Focusing on a specific market segment based on the product positioning can be a great way to identify matching niches and opportunities.
Identify customer fit during sales: one of the most important aspects of the sales process is identifying and ensuring prospects are actually a great fit for your product. It’s wasted time for both you and for your prospects to invest a lot of effort evaluating and piloting a product if they will not benefit from it. Positioning can help you quickly filter and identify which customers to focus on.
Better focus on initial product vision: there are a lot of directions to choose when building a new product. If you don’t have a clear vision to guide you, it is easy to be distracted by different directions and work on too many things at the same time. Clear positioning makes it easy to focus product management on specific goals and use cases.
Easier to choose features: when you start working with customers, you will (hopefully) receive a lot of feedback on features you should add. Positioning helps you decide which of these features you should actually implement. Often times the most successful products are developed by following strong opinions and saying ‘No’ to many requests.
Examples of software product positioning
Let’s look at a few examples of companies that use positioning to market and build their products. All these examples are from industries and product categories with many existing competitors and products.
Testmo: we entered a crowded market with many established testing tools when we developed our new product. Most existing offerings either focus on manual testing, or they offer a complete ALM toolset to handle the entire development lifecycle. With Testmo we had other ideas and wanted to position it differently, focusing on unified testing. This means we combine test cases, automation and exploratory testing in a single platform. At the same time it allows us to limit the scope of the product. We won’t add our own issue tracking, or CI pipelines, or existing DevOps features. Instead of we focus on integrating with other tools customers already use.
Another example is the documentation and wiki product GitBook. They heavily focus on software developers and position themselves as the primary tool for developers to publish user docs and to document internal knowledge. With this positioning in mind, they can focus on features that primarily make sense for developers, such as Git synchronization, Markdown support and code snippets. It also allows them to more easily market directly to software developers with a clear message.
Then there’s the application monitoring service Checkly. There are many services and products that enable you to monitor apps and sites for downtime and notify you about issues. Checkly positions itself as a tool that enables end-to-end monitoring with flexible scripting. So it doesn’t just make simple web requests to see if a site is still live. It allows customers to write custom scripts to implement complex user flows and thereby not just check if a site is reachable, but also test the entire stack with the front-end, database, authentication and much more. This focus allows them to build more targeted features for advanced use cases and thereby provides more value to customers compared to simpler competitors.
The popular email marketing service Campaign Monitor also started with very focused positioning. In the first few years they concentrated on providing the best possible campaign tool for web designers and design agencies. This focus allowed them to invest more in features designers needed, such as white labeling, reusable themes and live email previews. Once they established their market presence, they started to expand their customer base to capture a larger part of the overall market for newsletter tools.
These are just some examples of companies and products that have benefited from clear positioning. Of course there are also countless of examples of companies choosing not to have such clear positioning. There is nothing wrong with this and you can certainly be very successful even if you ignore these points. But more often than not positioning is a useful tool to improve focus on specific goals and customer needs, which increases your chance to build a successful software business.
Dennis Gurock is one of the founders of Testmo, a QA testing tool that unifies test case management with exploratory testing and test automation in one platform. He has been working on products that help teams improve software quality for more than 15 years.
I have been using bundles and 1-day sales as a useful way to increase the exposure for my visual planning software. I have had positive experiences with BitsDuJour, Macupdate and BundleHunt. Once you put your software in one bundle you inevitably get approached by people who run other bundle promotions. I was approached by Bundlefox and agreed to put Hyper Plan in their Mac software bundle. I wish I hadn’t. It has been a pretty miserable experience from start to finish. In brief:
I never knew when the promotion was going to start or end. I was told it was going to start on 27th February, but it eventually started on 20th April. It was supposed to run for 3 weeks, but actually ran for 6 weeks. This is a problem, because it means you can’t put your software in other sale or bundle that require an exclusive discount.
Communication was poor. They generally took several days to reply to emails.
The number of licenses sold was very low, especially compared with sales of Hyper Plan on BundleHunt.
Worst of all, they only paid me 60% of what I was expecting per license. When I queried this they emailed me back “It’s **% revenue share after fees, most of the sales came in through affiliates and we had to pay them off before sharing the revenue”. I went back through their emails and their ‘Vendor Manual’ and there is no mention of affiliate fees being subtracted. It just says “You would receive a percentage of the total payments received for the bundle minus PayPal fees”. In fact I had emailed them “So if you sell 2000 bundles for $12 of which 500 choose Hyper Plan, I get **% of $12×500 = $***?” and they replied “Your calculation is correct”. I feel deceived.
The low number of licenses sold and the low payout per license means that it wasn’t worth the effort to setup.
I don’t know what Bundlefox are like to deal with as buyer, but I recommend vendors give them a wide berth.
I have heard various product owners beating themselves up about how they don’t have enough of a social media presence. Well, I have been running a profitable one-man software company for the last 12 years and I am here to tell you that neither of my products have a social strategy worthy of the name – and that’s OK.
My seating planner software, PerfectTablePlan, has a Facebook page and a Google+ page. Whenever I publish a newsletter for PerfectTablePlan I publish a link to the newsletter on these sites (which is a few times per year). That’s pretty much it. My visual planning software, Hyper Plan, has an even smaller social media presence than PerfectTablePlan. To be honest the small amount I do on social media is intended mostly for the benefit of the mighty Google.
My forays into social media have not been encouraging:
I once sent out a newsletter to over 3000 opted-in subscribers and encouraged them to follow a newly created PerfectTablePlan Twitter page. Exactly 0 of them did.
I created a Pinterest page for PerfectTablePlan and paid someone to post to it for a few weeks. It generated a bit of traffic of questionable quality, but the traffic dried up as soon as they stopped posting.
I have tried paid ads on Facebook and Twitter and the results were miserable.
The PerfectTablePlan Google+ page has just 14 followers.
The PerfectTablePlan Facebook page got a miserable 4 views last week.
The question isn’t whether social media can bring you traffic, but whether that traffic will convert to sales and is social media the best use of your limited time? Social media is a productivity black hole and the opportunity costs of noodling around on Twitter should not be underestimated. Also various studies show that email still out-performs social media by quite a margin.
“E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” McKinsey
People go on social media to chat to their friends and look at cat videos. Not to buy things. They use search, Amazon and Ebay for that. When is the last time you even looked at an ad in the Facebook sidebar? Or clicked on a sponsored post in Twitter? Exactly.
Making an impact on social media is hard. 90% of tweets are not retweeted. And even the followers that are real humans may only be interested in discounts:
“The IBM Institute for Business Value found that 60-65% of business leaders who believe that consumers follow their brands on social media sites because they want to be a part of a community. Only 25-30% of consumers agree. The top reason consumers follow a brand? To get discounts – not exactly ideal for a company’s bottom line.” Forbes
A lot of the ‘engagement’ on social media is fake. You can buy 1000 Twitter followers for less than £10. The BBC advertised a fake business with “no products and no interesting content” as an experiment on Facebook and got 1,600 highly suspicious ‘likes’ within 24 hours. Copyblogger deleted their facebook page due to the amount of fake followers and the low level of engagement.
A thread I started on the Business of Software forum showed that many other small software product companies had tried and failed with social media. Why do you think you will fare better? Most software products just aren’t inherently social. There is a limit to how much you can usefully say, day after day, about seating planning. I could try and create a social media presence talking about the latest wedding and catering trends and try to sneak in some references to seating plans. But I would rather commit suicide with a cheese grater.
As a rule of thumb it might be worth putting serious effort into social media if yours is the sort of product people are likely to talk to their friends about down the pub. In that case social media may be able to usefully enhance your visibility and reach. But for the vast majority of software that doesn’t fit this description, you are trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. At the time of writing the pop star Taylor Swift has 74,638,154 Facebook likes. While Intuit, one of the world’s largest software companies, has 221,130 likes.
Next time somebody tells you that you must have a social media campaign ask yourself:
Is your product a good fit for social media?
Do they have an agenda, e.g. a social media tool, ebook or consultancy to push? Or an article quota to fill?
Have they produced any real evidence that a social media campaign translated into actual sales?
Is social media the best thing you could be doing with your valuable time?
Ignore any vague waffling about ‘engagement’. Nobody ever paid their mortgage with engagement.
Successful Software 