Tag Archives: microISV

What I learned spending $851 on Reddit Ads

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:

Clicking ‘Learn more’ takes you to https://www.easydatatransform.com/.

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
Impressions490,478
Clicks3,585
Windows installs177
Mac installs63
Total installs240
Click Through Rate0.73%
Cost Per Click$0.24
Click to install conversion rate6.59%
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:

  1. Italy
  2. Spain
  3. France
  4. Germany
  5. 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 / organic330.75
Successfulsoftware.net / referral310.74
Youtube.com / referral270.86
Chatgpt.com / referral240.69
Google / CPC160.65
Reddit / referral80.25

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.

Reaching 3 million page views on my blog

My recent post, 20 years working on the same software product, finally got this blog past 3 million page views:

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.

The low point was when WordPress accidentally shut down the blog.

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.

20 years working on the same software product

I released version 1 of my table seating planning software, PerfectTablePlan, in February 2005. 20 years ago this month. It was a different world. A world of Windows, shareware and CDs. A lot has changed since then, but PerfectTablePlan is now at version 7 and still going strong.

PerfectTablePlan v1

PerfectTablePlan v7

I have released several other products since then, and done some training and consulting, but PerfectTablePlan remains my most successful product. It’s success is due to a lot of hard work, and a certain amount of dumb luck.

I was getting married and I volunteered to do the seating plan for our wedding reception. It sounded like a relatively straightforward optimization problem, as we only had 60 guests and no family feuds to worry about. But it was surprisingly difficult to get right. I looked around for some software to help me. There were a couple of software packages, but I wasn’t impressed. I could do better myself! So I wrote a (very rough) first version, which I used for our wedding.

Things weren’t going great at my day job, at a small software startup. Maybe I could commercialize my table planner? I was a bit wary, as my potential competitors all seemed rather moribund and I didn’t think I would be able to make a living off it. But I thought I could do everything worth doing in 6-12 months and then start on the next product. Wrong on both counts!

Web-based software was still in its infancy in 2005. So I decided to write it as desktop software using C++ and cross-platform framework Qt, which I had plenty of experience in. Initially, I just released a Windows version. But I later added a Mac version as well. Qt has had its commercial ups and downs in the last 20 years, but it has grown with me and is now very robust, comprehensive and well documented. I think I made a good choice.

I financed PerfectTablePlan out of my own savings and it has been profitable every year since version 1 was launched. I could have taken on employees and grown the business, but I preferred to keep it as a lifestyle business. My wife does the accounts and proof reading and I do nearly everything else, with a bit of help from my accountant, web designers and a few other contractors. I don’t regret that decision. 20 years without meetings, ties or alarm clocks. My son was born 18 months after PerfectTablePlan was launched and it has been great to have the flexibility to be fully present as a Dad.

CDs, remember them? I sent out around 5,000 CDs (with some help from my father), before I stopped shipping CDs in 2016.

During the lifetime of PerfectTablePlan it became clear that things were increasingly moving to the web. But I couldn’t face rewriting PerfectTablePlan from scratch for the web. Javascript. Ugh. Also PerfectTablePlan is quite compute intensive, using a genetic algorithm to generate an automated seating plan and I felt it was better running this on the customer’s local computers than my server. And some of my customers consider their seating plans to be confidential and don’t want to store them on third party servers. So I decided to stick with desktop. But, if I was starting PerfectTablePlan from scratch now, I might make a different decision.

Plenty of strange and wonderful things have happened over the last 20 years, including:

  • PerfectTablePlan has been used by some very famous organizations for some very famous events (which we mostly don’t have permission to mention). It has seated royalty, celebrities and heads of state.
  • PerfectTablePlan was used as part of a demonstration of the (controversial) first commercial quantum computer by D-Wave.
  • A mock-up of PerfectTablePlan, including icons I did myself, was used without our permission by Sony in their ‘Big day’ TV comedy series. I threated them with legal action. Years later, I am still awaiting a reply.
  • I got to grapple with some interesting problems, including the mathematics of large combinatorial problems and elliptical tables. Some customers have seated 4,000 guests and 4000! (4000x3999x3998 .. x 1) is a mind-bogglingly huge number.
  • A well known wedding magazine ran a promotion with a valid licence key clearly visible in a photograph of a PerfectTablePlan CD. I worked through the night to release a new version of PerfectTablePlan that didn’t work with this key.
  • I found out that CDs are edible.
  • I sponsored the building of a kindergarten in Nepal.
  • I once had to stay up late, in a state of some inebriation, to fix an issue so that a world famous event wasn’t a disaster (no I can’t tell you the event).

The lowest point was the pandemic, when sales pretty much dropped to zero.

Competitors and operating systems have come and gone and the ecosystem for software has changed a lot, but PerfectTablePlan is still here and still paying the bills. It is about 145,000 lines of C++. Some of the code is a bit ugly and not how I would write it now. But the product is very solid, with very few bugs. The website and user documentation are also substantial pieces of work. The PDF version of the documentation is nearly 500 pages.

I now divide my time between PerfectTablePlan and my 2 other products: data wrangling software Easy Data Transform and visual planner Hyper Plan. Having multiple products keeps things varied and avoids having all my eggs in one basket. In May 2024 I released PerfectTablePlan v7 with a load of improvements and new features. And I have plenty of ideas for future improvements. I fully expect to keep working on PerfectTablePlan until I retire (I’m 59 now).

Easy Data Transform v2

I released Easy Data Transform v2 today. After no fewer than 80 (!) v1 production releases since 2019, this is the first paid upgrade.

Major improvements include:

  • Schema versioning, so you can automatically handle changes to the column structure of an input (e.g. additional or missing columns).
  • A new Verify transform so you can check a dataset has the expected values.

Currently there are 48 different verification checks you can make:

  • At least 1 non-empty value
  • Contains
  • Don’t allow listed values
  • Ends with
  • Integer except listed special value(s)
  • Is local file
  • Is local folder
  • Is lower case
  • Is sentence case
  • Is title case
  • Is upper case
  • Is valid EAN13
  • Is valid email
  • Is valid telephone number
  • Is valid UPC-A
  • Match column name
  • Matches regular expression
  • Maximum characters
  • Maximum number of columns
  • Maximum number of rows
  • Maximum value
  • Minimum characters
  • Minimum number of columns
  • Minimum number of rows
  • Minimum value
  • No blank values
  • No carriage returns
  • No currency
  • No digits
  • No double spaces
  • No duplicate column names
  • No duplicate values
  • No empty rows
  • No empty values
  • No gaps in values
  • No leading or trailing whitespace
  • No line feeds
  • No non-ASCII
  • No non-printable
  • No punctuation
  • No symbols
  • No Tab characters
  • No whitespace
  • Numeric except listed special value(s)
  • Only allow listed values
  • Require listed values
  • Starts with
  • Valid date in format

You can see any fails visually, with colour coding by severity:

  • Side-by-side comparison of dataset headers:
  • Side-by-side comparison of dataset data values:
  • Lots of extra matching options for the Lookup transform:

Allowing you to do exotic lookups such as:

Plus lots of other changes.

In v1 there were issues related to how column-related changes cascaded through the system. This was the hardest thing to get right, and it took a fairly big redesign to fix all the issues. As a bonus, you can now disconnect and reconnect nodes, and it remembers all the column-based options (within certain limits). These changes make Easy Data Transform feel much more robust to use, as you can now make lots of changes without worrying too much about breaking things further downstream.

Easy Data Transform now supports:

  • 9 input formats (including various CSV variants, Excel, XML and JSON)
  • 66 different data transforms (such as Join, Filter, Pivot, Sample and Lookup)
  • 11 output formats (including various CSV variants, Excel, XML and JSON)
  • 56 text encodings

This allows you to snap together a sequence of nodes like Lego, to very quickly transform or analyse your data. Unlike a code-based approach (such as R or Python) or a command line tool, it is extremely visual, with pretty-much instant feedback every time you make a change. Plus, no pesky syntax to remember.

data wrangling

Eating my own dogfood, using Easy Data Transform to create an email marketing campaign from various disparate data sources (mailing lists, licence key databases etc).

Easy Data Transform is all written in C++ with memory compression and reference counting, so it is fast and memory efficient and can handle multi-million row datasets with no problem.

While many of my competitors are transitioning to the web, Easy Data Transform remains a local tool for Windows and Mac. This has several major advantages:

  • Your sensitive data stays on your computer.
  • Less latency.
  • I don’t have to pay your compute and bandwidth costs, which means I can charge an affordable one-time fee for a perpetual licence.

I think privacy is only going to become ever more of a concern as rampaging AIs try to scrape every single piece of data they can find.

Usage-based fees for online data tools are no small matter. For a range of usage fee horror stories, such as enabling debug logging in a large production ETL pipeline resulting in $100k of extra costs in a week, see this Reddit post. Some of my customers have processed more than a billion rows in Easy Data Transform. Not bad for $99!

It has been a lot of hard work, but I am please with how far Easy Data Transform has come. I think Easy Data Transform is now a comprehensive, fast and robust tool for file-based data wrangling. If you have some data to wrangle, give it a try! It is only $99+tax ($40+tax if you are upgrading from v1) and there is a fully functional, 7 day free trial here:

Download Easy Data Transform v2

I am very grateful to my customers, who have been a big help in providing feedback. This has improved the product no end. Many heads are better than one!

The next big step is going to be adding the ability to talk directly to databases, REST APIs and other data sources. I also hope at some point to add the ability to visualize data using graphs and charts. Watch this space!

12 rules for software business happiness

Here are a few rules for happiness that I have learned (often the hard way) running a solo software business since 2005

Make sure your important stuff is backed-up automatically

Any sort of manual back-up is going to get forgotten. Back-up to more than one place, at least one of which is offsite.

Stay away from the bleeding edge

Stick with tried and trusty tools and technologies, where you can. JQuery will probably be here in another 10 years, but the latest and greatest Javascript framework might not.

Use good suppliers

You need your hosting company, payment processor and other critical suppliers to be rock solid. Think twice about going with a supplier just because they are cheap. Changing suppliers can be a pain, so ask around before trying a supplier.

Use version control for everything important

It matters less which version control system it is. Periodically making a copy of your source folder is not a version control system!

Don’t promise ship dates

Developers are notoriously bad at predicting dates. If you promise a date and get it wrong (and you will) then you either have to miss the date or cut corners. Neither is good.

Never send an email you might later regret

If you are starting to feel angry writing an email, then stop writing. Come back to it later. Or maybe write it, feel a bit better, then delete it without sending.

Write documentation as you go

Few people enjoy writing documentation. But if you leave all the documentation until you have finished programming, then you are likely to rush it and forget stuff.

Have a checklist

Automate where you can. Have checklists for everything else. Keep updating your checklists.

Get someone else to proof read everything

Typos are embarrassing, but it is impossible to proof read your own stuff. So get someone else to proof read any stuff that customers see: web pages, newsletters, documentation etc.

Never release changes just before going on holiday

You don’t want to have to be fire-fighting a new bug when you should be on the beach with your family/friends.

Don’t try to do everything yourself

You could spend weeks learning about taxes, web hosting, CSS or any number of other topics that aren’t central to your business. But why bother? Pay someone who already know this stuff.

Embrace imperfection

If you wait for perfection, then you are never going to ship anything. Just make sure each release is better than the last. Good enough is good enough.

Discussing lifestyle businesses on Bootstrapped.fm podcast

I had a discussion with fellow British bootstrapper Robin Warren about what running a lifestyle business means to us. Click the link to listen:

Bootstrapped.fm podcast #233: Running a lifestyle business and proud of it

No-one knows what they are doing

When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They clearly don’t have a clue. A more mediocre bunch of individuals would be hard to find.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Most of us who are running businesses had no real idea what they were doing when they started, and still struggle with decisions now. I’ve been making a full-time living selling my own software since 2005. But when I launched my seating planner software, I really had no idea if I would sell a single licence. After 17 years I know a lot more about my market and running a software business. But things are constantly changing and I still don’t know day-to-day if I should be spending more time on SEO, partnerships, Youtube videos, new features, a better website, or thousand other things I could be doing. A lot of guessing and gut feel is still involved.

It is easy to read 20/20 hindsight accounts of successful businesses and assume they they knew exactly what they needed to do at each stage. They didn’t. Running a business involves making a lot of decisions under great uncertainty in a constantly changing environment. So if you want to start a business, don’t be put off by not knowing what you are doing. No-one does.

Confessions of a bad software entrepreneur

If you read blogs and forums and go to conferences you will soon pick up that there are a number of recommended ‘best practices’ for being a successful software entrepreneur. I don’t conform to many of them:

SaaS product

No. Both my products are desktop based.

B2B market

Not really. Most of my customers are consumers.

Funded

No. I bootstrapped the business from my own savings.

Subscription model

No. My licences are a one-time fee.

Beautifully designed responsive website

No! www.perfecttableplan.com converts well, but it is certainly not beautiful or responsive (a new website is on the way though).

Co-founder

No. Just me.

Delegation

No. I have delegated bookkeeping to my lovely and talented wife (who also proof reads this blog) but I don’t have any employees or virtual assistant and do the vast majority of things myself, including all the marketing, sales, programming, documentation and customer support.

Drip email campaign

No. One day perhaps.

Focus

Not really. I like variety. I have 2 products under active development and also do some consulting and training.

Social media campaign

No. I have long since given up on Twitter and Facebook as marketing channels.

Mastermind group

No. I do talk with my peers in forums, at meetups and conferences, but not in any structured way.

Started young

No. I was pushing 40 when I started my entrepreneurial career.

Endless growth

No. I can’t really grow the business much more without taking on staff or becoming a workaholic. But I am happy just to maintain the current level of sales. [1]

Exit plan

No. I haven’t given it any real thought. I am quite happy doing what I’m doing.

But…

My one-man software business has made me a nice living doing a job I enjoy for more than 10 years. So I guess I must be doing something right. There is no ‘one true way’ to be an entrepreneur. If you have a good product with good support and good marketing, most other things are optional.

[1] Added after suggestion by Tom Reader.

South West Bootstrappers meetup

I am organizing a regular meetup in Swindon (UK) for people who are running (or are interested in running) their own bootstrapped (i.e. not VC funded) software product business. Come along and talk shop with other aspiring and experienced bootstrappers. It doesn’t matter if you are developing for web, Windows, Mac or mobile.

The first meetup is on the evening of Tuesday 16th June 2015. You can find out more and RSVP at meetup.com/South-West-Bootstrappers/.

swindon meetup

‘Start your own software business’ training course 2015

trainingI am planning to run my ‘Start your own software business’ training course again this year, probably in September. It is an intensive weekend course, at a hotel in my home town of Swindon (in the UK). It is aimed at people who want to start (or at an early stage of starting) a software company selling desktop or web software. It builds on my 10 years of experience running my own software company and consulting to other software companies. It’s the course I wish I had attended when I started my business.

I know a lot of courses are online now. But I think you get more from face-to-face training. More intensive. More interactive. Less distractions. Also you get to meet other people in the same boat. I have run the course twice before and the feedback was very positive. You find out more and read comments from previous attendees here.

Fill in the form on the training page if you are interested. I am happy to answer any questions in the comments, by email or on twitter.