

Bingo Card Creator Annual Report - patio11
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/18/bingo-card-creator-year-in-review-2009/

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patio11
Hiya guys. I have produced one of these every year and thought folks might be
interested in reading it. It includes figures for how this year compared with
last year, my commentary about what went right in my business and what went
less than right, and my goals for 2010.

I know it is technically speaking a little early but I'm getting on a plane
today to go home for Christmas and pulled an all-nighter to get a head start
on recovering from jet lag. This meant I had some time to kill.

~~~
bcl
I'm curious as to why your expenses were so high? Advertising and server
charges should be the bulk of that, correct?

~~~
kalendae
he has pie charts of how his expenses break down at
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats>

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ryanwaggoner
Patrick, I have incredible respect for what you've accomplished, so I hope you
won't be offended by this, but do you ever think that you might have picked
the wrong niche? I mean, you're _killing it_ in terms of growth, clearly, but
the market for bingo card creation software is only so big, and it doesn't
strike me as a particularly hungry market. I guess I'm wondering if you had
picked something a little bit bigger, could you have done essentially the same
thing and reached the point where you can do it full-time even sooner?

At the end of the day, it sounds like you're pretty much there, and the
experience you've gained is worth much much more than the dollars you've
gotten out of it, but still...I just wonder if a different niche might have
been more...efficient or something.

Again, I hope you don't take that the wrong way. You've accomplished something
pretty amazing, and I'm looking forward to hearing about what you do next.

~~~
tptacek
This is what I love about Patrick's business. He has it essentially stripped
down to the bare essence of marketing and selling software. Everything he does
is teachable. We sell a 5-figure enterprise product, and I pay attention to
everything he does.

I'm pretty sure he said himself that the actual product was a weekend project
for him.

~~~
patio11
_I'm pretty sure he said himself that the actual product was a weekend project
for him_

55 hours for version 1.0, but keep in mind, that was the barely functional,
ugly, terrible user experience I delivered 3 years ago. Somebody bought it
anyway. (He eventually got a refund, but 1.02 sucked a little less, etc etc.)

There may well be a programmer somewhere who could deliver the current site in
a weekend, but he sure as heck isn't me. (5k lines of Ruby code, 3k lines of
Java code, several hundred pages of content, etc etc.)

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pchivers
So you made $18,525 in profits, and figure that worked out to $125-$150 an
hour. That means you worked somewhere between 124 and 148 hours over the
_entire year_ , or less than 3 hours a week. Is this correct? If so, then it
is very impressive...

~~~
myth_drannon
He started it in 2007, I believe in that year while he was developing the
application he did not make any money. The more correct hourly rate would be
to profitIn(07+08+09)years/work(07+08+09)years

~~~
patio11
I started in 2006. It took me eight days to develop the application, not one
year. I had my first sale two weeks after it was released, and somewhere
around $2.5k sales in the rest of that calendar year.

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ryanwaggoner
Did I read right that you saw a ~10x improvement in conversion from visits-to-
trials over last year due to A/B testing? If so, that's incredible. Has the
conversation from trial-to-paid remained pretty constant? What plans do you
have to improve that?

Thanks so much for releasing this...it's always motivating to see someone
building a business system like this.

~~~
patio11
_If so, that's incredible._

It sure would be. I'm not finding where you're reading that, though. Since any
improvement at any stage of the funnel flows straight to the bottom line in my
business, that would imply a 10x increase in revenue.

Last year, unique visitors to trials was about 20% (57k / 292k). This year, it
looks like about 15.5%. This is primarily due to a change in the mix of
traffic -- my highest performing traffic is invariably those coming from
AdWords ads, but AdWords has not kept pace with the rest of my business growth
this year. The big drivers of increased unique visitors were organic SEO and
the seasonal promotions, which brought in folks who were less interested in
signup up for a trial than someone who had just qualified themselves by
clicking on a call to action to Sign Up For Your Free Trial Today!

 _Has the conversation from trial-to-paid remained pretty constant?_

No, it increased markedly. Downloadable trial to paid was 1.4% last year,
1.17% this year. (I think that decline is mostly due to cannibalization of the
best prospects by the web app.) The web app trial to paid (new way to access
old product, essentially) conversion rate was 2.33%. I push the online version
_VERY_ heavily, for the obvious reason.

 _What plans do you have to improve that?_

Improve app, improve experience of purchasing app, etc. I segment before
worrying about conversion rate, which is a subtlety I think a lot of Analytics
For Beginners articles miss: if your prospect mix is changing, changes in
consolidated conversion rates might reflect the mix more than it does the
desirability of the product or marketing.

~~~
SapphireSun
On the topic of A/B testing, I was clicking around your site and I noticed
that when I clicked on certain top level navigation buttons (such as purchase)
it changed my choices based on the context. If I recall correctly (I'm not a
professional designer by any means), many design books are against that. What
caused you to decide to do that? Did you discover it focused the user's
attention better?

Thank you for sharing this information with us! Data is always fascinating and
your story is inspirational :-)

~~~
patio11
_What caused you to decide to do that? Did you discover it focused the user's
attention better?_

I used CrazyEgg on my purchasing page, watched there be a lot of clicks on the
top level navigation elements, figured "But wait, if they click any of those I
_don't get paid_ ", started an A/B test with the consistent design versus a
stripped-down menu, observed improvement with the stripped-down menu, and put
my design books to use keeping my kitchen table level.

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Timothee
For living in the Bay Area (San Francisco's that is), I was surprised (and
pleased for you) to read that $18k was enough to live off of. Very cool!

~~~
teej
I believe he lives in Japan, not San Francisco.

~~~
Timothee
Oh, I know he does. I was talking about me living in San Francisco, thus
comparing Patrick's net revenue to salaries around here.

And I did believe that living costs in Japan were higher.

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noodle
just like in the US, it depends on where you live and how you live.

if you're living simply in somewhere like rural kansas, you could probably
easily get by on $15k-ish.

~~~
patio11
Right. The ramen profitable calculation: $300 ~ $450 rent (single room
apartment to 3 room palace in an inconvenient location), $200 a month food
bill (if you eat like a single Japanese twenty something), $300 for utilities
(water, gas, lights, Internet, phone, TV tax, cell phone, gym membership). No
car or train expenses, since I don't need either to get to my kitchen table.
Throw in a little extra for taxes/health insurance.

For comparison: starting salaries for an engineer at my company, which pays
well for this region, are $2.2k a month. (And most of them live in Nagoya,
which makes all of the above numbers higher.)

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falsestprophet
What grade-level students do you find are using your cards?

~~~
patio11
I primarily make and commission activities for elementary school students, for
pedagogical reasons.

Outside of low-level foreign language courses, I don't see much reason to do
it in high school. The primary skill generic word bingo tests is word
recognition, which one would hope high schoolers don't have issues with. You
can do variants with using a clue (e.g. "the part of the cell studded with
ribosomes") for vocabulary bingo, I suppose.

I haven't systematically looked into whether most of my customers are
elementary school teachers (or teachers, for that matter). I do know that I
have the full range from pre-literate pre-schoolers through senior citizens,
just based on customers asking for advice on how to play a game with
$DEMOGRAPHIC.

~~~
dhimes
If you could include math and chemical symbols, you may find some customers in
high school chem, physics, etc.

