

The second Red Gate million dollar challenge - dawson
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/08/the-second-red-gate-million-dollar-challenge.html

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paraschopra
I found the requirement of conversion rate of 10% quite funny. The conversion
rate is never an absolute metric to worry about. It depends on so many
different variables: product type, intended usage, sales and marketing effort,
etc.

In fact, you can artificially push up this number by having a team of sales
people profiling potential customers and then persuading users to try out the
product. Even though this will result in a large cost of customer acquisition
(remember: you have actively persuaded potential customers), conversion rate
will be much higher than 10%. On the other hand if you are relying on SEO and
get lots of passive and active interest in the product, your conversion rate
will be much lower. (But you paid close to nil for each additional potential
customer)

Ultimately what matters is if a company can make cost of customer acquisition
less than life time value of the customer. Hard to measure as compared to
conversion rate, but that's what really matters.

If you want to measure something related to conversion rate, measure how much
you can improve it. Not how much it currently is.

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gommm
The way they count the conversion rate is not from people coming over to the
page but instead the conversion rate of people buying the software after
having downloaded a trial version...

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paraschopra
That's my original point. If you are sending relevant users to download the
trial (albeit with a high acquisition price) your trial -> paid conversion
rate will be higher.

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tomjen3
This isn't so much a challenge as a "sell your (successful) software to us".

It is still interesting, but it needs a more accurate title.

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aerique
Definitely. It is actually dishonest of then to call this a challenge: I
couldn't for the life of me find out what the actual challenge was when
reading the article and when I came to their list of requirements I was
scratching my head.

If it was an actual challenge they would accept prototypes or they would have
a list of specs to build matching software to.

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dawson
"@neildavidson Just had the first #redgate million dollar challenge entrant.
Wow - that was fast." <http://twitter.com/NeilDavidson/status/20137466241>

