
Sales of Bingo Card Creator Per Month - paraschopra
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month
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patio11
Oh man, am I glad that page is cached now. (Generating it from a clean
memcached takes 30 seconds.)

Not sure why you guys are suddenly interested today, because its been up for
quite some time now, but if you've got questions hit me.

P.S. I hate summer.

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jgrahamc
I don't really understand what one does with a Bingo Card created by this
software. Is this an American teaching method that's common?

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patio11
Let's say you're doing, I don't know, a lesson on cellular biology. After
wrapping it up, on Friday afternoon, you want to play a fun game which still
has some educational content. So you print out one Parts of A Cell bingo card
for each student in your class and explain how bingo works (or not, because
they've almost certainly played before).

Then start calling things like "This center of the cell is where the
chromosomes are stored". Kids mark "nucleus" on their bingo card. Repeat a few
times -- somebody wins, the rest of the class comes close to winning (this is
the diabolically brilliant thing about bingo), everybody is happy and most
don't realize they've just reviewed some vocabulary.

Yes, this is a quite common activity in America. You'll find it in almost any
book of teacher activities from elementary school through high school.

Bingo has a few features which make it particularly good from the teacher's
perspective, incidentally. It scales to any number of kids with one teacher
(not true of all games), it performs excellent crowd control since all
students are forced to proceed at the same pace ( _very_ not true of all
games), it doesn't pit students directly against one another (many American
teachers do not believe that is wise), it is very difficult to be bad at bingo
(in a way it is not difficult to be bad at e.g. spelling bees), there is an
element of luck involved so the winner will almost certainly not be the
strongest student in the class (some teachers believe this is wise), etc etc.

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10ren
I've know about your Bingo Card Creator for about a year now, and for the
first time I know what it is. Clearly an explanation is not necessary for your
market (which I assume is the US); to expand internationally, evangelizing for
the teaching method itself would reap great rewards, I believe. As a vague
demonstration, Avatar has earnt 27.5% domestic, 72.5% international:
<http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.htm>

[I'm in Australia, a close relative was a secondary school teacher, and I've
never heard of it. But sounds like a great idea, and you have a great pitch
for selling it]

very minor nit: nice to distinguish in some way the final month (May) in the
chart as incomplete (or not show it).

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patio11
Evangelizing is tough, which is why most technology evangelists work for
companies with enough money to buy small European nations and have vague job
descriptions that they can't possibly fail at. I, on the other hand, have a
limited budget and a well-defined brief.

The audience of biology teachers is much, much wider than the audience of
"people looking for biology bingo", and it being more diffuse makes it harder
to address via scalable marketing methods like SEO and AdWords. They're also
much harder to convert, because I have to sell them on a) biology bingo, b)
Bingo Card Creator, and b) paying $30 for it, whereas if I just try for folks
who typed [biology bingo cards] into Google I get (a) for free.

I want to be someone's first bingo game about as much as Apple wants to make
someone's first cell phone.

P.S. The game many Australians think of when they think of bingo is not the
game on my website. Yay, internationalization.

~~~
10ren
Well thought out; but by "evangelize" I just meant to consider those people
visiting your site who don't know what your Bingo Cards are, and to sell the
concept of Bingo Cards, not just your product ( _sell_ in the sense of
explaining the benefits, as you did above). Like adding a link from "for
instructional and entertainment purposes" to an explanation page. It would be
a long-term strategy, to grow the pie, not just your slice, so it might take a
long time to show up in A/B testing (and probably would be minuscule compared
to the existing low hanging pie... er, fruit).

So many sites assume the reader already knows what they're selling. Still, I
can see that your customer acquisition costs must be much lower for those who
already know, and your site speaks precisely to those people; and there seems
to be enormous growth left in that segment.

I mainly mentioned it because it would be a beneficial thing to do for the
world - a connotation of "evangelize".

~~~
10ren
BTW: Here's more on lean evangelizing (for want of a better term):
[http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch13_Promote_Through_Educat...](http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch13_Promote_Through_Education.php)

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iaskwhy
You seem to be reducing the amount of money going for advertising. Any special
reason for this?

Thanks for the awesomeness of sharing all this stuff!

~~~
patio11
That is the opposite of the truth, actually.

I just haven't done bookkeeping for 2010 yet, because a plugin I used on my
bookkeeping page broke back in February, and I've been putting off fixing it.

My actual advertising budget is largely a factor of two things: Google AdWords
algorithms and Google AdWords customer support. One of these two things I have
a lot of love for, because it automatically matches my ads up with sites they
perform well on, and I'd happily spend $100k if they'd let me. The other I
have had some issues with, most recently that it frequently takes weeks or
months for them to approve changes or additions to my ads, which does not help
minimize the time through the learning loop at all.

I get really, really tired of having to argue /dev/null that I am not a
gambling operation.

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rjprins
Why is it so unusual for businesses to be open about the income and expenses?

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Luc
Because if you are successful it's asking for competition?

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robryan
Make's it easier for your competition to position themselves to. In this case
it's such a niche market that most people wouldn't mind releasing financials.
Other things though, I think there is a big advantage to keeping the
competition guessing.

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abp
Repost of repost of repost :)

Every now or then another URL of the Bingo Crad Creator sales.

But always interesting and nice to see some people sharing such detailed
information on their business.

Thanks to the creator.

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jarin
It's so weird that a guy who makes an online bingo card generator is openly
publishing sales stats and releasing an a/b testing gem, but I like it.

~~~
patio11
Believe me: I would have been thrilled if one of the larger commercial
entities using Rails had solved A/B testing before I did, but since nobody
seemed to be working on it, it was either write my own or use Google Website
Optimizer.

A/B testing is totally worthwhile for an Internet business even at small
scales. I can't say enough good things about it.

~~~
jarin
Some of these larger commercial entities could probably take a few lessons
from you!

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thinkbohemian
I've been asking about admin tools and buisness analytics inside of rails
(<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2849695/ruby-on-rails-adm...>) this is a
great example of something that I am making from scratch on my own.

Do you have any tips or rails libraries that can help?

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Aegean
I wouldn't expose too much of the company finances. Someone might find it
profitable and start a copy-cat. What do you think?

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patio11
I think it happened. Twice out of folks who know me from online forums,
possibly more outside of that.

Oh well.

~~~
anamax
I'll bet that most competitor attempts are a net positive.

Even the failed attempts help convince folks that they need bingo cards.

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graugrau
What are the freelancing expenses for? (Customer support and creating new card
categories?)

Side note: you might want to change the color of the "payments processing"
slice of the expenses pie chart, since it's pretty impossible to see with the
current background. But anyways, this information is really cool.

~~~
patio11
I do all customer support myself. Freelancing is overwhelmingly creating new
cards for the website, doing content for mini-sites, and doing web design
(something I'm not good at).

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jcromartie
It looks like the graph shows that this is popular with school teachers.

