Bingo Card Creator Annual Report
kalzumeus.com
kalzumeus.com
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.
(And the story to make them digestible.)
I'm curious about your stated plans/hopes to do BCC full-time. Do you think BCC could grow faster if you worked on it full-time? Do you want to add more products?
Have you thought about going into e-flash cards, it seems like you would have an overlap in customers for this product? And it wouldn't be too much work to create.
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They then assign the cards to the students as home work. (The student has to go through the whole deck over and over until he gets all the answers correct.) The teacher is now able to assign home work that grades itself. The students do better on tests because they have memorized the given material. Every one is happy.
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And unlike the bingo cards teachers will pay a monthly fee to use the service. So the revenue is recurring.
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.
With me, I spend all my time working on new products or supporting the existing ones, so I always feel sleazy neglecting that in order to tweak marketing.
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.)
I do not regret any of it. I do not even regret two years of salarymanning when I could have recontracted at the tech incubator. (Plusses, leaving at four thirty, no commute. Plusses for salarymanhood, much more professional growth, and everything I ship makes real people happier and real lives better. That is enough to tolerate low pay, no work life balance, and two hour commute, But not for forever.)
Not sure about next program, but I will have plenty of time to think. I secured a twenty thousand angel investment and ongoing cash injections from this crazy white guy who lives in a rice field, after all. Terms were pretty good.
Apologies for language, posting from cell．
But when you think about it, it isn't that niche a product. Who's the market? Teachers who run bingo quizes. Actually, that seems like a huge market although most of us here think of it as a marginal product. So perhaps it's not such a niche after all... just obscure to us.
Thanks so much for releasing this...it's always motivating to see someone building a business system like this.
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.
In addition to collecting numerous mentions from luminaries in the community, actually using A/Bingo has been key to my ongoing conversion optimization efforts. (Last year, for example, I had approximately 1.4% conversion rates for the downloadable version of the software.)
Since you list this year's download-to-paid conversion rate as 1.17%, I assumed you were talking about the visits-to-trials conversion rate, as going from 1.4% last year to 1.17% doesn't really strike me as something that went right in terms of conversion rate optimization :)
I didn't take the aggregate conversion rate into account.
Thank you for sharing this information with us! Data is always fascinating and your story is inspirational :-)
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.
And I did believe that living costs in Japan were higher.
if you're living simply in somewhere like rural kansas, you could probably easily get by on $15k-ish.
Trains and appartment are expensive... but restaurants and food in general is really rather cheap.
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.)
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.