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Comment by 10ren | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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".

BTW: Here's more on lean evangelizing (for want of a better term): http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch13_Promote_Through_Educat...

maybe a video with few people playing bingo cards with an explanation of Bingo Cards Creator itself, will do it.

I'd concur strongly with this. I have a few teacher friends who I've mentioned this to who have been interested in the concept and have never heard of it previously.

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