We're also going to be publishing a lot of good stuff in the coming months, so if there is a particular topic you'd love to see covered, we'd love your feedback.
The notes on the specific testing and implementation was great, but also the general tone of the piece. It can be hard to write about marketing to an engineering audience while honoring an engineering-driven culture.
For instance -
> FogBugz exists to help software developers write great software, but it also exists to pay the rent. This means that we have to actually consummate transactions on our website. This was previously delegated to the curiously named “Details” page. It had been designed primarily to explain to customers the difference between FBOD and the downloadable version of FogBugz. Sadly, this ended up being quite confusing.
Covers why marketing is needed in an extremely straightforward way (...it also exists to pay the rent). Then, it logically follows the page that converts needs to be easily accessible. And then, the notes here and elsewhere that non-technical people are often hitting these pages and getting lost trying to decide on the tradeoffs.
Great piece. Learned about the specific measures you took, but also a lot of meta-learning about how to present things well. Extremely straightforward, logical, acknowledging and honoring the engineer culture, while also noting that marketing needs to be part of the process to pay the bills and get the product in users' hands.
Interesting article. Thanks (to both you and Fog Creek) for writing it up!
I think that Patrick did an awesome job with Bingo Card Creator, but Joel didn't hire the guy because he manages to make $30K in software sales a year. That's not an impressive number for software sales in itself. Plain and simple. Patrick is however an impressive guy when it comes to the specific set of skills he has, so it just makes sense for him to capitalize (possibly far more than Bingo Card ever could) on that.
The absolute figures might not shock you, but I consider the growth rate very impressive!
That depends where you're standing.
His methods and communication are definitely top of the scale though.
I know you were involved in the Fog Creek side of things and not the Stack Exchange side... but that actually make it more interesting for me since I expect your ongoing series of blog posts will cover as much as possible of Fog Creek-related stuff.
Luckily, Google does a pretty good job these days of sending you to internal pages for entrances when appropriate to demonstrated user intent.
I'm really glad Fog Creek hired you so that the rest of us could all learn a little something.
What I still remember from that page was : 1) Hand-made 2) Scarity (in a good way)
I just checked your website and 30 seconds after I don't remember anything about it.
The challenge is how do you add more products while keeping complexity to a minimum. We still want to have a clear message to someone that lands on our page but now they have more options as to what they can buy on our site. I guess it is a bit of a trade off.
When I do the test myself on your website :
1) REX RAY DODOCASE 2) DODO Case - Protects From Extinction 3) Couldn't tell in less then 5-10 seconds
Is that really what you want me to remember ? Also, my comment apply to "Acquisition", repeat customers is another matter.
PS : Sorry for my poor grammar/syntax, english isn't my first language.