I Just Made My First Sale Woooooooooh | Hacker News Reader

I Just Made My First Sale Woooooooooh

29 pointsmotyar31 comments

I just made my first web script sale, http://motyar.info/draw/

Its the code to draw like on canvas like ms paint. User can download the drawing.

I placed the "Buy It for just $10" one week ago. Here are more statics from Google analytics:-

467 Pageviews

327 Unique Views

00:04:20 Time on Page

78.95% Bounce Rate

69.59% % Exit

I need suggestion to improve sales.

Thank you all in advance!!

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Contact the buyer, and find out WHY they bought it.

Personally I can't see why anyone would spend money on this (no offence intended), but perhaps they have a use case I (and possibly you) haven't considered. You can then optimize your marketing for this.

Indeed. Maybe the only reason for buying was to give some "kudos" to the author?

In that case, making it open source and putting a donation button on it (e.g. Flattr) might generate more revenue for the author.

Thanks! I am just learning about sales and it was the fist thing, I thought I can start. FYI visitor come from above mentioned post from my blog.

Thanks! Visitors come from this tutorial -> http://motyar.blogspot.com/2010/04/drawing-on-web-with-canva...

What is it that I can buy? I can guess, but you're giving me no clues.

Visitors come from my blog post, from -> http://motyar.blogspot.com/2010/04/drawing-on-web-with-canva...

Other people have touched on your price and quality/usefulness of the app, so I'll ignore those.

You're conversion rate is around ~0.3%, which actually isn't that horrible for an unoptimized site. Between 0.25% and 0.5% is pretty average for newly launched app.

In terms of marketing and copy, you need to work on your message and audience. Who is going to use this? Probably not techy people who know how to use Photoshop/Illustrator.

Perhaps grandmothers wanting to draw something for their kids? Or kids drawing something for their grandmothers? Either way, neither of those audiences know or care about "jQuery". This is just one example of how you need to optimize your message.

With that said, I wouldn't put time or energy into promoting this further. There are a lot of great drawing/illustration programs, both online and offline, so its a pretty competitive market.

Thanks, I am a developer and doing good with services. I just wanted to start learning about sales and I thought I can start with this script. Visitors come from Google to my blog with keywords like "Draw with jquery" or "Drawing on Canvas with jQuery" ect. (Here is the post http://motyar.blogspot.com/2010/04/drawing-on-web-with-canva... ) and from this post they come to this demo page, they can buy if they want to use the code in their own application.

Targeting a user group is good practice, and I think most of the visitors are developers. Thanks again.

Try out http://sellfy.com/ - you can offer discounts for people who share your product with their Facebook/Twitter friends.

You can also setup freemium (in they sahre) - paid (if they want just buy) model.

Paypal also has a button widget for sending paid customers to download link. Of course Paypal takes its 3% taste of the kick.

Thank you! I ll try that.

This is a pretty terrible canvas drawing app.

Yes, But is a good code base to write your own drawing application with canvas and jQuery. Thank you

Do you know your price is easily hackable?

Anyway I must implement a feature like this to my drawing app http://drawbang.com, cool idea!

What do you mean by "hackable price"? One can easily download the source code of course... He did wrap it in a frame or something to make it somewhat nontrivial.

I believe he is referring to this snippet in the source code:

PayPal IPN solves this by returning the transaction data to whatever IPN URL that you specify. You can then verify that the correct amount was paid.

Maybe he's using Paypal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) system, to only send out the sourcecode when the user has paid the correct amount.

Yes I know that. If I ll receive less payment, I ll not send the code. Your application is cool!! keep up good work. Thank for the link!!

That's pretty expensive for what you offer. You can't draw lines without moving the cursor slow enough for the dots to overlap. There is not even a brush size setting.

I feel the same way!! But one who is going to code his/her own drawing application with canvas. Its a good code base. A lot of things to improve in code.

Thanks

Despite what others say, getting people to pay you money is an achievement in itself. Keep improving the product using feedback you get from new visitors/users!

I am agree with you "Getting people to pay you money is an achievement in itself". And if I can sell such a code ( someone said "terrible") I think I can do good in sales.

Thank you!!

Congratulations!

Do you have any idea of people might be simply stealing the code? Any way to prevent that (I guess not)?

Someone who can steal it doesn't need it.

I'm not sure. Is there not a big difference between someone competent enough to copy-and-paste and integrate javascript snippets, and someone who can write decent javascript code?

And unfortunately, the difference incrases as you go. For instance, I made a rotating globe with clickable countries in js/canvas. Took me about 20 hours to build - including time to pregenerate the globe sprites. I'm pretty sure there's a vast swath of people who can integrate that code, but lack the skill and patience to build it.

Would I be able to make some [pocket] money off something like that?

Agree!!

Yes anyone (Who know JavaScript) can steal the front end code, but there is also a back-end script (php) no one can!!

Bounce rate is scary high. You need something to keep them on the page longer.

And congrats on the sale!

Yes. I think a long copy can help me on this point. Thank you!

My suggestion: put it on the webOS App Catalog. You'll just need to package it up and it's ready to go. Easy way to get more money.

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