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Comment by cygwin98 | Hacker News Reader

Found an interesting comment from a guy called Fildo on patio11's blog:

Hmm,

that makes me wonder. 2013 was the first year I started selling my (desktop) software and I made a little more than you – without doing all the A/B testing and marketing dance. Makes me wonder if I should follow your path (originally I intended to do so) or if I should keep improving my product (adding more features).

The thing is that my software is not trivial and does some pretty complex things. Maybe that’s the difference? The retail price is about the same.

I’m pretty confused now.

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The thing is, we believe patio11, there's no way to work out whether this poster is simply trolling or not. Making six figures in 12 months from a standing start working alone is very, very hard.

That said, I was surprised, initially, to see the total profit of $60k. Thinking again, I'd say the call he made was that BCC was never going to scale to any major extent. Instead, it's just background cash generation while he searches for a market/product with more promise.

I agree with your point: BCC is a niche market.

Though I wonder if BCC even has achieved its potential. I was surprised by patio11's statement:

I’m sorry, Bingo Card Creator does not support using clip art. Have a nice day.

Maybe he was joking. Clip art seems to be a feature straightforward to implement, IMHO should have been part of the feature set to begin with.

Seems like it would be a support headache to me. So much can go wrong with random uploaded images on the way to the printer.

The straightforward implementation of clip art would be larger than BCC in complexity, be used by almost no one, and not appreciably increase sales.

For example, you have to create a UX which allows non-technical customers who largely do not understand the file system metaphor to upload 25+ images, edit them, scale them to bingo card box size without making them look terrible, and then successfully print in greyscale.

Maybe I significantly underestimated the workload to implement such a feature, especially with good UX. I personally consider it a good feature to differentiate BCC from its competitors. Though I am not sure if you can say such a feature won't increase sales. I guess you may have done some market research on it, such as doing survey among users.

I (obviously) don't know your business, but the fact that the clip art / images question is part of your standard operating procedure gives me the impression that it would be used by quite a few of your customers. You may be right that it wouldn't improve sales numbers.

As to the UX, I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that in today's day and age, most users on the internet, technical or not, understand the filesystem metaphor just fine. They send photos and other files over email, facebook, and other media frequently.

I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that in today's day and age, most users on the internet, technical or not, understand the filesystem metaphor just fine.

Did you see Google's video where they asked people what browser they use? Many used Google, sometimes using Yahoo.

Different markets have different potentials.

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