throwaway58182

I wish this was true. Our existing customer base is very pleased with the product. But they don't influence others to purchase. We're a gnat in the loud circus of the market place. The product doesn't market itself because not enough people find out about it.

Our competitors are 10 - 1000 times larger than us. Doesn't help us in any way for them to know our size.

And the couple of customers that know our size have indicated it's better to appear large. For example, you wouldn't switch a company from using Microsoft Exchange to something else if that something else was run by a couple of guys. Our company would be in very deep trouble if something happened to me. To balance that, customers get updates and fixes very fast because they work with such a small company.

No, but it would be great if I was that creative or could come up with stuff like that.

The customer gets year #1 for free. At the end of the year we approach them and ask if they want to renew. If they appreciate your software, they usually do.

And since my replies were being rate limited, I'll respond to your long-tail question above. We have tried a lot of long tail keywords, but they have such low frequency that Adwords penalizes you (low quality score) for using them, which means you pay more per click account-wide. That is why I say get to know Adwords - there are a lot of gotchas.

Also in a very saturated market. Getting to the first page of Google is everything. It takes time work, editing each page, good content, and (though they seem to want to downplay it) good incoming links.

Somewhere around $500 - $600. Per year support contracts are around 20% so the life time value of a customer is probably around $1000.

We've tried everything, and the only two techniques that have paid off are: website SEO (including having a blog) and Adwords. Adwords is hard - we've thrown away many thousands of dollars on garbage traffic. And some keywords are in the $15-$30 per click range! (our competitors have deep pockets)

lol - yes, me too. Used to really dislike the marketing guys. Once you're running a company though, you discover marketing is what counts, more than code quality in most cases. Though I'll say keeping technical debt low has allowed this product to grow for many years.

Just hit $1 million/year in sales :)

About 20 years ago wrote a scratch-my-itch B2B desktop software for Windows. Side project for 10 years which is how long it took to reach about $120K to make the switch to full time. Added features and increased price accordingly.

Hired a few more people. Growth is slow but steady. Yearly renewable support contracts are the secret.

Coding is easy, marketing is hard. Persistence, persistence, persistence. In a very crowded niche. Desktop software is definitely not dead - you can charge a whole lot more for it, and ongoing costs (other than people) is comparable to trendy web apps.

Using throwaway so customers don't find this comment.