Bingo Card Creator Annual Report

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/18/bingo-card-creator-year-in-review-2009/

by patio11 • 17 years ago

164 38 17 years ago

patio1111• 17 years ago

Hiya guys. I have produced one of these every year and thought folks might be interested in reading it. It includes figures for how this year compared with last year, my commentary about what went right in my business and what went less than right, and my goals for 2010.

I know it is technically speaking a little early but I'm getting on a plane today to go home for Christmas and pulled an all-nighter to get a head start on recovering from jet lag. This meant I had some time to kill.

eru• 17 years ago

Thanks for sharing the numbers!

(And the story to make them digestible.)

trickjarrett• 17 years ago

I loved it. My fiancee and I have been talking about a similar business (not competing, bingo cards are all you) and it was interesting to see how your business has progressed and where you are.

akamaka• 17 years ago

Thanks for posting your annual write-ups. You have a straightforward style of writing that's very enjoyable to read!

callmeed• 17 years ago

Thanks Patrick. Very cool of you to share this.

I'm curious about your stated plans/hopes to do BCC full-time. Do you think BCC could grow faster if you worked on it full-time? Do you want to add more products?

patio1111• 17 years ago

Yes, I think I could accomplish more with BCC if I didn't have one particular obligation which sucks 60+ hours plus travel a week. I do not intend Bingo Card Creator to be the last thing I ever program, but don't have concrete plans for my next application yet.

bcl• 17 years ago

I'm curious as to why your expenses were so high? Advertising and server charges should be the bulk of that, correct?

kalendae• 17 years ago

he has pie charts of how his expenses break down at http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats

csmeder2• 17 years ago

Wow, Thanks for sharing.

Have you thought about going into e-flash cards, it seems like you would have an overlap in customers for this product? And it wouldn't be too much work to create.

patio1111• 17 years ago

SEOwise if it is not bingo then my built in advantage is same regardless. Given that SEO is my main acquisition channel, makes little sense to make next business in nonlucrative niche when I could carve out a spot in a more rewarding niche for similar work.

charlesju• 17 years ago

This was an awesome post, thanks. 48% from Google = 250,000 views from Google SEO alone? That's pretty cool.

falsestprophet• 17 years ago

What grade-level students do you find are using your cards?

patio1111• 17 years ago

I primarily make and commission activities for elementary school students, for pedagogical reasons.

Outside of low-level foreign language courses, I don't see much reason to do it in high school. The primary skill generic word bingo tests is word recognition, which one would hope high schoolers don't have issues with. You can do variants with using a clue (e.g. "the part of the cell studded with ribosomes") for vocabulary bingo, I suppose.

I haven't systematically looked into whether most of my customers are elementary school teachers (or teachers, for that matter). I do know that I have the full range from pre-literate pre-schoolers through senior citizens, just based on customers asking for advice on how to play a game with $DEMOGRAPHIC.

dhimes• 17 years ago

If you could include math and chemical symbols, you may find some customers in high school chem, physics, etc.

ryanwaggoner3• 17 years ago

Did I read right that you saw a ~10x improvement in conversion from visits-to-trials over last year due to A/B testing? If so, that's incredible. Has the conversation from trial-to-paid remained pretty constant? What plans do you have to improve that?

Thanks so much for releasing this...it's always motivating to see someone building a business system like this.

patio1111• 17 years ago

If so, that's incredible.

It sure would be. I'm not finding where you're reading that, though. Since any improvement at any stage of the funnel flows straight to the bottom line in my business, that would imply a 10x increase in revenue.

Last year, unique visitors to trials was about 20% (57k / 292k). This year, it looks like about 15.5%. This is primarily due to a change in the mix of traffic -- my highest performing traffic is invariably those coming from AdWords ads, but AdWords has not kept pace with the rest of my business growth this year. The big drivers of increased unique visitors were organic SEO and the seasonal promotions, which brought in folks who were less interested in signup up for a trial than someone who had just qualified themselves by clicking on a call to action to Sign Up For Your Free Trial Today!

Has the conversation from trial-to-paid remained pretty constant?

No, it increased markedly. Downloadable trial to paid was 1.4% last year, 1.17% this year. (I think that decline is mostly due to cannibalization of the best prospects by the web app.) The web app trial to paid (new way to access old product, essentially) conversion rate was 2.33%. I push the online version VERY heavily, for the obvious reason.

What plans do you have to improve that?

Improve app, improve experience of purchasing app, etc. I segment before worrying about conversion rate, which is a subtlety I think a lot of Analytics For Beginners articles miss: if your prospect mix is changing, changes in consolidated conversion rates might reflect the mix more than it does the desirability of the product or marketing.

ryanwaggoner3• 17 years ago

Under "Things that went right", you state:

In addition to collecting numerous mentions from luminaries in the community, actually using A/Bingo has been key to my ongoing conversion optimization efforts. (Last year, for example, I had approximately 1.4% conversion rates for the downloadable version of the software.)

Since you list this year's download-to-paid conversion rate as 1.17%, I assumed you were talking about the visits-to-trials conversion rate, as going from 1.4% last year to 1.17% doesn't really strike me as something that went right in terms of conversion rate optimization :)

I didn't take the aggregate conversion rate into account.

SapphireSun• 17 years ago

On the topic of A/B testing, I was clicking around your site and I noticed that when I clicked on certain top level navigation buttons (such as purchase) it changed my choices based on the context. If I recall correctly (I'm not a professional designer by any means), many design books are against that. What caused you to decide to do that? Did you discover it focused the user's attention better?

Thank you for sharing this information with us! Data is always fascinating and your story is inspirational :-)

Timothee2• 17 years ago

For living in the Bay Area (San Francisco's that is), I was surprised (and pleased for you) to read that $18k was enough to live off of. Very cool!

teej• 17 years ago

I believe he lives in Japan, not San Francisco.

rgrieselhuber• 17 years ago

Which, contrary to popular conception, is actually quite affordable. Trains are pricier but housing is pretty cheap these days and food is about the same if you buy local.

patio1111• 17 years ago

The other day I joked that the average household income here is lower than SF average rent. Turns out that if you restrict to sole occupant households, joke is true. Not sure I can laugh at it now.

Timothee2• 17 years ago

Oh, I know he does. I was talking about me living in San Francisco, thus comparing Patrick's net revenue to salaries around here.

And I did believe that living costs in Japan were higher.

pchivers• 17 years ago

So you made $18,525 in profits, and figure that worked out to $125-$150 an hour. That means you worked somewhere between 124 and 148 hours over the entire year, or less than 3 hours a week. Is this correct? If so, then it is very impressive...

myth_drannon• 17 years ago

He started it in 2007, I believe in that year while he was developing the application he did not make any money. The more correct hourly rate would be to profitIn(07+08+09)years/work(07+08+09)years

patio1111• 17 years ago

I started in 2006. It took me eight days to develop the application, not one year. I had my first sale two weeks after it was released, and somewhere around $2.5k sales in the rest of that calendar year.

ryanwaggoner3• 17 years ago

Patrick, I have incredible respect for what you've accomplished, so I hope you won't be offended by this, but do you ever think that you might have picked the wrong niche? I mean, you're killing it in terms of growth, clearly, but the market for bingo card creation software is only so big, and it doesn't strike me as a particularly hungry market. I guess I'm wondering if you had picked something a little bit bigger, could you have done essentially the same thing and reached the point where you can do it full-time even sooner?

At the end of the day, it sounds like you're pretty much there, and the experience you've gained is worth much much more than the dollars you've gotten out of it, but still...I just wonder if a different niche might have been more...efficient or something.

Again, I hope you don't take that the wrong way. You've accomplished something pretty amazing, and I'm looking forward to hearing about what you do next.

dangrover• 17 years ago

What's neat about it is that he can spend time on A/B testing and stuff like that. Also, it's the sort of app where you have a problem, you google it, and you buy it. These are great products to sell. With apps like mine, users need to warm up to the app for much longer.

With me, I spend all my time working on new products or supporting the existing ones, so I always feel sleazy neglecting that in order to tweak marketing.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

This is what I love about Patrick's business. He has it essentially stripped down to the bare essence of marketing and selling software. Everything he does is teachable. We sell a 5-figure enterprise product, and I pay attention to everything he does.

I'm pretty sure he said himself that the actual product was a weekend project for him.

patio1111• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure he said himself that the actual product was a weekend project for him

55 hours for version 1.0, but keep in mind, that was the barely functional, ugly, terrible user experience I delivered 3 years ago. Somebody bought it anyway. (He eventually got a refund, but 1.02 sucked a little less, etc etc.)

There may well be a programmer somewhere who could deliver the current site in a weekend, but he sure as heck isn't me. (5k lines of Ruby code, 3k lines of Java code, several hundred pages of content, etc etc.)

patio1111• 17 years ago

People always worry about offending me with that comment. It has never bothered me, and there is some truth to it. With the skills I have today, I like to think I could accomplish something ambitious. However, the skill acquisition has been path dependent. Four years ago I did not even know what svn was, had never written a line of sql, had no particular marketing expertise, etc etc. I was totally unprepared to be a businessman and started only when I saw an opportunity even I could bring in. All the skills I have now are because I have been compounding marginal improvements since then.

I do not regret any of it. I do not even regret two years of salarymanning when I could have recontracted at the tech incubator. (Plusses, leaving at four thirty, no commute. Plusses for salarymanhood, much more professional growth, and everything I ship makes real people happier and real lives better. That is enough to tolerate low pay, no work life balance, and two hour commute, But not for forever.)

Not sure about next program, but I will have plenty of time to think. I secured a twenty thousand angel investment and ongoing cash injections from this crazy white guy who lives in a rice field, after all. Terms were pretty good.

Apologies for language, posting from cell．

hopeless• 17 years ago

For Patrick to kick ass in this small niche is great... and that has often got me thinking: If he can do that with that niche, there's some hope for me yet!

But when you think about it, it isn't that niche a product. Who's the market? Teachers who run bingo quizes. Actually, that seems like a huge market although most of us here think of it as a marginal product. So perhaps it's not such a niche after all... just obscure to us.

Bingo Card Creator Annual Report

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