I passed a bit of a milestone yesterday: I’ve sold $50,000 of Bingo Card Creator.
It is an arbitrary and meaningless milestone, but it put a smile on my face nonetheless. I’m cautiously optimistic that the next $50,000 won’t take 3 years. (Profits before taxes are somewhere in the $27,000 range if I’ve managed to tally all my receipts correctly — always unlikely until tax time rolls around.)
Wish me luck — the school year sales started this week and it appears that I will be moving out of the summer doldrums in style. The online version is converting very well (1.7% of all trials, including a large portion of trials that wouldn’t reasonably have converted yet because it is too early). My new ad campaigns are posting my highest conversion rates ever, courtesy of the online version being easy to sign up for. My first newsletter, sent yesterday via Mailchimp, resulted in 2 sales ($60) for about $2 worth of email postage.
All in all, things are going pretty well business-wise. More updates as they happen.
Congrats Patrick! You’ve been an inspiration to many of us, with your relentless process improvement.
I hope the second $50,000 comes much quicker.
Steve
Congrats, of course! You’re an inspiration to many.
Do you ever wish you picked a different niche? I know–you (and I) have nothing against your current niche, and you’ve done quite well squeezing tons of marketing improvements, etc, and I imagine there’s a good deal of progress yet to be made.
But it’s still a pretty small niche. Ever wish you picked something just a *tad* bigger, so that you were dealing with (say) an order of magnitude higher sales? Each tweak would then result in a comparatively bigger increase in sales.
Nah, I’ve never seriously regretted not doing something bigger. I have severe doubts that if I had plunged into something competitive/technically intensive/etc right off the bat I would have gotten myself to a point from which I could build on my successes.
I will eventually branch out a bit — after I say goodbye to the day job. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday — and forever. ;)
Congratulation, Patrick! Your undying pursuit of ways improvements in your product and
marketing effort have shown us what it looks like to be in it for the long-haul.
Here’s to the next $50k :-)
I’m quite curious how the $23K of expenses break down. I — and presumably others — would appreciate a rough outline of where the overhead came from.
Would a pie chart help? ;)
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-chart
Thanks, Patrick! You are truly a wealth of information.
Congratulation Patrick, Very inspirational!
Thanks for sharing this with all of us
Out of curiosity, is there any plan to start another apps?
Keep up the great work!!
Thiru
I don’t think I’ll have the mental bandwidth to do another for-money application while still connected with the day job. I do have essentially three apps now, though: BCC, BCC as a web app, and A/Bingo (though that is OSS).