If you search “bingo card creator”, I’m now result #8 through my download link at Payloadz, one of the folks I’m using as a payment processor.  Whee.  Its not that useful to me, though, because the web store design is not so hot.  I’ll have to get work on optimizing that.  Unfortunately, there is a limit to what I can do, and they link back to my main site in a way that is Google friendly.

I wasn’t exactly happy with the amount of steps it took to get people to use my pre-loaded word lists. You had to learn how to open a file, then navigate through two directories, then pick the list. Sure, four steps is nothing for a computer programmer, but my users… aren’t. So I just put in another, simpler way to do the same thing — a Wizards menu. It automagically parses my data directory and extracts the available templates, then puts them in easy-breezy menu form. Plus it makes for a great screenshot.

[Edit:

The screenshot in question now leads my screenshot page: check it out.

Incidentally, total development time for this feature was about 20 minutes of planning, 20 minutes of coding, and 20 minutes of testing.  This was mostly because I started at 10 PM at night and lost 30 minutes to the JMenu.setName and JMenu.setText *not* being equivalent, which isn’t a mistake I would make in daylight hours.  If you start with extensibility and code reuse in mind, Java or any other OO language can be used to rapidly code in new features almost as quickly as Rails or the other new hotness these days.  If you don’t, you end up with hundreds of classes full of totally unmaintainable spaghetti code.  Here’s an example: I spent an extra 10 minutes during this part of the project coding a Factory class.  Why code a factory when I could have just subclassed JMenuItem for a single purpose?  Because with a Factory I can decide tomorrow to make another type of wizard that isn’t just an alias for “read this file” — for example, I can make ones to autogenerate math problems.  Hey, wait, I think there could be a market for that one…

]

Oh boy, how I have come to love and hate Google Analytics.  Love, because it offers me incredible amounts of information about my business.  Hate, because I can’t resist the urge to check it every five minutes during the business day (i.e. when I’m working the job that, oh, pays a salary).  But its given me some preliminary stats which I’ll share with you all.  Note that these are for approximately 48 hours during the weekend in summer, which is about as cruddy a time as you could possibly pick to meet my customers.

I’ve got two ad groups.  One is carefully targetted at people searching for something very much like my product — typing “make my own bingo cards” and the like.  I’m willing to pay a bit of money to reach them — we’ll have to wait to see conversion rates over the long run, but at the moment they’re costing me 20 cents per click and that sounds fair.  Over two days, I served these folks 115 ads and got a CTR (click-through rate) of 4.34% (5 clicks).  Thats a bit of a multiple of the industry average, probably because I’m giving them exactly what they want with my ad text, which is something like this:

Print Custom Bingo Cards
Your own text or use our lessons.
Download our free trial now!

Last night I added conversion checking — i.e. I hear when people go from the ad to download my demo or buy my software (hasn’t happened yet).  I expect these folks to eventually convert at some multiple of the folks brought in by ad #2.  However, the results aren’t even close to accurate yet.
Group #2 is focused on teachers/parents looking for sight word lists.  One of the features my software comes with out of the “box” is making sight word bingo cards.  So I pay for folks looking for words like “Dolch word lists” (n.b. Dolch is an education bigwig from the 50s who came up with the eponymous list of 220 most common English words, and if you’re not an elementary reading teacher you will NEVER hear his name in your life but if you are he has name recognition approaching that of Einstein).   I only pay $.04-10 a click for these customers because a) surprisingly, folks trying to sell to first grade reading teachers don’t speak First Grade Reading teacher (they bid up “sight words” but not “Dolch words” despite the fact that the two are synonymous to my customers) and b) there is money in gambling, which drives up the price of any string involving “bingo”, but there is a lot less money in teaching first graders to read.

Anyhow, my ad text.  I’m very happy with this one, since it works in my price advantage and my main selling point (save you time) while appealing to every teacher’s sense of Purpose:

Sight Word Class Games
If you prep more than you teach,
try out a better way for free.
www.BingoCardCreator.com

And here we go with a variation:

Sight Word Class Games
Paying $10 a set for vocab cards?
Try out a better way for free.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

That second variation is getting no hits whatsoever, but oh well.  Its not costing me money, and Google will automagically optimize in favor of the one getting the clicks.  I’m going to periodically try out lots of different ad phrases and landing pages to see which ones work best at getting clicks and, ultimately, conversions.

Cross your fingers for me: I live in Japan so the US work day for Monday starts right after I go to bed tonight.  When I wake up in the morning we’ll see if the mass of teachers returning to work late in the school year or early in the summer break (what, you thought teachers actually stayed home in the summer?  Ha, ha, ha, good one) are interested in buying.

I posted a classified ad (hey, it was free) on a large message board teachers collect at (and collect they do — PR 8!).  I wasn’t seriously expecting anyone to drill down two levels to get to my software, but hey, what could it have hurt?  Plus some decent profile links will help the spiders find me.  Well, not 2 hours later I got a letter from somebody.  They needed a little handholding, so I handheld.

I just got done all the conversion tracking code for the web site.  Conversion means when somebody takes the action you desire when you market to them.  There are two seperate conversion worth noticing for me: every time somebody downloads the trial version, and every time somebody pays me money.  The second hasn’t happened yet (not surprising, since I’ve been open for 30 hours in the middle of the time my target audience is least likely to be at their computer).  Demo downloads have been happening, but I expect thats mostly from the Joel on Software people wanting to give advice (keep it coming guys!).  So now I can track whether demo downloaders are me (doesn’t count ;) ), sent in by my Google AdWords ads (which is a percentage I’m *keenly* interested in, for obvious reasons), or whether they came in from “organic” (not-paid-for) searches or even links.

Google made this all stupidly easy to set up.  Hats off guys.  I really hope they continue to make boatloads of money if they can continue to drive quality leads for me for so cheap (my cost per customer is sort of hard to estimate after 24 hours and no actual sales, obviously, but the kind of words I’m targetting typically cap out at about 10-15 cents with many in the sub-nickle range, with my most expensive ones being about a quarter.  Doing the math, I’m profitable with my most expensive words at a final conversion rate of slightly over 1%, and I’m profitable at my least expensive words with a conversion rate of, well, anything really.)

Ever heard the old saw “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”  This has a lot of wisdom for uISVs, who often are their own worst competitors.  We’re all sitting by the side of the road with a big sign saying “Get your free milk!”  Sometimes somebody ambles down, sees our sign, and says “Sure, I’ll take some free milk.”  And then he drinks it and leaves before we can even tell him how well-tempered of a cow she is.

I am not in the business of giving away milk, or selling cows.  My philosophy with Bingo Card Creator is that I give away cookies.  Because really, milk is a lovely drink but few people get up in the morning and say “I think I’ll go take a stroll around the neighborhood to find an independent farmer to buy milk from”.  Now cookies, on the other hand, put up a sign saying free cookies and you’ll be out of them before you can say boo.  So here’s me, sitting by my free cookie sign, with constantly pulling more out of my infinitely deep cookie jar.  And along comes a customer.  “Did I hear right about the free cookies?”, he asks me.  Yep, certainly sir, chocolate chip and absolutely delicious.  Have four, they’re small.

My customer spends several minutes going through my assortments of free cookies.  He can’t get enough of them.  And then he starts to get thirsty.  Pack down 3 dozen cookies and you’d be thirsty too.  Then, he notices a sign next to one of the cookie plates: “Feeling thirsty?  I bet you’d love some free milk.  Happens we have that, too.  Its right around the shed.”

So the customer runs around the shed and meets Betsie.  Betsie is wearing a sign saying “Hideho, looking for milk?  My name is Betsie and I’m your free dairy cow.”  And the customer has died and gone to heaven.  Not only is he stuffed full of cookies but he now has a free cow.  All he needs to do is sit down and milk her to finish his immediate need, then he can take her home.

So he sits down on the stool, and then realizes “Uh oh, no pail.”  Then he looks up and sees “Need a pail?  $24.95, less in quantity.  Ask the Cookie Guy.”

The cookies are the free sample cards I give out.   My target user is out on the Internet looking for an activity to do to teach something: maybe sight words, maybe phonics, maybe multiplication tables.  She (and she’s almost certainly a she, because she is teaching grade school) came to my site because I offer free activities to do exactly what she wants to do.  One mouse click later and she’s got a bingo card in front of her (I love you, Adobe Acrobat, thank you for being installed on every computer I’ve ever seen).  She can get eight the same way, and the last four all come on a single page so she realizes that I have that key feature.

Then, I ask her if she wants more cards from the same set.  Of course she does, because she has more than eight students.  Thats where she meets the cow — my free download.  A cow is a much bigger commitment than a cookie — my customer might even have to install the Java runtime (a 20 minute process if she’s on dialup).  But its a free cow, and it promises over a dozen cards to a thing which she was looking for and which she knows I can deliver (she’s got the proof literally in her hands by this point if she printed the PDFs).

So she sits down through my install process (if you’ve got Java, thats somewhere in the vicinity of five mouse clicks.  The program opens up directly into a free trial notice, then the main screen gives her instructions on exactly her use case — click open, click this folder to find your activity, click print.  She probably immediately prints one card to test and, sure enough, it works perfectly with no configuration.  Then she clicks print again and schedules one for everybody in her class.

And thats where she realizes that she has no pail.  A popup hits and says “This trial version is limited to printing 15 cards from any particular list.  You have printed 1 card, so your request of 22 cards puts you over the limit.  Would you like to register your software right now to be able to print as many cards as you want? YES / NO”.  Clicking on yes takes her straight to purchasing options, where I tell her for $24.95 I’ll sell her a pail that will hold all the milk she can handle.

I anticipate this process will generate a heck of a lot more conversions over time than actually selling to people who know they’re in the market for “make my own printable bingo cards”.

Hours worked: 47 hours (programming 31, website 10, payment processors 6)
Lines of code:  2226

Classes: 14 major classes (.java files), ~25 named classes, ~50 total classes (anonymous inner classes used for input listeners add up quickly)

Most expensive line item on budget: $17.20.  One 10 page fax of a contract from Gifu Prefecture to Nebraska.  My bosses would be so proud I’m helping to digitalize two rural regions at once :)

I got out of this morning and started making some improvements to my site suggested by the Joel on Software crew (thanks guys!), especially fixing one critical display bug with Internet Explorer (that required me to remove a nice visual effect but the jarringness of it was worth taking the hit).  I also tinkered a little bit with my AdWords campaign.  Then my phone rang and a friend of mine invited me out to the mall.  I haven’t seen the sun in seven days, so I figured, “Let the business run itself for six hours”.  And while he came over, I wrote some Google ads.  I was sort of proud of one of them — its almost guaranteed to hit either a reading teacher or a homeschool mother because nobody else knows one of the words in it. The text offers a freebie in the ad title, and the next two lines are “Tired of paying $10 each for vocab cards?  Try out a better way for free.”

Six hours later, none of my other adds had been displayed yet.  Not totally unexpected, since the US has only been awake for about 30 minutes.  That ad had been a few times — not a statistically significant number or anything.  And the click through rate?  Holy mother of God.  Now I just need to keep optimizing the web site to get my reading teachers to convert… and then start figuring out obscure words known only by elementary math teachers.

Well, unfortunately, I succumbed to a bit of a crunch time mentality even though this is supposed to be a non-crunch activity.  I just had a burst of energy (partially due to the drugs I am taking to stave off this cold, I think), and ended up working 9 hours on Friday instead of the 6 I have been allowing myself.  This brings the total time spent on this project to something in the vicinity of 45 hours, not including the daydreaming I have been allowing myself at work.

• The windows version is good to go, including all data files.  You can test drive it right now if you want.  I quashed three bugs discovered in last minute testing (user interface things that I hadn’t realized *could* exist because I generally use certain interface elements in a consistent way — I always type extensions out by hand, for example, and didn’t realize they aren’t forcibly included when you don’t until late in the game).
• The website is “complete ” except for the links to the payment processors.  I may still tinker with some advertising copy.  If I do say so myself, the Free Resources page is my best single idea in this entire project.  I detailed the plan for it in a post below and it worked out better than I could ever have hoped for… I hope.
• My Paypal/Payloadz system is all ready to go.  The eSellerate system is at about 80%, and they haven’t upgraded me to a real account yet so they may miss launch day.  Oh well, I wasn’t expecting a large stream of site licenses to start pouring in.
• A basic Google AdWords campaign is awaiting the start button, and I’m going to spend a good deal of launch day playing around with it and also Yahoo (which is offering a $25 free credit if you sign up now, which costs a $5 deposit which you’ll get back in clicks anyhow — such a sweet deal).