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Bingo Card Creator (and etcetera) Year In Review 2011

Posted on December 21, 2011 by in microISV, startups, stats

I’m Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on the Internets) and for the last several years I’ve run a small software company.  My first product was Bingo Card Creator, my current product focus is Appointment Reminder, and I do occasional consulting for a variety of clients, mostly on helping them sell more of their software over the Internet.

Traditionally, right before Christmas every year I release an annual report.  See, for example, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010.  (Crikey, have I really been doing this for that long?)  I’ve also traditionally published live stats for Bingo Card Creator, but not my other lines of business.

Writing the annual report is partially to keep me grounded, partially to talk through my thoughts on the year and goals for next year, and partially to (hopefully) give other folks ideas that they can use in their own businesses.  I hope you find it interesting or, at the very least, mildly amusing.

Obligatory disclaimers: Assume any statistics that I give are “roughly accurate, to the best of my knowledge, at the time this report was written.”  There are still a few weeks left in the year.  Sales are typically low in the last two weeks, but the exact timing of credit card charges can cause a bit of jitter in the December stats.  From past experience, I have a high degree of certainty that there are about $1,000 or $2,000 of expenses (across all lines of business) which aren’t in the bookkeeping  system yet and won’t be until I sit down in March and check things for taxes.

Capsule summary: Best year ever, by a lot.  Broke $100,000 in sales for the first time and increased total profits to ~$70k.  2012 has inflection points coming for life and the business.

The Year In Brief

I put Bingo Card Creator into maintenance mode for approximately 48 weeks out of 2011: I only answered emails and kept systems running, but took no action to improve the product or marketing.  (The other four weeks I tried a few minor things out.)  This was, theoretically, supposed to free me to spend most of my efforts on Appointment Reminder…

… but that didn’t end up happening.  For a variety of reasons, most of my focus business-wise went into consulting.  Although I technically only did about 10 weeks of consulting during the year, I spent quite a bit of overhead time on e.g. arranging deals which ended up falling through, arranging the deals which did actually go through, and doing general promotion activities like speaking at conferences.  (I had the opportunity to speak at about a half dozen conferences this year, and assorted other events.  It is great fun, but since I generally have to fly to America for them, they tend to munch a full week out of my schedule each.  I spent almost three months of the year in the US, doing a combination of family events, consulting, prospecting, speaking, and meeting some Internet buddies to discuss plans for later.)

I also lost two solid months due to dealing with legal issues, mostly centering around Immigration.  I’d love to fill you in on the nitty-gritty, but have been asked not to by people close to the situation.  Suffice it to say that I was a shoe-in for a Japanese visa back when I worked at a large megacorp, was not a shoe-in for a visa when doing my own thing, and had a very hairy experience with getting them to approve me as a “self-employed engineering consultant.”  Tips of the hat to my Japanese clients, particularly Makeleaps / Webnet IT and myGengo, whose support was instrumental in getting Immigration to approve my renewal.

Despite not having nearly as much time to work on Appointment Reminder as I would have liked, I did manage to firm up its technical underpinnings, add new features requested by clients, and do a small amount of work marketing it.  I hope to make that more of my focus in 2012.

Bingo Card Creator

Despite being in maintenance mode, BCC continued performing like a trooper.  People always ask “Could you afford to live on it only?” and the answer is “Yes, but barely, and it would require a lifestyle adjustment, mostly in the don’t-fly-across-the-Pacific-so-often department.”  BCC did not meet the numeric goals that I had for the year.

Stats:

Sales: 1,539 (up 6% from last year’s 1,451)

Refunds: 14 (down from 22 last year, to .9% of sales from 1.5%)

Sales Net Of Refunds: $45,479.93 (up 5% from $43,398.55)

Expenses: $22,560.00 (up from $18,287.93, but largely just due to an accounting issue — I can’t split costs in my homegrown bookkeeping software, so the ~$3,000 I paid for servers for AR is hiding in that number)

Profits: $22,919.93 (see above accounting issue, essentially flat from last year’s $25,904.66)

Wage per hour: Let’s see, ~15 hours of programming, 20 minutes a week on customer support…  about $700 an hour.  Not too bad.

 

Web Stats:

(All stats are from bingocardcreator.com unless otherwise specified.)

Visits: 821k (up from 777k)

Unique visitors: 670k (up from 655k)

Page views: 2.9 million (up from 2.7 million)

Traffic sources of note: Google (46%), AdWords (18%), Binghoo (13%)

Trial signups for online version: 82,000 (up from 72,000)

Approximate online trial to purchase conversion rate: 1.8%

 

Narrative Version:

Aside from kicking up AdWords spend modestly (to no good effect) and running a few A/B tests, nothing really substantial happened with Bingo Card Creator this year.  I lost probably $1,000 to $2,000 of sales when the site crashed right during the middle of the Halloween rush for ~9 hours while I was on an airplane.  That was a little disappointing, but while it broke my candy budget it won’t exactly put me in the poorhouse.

Projections that BCC would continue to grow despite not being actively worked on turned out to be totally wrong.  I forecast 50% growth, reasoning “Hey, most of the systems work pretty much without my intervention, so I think the overall growth of the Internet plus a few A/B test means, oh, 50% or so.”  It mostly tread water.  I’m not hugely disappointed.

 

What Went Right:

  • Not having to work hardly at all for it.
  • Aside from the Halloween crash, the system was largely stable for the year.  I think I got woken up by the automated alarm maybe once.
  • SEO, AdWords, email marketing, and the usual scalable marketing stuff continued to be my bread and butter even when I was too lazy to actually cut and butter bread.

What Didn’t Work So Well:

  • Crashing on the third busiest day of the year, in such a way that it depresses my AdWords campaigns for the first and second busiest days of the year.
  • I integrated Stripe and expected a huge lift in conversions for going from Paypal to a simple CC-based payment system.  I tested this extensively in A/B tests.  I love everything about the Stripe system, but I have no evidence for “Stripe is better than Paypal/Google Checkout”, “Stripe/Paypal/Google Checkout is better than Paypal / Google Checkout”, etc etc.  That said, it might be something as simple as my buttons being ugly.  I’ll probably take a whack at it in the future, or better yet, have my designer take a whack at it.

Consulting

I did a few weeks of consulting this year, for several different clients.  Mostly, I do my engineering / marketing shtick for software companies, although some of my clients have been a wee bit farther afield.  I wrote up a fairly typical engagement with Fog Creek.  That one was a mutual success and we’ll continue to work together in the future.  (To the best of my knowledge, all of my consulting clients are happy with my work.)

One thing I’m going to do differently in the future is to work for less clients.  Don’t get me wrong: I love all my clients.  I was privileged to work with them.  However, it takes approximately X units of work to set up an engagement with a previous satisfied customer, 5X units of work to get a new prospect to the go/don’t-go decision on a new engagement, and I generally have to get three to four prospects to that point to actually wind up with a signed contract.  As my buddy Thomas at Matasano says, “That is life in the big leagues.”  However, since I’m not in a position where 100% utilization is a huge overriding goal of mine, I don’t need to keep the new prospect pipeline totally full… so I’m probably going to cut back on it quite a bit in 2012.  I’ll continue doing follow-up engagements for established clients where it makes mutual sense to do so, and I’m still of course available for interesting projects, but I’m not going to be doing six-week fly-across-America-four-times tours to drum up new business.

The following numbers are approximations only.  NDAs and having the sense God gave a tadpole constrain me from revealing my “going rate.”

Consulting sales: $55,000

Consulting expenses: $13,000  (mostly hotels and airfare for prospecting, which I pay for out of pocket.)

What Went Right:

  • Client selection.  I was, again, privileged to work for people who have interesting businesses, problems that I could make substantial contributions on, and the willingness and ability to pay all invoices in a timely fashion.
  • Raising rates.  My first guesstimate at my rate, back in 2010, was $X.  It turns out that I could do just about as much work as I wanted regardless of whether I charged $X, $2X, or $5X.  As a result, I typically quote fairly high rates and mostly stick with them, unless there is another reason I really, really want an engagement to happen.

What Didn’t Work So Well:

  • Disorganization.  At one point I was juggling something like five simultaneous proposals out while preparing for three conferences, two engagements, and six weeks of travel.  It got so bad that I showed up at a city once and checked at the airport for where I was staying, quickly seeing that I mistimed a conference by three days and thus had no hotel booked, booking a hotel from the taxi, and then arriving at the hotel to recheck my schedule and discover that I had used the previous year’s schedule and was actually simultaneously at a different hotel across Brooklyn.  (Shoutout to the Brooklyn Beta guys for saving me from my own stupidity that week.)  There were multiple points in the year where I found myself wishing for either a boss or a secretary or somebody to just say “Show up to X on Monday and Do Stuff and all the stuff that is not Stuff will be taken care of.”  My occasional slipups in dealing with the demands of a growing business caused me to drop balls in ways that were sometimes client-visible, too.  This is a major part of the motivation for cutting back next year.  (There is Plan B, of course: hire folks to do either the execution or the admin and take whichever part they’re not doing, but I don’t think I’m moving in that direction.)
  • Too much work!  Largely due to overhead and travel, plus the outsize distraction generated by the same, consulting munched a heck of a lot more time than I thought it was going to.  I wanted to have a solid eight months of the year to work on AR.  I think I probably got maybe two.

 

Appointment Reminder

I launched Appointment Reminder last December, with the goal of having approximately 200 customers and $10k in monthly recurring revenue by now.  I had planned on focusing for most of 2011 on marketing and selling it to more businesses.  That largely didn’t happen, but since I got the fundamentals of my SEO strategy in place (while largely ignoring the modestly more advanced content creation / etc that runs BCC and that I usually help clients with), the business grew despite my best efforts at totally neglecting it to focus on consulting and not getting deported.

AR has been hanging around at a crossroads for a while now.  There are two very different trajectories it could go down.  In one, I grow it organically, and it grows into a modestly profitable software business which will provide handsomely for my family and (in the fairly near future) employees.  In two, I take outside investment, and attempt to grow as quickly as possible to $N million a year in revenue, at which point options would include either a) selling to one of the larger players in the small business software space or b) continued operations at scale with a focus on growth.  Luckily, I have  the luxury of waiting on making that decision: my runway is infinite, the market opportunity is only getting bigger, and the perceived value of my involvement with a startup among investors does not appear to be depreciating.

This is one of the reasons I can’t be as open as I would like to be about the current status of the business.  BCC has essentially no secrets, and would not really benefit from having them, as — aside from elementary school English teachers — there is nobody out there who has something I want for BCC.  However, if I hypothetically wanted to take investment, then accredited investors suddenly have something I want very much and having secrets about AR gives me something with which to trade to get it.  (It is similar to not putting prices on an Enterprise Software website.  You can trivially get them, but the price of getting them is giving a salesman permission to give you the spiel.  Similarly, folks who ask about AR’s numbers these days are generally asking in the hopes that they eventually receive a phone call asking them for a check.)

The other reason I can’t talk about AR numbers so much is that I radically underestimated how important the enterprise market would be to the business, and you can’t spell enterprise without NDA.

So: I wanted to have two hundred customers by now.  For the publicly available plans, I currently have a few dozen paying customers.  There are ways to get things from me that don’t involve paying the numbers on the Pricing page.

AR is modestly profitable — it covers all of its own costs.  I plow most of the money it generates back into the business, though, rather than taking distributions.  For example, I’m now about 95% certain that I will have significant contractor or employee involvement on it in 2012.

Revenue: Undisclosed

Expenses: Undisclosed (very modest ongoing expenses, reinvested most profits)

Profits: I took about $5k just to have a number that would minimize disbelief at the tax office.

What Worked Right:

  • Twilio.  The Twilio API and service have been unalloyed epic wins for Appointment Reminder.  I had zero disruptions in service attributable to them, their customer support has been fast, responsive, and technically savvy (even helping me debug my own code at points), and they’ve been very supportive of me.  Plus they have these awesome red track jackets that they keep sending me, which you’ve probably seen if you’ve seen a picture of me doing any talk this year.  (I actually wear them mostly because I love the color red, but apparently I wear them so often that folks at the Fog Creek office thought the Twilio logo was my logo.)
  • Sendgrid: It’s like Twilio, except for email.  Great service.  No red jackets.
  • Unit testing & staging servers.  I am gradually getting more sophisticated in my engineering practices, and have been ramping up my testing activities since starting to code AR.  It has transformed the way that I do development, for the better, and made it easier to respond to customer requests to change things while decreasing the number of problems I have caused.  Total win.  See my presentation at TwilioConf for examples of the specific ways I use it for AR.
  • Exact match domain names.  ”Hey Patrick, how is it that with no marketing budget and nearly no marketing work you rank #1 for [appointment reminder]?”  I told everybody that I was buying the .org specifically because that would happen but apparently folks didn’t believe me.
  • Using the self-service site as lead generation for enterprise sales.  Fairly self explanatory.
  • The service itself: AR solves a clear customer need, and my customers are raving fans of it.  There exist many services businesses which incur hundreds in direct costs and thousands in forgone revenue for a single missed appointment.  (Think, say, an HVAC company which sends a three-man team of tradesmen out to your house to replace your heater, which is a $2,000+ job, only to discover that you aren’t home to let them in.)  One of my customers reports that just the delta in no-shows since starting to use AR would pay for his mortgage and his daughter’s college education.  Many of my other customers report that their office managers, who previously did telephone reminder calls manually, are ecstatic to not have to do them any more.  Customer retention among folks who actually use the system (as opposed to signing up, doing a test call, and forgetting about it) is virtually 100%.
  • Talking to smart people for advice: Since I’ve been going back and forth on the investment question, I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and investors whose opinions I respect.  I really appreciate their feedback, which ranged from “Are you kidding?  You’d hate it.” to “I want to invest in you, but realistically, you would lose nothing by waiting until you are sure.” to “Best decision I ever made.” and helpfully included a lot of actionable advice on how to do things in the meanwhile such that options remain open.

What Didn’t Work So Well:

  • Catastrophic engineering failures.  I had one combination outage/catastrophic failure in February (the details are recounted in that TwilioConf presentation) and a ~3 day period of sporadically degraded operations after my move to Rackspace, which I finalized over the Thanksgiving holiday.  Both of those were my fault, for architecting the system in a way which did not gracefully handle its multiple moving parts getting out-of-sync with each other.  I’ve since done significant work on making it more stable.  (Overall reliability for the year has been excellent, but those periods were easily the most stressed I’ve ever been about any business issue.)
  • Lack of focus: I’ve been commenting above on this, so I won’t belabor the issue, but I really didn’t get to work on AR as much as I wanted.
  • Enterprise sales: I’m actually fairly decent at Enterprise Sales, and am working with someone in the industry who has a deep Rolodex among folks who would be great candidates for AR, but (partly due to the focus issue and partly due to my own comfort level) I didn’t put nearly enough effort towards it this year.  What I should honestly do is go to a conference some time, prospect like a madman, and then make following up on those leads my only job until I’ve got contracts signed.  (The prices for enterprise SaaS make this very economically viable.)

Goals For 2012

Bingo Card Creator

  • I’d be happy with continued flatness ($~30k profits on $50k sales), maybe.  It isn’t the source of growth for my business anymore.
  • Continue using it as a laboratory for weird ideas I have on conversion optimization.
  • Don’t break it during Halloween.

Consulting

  • Do less work prospecting for new clients.
  • Do more work for existing clients.
  • Modestly increase billings, if that makes sense for where my overall business is.  (If I take external investment in AR, that will likely require shuttering the consulting business.)

Appointment Reminder

  • Figure out whether I want to take investment or not.  If so, do so.
  • Convince Keith (who I do my podcast with) to work with me, if possible.  (Don’t worry, he knows this is on the agenda.  We’re best friends.)
  • See about transferring responsibility for the engineering (particularly front-end) side of things so I can focus on marketing/sales.
  • 10x current sales numbers.  That seems to be a fairly safe bet regardless of whether I shoot for a small business or for a high-growth business.  (1,000x-ing would be another story.)

A personal note: The last 3,300 words ultimately matter much, much less than the next 3: she said yes.  We’re announcing to our family on Christmas, as per our family tradition.

Dashboard Design For Metrics-savvy Software Companies

Posted on February 9, 2010 by in stats

I have a confession to make: I’m something of a metrics junkie.  I have lost entire days of my life just staring at Google Analytics reports.  Metrics have always activated that same part of my brain that WoW did: ooh, a page view, ooh, a sale, ooh, if this had purple bars on it I’d pay $15 a month.  So I would flip from email to Analytics to e-junkie (the extremely appropriately named payment processor I use) to Analytics to… and end up accomplishing nothing of real importance.

Because although I’m a metrics junkie, I’m a smart metrics junkie.  And any smart metrics junkie can tell you that if your metrics aren’t giving you actionable insights to make decisions that matter to your business, well, you might as well go play WoW for all the good you’re doing.

That’s why, in one of my periodic bits of investing in the business, I built myself a dashboard.

Goals of the Dashboard

A dashboard is, simply, an easy to digest one-glance view on how your business is doing.  Mine is implemented in Rails and it is the page that greets me if I visit my site (password protected, naturally).  The purpose is threefold:

  1. Minimize the time it takes me to do common repetitive tasks.
  2. Show me information about my business at a glance, so that I don’t feel the need to log into my various other sources of info.
  3. Arrange for easy access to drilling down into important things for me.

Like all of my other software, it is a work in progress.  (Incidentally, some folks have offered to buy it when I have mentioned it previously.  I can’t sell it, since it is tied very tightly to my business needs and data available.  At all of ~200 lines of code, though, you can knock one for yourself out in an afternoon.)

Here’s a screengrab from it:

Some comments on what this shows:

Search box (“The Omnibox”): The Omnibox is my Swiss Army Knife support tool.  Given absolutely anything I know about a customer — from her name to email address to transaction number to a (hopefully unique) phrase she has used in her bingo card — it goes off and fetches her customer record.  This is a real timesaver because many of my customers don’t remember what email address they purchased the software under, told Google to obscure their email address (a misfeature in Checkout, if you ask me), purchased with their husband’s credit card, etc etc.  The Omnibox saves me from having to actually do work to find customer records about 80% of the time.  Search results are the same as…

Customer Entries (Latest First): The vagaries of the bingo business mean that I’m overwhelmingly more likely to get a support incident from you in your first 24 hours of use than at any other time.  Accordingly, as soon as I open the dashboard, the last 10 customers pop straight up so I don’t even have to search for them.  (This also serves as a quick visual health check and lets me see if a customer’s transaction didn’t go through.)  This illustrates a core principle of dashboards: do less work, get more done.  Ten keystrokes saved doesn’t sound like a lot until you’ve done it 200 times.

Customer Support Options:  You’ll note some customers have their names in green.  This means they are using the online version of Bingo Card Creator, rather than (or in addition to) the desktop version.  Previously I just made that green to satisfy my curiosity (it gives instant, accurate visual feedback that 70% of my sales come from the online version), but as I got a feel for customer support needs I decorated their records with a pair of hyperlinks.

“Ghost me”: This is the same link you get if you try the Forgot Password function in the online app — one click logs you in.  I right click it, select Chrome’s Private Browsing option (to avoid overwriting my cookie), and suddenly I’m you.  This lets me see exactly what a customer is seeing, so that I can diagnose problems easier, or in a pinch just do what they need done.

“Email password”: The same as the password recovery functionality on my site — mails them a link to let them in so that they can change their password.

Sales Counter: This is only on the page because otherwise I’d a) log into e-junkie to check and then b) start trying to guesstimate how much money I was going to make this month.  Both are bad habits.  Putting it front and center decreased my logins to e-junkie from several times per day to once a blue moon (only when I need to speak with them, which since they run a very tight ship is “Almost never”).

Edit Bingo Cards: Takes me into the original core of the Bingo Card Creator site: a CMS which makes, you guessed it, bingo cards.  This is where I approve work submitted by freelancers, make minor content edits to it, or create new bingo activities.  Again, instant access on the dashboard saves time.  (There are also a few affordances there, like AJAX approval so that all I have to do is mouseover a new card and click OK to approve it.  Do less work, get more done.)

Downloads Per Month: This shows a graph of how many PDFs have been downloaded from my site, on a monthly basis.  It is a quick one glance indicator of how effective my SEO is, from back when I didn’t have the user stats to look at.  I could probably demote it from the dashboard these days.  This information is public, by the way.

All-time Sales: Graph of sales by month.  I mostly use this to check on market seasonality, year over year increase (70%, ho), and whether I’m on pace to make my revenue goals.  This is also public.

A/B Test Results: If you’ve been around this blog much you probably know that I obsessively test and measure.  When I have a particular A/B test on the front burner of my mind it gets promoted to the top of the dashboard.  At the moment nothing I have running is super-critical so they’ve been placed a click away.  You can see some of my A/B test results here — I’m a big believer in code reuse so a portion of my test results are also used for the documentation for my A/B testing library.

E-junkie: Convenience link to my payment processor, where I used to log into a lot.  This should be demoted from the dashboard.

uISV email: The Google Apps for Domains email account I use.  (uISV stands for “Micro-independent software vendor” — i.e. like “small software company” with a more pretentious acronym.)

Logins Today / This Week: This is my “one glance health check” for the business.  I have a rough idea of what these numbers should be.  If they go down far below that, I have broken the login button and need to fix it immediately.  If they go high above that, it must be Halloween.  If they stay flat I might have broken the login button close to Halloween.

Vanity Stats: I keep these around just to satisfy my primal WoW player urges.  They have no particular relevance to my business, but they’re fun to quote to people.

You might think “conversion rate” is a really important number.  See, conversion rate for a channel or a creative or a landing page is a very important number.  Conversion rate for all of your visitors, on the other hand, is very, very sensitive to traffic mix.  Since customers arriving by AdWords always outconvert customers arriving by organic search in aggregate (which is an artifact of my SEO strategy and not to be worried about), a gyration in conversion rate is generally caused more by a change in prospect mix than a strong reaction to a change in my product.

Things Not Pictured

This dashboard can potentially display a few other types of information.  Thankfully, I don’t have an example to show you today.

Exceptions in payment processing: An exception happening in most places in my code is probably a misbehaving spider or a bug.  An exception happening in the callback for successful payments is a bug.  A very critical bug, because it often means that a customer loses access to the software they paid for.  If that happens, the computer sends me an email, my cell phone gets rung, and this whole page gets hidden under a stacktrace written in blaze orange until I hit the “I dealt with it” button.  (This obvious probably won’t happen if the whole site goes down — mon.itor.us watches that for me.)

Regular exceptions get written to my log files.  That is, candidly speaking, where data goes to die.

Bug of The Day: I have a confession to make: I’m not much of a test driven developer.  It is really, sincerely difficult to anticipate every corner case which could happen with customers trying all possible combinations of words and bingo card options.  This causes a huge portion of the user-visible bugs in BCC, and because the symptom is typically “It looks… ugly?”  (for a value of “ugly” not known at runtime) it is sort of hard to capture ahead of time in the predominant Rails testing frameworks.

That’s why I have a wee little daemon who periodically sanity checks all the print jobs people have run recently, looking for anything I’ve identified as the symptom of the Bug of the Day.  Currently, the Bug of the Day is that under certain circumstances the combination of a very long title and a bingo card with four to six short words in a certain box can cause the box to render across multiple pages, which is not desirable.  This is algorithmically checkable, but only in retrospect.

If the daemon detects that a particular print job caused one of the Bugs of the Day to pop up, it displays that fact in red, along with a link which copies the word list to my personal account so that I can reproduce the behavior and start trying to squash it.

This system also lets me sanity check upgrades to the site.  If I cause a regression in behavior, typically (squashed) Bugs of the Day will typically resurface, and my dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree.

What’s On Your Dashboard?

I love hearing implementation details from other businesses, and this is about as wonky as it gets.  What do you put on your dashboard?  Do you have any suggestions for things I should consider adding to mine?

Introducing A/Bingo: Rails Split Testing

Posted on August 15, 2009 by in stats, web design

Regular readers of this blog know I’m a bit obsessive about testing and measuring small, iterative improvements to my website.  Previously I used Google Website Optimizer but I found it had some annoying limitations.  In particular, it was too much work to start tests, too much work to code tests, and too much work to maintain expired URLs after tests were over. 

So I went away to the code salt mines for the last week, and coded my own A/B testing framework in Ruby on Rails.  It is called A/Bingo .  (The name sort of popped into my head and wouldn’t leave.  It is a pun, it relates to my business and personal brand, and it gives the impression of Hitting the Target that successful testing should give you.  My designer took that and ran with it for the logo.  I’m very impressed with the results.

A/Bingo is, without question, the most technically impressive code I’ve ever written.

  • Setting up a test takes one line of code.  It is so easy you’ll find yourself doing it automatically when writing copy or making new features.
  • It tracks absolutely any event as a conversion, in one line of code.
  • It does statistical significance testing for you, producing human-readable output which tells you exactly how confident you can be that the test results are accurate.
  • It is fast.  No, it is fast.  Like, “A/Bingo could handle being linked from the front page of a social news site.  Heck, it could be used on the front page of many social news sites.”

If you want to read any more about it, I encourage you to take a look at the website.  A/Bingo is already powering all the Bingo Card Creator A/B tests.  I expect that the ease of use and copious features will mean I run a lot more tests.  I’ll continue sharing what I learn through them. 

P.S. Incidentally, I scored a 16.9% improvement to funnel completion thanks to Mixpanel.

2008 Taxes Done, Well Ahead of Schedule

Posted on March 13, 2009 by in stats, taxes

Thanks to my new expense tracking feature on the BCC website and the magic of TaxAct (the only online filing place I’ve found that supports the vast, vast number of American uISVs with day jobs subject to the Foreign Earned Incom Exclusion), for literally the first time in my life I have my taxes done well ahead of schedule.  Whee!

Final numbers, for those who were interested:

Sales: $21,720

Expenses: $12,318

Profit: $8,798

Self-employment taxes: a bit over $1,200

 

The expenses number includes some things which aren’t strictly speaking BCC related — mostly, costs sunken into getting the second product up and running.  More about that when I have something to show.

I also ended up scheduling the IRS to take four nice big bites out of my checking account during the year because the amount of taxes I expect to owe next year is going to be a few thousand more and if I have the money in my account I’ll probably do something stupid like spending it on a TV or, worse, investing it.  (Am I bitter about that?  No, not at all.  But it makes for a good joke.)

Sales Exceed Salary (Scary Thought!)

Posted on February 28, 2009 by in stats

I thought I was going to just miss being able to say this, but five customers bought copies of BCC overnight.  This brings BCC sales for February to $2,925.  

Now, looking at my February pay stub (which is pay for work done in January), the before-deductions sum of everything (base pay, housing allowance, travel allowance, overtime) is $2,890.

This isn’t quite as impressive as it might sound at first blush: Japanese salarymen generally get a biannual bonus which generally at my company amounts to 2.25 months of base pay each time, where base pay is about 75% of that top-line number.  It also doesn’t count that I had to pay expenses for BCC this month ($995), doesn’t count that self-employment would raise my taxes relative to regular employment, etc.

Still… yikes.  (I won’t tell you how many hours are required to get either of these numbers… principally because the difference is too depressing for words.)

Incidentally: the total salary of a programmer in his mid/late twenties in Japan is generally somewhere around the 4 million yen mark (~$40k USD).  It is considered fairly good for someone that age.  We’re crazy underpaid next to engineers in America, I know, I know — my family reminds me frequently.

Bingo Card Creator Year 2008 In Review

Posted on December 21, 2008 by in stats

Well, it is that time of the year again: home for Christmas, jetlagged like crazy, and up at 2:00 AM after passing out for 11 hours.  Sounds like a great time to compile end of the year stats!  These will change a bit in the next 10 days or so, but not all that much, so they’re roughly representative.

In A Nutshell: 2008 was a very, very good year.

My goal had been to sell $20,000 worth of BCC, after having sold $10,600 last year.  

Sales:

Total Sales: 815

Refunds: 24  (~2.9%)

Sales Net of Refunds: $20,707.40

Customers requesting CDs: 205 (24.9%)

Customers using Paypal: 373 (46%, remainder Google Checkout)

Expenses (Approximate):

AdWords: $5,850

Freelancer (Bingo Cards): $1,000

SwiftCD: $1,050 

Paypal: $400

Domain Names: $500  (Kind of went hog wild, eh.)

Hosting: $500

CrazyEgg: $240

Software: $200

Clicky: $90

e-junkie: $60

Total: ~$10,000

Profit: ~$10,700

 

Various Other Fun Metrics:

Unique Visitors (to main site): 285,000 

Page Views (main site & ChristmasBingoCards.com) : 1,000,000

Trial Downloads: ~57,000

(Implied minimum conversion rate: ~1.4%)

Confirmed Installations: 12,700

(Implied maximum conversion rate: ~6.4%)

Number of people who sat down at their computer one day and said “You know, I really need to play some Cheese bingo”: 52

Number of people who played Christmas bingo (plus an unknown number who evaded tracking when I borked it): 5,652

Commentary:

What went spectacularly right: In my writeups of last year’s results (blog and BoS forum) I had mentioned that I had high hopes for incorporating the bingo cards into my site design, to catch people looking for specific niche activities and funnel them into downloading BCC and then eventually making me money.  This has been a smashing success, and has greatly improved my SEO efforts.  The $1,100 paid to a freelancer might stick out in the expenses — I assure you, it is like paying for straw so you can spin it into gold.  And the loom is 95% automatic, whee.  I’d make such a poor wicked fairy, I make so much on the alchemy I can afford to do it without needing anyone’s firstborns.

The other thing that has helped me out was continued improvement in Google AdWords, largely due to Conversion Optimizer — I don’t get to keep nearly as much of the sales I get from it ($5,850 — Google, I want a nice Christmas gift from you guys)

What went wrong: I had much higher hopes for ChristmasBingoCards.com than eventually ended up getting realized (see here).  

I also regret that I have not proceeded much on the project I started at the 30 Day Sprint this summer — despite paying Slicehost quite a bit to keep a 512 MB slice sitting largely idle (yay, SVN repository) and my designer $500 for the design, I have done almost nothing with it since the summer.  I blame a combination of personal issues during the summer and work issues for the rest of the year — nothing sucks it out of you like getting out of work at 10 PM and then facing a 2 hour commute.  Hopefully I’ll be able to do a bit of work on it over the break, when not enjoying family and friend festivities.  After all, as nice as BCC is I have dreams of eventually going full-time and while BCC provides a quite nice foundation for that I think the next project will be the one that pushes me over the top.

Other Random Trivia:

  • My chapter in Blog Blazers was published.  I really like how it came out, and “My son, the published author” cooings have made my free copies great Christmas gifts.
  • I now hang out on Aaron Wall’s SEOBook forums quite a bit, as a moderator.  SEO is one of my favorite parts of this job — great intellectual challenge, combining a bit of engineering, a lot of marketing, and heaping helpings of pure magic.
  • As of next year, BCC will be providing part-time incomes for about five people (three freelance writers and my designer, plus me).

Goals for next year:

  • $30,000 in sales for BCC
  • $20,000 in profits for BCC
  • Release a second product
  • Go full-time (we’ll see where life takes me)

Bingo Card Creator Sales Stats

Posted on March 19, 2008 by in stats

As promised yesterday, I’ve cobbled together a feature to semi-automatically generate monthly sales reports.  At the moment I can’t show you guys the more impressive portions of the backend, as they integrate customer data at the moment, but I did manage to totally bulletproof the monthly sales report.  (Meaning it is physically impossible for anyone to get from the sales data to any identifiable information about customers, which would be 101 flavors of bad.  The actual backend code is not even uploaded on the production copy of the server.  I’m a little paranoid, what can I say.)

You can take a gander here.  Note the stats for March 2008 are, by necessity, not complete yet. ;)

Results of Site Redesign

Posted on March 15, 2008 by in stats, web design

About a week ago I merged Daily Bingo Cards and Bingo Card Creator, and embarked on a massive site redesign.  I thought I would write a bit about how this improved my numbers.  I have compared traffic to the combined total of the two sites — all other comparisons are against Bingo Card Creator itself, because I am lazy.  These are not rigorously devised statistics — they’re my quick eyeball of typical statistics for a weekday.

Visitors: 900 -> 1,200

Pages per Visit: 2.5 -> 3.5

Time per visit: 90 seconds -> 150 seconds

Trial Downloads: 100 -> 125 to 150 (hasn’t settled yet)

Confirmed Application Installs: 20-25 -> 30-40 (hasn’t settled yet)

Sales: 2 -> slightly under 1.

I’m sort of at a loss as to what is causing the sales to go down.  Its possible that is just natural fluctuation, as all of the pre-sales indicators are way the heck up.  I also might have some folks working through the trial pipeline who remember the old branding and get turned off by the new design (“This isn’t the right site!” is a very serious worry in my market). 

A graphic on how well the design focuses user attention, stolen shamelessly from my page on St. Patrick’s Day bingo and courtesy of CrazyEgg (I just upgraded to their $19/month plan because I’m getting too much traffic for the $9 plan to be useful — please, God, send me more problems like that one).  (This image will almost certainly be truncated by WordPress.  Click to see the full sized version.)

St. Patrick's Day click tracking

And one more, because images are fun.  Caution: this isn’t the best test in the world, because I did some significant changes to the sidebar several times while the test was running, and when element IDs change sometimes CrazyEgg “loses” the clicks from some of the views.  (This is so that you don’t see big red splotches where page elements no longer exist, obviously, but it also means that most of the clicks on those buttons aren’t getting shown.)

CrazyEgg analytics of front page

Alright, back to my favorite Saturday activity: doing taxes!  (I got the uISV part done already.  It came out to a bit over $800 on $6,300 odd of profits.  Now I’ve just got to collect a bunch of statements documenting less than $100 in interest and then fill out a bunch of boring administrivia forms.)

Year 2007 Stats and Year 2008 Goals

Posted on January 13, 2008 by in stats

2007 was my first full year running Bingo Card Creator, and I had impressive growth over last year (about a factor of four on both profits and sales, looking at my last tax return).  I hit my major goal for the year, $10,000 in sales, and see bright things in my future.

 Obligatory disclaimer: Don’t audit these numbers too seriously.  I haven’t given them the full once-over to make sure nothing is double-counted, etc.  (Although I do expect my Schedule C to resemble the following to a major degree.)

Sales: 406, including 116 CDs

Gross Income: $10,375 + ~$200 in various currencies = ~$10,500

Expenses:  $4,280

AdWords: $1,724

Freelancers for Daily Bingo Cards: $570

Hosting & Domains: $600  (Largely because I prepaid about a year at Slicehost, and use one server more than necessary there for putzing about with.  Cheap at twice the price and service is fantastic.)

SwiftCD: $550

The rest: CrazyEgg, e-junkie (best $55 spent for the second year in a row — they gave me a month free to apologize for some issues one week), one-time software purchases, and the like.  I don’t count Internet connection, laptop, or anything as I would be purchasing it anyhow.

Profit: ~$6,200

Rough estimate of wage per hour worked: ~$60  (beats my day job — substantially)

OK, enough about the money.  How about the website stats:

Bingo Card Creator

Visits : 140,488

Unique Visitors: 123,167

Page Views: 311,184

(Both of the following are from Google Analytics, which typically only counts about 60% of my sales conversions, so don’t trust them as gospel.)

Trial Downloads: 17,831

Confirmed Downloads: 5,846

 Daily Bingo Cards (keep in mind, only open 3 months):

Visits: 6,828

Unique Visitors: 6,022

Pageviews: 17,326

Bingo Card Files Downloaded (a precise count – yay Rails): 2,859

Big Wins for this year:

1)  Continuous improvement at very boring things, like web page design and on-page SEO.

2)  Continuing to provide great customer service

3)  Launching Daily Bingo Cards.  I think it will double my sales, eventually.

4)  Conversion Optimizer, which has made my AdWords campaigns much more effective than my manual tweaking ever did, while decreasing greatly the time I spent fooling with them when I could be doing stuff that mattered.  I was so successful with this that Google decided to write me up.  More on that later.

5)  Blogging.  At least when I manage to do it.  Besides the fact that it opens up great opportunities for me, like the above Google case study and (at last count) eight job offers, it is one of the reasons I’m able to collect legitimate links in a field where most of the customers do not possess the web savvy to link by themselves.

Goals for 2008:

$20,000 in sales (might have to revise that to $25,000 later — I want it to be a challenge)

Seeing Daily Bingo Cards be as successful as I know it can be

Releasing a new product

Restructuring my net-presence so that there is a dedicated Bingo Card Creator blog, at least

Because You Can't Quite Get Enough Transparency…

Posted on November 26, 2007 by in Rails, stats

I really wanted to post how Daily Bingo Cards was doing statswise today, but probably will not have the time.  (The short version: the snowflake queries are loving me and owning a top 10 spot on every possible variation of “thanksgiving bingo cards” is worth 1.5X owning the 11th spot on [thanksgiving bingo cards] itself.  Don’t ask me how you can rank for a phrase that competitive in less than 2 months of work.)  While I know the analysis is the really interesting bit, for the stats geeks in the audience I decided to make my website stats public in real time.  Enter a Rails plugin named Sitealizer, about five minutes of work, and powie, stats for anyone.

Want to take a gander?  Daily Bingo Cards stats.  At the moment it should be showing search queries, referrers, and the like for about the last 24 hours.  You’ll note that it is hardly as tricked out as Google Analytics (one nice feature Analytics lacks: it tells you what crawlers are hitting your site and at what rates), but it is good enough to keep me more or less honest when discussing traffic numbers.

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