Its that time again. Same disclaimer as all of my stats releases: its tough resolving the edge cases on the 1st and 30th of the month due to time zone issues, I roll out multi-month expenditures so that if I paid 3 months of web service in August I charge myself one month’s worth in September, and I take no responsbility for the accuracy of these figures until it comes time to chat to the IRS and zemusho at the end of the year.
Capsule review: My first two weeks went like gangbusters, my last two weeks have been pretty limp. Google AdWords has thrown me for a loop and I haven’t had the hours in the day to spend to recover from it yet. Text Link Ads were not a very profitable expenditure. Tucows, on the other hand, a direct PR9 link plus significant download traffic means a very happy uISV.
Sales: 22 (+2 refunds: one customer error, one less-than-totally-happy). 2 sales were at a discount through Bits du Jour
Gross sales: $533.90
Net sales after Bits du Jour and Paypal fees: $505.96
Expenses:
Hosting (GoDaddy): $10.02
E-junkie: $5
Tucows Expedited Submission: $52
Google Adwords: $90
Text Link Ads: $35
Total Expenses: $192.02
Profit: $313.94
I mentioned previously that I was in Tucows purgatory for three weeks after paying them $52 for an expedited submission. I’m currently out of that, thanks to a recommendation from a fellow developer at the Organization of Independent Software Vendors to contact Greg, their webmaster, and stunning customer service of the type which I always advocate giving. It included an apology, an offer to give me a total refund, a choice between the refund and a $100 credit against further services (smart move: it keeps me invested in my business relationship with them — I took it), and listing the software immediately. Yay. I’m going to post my letter to them later because its, in my opinion, a good example of how to phrase a customer support request to get what you want, and succeeded pretty brilliantly. Even business owners are customers roughly half the time, right?
I recently released Bingo Card Creator on Versiontracker.com, a Mac software site that is apparently pretty popular. And by recently I mean less than 12 hours ago. I’ve already got multiple sales (!) and also multiple bug reports that it doesn’t work on various versions of Mac OS X. I know it works on at least some Mac machines because I have happy, satisifed customers from the other download sites and I can see successful requests for the check-for-updates page in my HTTP logs which identify themselves as coming from the Mac version.
