Sales: $24.95 (of which Paypal keeps $1.02)
Subtotal: $23.93
Expenses:
$6 — eBay listing fees. Thinking I’m going to stop here. People on eBay are just not willing to pay any price I’m willing to charge (I get 20+ views per auction but no sales).
$10.02 — website through GoDaddy, billed for first two months (and a year of the domain).
~$15 — international fax to get legal documents to eSellerate
$5 — minimum signup to use Yahoo’s sponsored search thing (I got a $25 credit for signing up). After the credit has elapsed I’m thinking of canceling — I just can’t stand them next to Google and their performance compared with Google sucks.
$30 — my expected first month expense of working with Google, which drives probably 50% of my trial downloads.
Subtotal: $66.02
Hours worked: I estimate I’ve put about 5 hours in in the last week, so we’re somewhere in the vicinity of 50 total.
On a weekend. That was quite unexpected (I had almost turned off my ads for the weekend on the assumption they would not lead to money). For full price, from my website. Unfortunately, a misconfiguration kept Google from recording it as a conversion (so I’m not sure exactly how this particular customer found me), but I get paid just the same.
For those keeping track, thats two weeks and a day after launch. At the moment (with a free Payloadz account until I get, hmm, 3 more sales), that means I clear 24.95 – 1.02 (paypal fees) = $23.93 profit. Thats about 80% of my advertising budget for my first month, which is now half completed.
I’ve not accomplished anything major this weekend (working on some expanded Wizard functionality for math classes so I can start pitching the product to people not teaching reading) but there were one or two minor niggles with my program and website that I wanted to fix. The first was inconsistency in Wizard naming — some levels had Dolch Word Lists and some had Dolch Sight Words, etc. While inconsistency is fine for the website (got to catch search engine synonyms) I wanted the UI to look a wee bit more professional (it should also be sorted, which I’ll have to do later — currently the wizards end up alpha-sorted by filename instead of logically sorted by progression, so you end up with First Grade before Pre-Primer).
