Discounting the one-time startup costs (dang international fax that cost $17 or so) I’m currently profitable. Basically, I’ve sold enough in July (by the 25th) to cover all costs for the month of July and also absorb that unfortunate decision to try selling on eBay. If I get one more sale during the month, I will be strictly-speaking profitable.
My conversion rate of downloads to purchasers is a little hard to guesttimate since I got a massive surge of downloads from pirates last week. If you treat all the pirates as potential customers, I have a conversion rate of just over 1%. If you exclude all downloads from people referred by my weblog (JoSers who are not exactly in the market for elementary reading software) and by the pirates, my conversion rate is, and this is a back of the envelope calculation, about 5%.
My plan is, within the next week, to cancel my account with Overture and triple my budget on Google to $90 per month. That would put my marginal costs at about $95 a month ($110 if sales exceed $100, and I rather expect that they will), which is slightly less than what I get from four sales. I think thats easily achievable, considering that four sales was my initial goal for August and I’m already halfway there with a third of the advertising in a month where my target market is very not-motivated to buy.
I think I’ll celebrate with a milkshake. Hmm, do any accountants in the audience have an opinion on whether I need to count that as an expense? :)
