Might as well give out these stats, although since they include rapid ramping up of a business and ceaseless experimentation they don’t mean quite so much going forward. But if folks wondering if they can make the leap or not want to see some actual numbers, here they are. From opening my business on July 1st through August 1st (Japan time):
Business stats:
Sales (gross): $74.85
Sales (net): $71.79 (I pay Paypal $1.02 per transaction)
Expenses (subtotal): $68.02
Signup costs: $22 ($5 Google, ~$17 international fax for eSellerate)
Website: $10.02 (that technically pays for 2 months)
Advertising: $35 (I technically haven’t been billed yet)
Profit: $3.77. Take that, Bill Gates! :)
Labor stats:
Development week: 50 hours (all tasks)
Post-launch development: 5 hours
Post-launch marketing: 25 hours
Post-launch support: 15 minutes (easy-to-use, mostly bug-free program = I write “Thank you for saying thank you” a lot)
Website stats (for my main site, not this blog):
Visits: 1,873
Page views: 4,704
Trial downloads: 270
There should be an asterix on these data: I got a large spike of hits from pirates when my software was cracked. They accounted for roughly 120 downloads and a couple of hundred visits.
Advertising stats:
Google AdWords campaign:
Cost: $30
Clicks: 315
CTR: 2.45%
Conversion (to demo): 17.61%
CPA (to demo): $.61
Yahoo Search Marketing Campaign
Cost: $5 (its actually $30 but I got a $25 free coupon)
Clicks: 262
CTR: 2.28%
Conversion: 24.8%* (* its actually higher — Yahoo conversion tracking was off for a week or so)
CPA: 44 cents* (* its actually lower, for the same reason)
Organic search stats:
Google: 154 hits, 17.5% conversion
MSN: 85 hits, 13% conversion
Yahoo: unknown, doesn’t disaggregate well from CPC campaign.
My goal for the rest of August: I’d like to see 10 sales and would be very pleased with 20 (10 sales a month makes this an amusing hobby, 20 sales a month is a meaningful change in my standard of living). Aside from that, continuous improvement in marketing (.30 CPA and breaking in the top 5 organic results on my favorite 10 keywords), and getting Bingo Card Creator to be as good a product for teaching math (and potentially other subjects) as it is currently for teaching elementary reading.
