Its been two weeks since my last numbers update so I thought I’d briefly summarize things.

First a brief recap: My first two weeks in business (July 1st through 15th) I saw one sale.  My next two weeks I saw 2 sales (through July 31st).  These past two weeks, lets see, 6 sales?  I’m going to shoot waaaaaaay past my personal goal for August, which was originally 4 sales.

Expenses: I recently upgraded my GoDaddy account to their next higher level of Linux hosting ($7 a month, egads!) and Traffic Facts (their analytic software… which is garbage, incidentally.  The only feature I find useful is the fact that they let me actually have my raw log files, which I can extract the important information out of with gawk and grep.)  Plus $30 a month on Yahoo and ~$70 a month on Google (budgeted for $90 but search volume isn’t always high enough to make that), and $5 a month for e-junkie.  I’m going to cut my spending on Yahoo from next month, as it seems to have stopped generating results.

Anyhow, going forward, thats ~$110 a month in expenses, or 4.5 sales.  I now feel rather confident that I can make at least 10 sales a month, consistently, for about as long as I want with rather little additional work.  By my quick back-of-the-envelope math, thats about $1,500 a year, which won’t exactly have me sipping iced cocoa on the beach.  Actually, check that, that is enough for me to afford a quick jaunt out to Okinawa every year.  And I couldn’t go to the beach every day — I burn in minutes, its terrible.

Alright, daydreaming aside:

Sales sources are approximately 50% Google (no purchasers from organic search as of yet, oddly enough), 25% download sites (don’t know which — whoops!),  25% one single teacher message board which apparently loves me.  (Seth Godin, a marketing genius whose key insight is “make it easy for people to tell their friends about you”, would be proud.)

My ballpark estimate for download-to-purchase conversion is 3%.  So one of my Ad Groups (average CPA: $0.30) costs $10 per purchaser and another ($0.45) costs $15, leaving me comfortably profitable with either.

Some other statistics:

Total number of support requests: 0 (1 if you count the 1 refund I processed, which is not counted in the above sales)

Total customer contacts: hmm, call that 3.  3 teachers read about me on the aforementioned message board and asked where they could get a copy of my program.

Total downloads per week: I’ve written before about how this is difficult to estimate, especially with my software being available on 100 sites now.  Some of them cache the installer so the download doesn’t end up on my logs.  I estimate that there are approximately 200 downloads per week.  Of these, I get confirmation that at least 30 installed successfully through use of my check-for-updates feature.