The Business of Software

Yesterday Simidude was on sale on BitsDuJour which was a pretty exciting day for me. I even had a customer calling from California just to tell him that I had been in his city just a week ago. Pretty funny...

Now sales went smooth overall. I had one customer who had problems installing and one who didn't get the BitsDuJour special price for some reason.

There are great comments at the BDJ forum which I see if I can use them as user statements. I didn't experience any people shouting around about the product like some stated in this forum was their BDJ experience.

The BDJ staff was very friendly and helpful- Fastspring set up the backend code so that BDJ actually knows how many people paid through their service.

According to Fastspring I sold 63 licenses (I need to sort this out because I actually got 75 payment notification emails). I'm not sure if this is much or not. All I know is that my software was never in production on so many machines since I started programming :)

The statistics show that an overwhelming number of licenses was sold to the United States (nearly 3/4 of all sales), followed by Canada, Germany, Italy, Australia, Greece, Netherland, Sweden, Britain, France and Mexico.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with the whole deal.
Now the future will show if the visibility of Simidude was increased...

As a byproduct I collected enough suggestions for the next versions.

Although I found a bug in my license or Outlook: It appears that the license text (Base64) will be scrambled sometimes when shown in the Outlook preview window. When opened in a separate window the license again is shown intact. I will insert dashes into the licenses in the future to break down any Base64 sequences that might Outlook make do that.

I hope these numbers are of help for some.

If you have questions please post them here or directly to me.

Torsten.

>According to Fastspring I sold 63 licenses

That is pretty good for a day! Certainly it should be enough to kick start the cycle of:
1. get feedback
2. release
3. goto 1

Actually, I sold 75 times. Some users bought more than one license. It's just that the ones I didn't count don't appear yet in the sales statistics but only in the "Recent Payments" list on Fastspring. So I am suddenly even happier :)

Andy: Yes that cycle has certainly started :) Now it's my turn...

Torsten,

That sounds great - I'd be thrilled with 75 licenses in a day..it's a good start to getting a mass of people start using your software, and it must feel good to see that there are people willing to part with their cash..

I'm curious - how long did it take from you to put up your software for promotion to actually getting a date on which it showed up?

This is one of the things I'm planning to do to promote my software (not out yet...still struggling with a myriad of little things that need to be done before going live)

Torsten,

Congratulations, it shows that your product has a nice market.

And thanks for sharing the info,  seems that BitsDuJour is a good place for getting some exposure.

Torste, thanks for the detailed info. That's a nice result. I'd be happy to sell 75 copies of _anything_ in a day.

I wonder if this will lead to a persistent increase in sales.

Thanks all!

uwf: I think it was about three weeks between asking BitsDuJour until they finally set it up. You can speed up or slow down the delay by changing the amount of share they get...

Steve: I had one guy emailing me. He told me he did this twice and it helped gain visibility for his software.