posted April 3rd, 2008
The Naked light Pre-purchase Program was a resounding success. Not just better than expected, better even than I’d hoped. Seriously, 3× better than I’d hoped. It was kind of ridiculous.
Was.
Pre-purchase sales stopped precipitously and abruptly last week, after only a few days, and I’m rather dependent on sales continuing–not necessarily as well as they started off, but well enough that I can you know, pay the bills.
At first, of course, I was really upset at this. Had demand really already been fulfilled? What would it take to bring back demand for Naked light? Would I be able to do that before I ran out of time (in other words, money)?
Yesterday I figured something out that, with 50/50 hindsight, is now really obvious. The last day of really good sales was last Monday, March 24th. The next day, Tuesday, the 25th, was my first blog post after the announcement of the Pre-purchase Program–a casual post about the Dock. The Pre-purchase Program isn’t mentioned anywhere else on my website.
In other words, when the Pre-purchase Program was no longer at the top of the blog, people stopped (just about, at least) pre-purchasing.
Or, in chart form:
Chart courtesy of Microsoft Paint. Apologies for the Arial and the dumb quotes.
Let this be a lesson to all software developers who aren’t well in tune with the obvious: make it really, really easy for people to give you money.
So a couple of things need to change. I have to be a bit more vocal in advocating the Pre-purchase Program. I really need sales to continue. Y’know, the kid’s gotta eat. This means three things:
- The Pre-purchase Program needs to be featured more prominently on the website and blog.
- I need to put really tiny and tasteful messages in the RSS feed. These will be totally quiet and not at all annoying, I swear and/or promise.
- I need to put a nice little notice in the beta. Again, totally quiet and non-intrusive. No pop-ups or modal dialogs, just a little note in the corner of a window. Think more Panic-style than David Watanabe-style. Plus, this’ll be turned off when you enter in your license.
I think I have figured out the right balance of letting people know about the program while making the program subtle enough to be easily ignored by those that have already bought a license or don’t care to. If I don’t get it right, of course, drop me a note.
Uh oh, what’s this?
$49.99
plus tax in California and Connecticut
While I’ve got your attention, the Naked light Pre-purchase Program totally needs some love.
For more details, see the Naked light Pre-purchase Program.
Thanks!
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:52 AM
If you look at your website and RSS statistics (I see 42 subscribers on google reader), you’ll probably find out that you pretty much exhausted your current user base. People who watch your project are probably people who are ready to pay, since it is clear from the start that you will ask so. With the good price slack, it probably convinced people like me, who where not yet sure if the money was well invested.
What I’m trying to say is that it would probably be a more effective strategy to advertise your pre-purchase program on your homepage and then try to grow the project’s visibility in itself. I think you get the point.
You can probably do that by contacting apple news sites, sending free copies left and right, and maybe gently ask your users to put a small advertising banner on their websites. Why not ? Also, I don’t know what next features you want to implement, but maybe think about “would it make it an article title ?”. Keep the excitement.
Anyway, I wish you great success, and it’s not for my money.
Cheers, zimbatm
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:45 PM
zimbatm,
I have 42 readers on Google on my current feed, 78 still on my old feed, 95 on NewsGator, around 200 direct subscribers (via NetNewsWire, whatever other services there are that I don’t track, plus several thousand non-RSS blog visitors a day. In the scheme of things, that’s not much, nor is it as high as it was back in November when I first announced Naked light. But that’s also not tapped out (especially since I’m assuming the non-RSS visitors are different day to day).
That said, you’re right that the RSS feed will probably turn out to be the least effective place to spread the word. I feel like there’s a lot of people on the fence—not quite sure whether to buy yet or not—and each update will bring more people into the fold, at least as long as there’s a quick reminder. That said, I can really easily measure where people are coming from with their purchases, so if any of my little notices turns out to be ineffective or annoying, I can take it out pretty quickly.
You’re also completely spot on in your other points about the need to grow visibility and get some new attention. This is part of the reason I’m really excited about Beta 3.x: there’s a lot of newsworthy features being added soon. If any of them gets mentioned on a major blog, hopefully things will start to snowball again!
Thanks for the great ideas!