Archive for the ‘Shareware’ Category

Protecting software with Themida

Thursday, December 24th, 2009

piracy1Remember my post about fighting software piracy? A quick summary:

Don’t bother protecting your software against piracy. Your software will get cracked anyway.

If your software is protected, it will only take slightly longer before the cracker publishes his crack. Making the cracker’s life harder has no effect whatsoever on the number of users that get access to a cracked copy of your software.

In any case, don’t let piracy irritate you, drain your energy, waste your time or take away your focus from the important stuff: Improving and selling your software.

Well… I changed my mind… More »

What to focus on: Product, Conversion or Traffic?

Friday, November 20th, 2009

pctThe core message of my Art of Ignoring presentation is focusing on the right stuff and in particular, choosing between working on Product ( = Programming), Conversion or Traffic.

Many developers default to working on their Product, spending most (or all) of their time programming. But that may not be the best way to increase your sales. For example, if you are getting about 100 visitors a day, then adding more cool features to your program is not going to help your sales. (Tip: if this is you, focus on Traffic).

On the other hand, if you are getting thousands of visitors per day, but are only averaging one customer per 1000 visitors, then spending time and money to get even more Traffic may not be the smart thing to focus on. You should improve your Conversion first.

Final example: if you are getting 1 or 2 sales each day, then trying to optimize the Conversion of your check-out process is not a good idea, as you won’t be able to measure the effects reliably.

That’s enough examples of what not to do. Here’s some simple guidelines for deciding when you should focus on Product, Conversion or Traffic. More »

The Art of Ignoring - ESWC 2009

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

As promised, the slides and full text of my “The Art of Ignoring” presentation at the ESWC 2009 in Berlin. Download it in PDF format here.

(Sorry, no video of this ESWC presentation, but you can watch the SIC 2009 video of the same presentation here.)

artofignoring-eswc-620001

This presentation is about time-management for ISVs, about deciding what to work on at any given time. But more importantly, what to ignore.

More »

Meet the Collectorz.com team - video

Friday, September 25th, 2009

At Collectorz.com, we’re experimenting with the use of video, for both promotional and instructional purposes. Our in-house video guy AJ has already created cool promo-vids for our 3 main products. For instance, check out the Movie Collector vids.

For yesterday’s Collectorz.com newsletter, we decided to try something different: a “meet the team” video, showing a tour of the Collectorz.com office and introducing all members of the Collectorz.com team. Here it is:

Meet the team

The player will show in this paragraph

Our newsletter subscribers loved the video. Some feedback we found in our inbox this morning:
More »

RebateDelivery - Results of A/B split test

Friday, September 18th, 2009

rebatedeliverySo here they are, the results of my
Rebate Delivery A/B split test.

And after two weeks of testing, this test is showing the biggest difference between A and B that I have ever seen in any A/B split test.
More »

RebateDelivery - Mail-In Rebates for online sales

Monday, September 14th, 2009

rebatedeliveryAt SIC 2009, Sytske and I talked with the RebateDelivery people, Jason Foodman and Steven Miller.
We have worked with these guys for years, when they were running SwiftCD, so we were curious to hear what they were up to now.

Well, in short, RebateDelivery is a new system for offering Mail-In Rebates for online software purchases. Let’s look at the details of how it works and how to use it to improve sales. Oh, and of course I am running a new A/B split test to find out if it indeed helps to sell more software :-)
More »

Software upgrades through TrialPay - the results

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

trialpay-logo-160pxTwo weeks ago, I wrote about my email campaign offering software upgrades through TrialPay. That post was only one day after I sent out the campaign, so I could only include some preliminary results. However, two weeks have gone by now, so it’s time to look at the final results.
More »

Using TrialPay for Software Upgrades

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

trialpay-logo-160px
This week, I tried something different with TrialPay:
Free software upgrades.

I emailed all customers who were still using an older version of our software and offered them to upgrade to the latest and greatest for free using TrialPay. Plus, I included an alternative “pay anyway” option with an extra $10 discount on the upgrade ($14.95 instead of $24.95).
More »

Using TrialPay on landing pages

Monday, August 10th, 2009

trialpay-logo-160pxAt the SIC in July 2008, WinZip’s Edwin Siebesma told me that I should talk to the TrialPay people. I did and I liked their sales pitch.
Of course, like everyone else who first hears about TrialPay, I had fears of cannibalizing my existing sales by offering a TrialPay option on my website.

So in August 2008 I ran a simple A/B split test, testing just that:

trialpay-html-button

  • Group A: my regular product pages, no TrialPay option
  • Group B: An extra “Get it Free” button, taking visitors to the TrialPay offer page. Just for our Standard edition (regular price $29.95). The button was a regular HTML button, just like our other “Add to Cart” buttons. Like so ->

More »

The Art of Ignoring - Video

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Finally, here it is: the video of my “The Art of Ignoring” presentation at the Software Industry Conference in Boston.

Download the slides and full text of this presentation in PDF format here.

The player will show in this paragraph

Enjoy!