Software Businesses On 5 Hours A Week

A SOFTWARE BUSINESS ON 5 HOURS A WEEK

Patrick McKenzie

The Problem: Making This Sucks

The Big Idea

$60 budget 1 week schedule Big Hairy Audacious Goal: $200 a

month

Bingo Card Creator – July 2006

7/2006 8/2006$0.00

$50.00

$100.00

$150.00

$200.00

$250.00

$300.00

$350.00

Sales In First Two Months

Why Did It Sell That Much?

Version 1.02 – Now With Less Crashes!

7/2006 8/2006 9/2006 10/2006 11/2006 12/2006 1/2007 2/2007 3/2007 4/2007 5/2007 6/2007$0.00

$100.00

$200.00

$300.00

$400.00

$500.00

$600.00

$700.00

$800.00

$900.00

$1,000.00

Sales In First 12 Months

AdWords, Halloween, Google… Oh My!

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$0.00

$500.00

$1,000.00

$1,500.00

$2,000.00

$2,500.00

Sales Through Halloween '07

A Brief Aside About EMDs

• Mini-sites targeted at individual customer needs: $200 + $10 per year (~$500 for this one, for the domain)

• Exact match domains (“halloween bingo cards”.{com|net|org})

• Declining part of my strategy, but still print money three times a year.

• Why lease traffic when you can get it for free?

The Big Idea: Scalable Content Creation

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$0.00

$500.00

$1,000.00

$1,500.00

$2,000.00

$2,500.00

$3,000.00

Sales Through 2008

Make It A Web App

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$500.00

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$2,000.00

$2,500.00

$3,000.00

$3,500.00

$4,000.00

$4,500.00

$5,000.00

Sales Through 2009

Holy Cow. This Is My Day

Job.

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11$0.00

$1,000.00

$2,000.00

$3,000.00

$4,000.00

$5,000.00

$6,000.00

$7,000.00

Sales To Date

Adventures Since Quitting

Five Quick Bits Of Advice

Charge More

Programmers consistently underprice. Double it, then go higher.

Avoid pathological customers by charging more.

Revenue is dominated by customers on most expensive plan spending other people’s money.

Recurring revenue is the best kind.

Make Web Applications

Faster iteration. Easier support. Dramatically higher conversion rates. Recurring revenue is the best kind. Better tracking of actual use than

MiniPeace.

Figure Out SEO

Free traffic from interested people = free money.

Single best thing you can do for SEO: create a reason why people who do not buy your software should cite your website anyhow.

Second single best thing: create a system which makes content at scale.

The Inverted Iceberg Rule

Photo: Natalielucieron Flickr

Optimize. Everything.

All factors in success of a software business are multiplicative.

A/B testing: 5% increase in conversion rate, once per month, is ~70% increase in revenue per year.

A/B testing is cheap & easy to get started with.

More advanced: funnel optimization, first-run experience, etc.

In Five Hours Per Week!?

Three Keys To Avoid Wasting Time

OutsourceAutomateEliminate

Stuff To Outsource

Web designWeb contentSelf-contained programming projects

Customer support

Stuff To Automate

Routine customer support tasks

Drudgery – license generation, keyword analysis, etc

Server maintenance/monitoring

Dashboard O’ Goodness

The Big Idea: Scalable Content Generation

Automate production of high-quality pages responsive to specific user needs, around a template and/or data source.

Outsource the production of text for those pages.

???? Profit!

Make One Page

Do It 941 More Times

… Without Going Spare

Live Demo Time

It Really WorksBaby Shower $6,870.00Halloween $4,230.00Valentines Day $3,600.00Christmas $2,520.00St Patrick's Day$1,890.00Summer $1,680.00Easter $1,470.00Cinco De Mayo $1,170.00Addition 1 To 10 $960.00

Thanksgiving $600.00Christmas (Seasonal) $600.00

Football $570.00Multiplication 1 To 10 $510.00

Mother's Day $450.00Back to School $390.00Periodic Table Of Elements $360.00

4th of July $330.00Spring $270.00Women Of The Bible $270.00

Winter $270.00Nutrition $270.00Geometry $240.00Autumn $210.00Careers $210.00Fraction Multiplications $180.00

• Total sales: $39,270• Total investment: $3,000• 251 activities / 942 have generated sales• Top selling activity: I didn’t even know people

did that.

And 226 More!

Stuff To Eliminate

Checking Google Analytics 37 times per day

Worrying about competitionDevelopment which does not meet demonstrable customer needs – see Lean Startup

Thanks for Listening

Blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com Slides will be posted. See @patio11 Send me email. I love chatting about

this. [email protected]