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I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?

udeployer.com

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I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?

#1
I've decided to create something that doesn't really exist out there. It's a program that makes it easier for IT departments and small networks to install software on many different Windows computers. Say you have a company with 20 windows computers... you don't want to manually install Skype, Flash and all the other free 3rd party apps... you want something that does it automatically for you. So I created uDeployer.

But I'm just a developer - the website sucks, the program UI sucks - and I'm lost with marketing... maybe the price for it is too much? I have spent a lot of time working on it (almost one year).

Any ideas?

I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?
udeployer.com

Re: I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?

#4

Make your download and buy buttons bigger. They look like 10px in size- are you ashamed of charging?

It is essential to an extensive A/B testing first. Otherwise how can you possibly know that 11px is better than 10px?

Re: I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?

#5
1) You need to radically increase the professionalism of that website to support the $499 price point. That price point is not necessarily high for someone in an IT group at a large company, but he cannot pay it to you because everything about your site -- the design, the copy, the video, etc -- screams "risk."

Look at other sites which successfully sell to large corporations with buckets of money and try to hit the note of restrained professionalism they go for:

http://www.fogbugz.com

https://spideroak.com

http://smartbear.com

I picked companies which are on the smaller side. Importantly, they don't look like they're not Real Respectable Software Companies of the sort that will cost you your job if using their software breaks your entire office for a day.

2) Price is typically not the reason software fails to sell. What is your strategy for acquiring the attention of people who have $499 to spend on software deployment? If I were you, I'd be thinking along the lines of creating lots of content specific to their needs, since the organic SEO benefits from doing so are substantial.

At least one B2B business hanging around the forums has had success with this -- they turned a source of data that they already had into a lot of pages, and those pages have lead to leads which bought things priced substantially north of $500. Hopefully they will chime in with their experiences.

3) You need radically more textual content, to answer the numerous worries your prospects have prior to shelling out $500 to you.

4) After someone credible buys this software, get approval to use their logo and then mention that it is in use at Respectable Brand Name. This is social proof and decreases the perceived risk of using your software.

5) (Much love to the HN community but I have to say this.) Ignore the opinions of anyone who says "Reduce the price" that does not also have authority to install this software at their corporation, because they are not your customers and they will not buy your software at any price. Among many other reasons: price signals quality, and if you adopt App Store pricing (or even $29.95 pricing) you will be communicating that you are not nearly reliable enough to be trusted with computer systems which would burn six figures or more a day in the event of downtime caused by a botched deployment.

Re: I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?

#6
1) The website doesn't justify a 499 dollar app. (the website is to simple) 2) The GUI of the software is old fashion and to simple which isn't worth 499. 3) Your marketing can be much better. You don't appeal to your audience which are system administrators. I had to look for 3 minutes to understand what deployer did. 4) Where are the bullets with the benefits? Like saving time, money error etctetc

Re: I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?

#7
post #5

1) You need to radically increase the professionalism of that website to support the $499 price point. That price point is not necessarily high for someone in an IT group at a large company, but he cannot pay it to you because everything about your site -- the design, the copy, the video, etc -- screams "risk." Look at other sites which successfully sell to large corporations with buckets of money and try to hit the…

Totally agreed!

Re: I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?

#9
Your video needs more professionalism. Given that video, I'd rather just use Windows Deployment Services or pay for Altiris.

* What's with the closing statement? You need to redo that, this YT video feels more like a developer demo than a demo that needs to sell to the stakeholders in the business.

* "Trust me" is not a word used in most demonstrations aimed at corporations

* Don't go searching for the Finance Copy Area machine in your demo, just know exactly where it is.

Re: I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas?

#10
post #4

Make your download and buy buttons bigger. They look like 10px in size- are you ashamed of charging?

It is essential to an extensive A/B testing first. Otherwise how can you possibly know that 11px is better than 10px?

I'd go much bigger than 11px... I think it's pretty much a given that the download trial link is way too small. It needs to be clear for people that they can give it a try without having to fork out $500 immediately. I don't think you need A/B tests to prove that - it's pretty much a given that 10px is too small.

I'd also agree with @patio11 - the website is outdated, unprofessional and I wouldn't trust it. I'd pay a decent web designer a couple of thousand to get a bespoke design that will be much more suitable than what you have now.

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