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Twenty dollars in an envelope

justinjackson.ca

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Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#71

Post by ihaveajob »

belthasar wrote: post #53
ruswick wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among apps, $2.99 is quite high. The average price per app in the store is roughly $1.40, and the average selling price is likely less than 50 cents (I'm unsure, because reporting is only available for average overall price, not average sale price. However, logic dictates that, given that free apps are purchased with many times greater frequency than paid apps, the average sale price would be significantly lower than…

When I had a paid app in the app store price didn't seem matter too much. I had a free version of the app with IAP and a paid version. Both initially cost $0.99 but after 6 months I raised the price to $1.99. Sales actually went up. I think if you have an app people like and you have good reviews, price isn't as important. Graph for paid app https://www.dropbox.com/s/s7zvicfuan9ci5n/paid.png?m Graph for IAP https://w…

Funny thing, your reviews also go up when you raise the price. I have 2 theories to explain this: - People who pay for something are more likely to research it before, and thus will only get the product if they think it fits their needs. On the other hand, if the app is free and it doesn't do what you thought it did, you might give it a bad review. - People who pay for things tell themselves that they're buying more quality, and so they truly see things differently.

Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#72

Post by jim_lawless »

mijustin wrote: post #2

I'd be interested in hearing more shareware stories. Did anyone else here have success selling shareware in the 80's and 90's?

In the late 90's, I began selling several command-line programs for Windows using the shareware model. I sold a command-line SMTP mailer (MailSend), a command-line POP3 reader (MailGrab), a command-line scheduler (TSched), and a command-line Dial-up-networking disconnect utility (HangUp).

Total income over several years was in the low five-figures when bundling deals were included ( some people wanted to include these programs as part of bigger systems that they sold ). I created a successor to MailSend called MailWrench that provided better support for Microsoft Exchange Server and SMTPS (SMTP over SSL), but the market just didn't seem to be there for command-line mailers any longer.

These programs are now free-to-run software with source ( with the exception of MailGrab).

Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#73

Post by orangethirty »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #70
orangethirty wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A handful of people from thousands who prefer to keep quiet. Plus only those who do talk about them do it to help themselves (as a marketing tool). Any time you talk about amazing sales you risk alerting your competition about your niche.

Not sure I understand that logic. If you are selling to a niche, then by definition your competition is also. If you mean a narrower niche than you and your competition already share, then it's very unlikely that they also don't know about it or won't soon regardless of you talking about it. The only way this statement seems true is for a very loose definition of "competition." But I would love to be shown I'm wrong.

You don't talk about how profitable a given niche is to you because then your competition will just outright copy, and or do negative things to you. Its like walking inside a cage of sleeping bears. You don't want to wake them up.

Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#74

Post by NamTaf »

mijustin wrote: post #36
thetrumanshow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In those days, two things: 1) The possiblility of "Oh, crap, I just bumped the decimal to the right, by accident, on 1000 customers." 2) The likelihood that someone would tell me that I was "a joke", to be charging money for my software. So, fear of rejection and fear of screwing up on the money side. Thankfully, there are billing services which eliminated #1 a few years ago, and that was probably the tipping point f…

I think the fear of rejection is huge. I'm a pretty confident guy (I'll speak in front of crowds without too much trouble). But the idea of putting a price tag on something and asking people to pay for it is scary. The biggest fear: "What if no one buys it?"

"Pay what you think it's worth" might be a good way to mentally offset this? That way, you're not affixing a price to your work but instead just asking for a demonstration of what they value it at. It's probably a unilateral upside if the entirety of your payment process is 'post me a cheque if you feel it's worth it!', for the following reasons:

1) By not affixing a price to it, people will pay what they think it's worth. By affixing, say, $20, those who think it's worth less may not pay but those who think it's worth more won't pay more. There's a small risk that people may stretch to make your price tag but instead not bother but my completely untrained gut would say that'd be minimal?

2) You're already relying on people to go out of their way to send it based on goodwill. You're not going to lose customers simply by floating the amount they can choose to send.

3) Your conscience doesn't tell you 'hey, are you SURE this is worth $20? What if something breaks for someone? You forced them to pay $20 rather than $5, you owe them more than this!'. That's got to be liberating.

Of course, PWYW works mainly if it's a supplemental income and you're not relying on it to feed yourself :) That said, I'd expect it's pretty confidence-boosting to see someone voluntarily pay for something you made, since it basically says 'hey, I think you're worth this, thank you!'

The OP and this discussion is incredibly inspiring too, it makes me want to build and release stuff in my spare time that people are completely free to pay as little or as much as they want for, just to see what happens :)

Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#75

Post by specialist »

mijustin wrote: post #2

I'd be interested in hearing more shareware stories. Did anyone else here have success selling shareware in the 80's and 90's?

Yup. I wrote AutoCAD add-ons. Public domain and some shareware. The "big money" was in site licenses. Architects wouldn't pay for anything. But anyone doing work for the government was serious about making sure they had licenses for everything.

Promotion and distribution were major challenges. You'd upload your wares to CompuServe, BBSes, etc. I'd also visit conventions and tour user groups. I never felt the need for classified ads (not targeted enough).

The real shareware players had their own BBSs. I went a bit further and started a network of CAD/CAM, computer graphics themed BBSs and served as the hub. Much like FidoNet. It was huge fun, but a lot of work.

Someone else noted that majority of income came from consulting/contracting and some writing. That was my experience too. I had the view "your work is your resume" and publishing shareware was the best way to get known. Much like working on some open source projects today.

Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#76

Post by th »

mijustin wrote: post #2

I'd be interested in hearing more shareware stories. Did anyone else here have success selling shareware in the 80's and 90's?

I gave away and eventually sold snippets of front end web tools (example code mostly) shortly after picking up basic JavaScript/HTML/CSS skills as a pre-teen in the late 90's.

My first product was a "login" script (just JavaScript which generated an encoded version of a username and password and navigated to that URL). I remember when I received my first envelope with a $10 check and an email address inside. That was an awesome feeling.

I also made a fairly complicated "calendar creator" script which allowed a user to stylize and customize a calendar template that would be output in the form of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were the only tools I knew how to use that's naturally what I wrote the program using. Everything was output in a textarea field for "easy" copy-pasting into the user's website.

After a few years I realized the programs were becoming dated (I started receiving more frequent refund requests) and I stopped charging and open sourced them.

In hindsight, the programs were fairly poorly written but I'm glad to know that at least a couple dozen people found them useful.

Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#78

Post by exDM69 »

When I was a kid in the early 1990's, there was a very vibrant shareware game community in my home country Finland. I remember putting my pocket money to envelopes and sending it to these hobbyist game authors, to their home address and then waiting for weeks for them to ship my game back in a floppy disk.

There was a magazine that had monthly reviews of games and software and the magazine hosted a BBS where you could download the demos. There were so many Finnish shareware games back in the day that they had separate sections for Finnish and Foreign games and apps in the mag. Some of the local games had mild international success too.

Some of the games I still remember by name: Triplane Turmoil, Mine bombers, Slicks'n'Slide.

The internet has brought us many things, but we've also lost something because of that.

Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#79

Post by Shivetya »

my first experience was writing a call back verification program for WWIV BBS systems. I do not recall how much I made, but it was a substantial amount. I think it was named CBVWWIV, I forget as the code is long lost. It was written in Turbo Pascal and supported ASCII, ANSI, and AVATAR, output.

That was an interesting time to be involved in and at times I think it was more fun and entertaining that the net today.

Re: Twenty dollars in an envelope

#80

Post by coldpie »

I host an archive of a free British political satire podcast. As far as I'm aware, my archive is the only place on the 'net that provides downloads for older episodes of this podcast. I receive something short of a terabyte of transfer per month. It's been implicitly approved of by the podcast creators by their linking directly to my archive.

To my surprise, in the two or so years I've been running the site, I've had no fewer than 5 people go out of their way to email me and ask how to give me money. I always redirect them to a charity, as I'm just redistributing someone else's content and the hosting only costs $10/month anyway.

But this reflects what this article describes: people will pay for what they perceive to be a quality product. I really wish the content industries (entertainment, software, literature) would learn this lesson and stop with the DRM nonsense. Make your product easy to use, easy to acquire, and easy to pay for and people simply will pay you for it. It is a different business model than what we've had in the past, and you'll have to get used to the fact that some won't pay you at all, but it can and does work.

It's the future, folks. Time to give up on buggy whips.

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