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

Why Did It Sell That Much?

Version 1.02 – Now With Less Crashes!

AdWords, Halloween, Google… Oh My!

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

Make It A Web App

Holy Cow. This Is My Day Job.

Adventures Since Quitting

Five Quick Bits Of Advice

Charge More
Programmers consistently underprice. Double it, then go higher.
Avoid pathological customersby 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:
Natalielucier
on 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
Outsource
Automate
Eliminate

Stuff To Outsource
Web design
Web content
Self-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 Works
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 competition
Development 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. patrick@kalzumeus.com

http://www.kalzumeus.com	26404
http://old.kalzumeus.com	162
http://www.newsblur.com	25
http://lanyrd.com	25
http://dashboard.bloglines.com	10
http://kalzumeus.com	9
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	7
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	6
http://127.0.0.1:8795	5
http://www.netvibes.com	4
http://microisvcentral.com	4
http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com	3
http://www.twylah.com	3
http://quickname.blogspot.com	2
http://static.slidesharecdn.com	2
https://www.flowfs.com	2
http://dev.newsblur.com	1
http://kalzumeus.staging.wpengine.com	1
http://planet-microisv.com	1
http://feeds.feedburner.com	1
http://newsblur.com	1

Software Businesses On 5 Hours A Week

by Patrick McKenzie on Jun 17, 2011

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

21 Embeds 26,678

Statistics

Software Businesses On 5 Hours A Week — Presentation Transcript