Billable: The First 100 Days
Billable, my first ever commercial software project has been out on the market for roughly 100 days as of this week. I thought I’d take some time to share some numbers and my insights on how it’s going so far.
Overall Interest
To start I guess there is overall interest, and one way to track that is probably counts of DMG downloads.
While lacking specific numbers it’s clear from the graph that traffic certainly peaked during the first few weeks of launch and then has, for the most part, flat-lined. This follows inline with expectations since there was a lot of good PR on the Mac web about Billable’s launch but no real marketing since. The rest of the downloads after launch I suspect are from people who found it via VT or MU and have a real business need and/or via word of mouth.
I didn’t keep a specific list but the top referrers during the launch included: Apple’s Download Site (which I was featured on), Apple’s Product Guide (which I was on the front page of for a small amount of time), Daring Fireball (which linked me on its linked list, twice), TUAW, and then a collection of blog posts / reviews. I don’t recall seeing VT/MT/iusethis a lot, but those site link directly to the DMG so Mint doesn’t pick it up (which is what I use to notice most of these types of links).
I don’t want to share a graph of specific sales but in my own number crunching I found average revenue per download is actually going up as time goes on which to me suggests that the application is finding its audience. The people coming and testing it out these days are liking what they see which makes me proud.
I hear and suspect I’ll see another spike of interest when I launch 1.1 and it makes rounds on the Mac web. After that it is my goal to really start trying to market this thing. I’m not 100% sure what I’ll be focusing on first but I wanted to start to get a handle on the numbers and tracking so I can hope to have any luck in understanding which marketing efforts are paying off. If you have a marketing suggestion please let me know and/or post a comment.
Support
When it came to the actual launch I vividly remember spending the first week answering tons of email (practically full time). Almost all of it was feature requests; very little of it was actual support. Since the launch I get a similar, but smaller, stream of feedback with very little support issues.
I have a feeling the video screencast I prepared (and the way it was presented to users on launch in the “Starting Points” window) plus a fairly detailed Help Book helped a lot in this respect. I also think it helps that the application itself is rather simplified and tries not to get too fancy.
After a while it was clear what I (and the public) wanted to be included in version 1.1 and so I came to tell people who sent me feedback: “I know, I’m working on it for 1.1. Please join this announcement list to find out when it’s available.” I’m sure having the list ready was a good thing and will show its usefulness when 1.1 is released.
I had a small handful of people call me for help (even though I say right next to the number I can’t do tech support over the phone). I don’t regret leaving the number up, as it is helpful for my consulting business to have it online.
Sales Metadata
To sell Billable I wrote my own custom store in Rails and am very happy with its performance. I think it’s a very clean buying experience and am very happy to accept PayPal as well as the four major credit cards for orders. When it comes to the numbers people used a PayPal account 38% of the time and a Credit Card 62% of the time.
Billable is not a completely localized application. In 1.0 we do make some effort to use the system defaults for date and currency formats (and in 1.1 that support has gotten much better) but this is far from complete (which I do want to work towards). Thankfully even this small effort has paid off. The US accounted for 73% of sales and Non-US countries were the remaining 27%. 27% sure is a big number considering. The top non-US countries were:
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
Part of this I think (and have been told) is that the value of US dollar is so cheap in many of these countries so the reasonable price tag of Billable looks even better to them.
Work on 1.1
I originally set a goal of having 1.1 out 4-6 weeks after of the original launch. Well, I ended up spending much more time than expected handing the launch and then spent other time catching up on some client projects that were getting neglected. When November came around I had a series of family issues come up and then personally had an apartment move and a computer die on me. It wasn’t till December that work on 1.1 really got back on track and even then there were the holidays to work around. I still think small steady updates are the way to go and hopefully can follow through in the new year.
To be clear about the status of 1.1 (as of this post): Billable 1.1 is technically done. It’s in a state of beta testing called “Final Candidate” which means I don’t plan to edit it anymore, just fix bugs that come up in testing. I’ll probably release it next Monday (Jan 15th or earlier). If you want to know, the major changes include:
- Invoice Numbers
- Tax Support
- Auto-backup and Auto-save
- Better Currency Support
- New appearance options
- Performance improvements and more dead bugs.
I also have a What’s New in Billable 1.1 screencast ready (Small | Large) ready and that’s already online if you’d like a peek.
I primarily wrote this post for my fellow MacSB-ers whom have shared with me a ton of knowledge and guidance. Hopefully this continues that style of cooperation amongst the community which makes this job so much fun.
Happy Macworld!
Posted on: January 8, 2007 – 5:03 am
6 Comments
Great post. I’m hoping to launch my own app in the next few months.
What service do you use for accepting credit cards? Did you open merchant accounts with Visa/MC directly?
-M
Mike, congratulations with your first 100 days. I’m halfway, but I will get there eventually ;-). I did notice the same thing about the overload of feature requests in the first month (highly appreciated, though).
Congratulations. I have to sit down and make nice graphs with my own numbers, it’s the cool thing to do. I am glad I sold MyTime, I wouldn’t want to be up against Billable. All the best for Billable in 2007.
Mike Bernardo: I use Website Payments Pro via PayPal. It allows you to process credit card totally on your site and then offer people to use a PayPal account as well. It was a pain to setup since they don’t offer a Ruby API so I had to work out the SOAP calls myself.
You can use Active Merchant with Payments Pro.
I worked with Active Merchant and talked with the maintainer and the person who submitted the Payments Pro code. I never got it working. Not sure of anyone who did either.
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