In the BOS forum is frequent that some uISVers publish some partial data of their sales, visitors, etc.
Some interesting facts:
Cristian Pascu, FlairBuilder, Mockup & Prototyping tool:
Over the past 2 weeks, the best 2 weeks so far, I had:
~7150 visits
~5800 unique visitors
~12300 page views
~780 downloads (~10% * visits)
~30 sales (~4% * downloads = ~0.4% * visits)
Impressive numbers for a new product, we must take note of the following factors:
- Cristian went through a very long development and beta proccess during which he released versions, get reviews and built links.
- His product is really impressive
- His product is in a hot zone, trailing Balsamiq
Let’s compare it with text2go.com, Mark Gladding posted in BOS after his Bit Du Jour last experience and gave this numbers for reference:
…. To put the numbers into some perspective, I normally average 4-6 sales per week with about 60-70 visitors to my site each day….
text2Go was launched in August 2007, has almost three years in the streets and his daily visits are around 1/10 of the newborn FlairBuilder’s. IMHO, here’s a marketing problem. I like text2Go website, the product seems interesting and I think it has a great potential, in fact it has a 1,4% sales / visitors far over the industry media (according to A.Brice).
Another data point.Mo Flanagan developed a very cool gadget, it lets you view all the windows you like in the Chrome’s tabbed style. WindowTabs (very clever name and good a domain he got) is attractive and visually impressing.
@shanselman tweeted a link to WindowTabs about five hours ago and I have already gotten 50 downloads and several purchases. With AdWords, I struggle to get five downloads a day. Word of mouth marketing rules.
5 downloads a day? using adwords?.
Well, Mo is lucky, his product has the strength to become viral, after the tweet he got featured in lifehacker.com and got a peak of 3280 visits, 1332 downloads and 13 sales.
June 10th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Hi!
I didn’t expected my data to be impressive. It’s whole new different domain for me, doing a business, and since I had no other to compare with… well, I didn’t know where I was standing.
Anyways, after a post on BoS forum where I was saying about me being concerned because of the 4 sales I made in two weeks, I got some advices from different people. One particular advice was related to the trial period of the product. When I introduced some restrictions into the trial version, a nag screen and only 14 days instead of 30, then the sales started to grow. In only 2 weeks I made the rest of 26 sales.
It very much depends on the type of product but indeed, it is also a matter of proper marketing, something that I feel I haven’t done as I should have. There are lots of products starting to gain interest and momentum from the crapiest stage possible. This is something I couldn’t do and I am afraid that I waited a bit too long.
Time will tell!
I’ll get back to you as I grow older in my business.