February 23, 2010
While reviewing ad inventory on the StackOverflow, it occurred to me that it’s not easy to sell things to the programmers. If the visitors of your site are programmers, what ads are going to be most effective and perform better than the others? Currently, the only non-job ads on the StackOverflow are promoting SDKs, components, development and related tools, training courses. This is basically all you can try to sell to the programmers. From the top of my head I typed www.programmers.com into the browser and got a site with just the same sorts of ads.
Now, one would think that it’s not easy to sell these things to the programmers for a variety of reasons:
- There are many open-sourced and free alternatives.
- High piracy rate. Programmers (in general, but not all of them) love to find and download things they need without paying.
- A lot of programming is outsourced these days, meaning there are many programmers from India, China, Russia and other countries, whose buying power is reduced. In other words, there are a lot of customers who won’t spend an extra dollar unless absolutely needed.
- Build or Buy thinking, meaning that every time a programmer evaluates someone else’s software, he thinks “I can build it myself and it will be better”.
For me personally, these reasons are scary enough to keep away from programmers market as far as possible. I know there are people who built successful companies selling stuff to developers, like a code review tool or bug tracking system. Well, these people are very smart and lucky. I’ve seen dozens of companies that tried to sell components and crashed into the ground.
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Marketing | Tagged: ads, programmers, StackOverflow | 
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Posted by Oleg Kokorin
February 8, 2010
OK, we finally got our ad copy approved by Google and it has word “iPhone” in it. We didn’t do anything fancy, just were persistent and Google caved in. The thing is however that we are getting miserable CTR on those ads. It doesn’t look that Google is good to advertise iPhone apps on it.
Now we are trying Microsoft adCenter. The CTR in Search will probably be low as well. The idea is to get somewhere on a Microsoft page with “OneNote” on it. This should be a relevant page for OneNote client for iPhone, ain’t it?
Leave a Comment » | Marketing | Tagged: AdWords, Google, iPhone, MobileNoter | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
February 4, 2010
We tried advertising our app on AdWords and were immediately set back by Google. Turned out, they don’t let some trademarked terms to be used in the ad copy. Namely, we can’t use word “iPhone”. They neither allow “i Phone” or “i-Phones”, but you would expect this from Google.
This is obviously wrong, because it’s legal to use a trademarked term to describe product compatibility. And the sole purpose of using the word is to say that our app is designed for iPhone, nothing else.
Funny enough, we can use “Onenote” no problem, even though it’s a trademarked term too. So, Apple nowadays is really the Microsoft of 90s, the enemy of openness, competitiveness, trying to preserve the monopoly by any mean.
1 Comment | Marketing | Tagged: AdWords, Google, iPhone | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
January 30, 2010
I was really looking forward to getting the future Apple tablet. Then at some point I thought: “it will be a cool device, but it will cost about $1000 just like everything from Apple, and it will probably arrive to the market somewhere late 2010″. So I chickened and bought a nice new netbook Compaq Mini 311c.
Turned out, I was all wrong: the iPad will arrive soon, it’s seemingly not overpriced, and it’s totally not cool. Let’s start by comparing iPad to Mini 311c and then see if the tablet is good for anything at all. I won’t compare GHz’s and GB’s. They are in the same price category, similar size, the tablet is slightly smaller and lighter. Let’s get down to consumer characteristics:
| |
Mini 311c |
iPad |
| Battery life |
6 hours |
10 hours |
| Camera |
front webcam |
none |
| Web surfing |
any browser, plugins, Flash |
basic Safari, no Flash |
| Apps |
anything goes |
AppStore only |
| Gaming |
real 3D games like COD6 run |
very basic |
| Video |
720p screen, 1080p HDMI |
standard |
| USB |
3 ports |
needs adapter |
So, I can use the Mini for web browsing, video chats, HD video, gaming. I can use iPad for lame web browsing, and for …. AppStore browsing. iPad is not a normal computer, is not a multimedia device, not a gaming device, not an eBook reader. To further add to the offence, it’s locked into the AppStore.
Obviously, Apple is up to something. They can’t just deliver a device, which is not good for anything at all. What they are trying to do is to invent a new product category. Something like “a household tablet to read e-magazines and for occasional web-surfing”. The fact that the category name is so long is a bad sign. It means they will have to educate consumers about how their iPad is nice and useful.
But it won’t help, because their product is very ordinary. With iPhone, it tooks others 2-3 years to deliver similarly cool devices. With iPad, it will be eaten alive by the competition this year.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing | Tagged: Apple, iPad | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
December 6, 2009
We had a sales drop recently, due to the holiday and Black Friday that followed. It is natural for software sales to suffer during the holidays, especially for Productivity software. What can be done to prevent the slump or increase the sales during non-holiday days? There are a few simple and realistic things that lead to immediate increase in sales.
- Start (or increase your current) AdWords campaign. This is easy to do. It will cost money, but again it’s easy to track how much you spend on ads and how much revenue it brings in. As long as the cost of acquiring and keeping a new user is lower than the money you get from a sale, it works.
- Offer discounts via coupons, “bargain of the day” sites, or just old plain ”holiday” discount. This always works, but sometimes it can alienate your recent customers who didn’t get the discount, and it also teaches potential customers wait for next discount period instead of buying outright.
- Draw attention to you product or company by sending out a press-release or posting some cool controversial article. Sending out press-releases is next thing to spamming, so I don’t think this works very well anymore. Posting a cool article is a much better thing to do. And it has to be controversial to draw people’s attention.
- Run a contest or lottery with a meaningful prize. For example, if you offer software for a specific industry, it could be an industry specific gadget or book. This works very well, but it will cost some money, and most of the time your site doesn’t have enough visitors, so you need to advertise your event on other sites and it will cost even more money.
- You can always send people emails reminding about your great product and how it is a good time to buy it. I’m not talking about blind spam here. You need to build your own mailing list by giving people something good in exchange for their email address. It can be a free version of your product or a white-paper on the topic of their interest. This means that you should plan this in advance and work your way to creating a list of people who is interested in your product. It is therefore more of a marketing strategy than a quick “trick” to increase the sales, which is my topic in this post. So I will end the list here.
Leave a Comment » | Marketing, OneNote on iPhone, Startups | Tagged: MobileNoter, sales | Permalink
Posted by Oleg Kokorin
