In the few months that we have been selling SmartInspect (we released version 1.0 in May), we mostly sold less than 5 licenses per order. In an attempt to push the 5 User Pack, we decided to try a special December discount and offer the 5 User Pack 40% off the regular price. This actually might hurt sales in the following 1-2 months, but we are new to this whole marketing/pricing game and just wanted to try it. On the other hand it could increase the December sales enormously and don’t affect the sales in January/February at all. I will report back how this special discount turned out and if it was a success for us. In the meantime, if you or your company is looking for a logging solution for .NET, Java or Delphi, this might be a good opportunity to save some money.
2 Comments
I see a problem with your sales strategy. I won’t name the product that this one company sold but in the past they gave a scaled-down version of their software for free, hoping that the user will opt to buy the full version at a fairly reasonable price, at some point in future. What they realized was they recieved a lot of downloads of their free software compared to their full featured equivalent (50:1 ratio). They were getting a lot of feedback, but more from customers using their free product. They then decided to only allow the next full version to be available for a four month trial before expiring. Six months later, they saw the ratio jump from 30:1, then 20:1 then I believe a consistent ratio around 3:1 from a download vs. sales perspective. What I’m trying to say is that our dev group (7 of us) find your free version good enough for 99% of our general debugging and logging needs. We tried the full version on trial, but really had no need to purchase it since the free version is more than good enough. I just want to pass this advice to you because I think you have a great product and can make some very good money if you just play your cards right.
Good luck! - Jon
Hello Jon,
Thanks for your feedback. We really appreciate such an honest comment because most people would probably be reluctant to notify a vendor about such things. We already decided to stop offering the Personal edition for the 2.0 version of SmartInspect (which won’t be available in the next 10 months). With your comment we are really considering canceling the personal edition even earlier.
Although we could track some of our sales back to the usage of the Personal edition, we learned that the Personal edition isn’t as useful in generating more traffic for our website as we hoped for. Our download ratio is around 1:3 personal/trial so it is not that bad, but when you consider that we are actually losing customers with the Personal edition and are not gaining much from it, the resulting decision should be pretty clear.
By the way, the Personal edition is for non-commercial use only and the license text states that. But we of course know that this is impossible to enforce for us and that many users aren’t even aware of it. Thanks again for your honest comment!
Regards,
Dennis