David, I'm knee deep in a project to sync QB customer lists with my product's, so will just quickly blurt out some thoughts off the top. Hope something here is of use.
Pricing and marketing are so intimately related that I can't resist talking about both at the same time. You don't say, but do you have a website setup that presents these offers? Are you cross-linked in as many places as possible? Are you listed with as many 'tools vendors' on the net as possible? Have you written up and distributed "news releases" and other material that can be posted in all the 'right places' on the net? Can you/are you willing to make deals with tool vendors to accept 40% of the selling price for copies they sell? You do know never to enter an exclusive deal with a marketing company, right? Can you find other products that might be enhanced by including your product within theirs? Putting yourself in the position of a potential buyer of such tools, what websites do you frequent and can reasonable expect others with similar orientations will frequent, and get some sort of advertising onto those websites. Are your products thoroughly debugged on all versions of the OS they run on? Are they intuitive to use or require user documentation? Is doc ready? Would a video of how to install/use your products help? Do you have such videos on your website? Do you accept paypal and other means to make it easy for people to buy? Can people pay for, download, install and use your products with just a few clicks? As for the actual price, have you studied the offers of others in essentially the same business? Choosing a price point is a tough call. We all remember how well a very low price did for Borland, MS and others, and it's hard to argue against offering solid value for low cost, but you do have to take into account all of your expenses, particularly marketing and support costs, and still come out with a respectable profit. If your products don't require support and you can market them for low cost (say, less then 40% of selling price), you're pretty much ahead, so long as you don't have to spend thousands of hours doing unexpected support work. Personally, I think tools are a one-time shot (not recurring) pricing situation, usually bought spur-of-the-moment-of-need, but as you mention you have 'high end' variants that could be treated differently. Always keep in mind that the world has 6 billion people in it, so even selling to 1 in million is still 6,000 sales. Of course, any product that actually works, does something useful, is priced right, easy to acquire .. Will sell to more then 1 in a million. Bill > Of course... sorry folks... > > I sell software tools ( IE toolbars, custom Office tabs, IE > task panes, stand alone applications ) that are used > primarily in marketing campaigns that utilize videos. The > "big" product is currently the PVU ... personal video > uploader ... that in two user clicks allows them to upload a > video online in a custom HTML template and generates a link > for them to include in to their email. The fancier version > will allow the importation of already-uploaded Youtube, > AOLVideo and other video services to "pull" the video into > the template for them. The uber version does all that and > also will take xls lists of email addresses and will > automatically send the mail for you from within the toolbar > or app. My other products are subsets of these three. > > David Smith _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
