Month: October 2009

One Week After Launch

Ruben1 Comment

So it’s been a week after launch, and I’ve not had much time to do any development. Most of my time has been taken up responding to emails, hacking my sales website, introducing a new plan, and sending emails out to my lists.

Today I introduced a $9/month pricing plan. Now I have the following plans: Free, $19/month, and $9/month.

One surprising thing about increasing the Premium Plan price to $19/month is that I’m still making sales. I honestly thought they’d stop coming in after that. I haven’t had a great deal of them, but much more than I thought I would.

I feel like I’m underpriced here, but I recently launched and I’m more interested in getting enough users to see patterns in the feedback that I’m getting. So far so good 🙂

I’m still very cautious, and I expect to hit tough times any day soon, in the meantime I’m enjoying getting sales! 🙂

Bidsketch Public Launch

RubenLeave a comment

So I’ve now been live with Bidsketch for several days now. Things are going well still, though my paid signups have decreased as expected.

I’m going to be working on adding a new pricing plan to Bidsketch. Right now I have Free and Premium. I think a Basic plan will give people a much needed choice when I move up the pricing to $19/month.

It’s funny, now that I’ve launched I feel like I have more on my plate than ever. I’m managing two blogs, a Facebook account, two Twitter accounts, two products, and the most time consuming thing of all — the day job.

I think things will get a little less crazy once I migrate SixCentral over to Bidsketch.

On the SixCentral front, I let everyone know that I’ll be changing SixCentral’s name. I blogged about it, sent out a tweet, and an email to all users and newsletter subscribers.

Some more info on that here:
http://www.bidsketch.com/uncategorized/bidsketch-sixcentral/

Pre-Launch Update

RubenLeave a comment

So far so good. I’ve received some great feedback and I’ve had a lot more people sign up than I thought would 🙂

So far, my visitor to account signup conversion rate is at about 25%! And about half of those are paid accounts.

I received some “media buzz” from about.com:

Blog post
http://webdesign.about.com/b/2009/10/14/new-tool-launches-bidsketch-limited-time-offer.htm

Product review
http://webdesign.about.com/od/websoftwarereviews/gr/bidsketch_gr.htm

There’s one more day left for users to sign up and get the $9/month price. After that I’m going to redirect everything to “www”, and raise the price. I was going to raise it to $19/month right off the bat, but I’m going to try out $14/month first. That way I can see what sort of effect going to $19 has on my conversion rate.

These last two days have been awesome. Lots of great feedback and I’ve talked to some really enthusiastic new users.

Oh, I kind of slacked off on emailing bloggers for a website review but I’ll be putting in around 30 mins each day to try to get some mentions going.

I’ll be posting another update after I move everything to “www”.

Bidsketch is Live!

RubenLeave a comment

I’ve just launched Bidsketch!

It’s been a very exciting day today. Last night I was starting to get nervous thinking that no one would sign up for either the premium or free accounts. The premium is just $9/month which is really low, but it’ll be going up in three days.

The URL currently is:

http://launch.bidsketch.com

Signups have completely exceeded my expectations, and the feedback I’ve received has been awesome. I’m feeling pretty good about things right now 🙂

Anyways, I’m taking the rest of the night off but I’ll follow up with a post about my launch strategy later.

It just hit me that this will be the last post that I put in the “Before Launch” blog category. 🙂

Bidsketch Sales Website

RubenLeave a comment

This weekend I got to work on the Bidsketch sales website. I’ve made decent progress so far; in fact I could possibly be done with the sales website by tomorrow night. I’ll still have to set up WordPress on my production server, but that shouldn’t be too bad.

I figured I’d show an early screenshot of what the home page looks like right now:

Bidsketch Sales Site