MacSanta Recap
Last Friday, we were featured on the front page of MacSanta (for some background on MacSanta, see our post from last week.) For our day on the MacSanta homepage, MercuryMover (our product that lets you move and resize your windows on your Mac via your keyboard) had its best day ever. Below is a table with metrics from last Wednesday (the last full day without any MacSanta traffic), MacSanta day and the highest value for said metric (taken from any day since our launch on 3 December.)
| Metric | Wed | MacSanta | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pageviews | 114 | 937 | 1827 |
| Visits | 57 | 330 | 823 |
| Downloads | 23 | 54 | 220 |
| Sales | 1 | 7 | 7 |
Although we got more traffic due to our PR campaign surrounding our launch, MacSanta by far gave us the most sales. Before MacSanta our record for sales per day was one.
So was MacSanta an unmitigated success? Not exactly. Since we still have an introductory price for MercuryMover (about 25% off), i decided that we shouldn't give the customary 20% MacSanta discount. Originally, i wasn't going to offer any additional discount, but at the last minute, i decided to offer a 10% discount in place of the 20% one. What a terrible idea! I quite likely caused some ill will and definitely seemed pretty stingy. I did this to save $14.00. That's right; for less than the value of one sale, i practically invited my potential users to dislike me. Mr. MacSanta himself forwarded a few emails to me from slightly disgruntled users and i jumped at the chance to redeem myself by offering them a 20% discount. Of those users, 2/3 of them have already taken me up on my offer and my MacSanta sales total increased to 9. The moral of this story is not so much to not be a cheap base turd, but to be generous with your users and hopefully they'll be generous with you. Check back next year and we'll see how well that works out.