Helium Foot Software

Shameless Self Promotion

Tis the season for promoting your software and for the next 24 hours, Helium Foot Software and MercuryMover (our very own utility that lets you move and resize windows on your Mac via your keyboard) will be participating in the excellent MacSanta promotion. Mac Santa began in 2006 as a way for indy Mac developers to promote themselves and their products. In the middle of 2006, i was still just an indy Mac dabbler with dreams of an empire and a vague goal of releasing a product by year's end. By the time MacSanta rolled around, i knew i would never make that goal. What's more, i felt pretty jealous of everyone who was participating. I resolved that i would release my first product in time for MacSanta 2007. I'll skip the middle part of the story (or really, just point you towards it) and fast-forward to 30 November of this year when i quietly released MercuryMover v1.0 about 24 hours before MacSanta began. Sales have definitely picked up since the beginning of last week but it will still be very helpful to get some additional exposure.

I've said this in other forums, but let me publicly thank the MacSanta team for all of their hard work to make this program a reality! Keep in mind that MacSanta runs through December 24th, so definitely keep an eye on the daily deals.

No Sooner Do I Post...

Literally as i clicked submit on my last post, my Mail icon in my dock lit up with a tell-tale "2". I use a company called E-Junkie to handle paypal processing for me. For 5 dollars a month, they shield me from the vagaries of paypal's IPN API. This is a terrific value, and i'm incredibly happy with their service. A quirk of using E-Junkie on top of paypal is that i receive two emails whenever i make a sale. Thus, whenever i see a "2" (or really any number > 1) on my Mail icon i get positively giddy. The moment i clicked submit, Mail checked all of my accounts and lo and behold, i had a new customer for MercuryMover.

As an aside, does anyone know if there is some Mail/Safari mojo/notification that makes Mail check all accounts whenever you submit something in Safari? I actually really like this feature; it's useful when you sign up for something online and receive your email notification immediately.

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.)

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.