Launching and growing a SaaS product
A while ago I mentioned that I was going to try out per-proposal pricing to see how this affects sales.
As I started looking into it, I found that this is easier said than done. There’s a fair amount of rewriting of billing code and the proposal workflow to get this working. I’ve not received any requests for this in a while so I won’t be going through with it (for now at least).
I’ve just got bigger fish to fry.
I’m about to start working on Freshbooks integration and I’m very excited about where this is going! A couple of weeks ago I had a phone conversation with Hiten Shah of Crazy Egg and the excellent KISSmetrics. Hiten is a bright guy and was kind enough to take some time to give me his thoughts on some of the things I might want to consider doing with Bidsketch.
One of those had to do with doing things on the integration side that no one’s really doing nowadays. I won’t go into much detail right now but I’ll just say that there’s great potential to kick some serious ass here!
I’ll be running this by a few of my customers and will be following up with more details on where I’m going with this.
I’ve finally updated the the Bidsketch screencast. I’ve been meaning to redo the whole thing since I went live with it. The old one was too long, and my voice is just terrible for that type of stuff.
The new one is shorter and Emilie (my lovely wife) helped me out by recording the audio. It’s not perfect (my fault, the audio kicks ass) but I’m no longer embarrassed by what I have up on my website 🙂
Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozEK2l6MQ9k&feature=player_embedded
I’ve been working like crazy the last couple of weeks to introduce a feature that will let designers upload their own proposal templates.
Here’s the announcement:
http://www.bidsketch.com/bidsketch-enhancements/custom-proposal-designs/
This was the major feature that everyone wanted, and I’m glad I was able to release it this week. The day job took over my life so finding time to work on it was tough.
Still, I’m very happy with how it came out. You know you’ve got a pretty good feature when you’re done programming, you try it out for the first time, and it brings a big smile on your face, and makes you say — YES!!
It’s been about a month since I’ve launched so I’m reviewing some Bidsketch numbers. I logged into Google Analytics to review the traffic, and I’m at over 11k visits for the month! 🙂
This is due to getting several writeups, and redirecting all of the SixCentral marketing site traffic. I was averaging about 1,200 visits a month before this so I’m very excited about current traffic levels. Of course, a lot of this traffic isn’t sustainable, so I’ll need to work on my SEO to make it sustainable. In the meantime, I’ll take it!
