Wired Up And Fired Up

I can absolutely concur with him when he says, "What I was selling before the promotion was exactly the same as afterwards." Even on the day of the promotion I received about the same amount of sales that I'd expect on any normal, rainy, Autumn day.

Like Steve I received a hike in the number of feature requests, bug reports and questions. Although not so many that I couldn't keep up through the day, but then Relaunch is an order of magnitude simpler than KIT, so I guess that the scope of the questions I had to answer was somewhat smaller. I also didn't shift 1,500 copies of my app, although I was pretty pleased with the number of sales it did get.

And I suppose that brings me onto the economics of the whole thing. Relaunch is $5 (MacZot price was a little under $4) and John Gruber says on Daring Fireball -

"$10 is not enough money to charge for professional quality software. If you, the developer, don’t think it’s worth ten bucks, you really should just release it as freeware."

The weird thing about this comment is that I've been having this conversation with myself for a while. My company is, for the most part, funded by my consulting work and Relaunch was an experiment (originally priced at $10). It quickly became $5 because initially I received some whining and negative feedback on VersionTracker about the price. At the time, by cutting the price, I felt like I was doing everyone a favor (including me) and my logic was something like, 'Well, if ten people are prepared to pay $10 for it, I bet a hundred will pay $5'. Was I wrong? Probably.

It never occurred to me that it wasn't 'worth' $10, it just seemed like a good idea to make it, you know, cheaper. You always assume (or at least I do) that when you see shops with big SALE notices in the window and hordes of people queuing to get in that they must be raking it in, when in reality they're probably closing down. Can you tell that I wasn't an economics student?

I mentioned that Relaunch was an experiment. I actually wrote it to scratch an itch I had with software update rebooting the computer whilst working on another app (coming soon...) The whole launching Snapshots of apps part came later, then the reopening documents came a bit after that. So I guess it's grown a lot over the past couple of months and during that time I've also been working on internationalized versions and new features. I'd never released a shareware app before (just freeware bits and pieces such as noodleboard and Ninjar ) so I wanted to see how it worked and I don't think I've ever had a complaint with regards to the quality of the software (quite the opposite in fact). So far I've learned about marketing shareware, setting up payments, software updates, roughly what level of support is required and when, how much bandwidth you need and so much more...

And, despite my relative naiveté and the pricing faux-pas it does sell reasonably well.

However, in terms of a learning experience for me it's been awesome...

p.s. from next, say, Wednesday it's going to be $89.99 a copy. Send your complaints to Daring Fireball, I'm using the Gruber Theory of Software Pricing in lieu of having any clue what I'm doing :)