We in Stuffed Guys are lucky to be working with an outstanding designer nickoose. He is the person who have originally come up with an idea to physically create a real stuffed doll for our new site that he was designing in 2005. That doll is mr. Stuffed, you can see him in our official logo and in the header of this blog (by the way, the image in the header of this blog is not computer-generated if you were wondering, it’s a photo of a real custom-made doll in custom-made clothes).
Well, nickoose strikes again! This time with the main art concept for the new Stuffed Tracker site which we’ve launched several weeks ago. Here it is:
The main ideas:
- A tree — is your site.
- You cherish the tree and water it; and look how it grows every day.
- The magnifying glass is of course Stuffed Tracker itself. You use it to carefully examine the tree (your site) in order to understand how to grow it faster and keep it healthy.
The tree can as well be your advertising campaign which you analyze with Stuffed Tracker :)
I think the concept and the art are just amazing.
Continuing on this amusing post.
Mr X: I have no money to buy your software, I can translate it into my language. Will you give me one license for free for that? Or else..
Me: We can give you a 20% discount for the translation, please tell me if you are interested.
Mr X: I told you that I have no money, can you give me a 90% discount? Or else..
Me: No can’t do.
Mr X: I cracked your software. If you will give me a free license I will tell you how I did that.
The End.
Doing support for a product is usually a pleasant job. You help great people to understand your great product better.
But, unfortunately, this is not always the case. Sometimes you get an aggressive person on the other side of the email communication pipeline that doesn’t trust you from the start. Whatever you will say to such person, he will turn against you. Oh, and he will also try to say the last word.
We are lucky that we haven’t met such people in 10 months during which the new re-launched version of Stuffed Tracker is on the market. But everything happens some day. And such person just ruined my whole day today.
That’s actually the hard part of the support job. You can’t get angry on the client, whatever he says to you or however aggressive he is. Your job is to kindly show why the person is wrong. That’s what I did today, although I feel very bad right now (you know when somebody says something very unfair to you and you can’t open the person’s eyes — he just doesn’t listen to you).
I am sure, good support service should always be polite and kind. That’s the key. This can often even save the situation. But not this time. Oh well.
I recently had an email conversation with our client who is using Stuffed Tracker to track effectiveness of his advertising. The client’s company is selling web software just as we do. He complained that he can’t make his adwords campaigns generate him sales.
And we have exactly the same problem! Traffic from Adwords seems to be of less quality for us compared to other advertising sources.
What’s the reason for this? Maybe software developers are not good at writing short text creatives and buying the right words? Or, maybe the majority of the people clicking on adwords are not looking to purchase the software?
This is an obvious thing that everyone around tells about. Care about your clients. They are the most valuable asset that your business has.
Well, we take this advice very seriously here. Being a small company allows us to give a lot of attention to everyone who is at least slightly interested in our products or services. And this works very well, I should admit.
For example, we recently had a situation when a person wrote to us to ask about a certain feature of Stuffed Tracker, our web traffic analysis software, which the product didn’t have. The feature was quite specific and we will probably never add it to the standard version of the software.
Someone might think in this situation “I can’t make a sale here. I don’t have what he wants”. And this someone would be wrong. We’ve eventually sold quite an expensive pack of licenses to this person.
There was no magic trick. We’ve just showed that we care about this person’s problem from the very beginning. We’ve offered our help and showed that we have a very good understanding of what has to be done to achieve what this person needed.
And this worked! We were hired to do a customization project based on Stuffed Tracker. And this person bought a Stuffed Tracker license too.
The morale of this story: if someone made the first step and wrote to you with any question, this is always an opportunity. Do anything you can to help that person. Don’t spam him/her with your offerings; just try the best you can to help. This will always pay off in one way or another.
After 1 week of Stuffed Tracker advertising I’ve realized one thing that might be obvious to someone, but was not that clear to me.
Conversion cycles for different products are completely different.
Take for example hotel bookings (which I am familiar with because Stuffed Guys have developed Twibo). Typical visitor coming from an advertising to a hotel booking site usually books a room within several hours of arrival, very rarely within a day or two (of course if he/she books at all). Thus the conversion cycle for a hotel product is quite short.
On the contrary, if you take a software product, the conversion cycle can be quite long. A visitor arriving from an advertising does not usually buy the software right away. At best he/she downloads a trial version and then works with it for a typical month until the trial expires. Only then this visitor might convert and buy the product.
There are of course exclusions from this rule, but in most cases it works like this.
This imposes additional challenges when tracking the conversion for long cycles.
I’ve recently finished reading a book by Michael A. Cusumano called “The Business of Software“. It helped to crystalize in my mind what was already obvious: the difference between a products oriented and a services oriented company.
Products oriented model is very scalable. You create and sell you own software, usually the only services you provide is support. The labor requirements increase only slightly when you sell 10 licenses of your software per month and then start selling 1000 licenses. With a hit product your profit margin can reach ridicoulos proportions. That’s why so many software companies prefer products oriented model.
With a services oriented model you provide custom programming services to your customers. This model is much much less scalable then a products oriented model and has much lower profit margins. Basically the profit margin is constant with limited ability to increase: it stays the same if you have 50 programmers on staff or 1000 programmers. Also, if your business increases you always have to hire additional people, you actually have to do it proportionally to the increase. Taking into account that it’s usually hard to find good people this model becomes even less attractive.
But the truth is — it’s very hard to create a best-seller product. And even if you would manage to do it, there is no guarantee that one or more competitors will not appear copying the main features of your product and offering their own products at a more attractive price. It’s hard to create a best-seller and it is even harder to repeat the success with the next product.
So there is a sense in a hybrid business model (as Michael Cusumano calls it), when a company creates and sells its own shrink-wrapped software, but also provides custom services to its customers.
The hybrid model is what I am thinking to use for Stuffed Guys. In my opinion it decreases the risks significantly and makes the business model much more balanced. When our two products will be ready and launched, I plan to aggressively promote our customization and custom web programming services along with them.
