Getting another $n * 0.93

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:25:53 -0700

One of the main goals when selling software is getting people to be aware of your product so they will buy it. Ideally, everybody will buy it at full price (let's call this $n) but not everybody is going to be finding your application through word of mouth, search queries, links from websites that mention it, and so forth.

There are something like 25 million Mac users out there, probably more, who could conceivably buy your application. But the fact is, a good 99.9% of them have never heard of your application and won't buy it.

So even though it would be cool to get just a few more users at $n per license, it might be worth reaching some small percentage of that 25 million people who weren't going to be paying you anything otherwise. This is why it's often useful to do discounts and sales (getting you an additional 50-90% of what you make on normal-priced sales), daily promos (an additional 20%-30%), or perhaps bundles (peanuts per license, but hopefully a few extra thousand dollars) to reach some of those otherwise unreachable people and make them paid users of your application.