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Basics of iPhone Development @ SIEGE 2009

Friday, September 11, 2009

I am really looking forward to SIEGE 2009 in Atlanta. I will be participating in the panel session on the Basics of iPhone Development on Friday, October 2.

Labels: Business Development, Conferences, iPhone

Two Atlanta Music Hosting Domain Names for Sale

Monday, June 29, 2009

I have a great set of domain names for a budding entrepreneur who wants to start a music related business in Atlanta.

AtlantaMusicHost.com and AtlantaMusicHosting.com have been registered to me since 2004. I launched these websites as part of a planned shoutcast-based service that was to be a product line extension to the web hosting business I used to own.

I sold the web hosting business in 2005, but kept these domains.

Both domain names are registered with Dotster.

UPDATED TO ADD: Asking price is $100 for both domains.

PayPal may be used to complete the transaction.

Labels: Business Development, Domains

Startup Professionals Musings: Startups: Top 10 Funding Sources

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Martin Zwilling posted a summary of the Top 10 Funding Sources for startup companies.

I personally funded my current company with the proceeds of the sale of a previous business and lots and lots of sweat equity.

While Mr. Zwilling mentions bartering services for equity, it is also quite possible to barter services for a profit sharing arrangement with the people who help with a particular project. This way the company equity remains with the founders and yet those who take the risk to invest in one or more projects can be rewarded for their time investment once that project takes off in the marketplace. It is also vital to never underestimate the importance of choosing the right co-founders and early-stage advisers! A good financial advisor, for instance, may just agree to provide free advice on business structure and tax consequences with the understanding that you will first come to his firm once a payroll is established.

Overall, this is good stuff folks. Check it out!

Labels: Business Development

Software Marketing Metrics

Monday, January 29, 2007

In software marketing, it is important to change one thing at a time and measure the results. Continual iterative improvement is the best way to achieve long term, measurable, results. So what are conversion ratios? Conversion ratios are simply tools to measure how effectively your product is being sold. They can often be easily computed directly from your web logs.

The Overall Conversion Ratio, the Download Conversion Ratio, and the Trial Conversion Ratio are particularly useful, and easy to calculate, for those selling software on the internet.

Overall Conversion Ratio (OCR)

The overall conversion ratio (OCR), Purchases/Total Visits, is the easiest ratio to calculate, but it is generally hard to make much use of since the visit count typically includes a lot of noise from search engine spiders and other non-prospective-customer activity.

Download Conversion Ratio (DLCR)

The download conversion ratio (DLCR). Total Downloads/Total Visits. Assuming you are in the business of offering a try-before-you-buy product to prospective customers, it is fair to say that a unique visitor who downloads a copy of the trial software is a prospective customer. This ratio is more useful than the OCR as there is typically less noise from automated spiders.

Trial Conversion Ratio (TCR)

The trial conversion ratio (TCR), Purchases/Total Downloads, is a great measure for how well a product sells itself to prospective customers. A low TCR indicates that there may be critical problems in the program that need to be addressed:

It does not install properly or is otherwise dead-on-arrival.
It crashes or behaves incorrectly.
It has been cracked.
It is falsely identified as malware by one or more anti-virus or anti-spyware programs.
It is low quality work for which the prospective customer just does not want to open his wallet.

Looking for More?

If you want to have more fun with ratios, you can check out my 2006 SIC paper on Business Intelligence for the Micro-ISV.

If you want to get really serious about business intelligence, read the Business Intelligence Roadmap by Larissa T. Moss and Shaku Atre, and Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques by Ian H. Witten and Eibe Frank. These sources will help you get started building a deeper understanding of the business intelligence process and data mining.

Labels: Business Development, Marketing

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