Nov 2011

BucketSoft's First Profitable Month

by Steve Wortham
These are exciting times. October was by far the best month for Regex Hero ever. In total there were $450 in sales. Now, I must say that I have also been doing some contract work on the side to earn some cash for BucketSoft and keep the lights on, so to speak. So technically I've had profitable months before this. But if you're just counting product sales and company expenses then October is the month to beat.

Traffic hasn't changed much during the past few months. It's consistently been at around 250 visits per day. So how can we explain this success? Well, in part I think it's due to the new Standard / Professional version strategy with Regex Hero. It's wild to think that you can spend hundreds of hours on design and development and only see a slow trickle of sales. Then by employing a simple marketing trick, the sales take off.

In fact, here are the sales before and after I began selling the two versions...

Before (July 1st to August 31st)
$135

After (September 1st to October 31st)
$510

That's nearly 3.8 times more sales in the two month span following this change. Of course I can't attribute all of that just to this change. I've also added some functionality to Regex Hero Professional that allows you to save your regular expressions to your local computer (rather than saving it online). And then I added multithreaded regex matching and highlighting. Both are welcome improvements, but due to the timeline in which they were released it's impossible to know exactly how much these improvements affected sales.

Regardless, it's obvious that BucketSoft is doing better. I still love working on Regex Hero and I'm encouraged to see what the future might bring.