I'm selling my software for too much money and nobody is buying. Any ideas? (udeployer.com)
I've decided to create something that doesn't really exist out there. It's a program that makes it easier for IT departments and small networks to install software on many different Windows computers. Say you have a company with 20 windows computers... you don't want to manually install Skype, Flash and all the other free 3rd party apps... you want something that does it automatically for you. So I created uDeployer.<p>But I'm just a developer - the website sucks, the program UI sucks - and I'm lost with marketing... maybe the price for it is too much? I have spent a lot of time working on it (almost one year).<p>Any ideas?
51 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadIMO $500 for deploy tool is a bit too much, when there are so many free tools available already... or whip up your own bash script.
To OP: You should have a Features link. It's always the first link I find when comparing products.
I'd also agree with @patio11 - the website is outdated, unprofessional and I wouldn't trust it. I'd pay a decent web designer a couple of thousand to get a bespoke design that will be much more suitable than what you have now.
I'm all for A/B testing, but the problems here are at a much more fundamental level--it is about understanding your market, and matching your customer's expectations. There will be plenty of time for A/B testing, once the sales volume is there to support it.
I know while I'm happy to make an additional $500, the amount of time I spend thinking about spending it to try something out which could save me a day or so is getting very small. We're talking minutes to maybe hours.
Stick a big honking buy button there, and make it easy as hell to buy your stuff. Hire a real voice person to explain it if your accent is an issue, toss a presi presentation up there, and go with it.
Look at other sites which successfully sell to large corporations with buckets of money and try to hit the note of restrained professionalism they go for:
http://www.fogbugz.com
https://spideroak.com
http://smartbear.com
I picked companies which are on the smaller side. Importantly, they don't look like they're not Real Respectable Software Companies of the sort that will cost you your job if using their software breaks your entire office for a day.
2) Price is typically not the reason software fails to sell. What is your strategy for acquiring the attention of people who have $499 to spend on software deployment? If I were you, I'd be thinking along the lines of creating lots of content specific to their needs, since the organic SEO benefits from doing so are substantial.
At least one B2B business hanging around the forums has had success with this -- they turned a source of data that they already had into a lot of pages, and those pages have lead to leads which bought things priced substantially north of $500. Hopefully they will chime in with their experiences.
3) You need radically more textual content, to answer the numerous worries your prospects have prior to shelling out $500 to you.
4) After someone credible buys this software, get approval to use their logo and then mention that it is in use at Respectable Brand Name. This is social proof and decreases the perceived risk of using your software.
5) (Much love to the HN community but I have to say this.) Ignore the opinions of anyone who says "Reduce the price" that does not also have authority to install this software at their corporation, because they are not your customers and they will not buy your software at any price. Among many other reasons: price signals quality, and if you adopt App Store pricing (or even $29.95 pricing) you will be communicating that you are not nearly reliable enough to be trusted with computer systems which would burn six figures or more a day in the event of downtime caused by a botched deployment.
Do you have a different sales channel?
I guess I wanted to go for a more "casual" feeling. In the sense that companies would feel more comfortable knowing that I was just a casual developer and that I will have full attention towards them and their success with my product. I guess that's not how the real world works though.
In order to sell to a customer, you must understand what is important to them. Humans respond to people with whom they can identify. When you sit across from a business manager and your selling points match their concerns directly, a sense of comfort overcomes them. You should take any opportunity you get to talk to customers about what is important to them; not only from a software perspective, but from a business perspective. What companies do they enjoy doing business with? What software are they most satisfied with? What's the best product website they can tell you off the top of their head?
Understanding what your customer wants is half the battle. Developing a quality product is the other half.
Why does one need to register to dowload the trial?
This is quite different from ninite. Ninite doesn't let you install software on many different computers - uDeployer is actually meant to install software on many different computers.
What do you want to track about a download? How many times it's downloaded? Just use your apache logs (or make your download link a simple webapp that records a value then redirects to the proper file url). Do you want to track email addresses of a download? If so, you should be aware that it might put of X% of customers. Are you willing to give up tracking emails if it leads to an X% increase in downloads?
* What's with the closing statement? You need to redo that, this YT video feels more like a developer demo than a demo that needs to sell to the stakeholders in the business.
* "Trust me" is not a word used in most demonstrations aimed at corporations
* Don't go searching for the Finance Copy Area machine in your demo, just know exactly where it is.
Also the applications that you show being deployed aren't exactly the kinds of things that most enterprises would be bothered about pushing to desktops...
Off the wall - but the price might be a bit low for larger corporates.
I've been selling software at your pricepoint for 5 years and more. If you want to sell, follow these rules:
- Design of your website don't matter
- Add a price-list request form and remove the price
- Get into a real and genuine conversation with each person who requests your pricelist
- Answer emails within 30 minutes and be very helpful
- Make sure there is no competition with exactly the same featureset who is cheaper
- Use affiliates and people who are selling similar stuff. Get into partnerships with them
- Make sure you have your website listed in all download sites possible. They will rank higher than your actual site typically
- Make sure your software works perfectly, has an easy install and does not require any additional installs and does not crash
- Capture the email addresses of your potential customers and email them
People want software that works well, is at a reasonable price and that has a human behind them, when they buy at those prices. All the other stuff is really secondary.
And I totally agree that if I'm selling a desktop application I should probably concentrate in making its UI simpler instead of my Websites UI... it's not a web-app.
These price-list requests are quite interesting, I would think people would like to know right away what the price is, but maybe that's not the case considering your experience - thanks for the advice.
If you are too friendly, you often lose the sale.
Also, being a human behind it is not a selling point. It's not a differentiator. It's just the expected thing. Your product is your selling point, don't try to sell anything else.
People want to know immediately what the price is - but people who are communicating with you are a LOT more likely to buy from you (assuming you know how to communicate with them).
More the an GUI complaints people have pointed out the thing that initially gets my attention is that I can only see 6 programs, unless this was able to install just about everything someone needed when provisioning new machines the value proposition seems to be lacking.
Something I think of when I think of a suite of applications is portable apps, a quick browse of their applications list shows probably a couple of hundred apps.
But you're right, I need to show and support more apps. After I finished development I just put all my efforts in marketing and now, after one year, I'm quite tired of just adding refinements to the program - I would love for someone to just buy it so that it would really drive me to get back into development.
My father has a software which sells for around $1,000, but doesn't have a website. He find clients (through his business network, word of mouth, a phone call...) and then install a trial version for them and guide them until they agree and purchase a license.
It's quite important to note that in my country $1K is equal to a professor salary; so that still a big deal for him.
You could do that with Skype, since (I assume) your audience is all over the world map. You may want to spend more time with your customers and to make the product works for them.
If you are selling many licenses, you may consider outsourcing someone to do that work for you. This strategy doesn't work for $0.9-$100 products, but works well for $500. Even if you are paid $100/hour, that still 5 complete hours.
If you need to register then make it part of the download page. Now lets be honest here, I am very reluctant to give my details for a free download which might turn out to be a POS (or worse a trojan) and give my details to someone who is going to spam me. Not to mention another login to maintain.
I'm not saying that your software is a POS or that you are going to spam me but I don't know that :)
I couldn't find the price (but then I didn't register). Being coy about the price makes me think that it is overpriced.
The front page is not really selling the product, it doesn't explain the problem it is trying to solve, it doesn't make clear who the target audience is (school/college/company IT departments).
Make the blog part of the site itself so the the branding and navigation does not change.
Then try pricing it at $59 so the IT guy can put it on a corp card now and explain it later if someone asks.