{"id":2102,"date":"2003-11-30T10:16:57","date_gmt":"2003-11-30T13:16:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/bb\/viewtopic.php?p=699"},"modified":"2010-05-08T23:09:31","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T02:09:31","slug":"exponential-income","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2003\/11\/30\/exponential-income\/","title":{"rendered":"Exponential Income"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was tabulating the income from XRay<\/a> registrations and thought the graph might be interesting for other shareware authors:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The initial peak is probably due to the fact that I had a relatively long public beta period – about 6 months, if I recall correctly – so the product was already well-known when 1.0 came out. I suppose that software released without a public beta would have a registration peak some weeks after release. After such a peak, if the product is left alone, registrations fall exponentially, approaching but never quite reaching zero.<\/p>\n

The 1.0.5 release seems to have been well-timed; the curve had already stopped falling steeply and there was demand for new functionality, so the new version attracted a number of new clients. Publicity was favorable and XRay had been included on several CDROMs<\/a> (some of which published the previous version), so there was a new, shallower peak.<\/p>\n

For various reasons I then stepped on the ball, as they say here, and essentially left the product alone for nearly a year, except of course for user support. I should have begun working on 1.0.6 (or even 1.1) immediately, aiming for a release date around November 2002, to jack the curve up again. When I finally went back to the old drawing board<\/a> a couple of months ago, the initial buzz about the product had long died down, and some of the functions which made it attractive when Mac OS X 10.1.x was new had been gradually added to later releases over time.<\/p>\n

So the slight peak for the recent string of releases is due solely to some new users attracted by the release notices; there’ve been no reviews for some time, though I believe a couple will come out now. So part of the lukewarm reception is probably due to a lack of proper publicity; the bulk of downloads, from what I gather from my e-mail statistics, was from already registered users.<\/p>\n

So the correct strategy now seems to be, release 1.1 with sufficient additional functionality to attract a substantial number of new users, and generate sufficient publicity around it. I’m working on that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was tabulating the income from XRay registrations and thought the graph might be interesting for other shareware authors: The initial peak is probably due to the fact that I had a relatively long public beta period – about 6 months, if I recall correctly – so the product was already well-known when 1.0 came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,19],"tags":[23,29],"class_list":["post-2102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dev","category-software","tag-mac","tag-xray"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-xU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}