Patrick created, markets, and sells Bingo Card Creator in his spare time. Active in the ESL community and a full time job with a Japanese technology incubator.
From his site:
It seems like you tool would work well in primary education.
You created your software to fit a specific niche market (ESL teahcers/students),
did you plan on creating general classroom oriented cards? or was this something your customers asked for?
"My goal in offering Bingo Card Creator to the world is to in my own small way improve students' education by making fun and educational activities possible. In addition, I hope to save teachers from having to spend excessive amounts of preparation time doing a menial task when you could be directly engaged with your students."
I never planned on it being exclusively for ESL teachers/students -- the general market for teaching vocabulary is much larger, and it was my plan from the first to target them and all other sorts of educational activities. The number I actually offer with the product has expanded significantly, though. (Version 1.02, which was released in about 8/2006, came with 15 lists. The product now has over 250.)
What percentage would you say your modifications come from your own thoughts vs. customer requests? Is there any significant synthesis that comes from several requests leading you to some new
addition to your software?
Most new features come from my thoughts, but I frequently rethink implementations because my customers tell me that the current way is not intuitive. For example, I made it impossible to print to anything but the default printer, on the theory that this would make things easier for technically disinclined customers, but as it turns out many of my customers have not set their default correctly on the school network and are used to picking it anew every single time.
Have you been involved in education environments long? How has BCC changed how you think about eductation?
I seem to be unable to escape education -- I've bounced from being a teacher to supporting teachers to now developing Big Freaking Enterprise Apps for universities, and then there is Bingo Card Creator. BCC hasn't really changed how I think about education.
I've noticed on Joel on Software how you mention some strategies you've used to attract attention online to your product, what sorts of things have you tried?
Adwords, organic SEO (search engine optimization), creating resources likely to be consumed and linked by teachers, offering hundreds of sample bingo cards, etc.
If there was one thing you felt would absolutely make a huge impact on your sales, but did very little (or nothing) - what was it?
I thought my site redesign, which professionalized the look a bit and made it much more modern, was going to increase my conversion rates by much more than it actually did.
Have there been any huge eye opening moments related to marketing online - something that just made a huge difference or has it been incrimental?
There were a lot of big wins in the early days from things which were fairly trivial. Use visual buttons instead of text links for trial downloads, increase conversion 100%... As of late, the biggest "flip a switch and make money" change has been using Conversion Optimizer with AdWords. Google featured my success with that, you can read about it on their site here: http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/bingocard.html
What would you say is the most challenging part of publishing software online?
There are 50 gabilllion sites on the Internet, how are you going to get folks to notice you and choose to spend their limited time with you over the other ones?