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So it's been two weeks since I last gave an update on my progress as an "entreprogrammer". Unfortunately, illness and other projects meant I didn't really get to do much on Skype Voice Changer. In particular, the tutorial video I need to make is still not done.

After 6 sales in week two, and 5 sales in week three, I was hoping I might at least keep roughly that level of sales up. But week four was again a disappointment with only 4 sales, and week five even worse - just a single sale. I'm not entirely sure what has gone wrong - traffic to the site has remained constant at over 100 visits per day.

At the end of week four, I needed to come up with yet another idea for something to send to the mailing list, which now has just over 100 subscribers. I decided that rather than writing about my product, I'd make a generally useful list of tips for getting good quality audio in Skype. It paid off as I got one sale I was able to track to the mailing list came through within a few hours.

I've also now set up my website to email me when a customer submits an error and improved the diagnostics I get back. It's helped me to identify some of the most common issues people are running into. As usual there are strange edge cases for old operating systems (XP and Vista) or .NET assemblies missing. Also, it seems that if Skype itself loses network connectivity, it causes timeouts in my app. So at least I can put in some explicit error handlers to deal with these situations.

What’s next for this project? Well I don’t have a lot of time to devote to it, but I’d like to see if I can kickstart sales again by doing at least a few from the following. 

  • Get round to making a tutorial video for the website Brainstorm more ideas for marketing emails.
  • Update my website to properly ensure you only get the download link if you subscribe to the mailing list.
  • See if I can pass the referrer through to paddle so I can properly track how I make sales Update the app with a few new features.
  • I've got some cool ideas about some "killer" features I can add to make the purchase a more attractive proposition
  • Improve error handling for more common issues that customers are reporting
  • Research facebook / twitter / google ads, and decide what would be best