It's at the MVP stage, and while a technical success (I think it's an awesome in-browser app), no one seems to be interested in paying for it. I reduced the price to $10 prior to launch, and I still haven't had a nibble. I burned through about $200 in Adwords/Bing/Facebook ads so far. I guess it's hard to compete with the many free typing tutors out there.
Still, I plan to keep plugging at it. I have no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever, so next on my list is to get some badly-needed design help.
Many thanks to everyone who provided invaluable feedback during the past month. I really learned a lot and had great fun developing it.
I think your biggest difference from Patrick is that you are in a B2C situation where he's definitely in a B2B situation.
A teacher or event planner needs to make bingo cards to save time - which is money.
If I just want to type better, I have to justify this expense as a consumer. Is this something I will spend $9.95 on? No. I'll probably spend 20 minutes looking for a free typing tutor that will ultimately have me repeat type what I see on the screen until I get better at typing.
Hey, no worries; to each his own. I happily spent $30 (twice!) to buy shrink-wrap typing software.
I think my app outshines the top Google result for "learn to type online". But as you mentioned, not everyone will be willing to pay for that difference.
That is a wonderful application technically. Chat me up sometime when I'm more coherent and I'll give you some marketing/conversion pointers. The only one I trust myself to be accurate on at 2:30 AM is that you need to charge radically more.
Why tutor? At a glance I thought it was a very cheap way for employers to test via the browser an possible hire's typing speed. A certificate is printed by the person at home who brings that to the employer. It should have a URL that could be used to prove they didn't just make up the result.
That's a great idea. You can target it to job seekers ("Improve your CV") and employeers ("Find better employees"/"Know who they are before you hire them").
I won't claim to have answers but I can share some impressions.
The number of clicks you mentioned isn't a lot to judge a PPC campaign on. In such a small sample you never know where the clicks may fall--sometimes you'll get a bunch later and be surprised. I don't mean to suggest you should continue your campaign (especially if you're paying a lot for clicks while lowering your price), just that I wouldn't measure its success based on such a small sample size.
Price drops like that just seem like a race to the bottom, and it doesn't appear you've generated enough traffic to know for sure whether it's necessary. If/when you do find someone who'll pay $9, maybe they would have been just as happy paying $29, or more.
If it does turn out you're "competing with free," there are articles out there discussing tactics you can use to compete. Can you white-label it and sell to businesses, such as temp firms (I assume they still do typing tests)? Or professional training programs?
If that doesn't work, can you give away the tests and sell something else? Use it to generate traffic and promote a broader/different product, etc.?
I was thinking the same thing, that 500 clicks was an awfully small sample size, and that I needed to collect more data. But I could go broke trying to get to a meaningful N. :-)
I think this is really well made and only have a few comments on the speed test portion.
I'm not sure if you scale the dial showing your speed, but at 100 words per minute, it's not maxed out, but it is at 123 words per minute (I'm assuming the max is 120 words per minute). I'm assuming so that people can target 60 wpm? I would actually suggest it go either up to 100 or have it go up to where 50% would be the target or average, and maybe scale past that.
Also, for the accuracy on the test, typically it is measured by whether the word was correctly typed after the spacebar is pressed to move to the next word, not a character by character as it's typed (as in, type tou<delete><delete>hough<space> and it's correct). I've always thought it odd that it was done this way, but I naturally correct while I'm typing and that had negative consequences on your test.
That said, you've got something really, really solid here, worth way more than $9.95. It almost lends itself to a subscription model.
The WPM gauge is set to go from 0..120. I didn't expect to have many customers that can type > 100WPM, but perhaps I was mistaken. If anything, I thought that I might end up dialing that down to 0..75, so that most users at the lower-end of the range feel like they're getting a positive result. Maybe I could make that a configurable option in a future release.
As for measuring typing accuracy, that's surprisingly complicated. I wrote up a blog posting on this:
Very nice application. I like the graphing of your progress over time. Maybe you could expand it to include DVORAK? I would have paid far more than $9.95/mo for DVORAK lessons when I was learning it. :)
I type between 130 and 140 WPM. The fastest I could get on your speed test was less than 100 WPM. Maybe some other fast typers can verify that this is a bug?
98 WPM @ 100% accuracy is probably not my main demographic. :-) It is a known bug though, and on my list to fix, but thanks for taking the time to screen cap it.
What tool have you used previously to measure your rate at 130-140 wpm? QBF counts every 5 characters as a "word"; other apps might measure differently.
Did the tool not keep pace with your typing?
How much did you "train" to get to that speed? I moved to dvorak a couple years ago and I'm actually at 80-90wpm. I used atypetrainer4mac to get to 50-60wpm, then I did this http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadsunrise/4338226640/ and I'm up to 85-90 but to get slightly faster now I have to invest too much time.
I'm not sure. I was at 60 WPM at age 16 according to Mavis Beacon and steadily increased over the last decade. IRC was my training program. :)
I do not even type correctly and I have had no formal training. I only use three fingers on each hand (index, middle and ring) and my right pinky finger to press Shift. I actually press the spacebar with my right index finger and occasionally my left thumb.
Sorry that I can't accurately answer your question!
I think your "free typing test" might be sort of a marketing vehicle if you could provide embeddable badges of results for blogs, or shortened links to your results for a Twitter stream, FB, etc...
Or maybe not. The sort of people showing off their mad typing skills probably wouldn't also be people who want to buy your service :)
My intended market was the kind of person who googles "learn to type", finds Mavis Beacon, and then orders a CDROM from Amazon. That's what I did a couple of years ago, and it was a painful experience.
First I bought a downloadable version, which then sent me on a wild goose chase for Stuffit Expander, which was required to uncompress the image. Then when I finally got that, it wouldn't run on my OSX Mac.
Finally I learned that there was in fact an up-to-date version available for Mac, but only on CDROM. So then I purchased THAT (yeah, I paid twice!) Ultimately, the software was great, but getting it installed was a major PITA.
I imagine that there are a lot of traditional desktop apps like this that you can only get on CD (or dodgy software downloads). That's the "niche" I'd like to target.
This comment made me try it out. I do wish I was a better typist. Maybe this is the kind of thing I could do in my spare time instead of playing Angry Birds.
Still, I plan to keep plugging at it. I have no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever, so next on my list is to get some badly-needed design help.
Many thanks to everyone who provided invaluable feedback during the past month. I really learned a lot and had great fun developing it.