A number of things have changed these last few months.  I somehow ended up elected a State Executive member of the Australian Democrats and a National Deputy President of the party as well.  There’s some pre-selection things going on there I won’t go into presently in respect of the next Federal Election – which is going to be anywhere between March and November next year, with a decided possibility of middle of August – unless the Conservatives (Liberals) and the Socialists (Labor) magically come to some kind of agreement over climate change legislation.  That the Greens are playing “my way or the highway” is pretty sad.  Negotiate?  Yer doin’ it wrong!

MixAction is still being coded.  Ironically I released another application a few weeks ago that would have taken a little over a quarter of the time allocated to write MixAction last year in the June 30 day stint.  More on that, which relates to the topic of this post, in a moment.

At the end of last month we bit the bullet and moved from sole trader status and incorporated.  We have a nice shiny new company called “MixAction Software And Audio Pty Ltd”.  For readers not from Australia that’s the approximate equivalent to an LLC.

There are distinct advantages and distinct disadvantages to this move.  I won’t go into those here right now.

BoomerApp And Klik ‘n Mix

Klik n’ Mix is a little “party” mixing package aimed squarely at the non “disco” and “dance” crowd.  It’s a B2C application, which goes against my own business principles quite a bit.  It retails at two price points.  The dreaded $29.99 that I’ve maligned so frequently and $49.99, an upsell that adds a range of audio tools.  I wrote it because I was asked to write it by a person who does entertainment at parties and functions.  This particular person is more entertainer than “DJ” and from experience there’s quite a few of those out there.  It doesn’t beat mix and that’s reflected directly by the price.  I’m saving my beat mixing algorithm for later – and a higer price point. 

Once written I figured I might as well market it and created the brand name and product site accordingly.  You can visit the product site here:  http://www.kliknmix.com

I’m pretty sure it’s currently the only party music mixing package to feature the Microsoft Fluent UI – AKA “The Ribbon”.  I suspect that particular differentiation is short lived. 

As I said, I’ve been pretty full on time wise, so I’ve done very little marketing of the application.  A few weeks ago however a new service was launched from the people who brought the world Bits du Jour.  That service is BoomerApp.  While Bits du Jour hands out full licences daily BoomerApp is instead a rebate system where-by the customer purchases in the normal way and recieves a rebate form which they return to FastSpring Ecommerce or a local representive.

FastSpring have a blog article on BoomerApp here:

Customers pay the retail price up-front, and then print out the special rebate form to claim their discount.  The site’s model is based on the fact that a certain percentage of customers will not redeem their rebate despite that we make it easy to do so and that a certain percentage will accept an alternate offer in lieu of redeeming their rebate.

Take a look at BoomerApp.com and contact them if you’d like to be considered for a promotion (not all products will fit the offer profile, but mention you’re a FastSpring client and they will review your product right away for a potential promotion).

The developer sets the rate of rebate for the offer.  Given some interesting data on rebate return rates, which I will discuss later, the application is live right now and therefore probably best not to advertise business data to passing clients, I decided to go with the full 100% rebate.  That is the client pays the full price and then can send in the rebate form to recieve the whole lot back.  By my calculations I have little to lose by treating this as a promotional exercise and getting the application “out there”.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes – and I will report back on it at the end of the promotion – it runs seven days, from today.  The report I give will probably be percentage based and not dollar based – we’ll see… 

Cheers!

Scott Kane