The last week has been a bit up and down for my April Challenge.  Here's a breakdown.

The Good

I've been contacted about three group orders this month of varying sizes.  The first two are done deals.  The accounts are setup and the invoices are in the email. It may take some time to get the check, but they'll come.  These two were both modest size, right around $1k combined. 

Taken separately either one of these would count as completing my challenge, but my intent was to increase single user sales, so I'm not counting them.  Things are looking pretty dim on that front (see The Bad and The Ugly).

The other group deal is very early, but potentially one of the biggest I've been in discussion for.  I estimate anywhere from $10k to $100k. There is still a long way to go and pretty much everything needs to come up Matt for me to pull this off.

The Bad

Last week I raised the price on the checkout page $5 to $25 per year.  Sometime at the beginning of the month I had changed it in all the info pages and emails, but anytime a user went to actually pay they still got the old rate of $20. There was no noticeable drop in signups when I did that, but once I actually changed it on the checkout pages orders slowed.

I was consistently doing 4-7 a day and now I'm at 1-2 a day. I'm not entirely convinced there's a connection since many schools have breaks last week and this week. Plus no one has actually complained about the price change.

Small Sample Size Warning

Looking at last April I see that of the 14 orders, half came after April 23rd. The other 7 are spread randomly in the first 23 days of the month. So it isn't unreasonable to think that things will pick up towards the end of the month, although Easter is much later this year, so that means more school days off and probably less sales. Regardless I'm keeping the new price for the time being.

The Ugly

I sent an email promotion last Sunday night to the 280 users who regularly use the site on the free plan. The deal was $5 for 6 months of premium features. I sent it on Sunday night since that is when the site is most active (for all types of users). I thought if I could catch them while they were actually using the site it would help convert them. Also I encouraged them to forward the deal to their friends.

Before the email went out I estimated roughly 5% conversion, so maybe 15 would take advantage (the original 280, plus a few tell a friends). 3 people have taken the deal.

So, yeah, that didn't go well.