Quixk marketing guide

Community Forums/Technical Discourse/Quixk marketing guide

JoshK(Posted 2017) [#1]
When people think of "marketing" they usually think of advertising, but it's a lot more than that. I myself don't do any paid advertising.

Basic marketing breaks down to what we call the four P's. They are product, price, place, and promotion.



Product
You should have a well-defined idea of what kind of customers you want as well as what kind of customers you are not trying to attract. This is called a market segment, and if you don't know which one you are targeting you don't have to worry, because you won't have many customers at all. You should have a main idea of why people would want your product. You can be the easiest to use, the most advanced, the fastest, the cheapest, etc. but you have to decide which you are. If you say you are all of those things you will be known for nothing, so it's best to choose one thing and keep repeating it over and over. You'll find that this comes back and affects the decisions you make in development, because you will be faced with a choice that either reaffirms or contradicts what you say your core value proposition is.

Your product is a solution that solves a problem for a specific type of customer. You don't have to know every detail on the chart below, but you should have a good idea of who your customers are. You can probably think of your own custom parameters that are suited to users of your product.



Price
Good consumer price points are $0.99, $1.99, $4.99, $9.99, $14.99, $19.99, $29.99, $49.99, and $99.99. Sometimes developers will want to go a little above that because it makes you feel like you are getting "extra", but the same psychology that makes you want to go a little above $9.99 is the same psychology that makes the customer want to be below $10, and they are the one making the decision whether or not to buy your product. When pricing products you should think in terms of price X quantity because that is what determines your revenue. The demand curve is a measure of the number of people who will purchase your product at different prices, and typically looks something like this:



As price increases, quantity demanded decreases. Sometimes you can make the most money at lower prices, so a higher price does not always mean more revenue. Optimally, we want to select the price at the point on the curve where revenue is maximized.

This can all sound very obvious, but when you sit down with a notepad and start putting your ideas on paper you will be surprised what comes up. You can always go back and change things, but it's good to have a working guide that keeps you on track and keep it written down.

To be continued...


RemiD(Posted 2017) [#2]
step 1 : have a product/service that some people need/want and are ready to pay for, and have the means to pay. (don't market to Yue, you will waste your time) (nothing against Yue, but low income + no mean to pay = not buying leadwerks engine!)


Derron(Posted 2017) [#3]
Above is what you learn in the basic "economics" courses (bachelor or lower).

What it does not tell is the difference between online payment and offline payment. For digital purchases the payment process is worth more than just 5 bucks.

pay 14,98 on amazon - with the knowledge of troublefree money back etc?
pay 9,99 via a service you do not know, which offers credit card or "skrills" (or whatever) ?

For the first one you do not have to sign up (you already did - in most cases), for the second one you need to create secondary-email (you do not trust that service but you need to retain access to the mail).



Also missing here:
Release-discounts and other rebates are creating an "I will wait till the next event" effect, it's up to the dev to estimate if the won sales outweight the lost ones (the more events you do, the more will wait)
-

@ Price/Demand-curve
Do not forget that we do not talk about a product you buy in intervals (like fruits, bread - or even clothes). So if you sell a really long-living-and-working-product you need to take this into consideration too.


@ Market segmentation
For BlitzMax the target audience was clear: (casual/arcade) game creators. For monkey the target audience was (casual) game creators (mobile + admob etc.).

Things like maxGUI came later on - or as "to-buy-module". They were created out of need - or because there was a userbase which was big enough to create some sales.

To advance with your "next language" into a higher level is a normal behaviour - imho, as the people of today know more about computers than some years ago, they also have easier access to knowledge - might even have learned basic OOP in computer courses at school (I only learned (Borland) Pascal there). Also competition defines what might be minimum features.
Creating desire out of nowhere (think of smartphones, think of all these small inventions you cannot remember to have seen and needed some years ago) is hard - and wont happen that often with computer software - especially not with programming software.



PS: is there a special reason for this thread?


bye
Ron


Pakz(Posted 2017) [#4]
Monkey 1 on Humble Bundle :) Increases the chatter in the community and you know #charity


Xerra(Posted 2017) [#5]
Putting Monkey on Humble bundle... That's not a bad call, actually.


skidracer(Posted 2017) [#6]
I suffered at school considering other people using an overly integral manner.

The thing I resonated with was when someone loved what they were doing and that love was spoken loud and clear from the music or writing that they produced. If you want to do anything of value consider working on something you love and the value you accord your work will I think be obvious to others.


JoshK(Posted 2017) [#7]
The thing I resonated with was when someone loved what they were doing and that love was spoken loud and clear from the music or writing that they produced. If you want to do anything of value consider working on something you love and the value you accord your work will I think be obvious to others.

That approach has worked out really well for BRL.


Blitzplotter(Posted 2017) [#8]
Josh, thanks for your initial post, very informative ;)


skidracer(Posted 2017) [#9]

That approach has worked out really well for BRL.



It has. Blitz3D and BlitzMax have been extremely successful and it is early days for the monkey technology.

As I have said before, monkey transpiler tech has already been more successful for more game developers making them more money than achieved in Blitz3D or BlitzMax. I don't pretend to understand the open source market and don't appropriate value to a product's financial success, I'm just a big fan of the use case of all BRL product.


Naughty Alien(Posted 2017) [#10]
..why recently i have feeling that things here are like wild wild west...guns are pulled out so quickly....must be post 2016 stress syndrome :)


RustyKristi(Posted 2017) [#11]
@NA haha


RemiD(Posted 2017) [#12]
Some products are "evergreen" which means the demand will almost not vary, whatever the time the product has been sold, an example of that is all the essentials products/services.
But for video games, since it is not an essential thing, the level of income of interested persons and the local legal/repression context concerning unauthorized downloads will also have an impact on the behaviors of the interested persons, and thus on the sales... (again, read the posts by Yue, about his use of pirated softwares/games) (nothing again the man, just observing)

Also, concerning impulsive buys, the mean of payment is important, it is often boring to have to create an account and to have to fill many fields before completing the buying process, but if you can instantly pay with a paypal account or with a call/instantmessage by phone, the process is easy and fast. (but the problem with calls/instantmessages by phone is that the fee of this payment service is still too high)
It is important to keep the interested person in the right internal state (feeling/mood) imo. (from my personal experience as a buyer and as a seller of infoproducts)

I also add that it is important to make sure that your website is compatible with most browsers/computers and that the navigation process is easy and fast, because it happened to me several times that i was not able to order a product just because a website was too slow (full of flash crap) or buggy (making it difficult to register with unnecessarily restrictive fields filters)