In this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by online marketing expert, David Coss to discuss how how he’s building small, inexpensive software applications that are sold as a Warrior Special Offer (WSO).
If you haven’t yet heard of a WSO, you should really take some time to learn more as every day, marketers are raking in thousands of dollars, building relationships, and growing their lists; all from their WSOs.
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About David
David Coss is a husband and father from Brisbane Australia and he first started online back in 2006.
Like all the rest of us, David did not find instant success. Instead, he floundered as he went from chasing one shiny object to another.
It wasn’t until he got focused on creating small software applications that success started to come his way. Now, with 10 WSOs under his belt, David is running a thriving online business that is paving the way for more success in the future, while having the time of his life!
In This Episode, David and I Discuss
Why creating small software applications is such a terrific business for new marketers
How much David spends per app (and it’s not very much at all)
How much he hopes to make with each one
The difference between the ‘front end’ and the ‘back end’ sale
Why using WSOs is one of the best list building strategies on the planet
How he found his developer
How he handles support
and so much more…
Links
Image Pressor Plugin (affiliate link)
Transcript
Click Here to Read the Transcript
OIL 027: An Interview with David Cross
Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! It’s Trent here with session no. 27 in the Online Income Lab podcast. And on this show I will tell you I have another really smart guy. This is the first in series of software as a WSO podcast. The guest in the show is a fellow by the name David Coss and he started online in 2006. Like all the rest of us floundered around for a few years first trying all sorts of stuff that didn’t work and chasing shiny objects. And in his own words he says I didn’t really make any money at all until I got really focused. And he got focused on building software and then selling it as a warrior special offer on the warrior forum. So that’s software as a WSO. As I mentioned I’ve got a number of guests in the next while that we’re gonna be talking about.
And so his first WSO I believe it was his first one and he did most everything wrong that the guy can do. Brought in about $30 or 40,000 in total revenue and grew his list like mad. And back on the 18th of June this year 2012 he was awarded WSO of the day again for something called Imagepressor which I bought. And actually that’s how I found out about David. I thought that was a really, really cool software product. Basically what it does is it allows you to within wordpress modify the heck out of an image. You can do all sorts of effects and filters and add graphics and zoom in and find images and you could pin them on pinterest. There’s all sorts of really, really cool functionality.
So in this episode you’re gonna learn about how he discovers his ideas for the software. You’re also gonna learn how he gets them developed and you’re gonna be shocked at how inexpensive it is to get them developed. We’re gonna talk about the list building benefits and what the difference is between a front end and a back end and why you could give away basically a 100% of the front end sales and still make a killing on the back end? And we’re also gonna talk about how to handle support and there’s a few other issues. We talk about some of the best selling software WSOs that he’s ever had. So really, really looking forward to this.
For those of you before we go to the show my last add is this, if you are really into this idea of building micro niche sites before in the course as we all know now and some folks will disagree but I’ll let them disagree, I think that model is dead. I think that a very viable model for new entrepreneurs who don’t wanna take huge risks but wanna still be able to get cash flow happening in a reasonably short period of time software as a WSO is definitely an opportunity you wanna check out. So with that said let’s get the show going and we’ll welcome the guest of the show.
Okay on the show with me today is David Coss out of Brisbane, Australia. David, welcome to the show.
David Coss: Thanks Trent. Great to be here.
T: So listen, you recently had a fair amount of success with a WSO which I bought. And you’ll have to remind me that the actual name of it, I think I have the sales page up here in front of me in some place, but you got WSO of the day with it and software was it called quickly create Imagepressor.
D: Imagepressor yeah.
T: And the kind of the tagline was you brought photoshop into wordpress and I thought that’s what caught my attention. I thought “really? This sounds cool.” So I went and bought it, installed the plugin, used it and it’s a really, really cool little plugin. So what we’re gonna be talking about in this show was how did you make first of all, where did you make the idea for it and then how did you make it so successful. We’ll just kinda work our way through so that everyone who’s listening can think that “hey this is something that I can probably do myself.” So let’s kinda, before we get any of that, because I don’t know you very well even my audience I’m sure they don’t know you. Maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself. What were you doing before you found the internet and how long have you been marketing online now?
D: Okay this is a tough one. So I’ve been looking to get online pretty much in 2006 and I’ve had a furniture business which is being great. It’s been a great business. It’s had a bit of a little bit of tough time because of the global financial crisis recession so that sort of taken, it’s going down a little bit. So I was looking at different avenues because furtniture is great. It’s been really good. But I’ve been looking for an opportunity to not be tied to a location you know. With furniture you’re tied, you’ve gotta ship it within the country. Just really looking around. I did try a lot of different things, developed many sites, you try to rank it, build with adsense and that kind of stuff. And it wasn’t something that I enjoyed doing at all. It just took searching over time and I guess I was grabbing the whole shiny object kind of journey and looking at different things and buying this and that.
Just talked to someone else the other day and reason out what would probably be over a $100,000 in one month in China buying some pretty thing to get into. I’d probably have I guess an online business with my furniture business so I sort of knew that business to begin with so it wasn’t totally pain. I’ve got the whole thing so still I was caught in that whole I’d been to more promote things together. And it wasn’t until I guess I really focused that sort of began to click and like sort of really have a guide to hold on to. I’ve got a friend who was into programming in university. He was really a bit old for university, he’s got 30 years old so he should be way pass finishing university but he’s helping me with this idea.
T: So I wasn’t able to make out the name. I think you said pixel pop?
D: Pixel pipe.
T: Pixel pipe. It’s very much like *pigmafilm. If you know *(couldn’t decipher the dialogue). So it’s basically what you’re doing is you’ve got a service which connects to lots of other different website like facebook, twitter, linked in, youtube and different links and you can actually save information to them and you can like pass it on.
T: Yeah.
D: To these different sites. Basically we interface a bit on a particular site and so what we ask them to do we ask them to make this plugin. See to it that it won’t take long. They said “no, no, no it’s gonna be like a couple of days max or whatever.” So that’s great. All works and logistics you know, we’ll pay you for the time. True it took longer to finish it so it cost a bit more than we anticipated.
T: And this was te Imagepressor plugin or this was the previous attempt?
D: This one’s the first one I did which was the previous called freeze pipe based on pixel pipe. And so it was difficult to make it and I guess I released it on form there, really low price just went into bag. And it just took off and more people were buying it. It’s great for a couple of days before some good reviews came in. Clearly it started to jump on board and then it just did sell pretty well. So I actually haven’t got to figure out how much we made because I haven’t calculated back in. But it was probably about $30-40,000 or something like that.
T: Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. Your first attempt to the plugin was the one that you just described it’s not imagepressor, the one that you got WSO of the day for. You didn’t recruit any jv so you didn’t really do anything other than you built this plugin and you just put up a WSO thread. You didn’t even have people mailing to it?
D: Guess what? Yeah.
T: And you ended up doing $40,000 with that?
D: Maybe I turn off the video. Maybe that will help. Okay yes so I think it was close to 30 but yeah it was no jv recruitment. I just put up a WSO, that’s it. It took me a while to get it to a hit because I was coming to a hurrying about the sales copy. What am I gonna do with that hammer? And then I just decided “hey this is gonna take me days about.” A week somewhere I think it was John Ross, Johnny Ross or whatever, and he has seen it was quite good enough and because if I tried to make it perfect which I was trying to do I wouldn’t be able to release it. This isn’t perfect. The sales copy isn’t perfect. The plugin I put it at the top of the best. And it’s all of everything but if I keep puffing around I’m never gonna release it in weeks. So at that time I hate to see that it’s good enough but it was good advice for me to put it up. I don’t think that’s always good advice but in this particular case it was great for me especially for the first one. Put it up and then really low price then it just started to climb up coz it did by himself. Then when it was time to get a steady level hunch of the same commission on the front end affiliates started to jump on board wanting to promote.
T: That’s phenomenal.
D: Yeah so it was okay but we got some bigger parades on. And then one affiliate promoted and he sold out 3 1/2 thousand dollars just for himself. He sold 200 units or something.
T: And this guy just found you? You didn’t contact this big affiliate? He was paying attention and found that it was converting well. Do you remember what your EPCs were?
D: I had no idea. I had no idea about all that stuff. It was probably been there at 20% or something like that on the front end. I wasn’t checking it. I had no idea what all that stuff was doing at the beginning. One time I looked at it coz someone mentioned to me why you’re doing so well. Probably was talking about that which I didn’t get. But he was saying he was surprised that I didn’t coz it was doing so well.
T: I’ll tell you that. That is a phenomenal story that flies in the face of everything I’ve ever been told about running a successful WSO which goes to show that if you create something that the market place wants the market place is gonna come and get it in drove and very clearly creating something. Coz this was a plugin that did some kind of graphic. Is that correct?
D: The first one it wasn’t graphics. It was more like distributing your content out to different sites.
T: Okay so linkbuilding.
D: Yeah linkbuilding.
T: Yeah.
D: I would say it was true at that time but the whole market place has changed.
T: Yeah.
D: You can get traffic from the form itself like all the first initial sales that are from people just looking and searching. But it wasn’t until we got a couple of first affiliates on board that it started to move faster. But I think it has changed quite a lot. I think you know now you sure need to have some sort of relationships. The affiliates start and rise. They don’t just go start searching for something and see if it’s doing well and promote it. It just takes a lot of time for me to build out an email and explain it. For me I like to review products so it takes me a day to go through a product and review and by that time the traction of the particular WSO could be finished. A lot of places of where to go for sales. So I think it has changed a little bit. But then it’ll be as easy as what you can do now just putting something up.Think of all the affiliates jumping on board. You will get someone promoting everyday. That will do that. They will jump on board. And maybe that’s what’s happening with my one.
T: I have no doubt that there are people who own big lists out there and all they do every single day is promote the top converting WSO that they can find to their list. So speaking of lists at the end of this first WSO how many people did you have on your list?
D: Well I had in that particular one sold about 1500 copies but the actual list size is, coz not everyone signed up to get updates or sign on the list, so I would probably say would be less than a thousand at that one.
T: Okay.
D: This week we don’t force them to opt in. We want people to sign up for update coz we do update our stuff. So that’s what that’s for. We do give promotions as well but it’s more of we can call and tell you about updates and what’s happening.
T: Okay so now let’s jump forward to this WSO, the imagepressor WSO which was WSO of the day on June 18th. So let’s just do some kinda conclusion fact here first. So how many units did it move to get WSO of the day?
D: To get WSO of the day or how much did we?
T: How much did it sell in total?
D: How much did it sell? On the front end it’s about just around 800 I think.
T: 800 units, okay? And was it a dime sale or regular?
D: Dime sale.
T: For any of the listeners who don’t know what the dime sale that means that the price is going up in predetermined increments with more units that are sold. So what did you start the dime sale at?
D: It’s probably at about $8 I think. And being sold it was moving up I think it was every maybe 5 sales have gone up 5 cents.
T: Okay. So not a huge amount.
D: I keep changing it everytime so I’m not sure exactly what it was this time.
T: And so for this one did you do a jv recruitment campaign? Did you have a jv page? Did you have a contest?
D: No.
T: None of that?
D: No.
T: Really?
D: I did put out I think it was as warriorjv.com. I put out an order on that. But that army just squeeked in coz it takes effect about a couple of days for information product to put it up. But I just got it I think the day or just before the day that it’s going live so I don’t know if they got much out there. But maybe like an affiliate page on it but all would have the video of the end product and what commission structures it’s gotta be. I haven’t done any jv completely.
T: And so did you have affiliates that you had recruited to help you sell this or was it just your list and then whoever else found you?
D: I didn’t recruit but it was a couple of people who did see the product. Maybe just half a day before they’re going live and then say they would like to promote it. So there’s a couple of affiliates but their computation actually wasn’t right so it wasn’t great conversion to help push the product along. It was more I think the product did well after we had some things to come and maybe that’s 6 hours after launch.
T: And were you structuring your product pricing in the dime sale to try and manipulate earnings per click up or was none of that part of your strategy?
D: I guess at the back of my mind that that is a consideration. I mean you do want conversions to be your earnings per click and your conversions to be quite good so that you can attract others. So I did price it low and it is priced low in the front end to run to get people to buy and also that helps with more people buying ups your conversions, your stats so that people will actually see that and see that it’s converting well. And it makes them wanna promote for you. So it is definitely a consideration, yeah.
T: That’s interesting. Okay so your second one did 800 units so it’s $6400.
D: That should be my 10th WSO I think.
T: Oh so it’s been about your 10th one. So you’ve been doing this for a while. So the front end was the $8 product for the basic software and I don’t remember what the back end is. I don’t think I bought the back end. Did you have a back end on this one?
D: Yes we do. It’s an upgrade to a developed license which means you can sell it to clients as well as we see on websites.
T: Oh that’s right.
D: It also has extra features which you can use on what’s called walking media and you’ve got pop up domain patches that you can use and insert it to the actual crop and it also got pinterest on the front end so whenever someone hovers over our image a little button will pop up which says you can click straight to pinterest your pictures. And it’s also got ability for you to send all those pictures and get back those to your sites if you got a bomb of authority sites like flickr, linked in, facebook, twitter, quite a few sites. I think we’ve got 15 sites, all authority sites. You can see your image also get a backlink to your website.
T: Interesting. So let’s just walk through that, the mechanics of that for a minute. Coz I’ve got the front end version here. You pick an image, I just did this before you came on the show. I opened up a post, I searched for an image that have creative commons off flickr so I know that’s a royalty free image that I can use in any way, shape or form that I want. And there’s all the enhancement features within the software. And we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that.
D: So you were talking about image manipulation.
T: That’s right. I know where I’m going. So with the developer license you’re able to take this image and then distribute it to get backlinks. What were the actual mechanics of that? Did you just plugin to the APIs of the various authority sites that you want to do like from a development stand point? How difficult was that to do?
D: Well we ask regarding doing plugins and this similar things. So we’re re-using some of the same codes. We have to tweak it a bit but we’re using some of the same codes that we’ve already used in some of the other plugins.
T: Okay.
D: So you know it’s more, well some of them are built from scratch but it doesn’t get to use APIs. It uses the access it through email.
T: Okay.
D: Let’s you email the sites the different things.
T: Okay so if someone wanted to build a lot of links they could have one or more facebook accounts I’m assuming and that would be distributed to one or could they distribute it to multiple facebook accounts at the same time? I’m guessing only one at a time.
D: Yeah at the moment it’s set up for one, we try as much as we can to make sure our tools is not used for spamming.
T: Yeah.
D: To be as all manners possible and as natural as possible but also we try to eliminate releasing it to spams. We just try and link it to one account. And so it is in facebook.
T: Coz I would think if you had too many, if you know if I could shoot it to 20 facebook accounts at one time it’s gonna raise all sorts of red flags and facebook and potentially cause all sorts of grief.
D: Someone has come to me and explain they wanna use it that way so they want a custom build up. But I can’t find any reason want 20 facebook accounts.That’s spammy really.
T: Yeah okay so let’s back up and talk about the development. What did it cost to develop the basic plugin on the front end? The one that was sold for $8-10, the one that I bought.
D :I don’t know if I have to tell you this. Do I have to answer that one?
T: You don’t have to answer anything that you don’t want to but I’m gonna guess not much. Because all of that functionality is delivered in a package from whatever the heck of the thing was, the software that you used.
D: You know so it’s the components of this like what I said you don’t get it on the front end but some of the tools to delivering to different sites we only had the codes made so it didn’t cost a lot to integrate that. But right now for the standard package with the extra all you’d be surprised. With the image we didn’t build that. I mean it would take us a year or two coz it’s just amazing. It’s just beautiful. We did essentially called *cannot decipher dialogue* that anyone can pretty much use. It’s an API for a bit so basically that means you can connect different programs or codes through that API and connect to their program. So that’s what we do. We connect that wordpress to API so that within wordpress you can drip. So that didn’t take a long time. I would say that that visualizing method we’re talking there maybe less than a week.
And then the other parts of the program, the pinterest path we’ve got pinterest path there where you can directly pin those images as they come in or as you upload them straight to pinterest. Again we already had code for that coz it’s part of imagepressor that does all that so we utilize a code and that would have taken maybe a day to integrate that into the plugin. And then flickr we use to get images and we use a flickr API and we hadn’t use it before so that’s a new API we’re going to use so that would probably take a couple of days to integrate that. So with that I would say we probably didn’t take in a week and a half to truly make that plugin so I haven’t developed full time on that. So the cost would vary but it wouldn’t be a large cost. It’d probably be in the range of $300 or something like that.
T: Yeah that’s about what I thought. I thought this wouldn’t cost $500 up. I actually have a pinterest linkbuilding app. It’s gonna be an adobe air desktop app and all the quotes that we’re getting right now are all under $500 to develop it. And it’s gonna be fairly comprehensive in what it can do at least the first version will be decent and then we’ll come up with others. So I guess that’s kinda the lesson on why I asked you that question is for people who maybe haven’t developed software before and I am one of those people. It’s always surprising especially now how inexpensive it can be. So in the old days you talk about building micro niche sites and I used to build micro niche sites and you’d spend all these money building these sites and then you’d spend all this money building links. It took forever for you to make any money doing that. Now if someone is listening to this interview and you’re thinking well you know gosh how can I start to make some money online. The reason I’m doing this software as a WSO interviews is because this is a super fast way. I really can’t think of any faster way. Maybe there’s one but I just don’t know about it.
For someone who’s relatively new could come to the warrior forum, could pay attention for say a week or two or three or just look at all the past WSOs of the day and see what it is that people wanna buy. And you would very quickly conclude that people wanna buy anything that’s gonna get them traffic. They wanna buy anything that’s gonna get them links. So then you just start having to looking at what was created beforehand so you don’t have to think anything up from scratch. You think that’s cool. Maybe buy yourself a copy of them and mess around with them which is exactly what we did for the pinterest thing and we thought how can we make it better. What extra feature or function or what way would we wanna make this so that we can re-release this under and obviously we’re not taking anybody’s code coz you can’t compile code or atleast I don’t know if you can. I don’t know how to do that. So we’re hiring a developer and it’s gonna cost $3-4-500. Let’s just say it costs $500. Well for $500 I mean even if you did $3,000 in sales total that’s a huge and if you gave it, even if you gave it all the way to affiliates your list that you built as a result of that is really cheap. You cannot like there’s lots of ways to buy solo ads and do all these things to try and get people to opt in to your list. But you buy a solo ads it’s gonna cost you a couple hundred dollars and people are gonna mail for you one time and you have no guarantees that you’re gonna build a list from that. Whereas if you come up with your own product, especially a software product that develops links or helps with traffic in some way, shape or form you can do this really inexpensively and end up with a list afterwards which you know these people are buyers because they just bought the thing that you had for sale. Chances are they’re gonna buy other stuff and that’s how you can make money on the back end. That is an absolutely phenomenal way of doing it.
I attended a webinar about 2 nights ago with a couple of guys who said here’s the thing that people don’t get. They think that they need to make all the money on the front end and it couldn’t be further from the truth. Give away 75 to 100% of the commission on the front end because you’re gonna get all the leads. And if you have any clue about the power of owning a list and oh you’ll very, very quickly realize that as soon as you have those leads and those names on your list you can communicate to those people as many times as you want. You can build a relationship with them. You can offer them other products. I’d imagine obviously I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know.
D: That’s good. I agree with you simply and I just wish you’d be quiet coz you don’t need a competition here.
T: Okay I’ll tell you what. I’ll never publish this particular episode. We’ll just turn the recorders off now.
D: Because like you say unless you are an authority in the area info products is gonna be a hard sell. And you gonna have to do all the research a lot of it yourself and try to promote together so there’s not a lot of people that could just easily go and sell info products and make it sell really well. But you came up with a good idea. Like you said it doesn’t have to be your own idea. You come up with something that’s already up there. Get that little idea out there and get a programmer to make it. So all the hard work that you’re doing is actually the idea part but the actual work is being done by someone else, the programmer.
T: Correct.
D: So it’s a lot easier than trying to do an info product.
T: Absolutely.
D: I’m not quite familiar with that kind of stuff but it’s definitely a lot more different than actually doing a software product.
T: Well not only that if you’re gonna do an info product people wanna see proof which means that you have to prove that whatever your info product tells them to do will actually do so it might take months and months for you to amass the proof.
D: Yeah.
T: That’s far, far longer than it would take you develop a piece of software. So here’s a little tip listeners that I literally just thought of this as we were talking about this. So I mentioned to you about how to find out what’s selling on the forum. On the warrior forum you can and through WSO pro which I think cost like $4 a month or something to get a subscription to you can get a notification of the WSO of the day everyday. But obviously you know some guy got WSO of the day for his widget software last week it wouldn’t necessarily be the best idea to develop that over 2 weeks and then release it because there’s not been enough time that’s passed and if it’s too similar there’s just not gonna be enough demand. What you can do however is you can start looking at who are the top WSO sellers and then you can search for all the threads that have been started by each individual person.
Now some of the people take their threads down and they just put this thread as closed and there’s no information there but not everybody does that. So there’s still gonna be their youtube videos which might demonstrate their software. There’s still gonna be their sales copy. It’s still gonna give you a ton of ideas as to what was successful which will then be your road map coz success leaves clues. It’s just repeatable process. That’ll be your road map to figure out what is it that I need to built. And like I said earlier that’s been exactly the case with us in this pinterest plugin that we haven’t developed. I wished I could take credit and say you know I sat down with my white board and I just thought all this stuff up and knew that it would be successful and the reality is it’s not just the case.
D: Yeah that’s good. Another thing I just remembered something myself that I had recently coz I had a selling and the day before I was gonna release it someone released something similar and I thought this isn’t doable. What I decided to do is give it away as a bonus for a product that I’ve spent a long time making. I’ve just got it made a bonus to buy this other product and I thought this is never gonna sell now, right?
T: Yap.
D: What I saw recently is someone I think put out a page one curator.
T: Yeah. I was actually just talking to him.
D: That is a good product and everything like that. And then I think it was about 2 months later someone put out a similar product and I’ve been thinking this is too similar to the other one. And I could not actually get it work pretty well so I decided I wasn’t gonna promote it. But that one sold like 3,500 copies as of the month end. It was very, very similar. There wasn’t pretty much difference to the page one curator. I was quite surprised that it sold so well. But basically I think a lot of people who bought the page one curator would end up buying this other one. But it goes to show that something *cannot decipher dialogue*… people buys products that are very, very similar. It didn’t have any difference whatsoever. They might buy the same product or there just is demand for that kind of product that you don’t need to worry about other products being very similar. Just maybe tweak it a little to be a little bit different. So there’s lesson from there as well. Don’t worry too much about what other people put out because you have buyers and you’re gonna manipulate this coz people will buy from you whatever you put out. But also it’s a hot topic that people will continually buy that particular kind of product.
T: Absolutely. You know I’m a buyer like everybody else is. I buy a lot of WSOs because I’m always curious as to I wanna see their sales page. I wanna see their upsales. I wanna see their product. Sometimes I don’t wanna see anything, the product is a need for me. When you have most WSOs are under $20 it’s kinda throw away money really. I don’t think a lot, it’s almost the price, the mindset is why not. I mean if it really, really stinks maybe I’ll ask for a refund but I can’t if it’s a $10 or $12 product I can’t even bother for a refund. Now I’ve heard that many people will so I can’t say that’s a big thing or not a big thing but I think it’s still as you pointed out there’s just coz someone had a similar product a week or 2 or 3 weeks ago isn’t the worse thing in the world by any stretch of the imagination. Had I known about WSOs 18 months ago before right when I learned micro niche sites I can tell you that I probably would have never built a micro niche site. I would have figured out in some way, shape or form to go and build some kind of software WSO. And if you’re listening and you’re thinking you know I’ve never built software. I don’t know how to do that. If you can draw a picture on a piece of paper you can get someone to build the software for you coz you can draw up the screens or you can use up an application like cacoo.com and you can literally lay up all the screens. Or you can say make one that looks like that one and purchase the one and make these and these and these changes.
And in terms of finding developers and David I’m curious if you have an opinion on this but here’s the 2 ways that I do it. One is you can go on to Odesk or Redecoder or Elance or any other job sites and you could put job postings up. The other thing that you can do is go to meetup.com especially if you’re gonna do a wordpress theme or wordpress plugin and go on to meetup and find the local wordpress developers in meetup and just go because you’re gonna meet a room full of people who all know how to make software and no nothing about marketing. Absolutely suck for the most part at marketing. And you start to build a relationship for this group of people. And say hey let’s do deals together. Tell you what you make whatever widget and then I’ll make sure that it gets sold and in that way you’ve got someone not even have to pay them upfront. It’s a shared risk. How about yourself David? Is there any other tips you have in finding developers?
D: This would be a great tip to meet up. I’ve tried the whole freelance kind of concept. It just didn’t quite work for me. I hired someone but just a few like necessary getting a good traction or getting a good output or something like that. So we’ve got full time coders. I’ve hired some people for full time so they’re working for me for 5 or 6 days a week. We certainly don’t do a hire out. This is job security for them as well so it works well for me coz if something goes wrong with the program and the other person is tied up with the particular job then the support can get around to using them again for another 2 weeks. And that might not be good for sorting out the program or whatever. It’s good to know that I can contact my personnel and they’re gonna be there and they’re gonna be out to work on that program straight away. That’s how I prepare anyway.
T: I think that’s an excellent idea. That actually segways us beautifully into the next topic which is support but before I get to support so what would you say that someone would have to expect to spend for a full time coder?
D: I guess it depends on where you’re hiring from. Some people prefer to hire from their own country. So let’s say from US it’s gonna be expensive but there’s different places that you can hire from like India, Philippines and different countries. We hire from the Philippines. Their english is really good. Their communication is great. Tend to be very, very well. I have had a lot of difficulties with eventually hiring people from there. Just does that change and run away. They don’t like to go out and leaving me down at all. I have had some extreme difficulties in retaining staff is not that bad. It’s just that there’s difficult task for them and they just run away. It’s quite strange. I guess you’re looking at about if you’re looking at the Philippines I would say starting at about US$500 a month.
T: $500 a month. Okay. So again if you think about that we just talked earlier in the call about well I’m gonna spend $500 to make one app. Now for that same $500 a month as long as you can come up with say one new app idea per month you’re gonna keep your coder busy and I guarantee you’re gonna have the fastest growing list in town and you will have no problems regrouping your $500 if you did nothing else other than to take your list and promote other people’s or your next offer or other people’s offer to that list of buyers. Because one of the things about the warrior forum the users that you need to understand is they are ferocious buyers. These people love, they are addicted to buying stuff. It’s a whole different argument whether they use everything that they buy but that’s neither here or there we’re in the business as capitalist and generating revenue and if the customer wants to buy a product far be it for me to get in their way.
Okay so let’s segway to support because I know that support can be a pretty serious issue. What is your experience then and how do you handle it?
D: Well I’ve actually been handling much of support. I’m gonna be I’m putting it to someone else in my team to directly handle support. We’re saying because it can’t be big issue at this. Most of the part I don’t get a lot of support issues but you do get people from time to time they will just hassle you with some small very, very small issues. And you’re just gonna see right away where it’s at. Whether it’s just the person who wanna cut off and I say look it’s just a hassle. I just had someone I had to do that with. Just asking money questions and I was like I’m not here to answer your questions. It’s a product for $8 or something like that.
T: Here’s your $8, go away.
D: Yeah here’s your $8 right, go away. But not only like you said people are ferocious buyers so the formula you see when you’re selling something that maybe it seems that people will use that product. So if you sell a thousand units you’re gonna have a 100 people actually use it and so only a few will ask you for support. There’s one part most supports don’t have many support issues. You’re very limited on your testing because you’re only using a certain hosting server and you’re using your web browser or something like that but when you’ve single it out the rest of the people will buy you’re gonna have different users to come out and come back up. And so you try and deal with that as quickly as you can.
But most of our products have far more competitions. One particular product which people didn’t understand and so I’ve got so many support issues over that. So what I would say is that as much as possible keep your products simple so people can understand it. And make sure your product does actually work as stated as much as possible. But other than that support isn’t too big because you don’t have a huge amount people actually using your product says the same thing. It’s pretty sad that like you said people actually don’t use your product. But if that is the case so but I mean that is not a huge issue. You just deal with things just as they come up and try to actually understand what people are actually saying. That’s an issue that getting another support person to do that coz I understand all the issues *cannot decipher dialogue*. But if you got a support person doing that better be a technical person who’s actually a coder himself so they can figure out at the same time fix it right. So you’re not actually going to train people. But it’s not a major issue. It’s just nothing to worry about in making a product. We all have support issues but.
T:You know if you thought about it this way, if you thought that your average product development road map is 3 weeks and then you launch technically speaking your developer will be doing nothing for a week until you started to develop the next product and the life span of a product is approximately a week on the forum. You could have your developer swtch from developer to support for that one week and then when the sales velocity dies down then go on to develop the next product. Just repeat, repeat, repeat. That’s the business that you could run and build quite successfully. And I’ve talked to quite a few people who’ve done that.
D:You can have just one person like you said. One person doing that building the product and then one week for support. So you have one to do the product every month and like you said you can do something like that quite easily. Worse case scenario is that you break even with the person that you’re hiring but I mean even if you’re doing that even if you’re break even and you’re paying them the money you still got this code that you’ve got. That you’ve already bought the product and you can reuse some of the codes into something else. Or something that you could jv with someone else or backing their launches and all that if your initial product didn’t sell that well you know. It’s a great business. I’m loving it.
T:Yeah and so give us an idea of where somebody can take this. I mean how, again you don’t have to answer anything you don’t wanna answer. I didn’t brief you before on what I was gonna ask but how many coders do you have on your team now and what’s your product velocity look like? How many products do you try and put out each month?
D:Yeah so my staff was quite high at one stage for different reasons. It’s like one guy comes back to you initially so it’s down like 2 at the moment. At the velocity like you can say you can use your code you can reuse it into other stuff. Most of my things I’m not starting from scratch. But I’ve got about 4 products I mean probably only a few days out from being ready. So I’ve got 4 products free to go. All plugins. You can’t have an idea I would say for anyone who’s starting out never come up with a complicated idea. Come up with something simple that you know within 2 or 3 weeks max it’s gonna be completed because you don’t want a project to shut down. You don’t want to mix big thing that is such a huge thing coz you are never gonna be finished. Huge takes a long time. So start with a simple idea that’s gonna make 2 or 3 weeks to make. Try to get it at fixed price for someone. Try to get a fixed price from someone if you’re not gonna hire full time get a fixed price for that particular project. And get it finished within 3 weeks. Just a simple idea but something that solves people’s issues.
Like you were saying you have to think about getting a huge amount of money for it. Just think about it as your first project of getting something out there that you can maybe think about it as something as a path for something bigger in the future. My flagship product is called link automatic which has all kinds and details which is pretty complicated. Not complicated but it’s quite a large plugin which does a lot of things like videos and wall posts and links that it does it all automatically but naturally as well. But there’s different components of that which we took from different WSOs that have come together to make that product. So we actually took a week to make that. It would have taken maybe 6 months, 6 solid months to building it. I mean you’ve gotta make money from that. You’ve got a business but basically making products within 3 weeks or something like that, 2-3 weeks you couldn’t make a big product like that. That product will eventually become $3 or $400 product that you can sell some more like that.
T: And what’s it called by the way? David repeat it.
D: Link automatic.
T: Let me make sure that I understood what you just explained. So link automatic is this fairly comprehensive product which is on its way to becoming a fairly expensive product but it sounds to me as though you built it with individual products each contributing a piece of functionality and then your developer over time for lack of a more technical explanation bolted those individual pieces of functionality together to create this more comprehensive link automatic product. Did I get that right?
D: That’s pretty much it yeah.
T: So that’s a pretty cool model if you think about it coz you’re getting some cash flow enough to cover your cost so in other words you’re developing this big product for free more or less and you’re growing a big list at the same time.
D: Yeah.
T: Or you’re growing your list quickly I should say at the same time. That’s pretty awesome. You figure even a moderately successful WSO is gonna add 500 to a 1,000 names to your list and if you’re gonna launch of those every month and your sum total of your cost is $500 a month for your developer. You know if you’re gonna do fancy graphics on your sales page you’re gonna spend a bit more on that for each WSO that you launch but you don’t have to do that. It helps with conversions but I’ve seen guys like Chris Guthrie he’s got WSO of the day and I mean if Chris he’s not probably not gonna be listening to this but his first page isn’t worth that good look but they are now because he hires really professional graphic designer and he spends $300 per sales page but back in the days when he was just starting out they were just a couple of screen shots and a whole bunch of texts and it still worked. So you don’t have to go out and spend all the big money.
So for all of you folks who are wondering what the replacements to micro niche sites. I don’t know maybe authority sites are not your thing. Definitely you wanna have a very very close look at software as a WSO.
David I wanna give you an opportunity to just, we’re gonna wrap up the podcast here, but I wanna give you an opportunity to, if anyone wants to get a hold of you or they wanna see what products that you have for sale. Is there a website or a URL or something? How can they find you?
D: We don’t actually have an official website as such. But if you do wanna get in contact with me you can actually just talk about something I’ve got limited time but you know I can just help you out. You can contact me at support@cossstrategic.com.
T: I got it.
D: You got it. There’s 3 sss in there and .com. You can have a look on the warrior forum for what I have done. Some products have been really well other products are bomb but you learn from all those experiences. It’s cossack. You can have a look at and draw the different products that we’ve put out there. And I think it’s partly that maybe there’s 8-10 that’s still active.
T: Okay.
D: Yeah we’re doing a website. We’re making another one as well but it’s kind of down at the moment so I can’t give you a URL to have a look at it.
T: Okay. Well that’s terrific David. Thank you very much for being on the show. It has been an absolute pleasure to do this interview with you and I hope that the listeners got a whole lot out of it. So folks if you’re listening to this somewhere other than the Online Income Lab you can get to the posts that this is hosted on by going to onlineincomelab.com/session027.
And if you’re listening to this on iTunes and you’ve got value out of this episode and you found that it’s helpful I would surely love it if you would take a moment and give some honest feedback or a rating rather on iTunes coz the more ratings that we get it really helps for the show to move up on the rankings and then of course more people come and listen and we get to spread the word of as I say at the intro pull back the curtain of bs and hear from people who are really making money online. And they’re doing things that you can be doing to make money online.
So my advice to you is get out of analysis paralysis. Stop buying ebooks and stop looking for short cuts and pick something that you know is working. And I will tell you that software as a WSO is a very very viable strategy for building up a portfolio of products, building up your mailing lists and I can assure you the by product of building up your mailing lists is that you will build up cash flow. I speak from personal experience when I tell you that subscribers they’re worth from 50 cents to $2 a month depending upon your relationship with your list and the number of emails that you send and the type of products that you promote and so forth. So you can’t help but make money as your list grows.
And finally again if you really did enjoy this episode. If you’re here on the Online Income Lab if you wouldn’t mind Google +ing or twitting or liking or doing whatever to help spread the word I would be eternally grateful. And we will be back soon with many many more episodes of the Online Income Lab podcast. I’ve got probably 3 or 4 more recording in the next week alone and they’ll be published in the near future. You mentioned Paul Clifford here David. He’s done 1 podcast with me and we’re gonna be doing 1 podcast soon to dissect his WSO of the day for page one curator. And Paul really really did very well with that so he’ll definitely want to share it with others.
Alright so that’s it for now folks. We will talk to you again soon. Thanks for listening. It’s my privilege to host the show and we’ll see you again soon. Take care.
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