The first eight days of Napkee turned out to be a real blast!

The numbers

In this short period we have already sold 27 licenses that covered the initial expenses and started to pay for our food

In the initial expenses I included all the services and goods used for Napkee, that means:

• e-books ($69)
• screencast music! ($30)
• software related ($271)
• hosting and build server ($60)
• skype related ($106)
• lawyers ($600)
• mailing campaign ($8)

That makes $1,144 of expenses and of course I had to pay my-self the amazing amount of $0/h. All the software licenses I already owned before Napkee and the computers are not included as well. As you can see, if you really want to start a micro-ISV you can do it without external capital  :)

The licenses we have sold to 8 countries so far brought home $2,047, so Napkee is amazingly profitable (+$903) just 8 days after its launch!

First marketing steps

I didn’t do any major marketing operation with Napkee. Right now everything was held on Twitter without any promotional tweet. I use TweetDeck and I keep a search open on “balsamiq” and follow whoever is posting something about Peldi’s company or products. I had a couple of tweets from Peldi that generated a lot of buzz, a contest and a guest blog post on Balsamiq’s blog…

guess when that happened

Donations

We also donated (and still processing the requests, be patient!) 29 licenses to charities, bloggers and presenters.
You will probably ask yourself why we gave out more free licenses than the ones we sold. I suggest you to read this amazing and inspiring blog post to fully understand why we decided to give away so much.

In the meanwhile…

After the first release announcement I got really busy following all the posts on GetSatisfaction, finding some bugs and releasing six minor versions of Napkee that fixed the ones found by the great community of Napkee users and made it a full 15-days-trial application!

We doubled the amount of licenses for the winners of the contest and announced the lucky followers that got one (have you missed that? check it out here)

What’s next?

I have a long list of new features I want to implement in Napkee. It includes, in this order:

• displaying not available controls
• changing the global N icon to single icons that represent the ones you find in Balsamiq
• usability improvements
• nice and exciting features I got from GetSatisfaction

Thanks for reading this post and stay tuned, the next time I will talk about the process and the tools that made it possible to release Napkee in about 4 months!

Enrico

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