Let's say you're doing, I don't know, a lesson on cellular biology. After wrapping it up, on Friday afternoon, you want to play a fun game which still has some educational content. So you print out one Parts of A Cell bingo card for each student in your class and explain how bingo works (or not, because they've almost certainly played before).
Then start calling things like "This center of the cell is where the chromosomes are stored". Kids mark "nucleus" on their bingo card. Repeat a few times -- somebody wins, the rest of the class comes close to winning (this is the diabolically brilliant thing about bingo), everybody is happy and most don't realize they've just reviewed some vocabulary.
Yes, this is a quite common activity in America. You'll find it in almost any book of teacher activities from elementary school through high school.
Bingo has a few features which make it particularly good from the teacher's perspective, incidentally. It scales to any number of kids with one teacher (not true of all games), it performs excellent crowd control since all students are forced to proceed at the same pace (very not true of all games), it doesn't pit students directly against one another (many American teachers do not believe that is wise), it is very difficult to be bad at bingo (in a way it is not difficult to be bad at e.g. spelling bees), there is an element of luck involved so the winner will almost certainly not be the strongest student in the class (some teachers believe this is wise), etc etc.
I've know about your Bingo Card Creator for about a year now, and for the first time I know what it is. Clearly an explanation is not necessary for your market (which I assume is the US); to expand internationally, evangelizing for the teaching method itself would reap great rewards, I believe. As a vague demonstration, Avatar has earnt 27.5% domestic, 72.5% international: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=avatar.htm
[I'm in Australia, a close relative was a secondary school teacher, and I've never heard of it. But sounds like a great idea, and you have a great pitch for selling it]
very minor nit: nice to distinguish in some way the final month (May) in the chart as incomplete (or not show it).
Evangelizing is tough, which is why most technology evangelists work for companies with enough money to buy small European nations and have vague job descriptions that they can't possibly fail at. I, on the other hand, have a limited budget and a well-defined brief.
The audience of biology teachers is much, much wider than the audience of "people looking for biology bingo", and it being more diffuse makes it harder to address via scalable marketing methods like SEO and AdWords. They're also much harder to convert, because I have to sell them on a) biology bingo, b) Bingo Card Creator, and b) paying $30 for it, whereas if I just try for folks who typed [biology bingo cards] into Google I get (a) for free.
I want to be someone's first bingo game about as much as Apple wants to make someone's first cell phone.
P.S. The game many Australians think of when they think of bingo is not the game on my website. Yay, internationalization.
Well thought out; but by "evangelize" I just meant to consider those people visiting your site who don't know what your Bingo Cards are, and to sell the concept of Bingo Cards, not just your product (sell in the sense of explaining the benefits, as you did above). Like adding a link from "for instructional and entertainment purposes" to an explanation page. It would be a long-term strategy, to grow the pie, not just your slice, so it might take a long time to show up in A/B testing (and probably would be minuscule compared to the existing low hanging pie... er, fruit).
So many sites assume the reader already knows what they're selling.
Still, I can see that your customer acquisition costs must be much lower for those who already know, and your site speaks precisely to those people; and there seems to be enormous growth left in that segment.
I mainly mentioned it because it would be a beneficial thing to do for the world - a connotation of "evangelize".
I'd concur strongly with this. I have a few teacher friends who I've mentioned this to who have been interested in the concept and have never heard of it previously.
Re your comment: "the rest of the class comes close to winning (this is the diabolically brilliant thing about bingo)"
Study this month confirms this and goes further:
"near misses were most rewarding for the pathological gamblers, who experienced them as being almost as rewarding as a win."
Was just browsing it and since it had so much juice, I thought HN might be interested :)
By the way, people, do check out other pages in the sidebar. The link showing expenses is especially interesting.
@patio11: don't you have conversion stats on this page? I see it has free sign ups and total revenue, month-wise. But having month-wise conversion stats (across the funnel) will be interesting.
Consolidated conversion rate is a poor metric because it doesn't help me make decisions. If it goes up, is that because of something I did on-page, or is that because of something that one of my competitors did, or is that because of market seasonality, or is it because of a change in the Google algorithms which sent a different mix of people to me? I don't know, so looking at it tells me nothing.
See also: consolidated bounce rate.
The only place I look at conversion rates these days is in the context of either two comparable traffic sources (like two AdWords creatives) or across an A/B test.
Well, I think if your conversion rate is going down or up, something has changed and you must investigate what has changed. Agreed that conversion rate, by itself, doesn't yield much information but compared to past or across segments, it can yield a lot of insights.
Just eyeballing that, can you pick the most critical time for me to have checked conversion rates in the last year? (It might -- and I stress might -- have saved me $3.5k.)
2) I think humans are exceptionally good at retrofitting explanations to data, even when the explanation and the data are unrelated.
3) Rather than continually reacting to minor changes in the conversion rate, deceiving myself as to their cause, and then implementing something that probably doesn't matter, I'd rather schedule this sort of work as part of a process: write A/B test, check conversions (with all extraneous sources of noise filtered out), implement winning alternative as appropriate, get back to work.
I just haven't done bookkeeping for 2010 yet, because a plugin I used on my bookkeeping page broke back in February, and I've been putting off fixing it.
My actual advertising budget is largely a factor of two things: Google AdWords algorithms and Google AdWords customer support. One of these two things I have a lot of love for, because it automatically matches my ads up with sites they perform well on, and I'd happily spend $100k if they'd let me. The other I have had some issues with, most recently that it frequently takes weeks or months for them to approve changes or additions to my ads, which does not help minimize the time through the learning loop at all.
I get really, really tired of having to argue /dev/null that I am not a gambling operation.
Make's it easier for your competition to position themselves to. In this case it's such a niche market that most people wouldn't mind releasing financials. Other things though, I think there is a big advantage to keeping the competition guessing.
Believe me: I would have been thrilled if one of the larger commercial entities using Rails had solved A/B testing before I did, but since nobody seemed to be working on it, it was either write my own or use Google Website Optimizer.
A/B testing is totally worthwhile for an Internet business even at small scales. I can't say enough good things about it.
What are the freelancing expenses for? (Customer support and creating new card categories?)
Side note: you might want to change the color of the "payments processing" slice of the expenses pie chart, since it's pretty impossible to see with the current background. But anyways, this information is really cool.
I do all customer support myself. Freelancing is overwhelmingly creating new cards for the website, doing content for mini-sites, and doing web design (something I'm not good at).
Not sure why you guys are suddenly interested today, because its been up for quite some time now, but if you've got questions hit me.
P.S. I hate summer.