I agree with you there is room for both types of approaches. At the end of the day, I’m not a marketer, just a software dev with a little spontaneous creativity :)

One thing you might consider is trying the OneFingerDiscount coupon on the store you were interested in. I know that at least some devs have left the discount up for a little longer than strictly required by the promotion.

Daniel

I know the whole software bundle idea has both its supporters and detractors (e.g., those who think it’s gets more users than otherwise might buy a program, while others think it devalues software, etc.). I have to admit, I’m guilty of haven taken advantage of one or two bundles myself (and yes, it’s gotten me hooked on some programs I might otherwise never have used). But I like your approach as well. I think there’s enough room in the market for both approaches. In some cases, this is all it takes to get people off the fence, and they get just the software they really want (and the devs make more per unit, so it’s win-win).

Hopefully it was a big success. It would be interesting to see (though no clue how you could do this) how many folks went with this approach vs. the bundle approach.

The whole think was pretty spontaneous so there wasn’t a lot of testing. Obviously this has its downsides, but all in all I think the promotion was still a success.

If I do do it again, I’ll definitely have some lessons to apply!

Daniel

Any chance you’ll be doing another promotion like this any time soon? The reason I ask is that I found out about this via your blog, and using Firefox v3.5.5, I kept checking out the site each day to see what new apps were part of the promo. At some point, the list never updated. It stopped at entry #75 – Code Chemistry. You added numbers up through 117 to the page, but no new software was listed next to those numbers.

Well, tonight I ran across another website blog for a product I was considering, and turns out that product WAS part of this promotion. But I’d never seen it, as I’d have jumped at the chance since I was already on the fence regarding this software. I went back and checked out onefingerdiscount.com, and nope, nothing past #75. I thought, “What the heck?!”

Then I tried something. I loaded the website in Safari. Sure enough, NOW I see actual entries up through #117. Looking at the HTML, seems you changed the format you used starting right at #76, and obviously never tested it with multiple browsers, as Firefox STILL doesn’t load any entries past #75 (even after clearing the cache).

It’s a shame that devs missed out on potential new customers and customers missed out on a possible good deal due to this. Only now have I found out that several programs I’ve been curious about and might’ve jumped at (I know one I would’ve lept at for sure) that apparently were part of this promotion. I think your counter to MacHeist is admirable and should be supported. Please do, however, consider doing a bit more testing of the site if you decide to do this again.

http://onefingerdiscount.com/feed.php