It finally happened: I sold a copy of my photo blur removal software, Blurity.  Two copies, in fact!  And it only took a month and a half.

Granted, I’m nowhere near cash-flow positive, and this project has been in progress in one form or another since the fall of 2008, but still, I’m giddy.

A demo of Blurity removing the blur from a photo

Here’s what I learned along the way.

1. If nobody wants your product, change your product.

There were two problems with the initial version of Blurity, released in the fall of 2009.

First, it didn’t work. It was really bad at removing blur from blurry photos, and that’s a hard sell when removing blur from blurry photos is its main selling point.

Second, once I got it to do something useful, I discovered that nobody wanted it as a web-based tool.  I had thought that a SaaS model would be good — upload your blurry photo, have the blur removed, and pay to get the deblurred photo — but what people actually wanted was a native PC version.

I hemmed and hawed, pulled the web version down last fall, and half a year later built a native PC version.  I launched the new version on April 27, 2012 while I was in Mountain View for an unrelated YC interview.

2. AdWords > Reddit ads > Facebook ads

When I relaunched Blurity at the end of April, I decided to try three different providers of display advertising: Google AdWords, Reddit ads, and Facebook ads.  I tracked conversions based on how many people downloaded Blurity and began a free 30-day trial.

Reddit ads: I bought two days at the minimum $20/day level for a Reddit ad.  After I complained about the ad traffic stats not showing up for almost two days after I launched my ad campaign, the Reddit support people comped me an additional $20 day, so I effectively had a total spend of $60.  From that, I had 145 clicks, for a click-through rate of 0.29%.  From those clicks, I had a single person download Blurity and start a free trial.  Cost per conversion: $60.  Yikes.

Facebook ads: I set up an account and tried playing with the ads, but I got basically no impressions at the $0.50 CPC bid level.  Given my expected conversion rates, I couldn’t justify going much higher than that.  In the end, I got 2 clicks, for a CTR of 0.03%, and zero conversions.  Fortunately, I spent only $0.95.

Google AdWords: I had played with AdWords a bit when I had the web-based version of Blurity up, but I had been using a very naive approach to keyword selection and display targeting.  I started with spending $30/day on AdWords with pretty much all of the settings on default.  My overall click-through rate was about 0.15%.  Then I did some research about how to better use AdWords, started tracking which keywords and sites were leading to successful trials (rather than just sending traffic), and I revised my targeting.  The most important move was splitting apart display ads and search ads.

After the changes, my display CTR averaged 0.50% and my search CTR averaged 1.15% — huge improvements.  More importantly, my cost per conversion dropped by 35%, my overall number of conversions went up by 20%, and my daily spend went down by 25%.  Overall, my visit-to-trial conversion rate is now around 17%, and the cost per conversion is less than 5% of what it was with Reddit.

Could I have improved the Reddit or Facebook conversion rates by revising the ad? Probably, but it would have required an enormous improvement to match, let alone beat, the AdWords results.

Even though I didn’t have good luck with Reddit ads or Facebook ads, I have had several dozen trials started by people sharing links on those sites.  Thus, they can be useful tools — but not, it seems, if you try to pay them.

3. Native app development is a heck of a lot harder than web development

The old version of Blurity was all web-based.  I had a few browser differences to deal with, but most of the complexity was in the known, stable environment of my server.

The new version of Blurity was a native application for Windows PCs.  Everything worked fine on the computers and VMs I had access to for testing.  Once the software was out there in the wild, I immediately started getting a deluge of crash and bug reports.  It was sobering.  I’d say that a good 30% of users in the first week were unable to use Blurity at all due to bugs of various sorts.  Making matters worse, I had only extremely limited bug reporting built in to the software, and it was extremely difficult to reproduce some of the bugs on my development machine.

The first major change I made was to include much better crash reporting in Blurity.  It wasn’t a panacea — I’m still not sure why Blurity sometimes crashes on certain systems with AMD CPUs — but debugging became much easier in general once I had at least a stack trace to look at.

4. People will try to steal your work

I noticed a strange phenomenon about two weeks after launch.  A number of people were trying the same two invalid registration codes.  At first, I thought that there might be a bug somewhere that was causing the trial activation to show up incorrectly as one of those two invalid codes, but I found no path for that.

So what was it? It turned out that people were trying the serial number and registration number of my Blurity trademark.  It seems that they were just searching for “blurity serial number” and trying the first thing that popped up.  I was both amused that people could be so stupid and dismayed that people were so eager to pirate my work. (Not that I’ve been a total saint on that front, but still…)

5. Your first sale will take longer and be harder than expected…

The 30-day trial period all but assured that I wouldn’t have instant sales.  I expected that a rational person would buy only after the trial expired.  What did surprise (and alarm) me was how sales didn’t start magically showing up after 30 days passed from the first trial.

There’s a lot of doubt that creeps up when nobody is buying.  Are people unable to use the software? Is my purchase path broken? Is the software too confusing? Is the price wrong? Are my trial-to-sale conversion expectations too high?

6. …but when you do make that sale, it’s bliss

Then, finally, on June 9, it happened.  My phone vibrated, and I saw the message from Stripe: “You have just received a payment!”  Yay!  The feeling of validation was overwhelming.  Somebody had felt that what I created was so useful that they were willing to part with 49 of their hard-earned dollars to buy it.  Amazing!

Two days later, it happened again.  Another sale!  This time, it was from a customer named Paul.  Paul was one of my earliest adopters, and I’m indebted to him for sticking with me when Blurity was first refusing to install and then crashing all the time.  Little by little, thanks to his bug reports and patience, I got it to a state where it was much more stable.  Every company needs a Paul as a customer.

The second sale provided evidence that the first sale was not simply a fluke.  And that made it feel as good as the first.

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Do you have blurry photos?  Blurity can fix your blurry pictures.