Your Professional Business Advise Is Needed!

Hey Guys,

A few weeks ago we launched our company that sells a web browser for children, initially we made a few sales but they have all dried up within a week.

We're selling the web browser for £12.99 or $21.

You can look at the company here: click here

Do we need to change our strategy and reduce the price of the software?

Thanks

 

Compared to your competitors, what is your pricing like?

What sort of marketing, promotion, advertising, etc. are you offering currently?

What does your browser offer that others don't?

http://www.securinu.com/features.html - this page is screwed in my browser.

You have a .com domain but only display UK pricing? Are you only targetting UK customers?

Look forward to your reply, hopefully I will be of some assistance

 

Is this based off of the IE control? If so, you have to bare in mind any legalities of Microsoft.

 

First of all, the prices look strange to me. Most of us prefer paying $19,99 rather than $21. Other than that, I would recommend advertising on Facebook or similar websites. There are a lot of parents on those websites who actually have kids and might be interested in buying this.

Like posted above, the features page is screwed up for me too in Internet Explorer 7.

- Blogger.

 

A number of people have said about the GBP pricing rather than the USD price so I think we will change that, yes the product is international.

The web browser includes 100% unique features such as Lockdown Mode, only being able to view websites that the parent adds to the software, not being able to view any external links that are not listed within the softwares website list, a timer, and the software allows children to visit actual websites, whereas most of our competitors do not allow that! We're targeting a larger age range of children compared to most competitors.

Thanks for all your feedback

 

Well do most of your customers pay in GBP or USD? Where are most of your customers based?

From what I've seen from other similar browsers that a lot of things you mentioned which are unique, are not.

I'd appreciate if you could answer all of my questions so that I can provide the best possible feedback and suggestions.

 

Most of our customers are from the US mainly, although I would say its 60% US and 40% UK, I'm not sure which browsers you're looking at but the way our features work are 100% unique, also, as our web browser is not brightly coloured etc, it has more commercial value, and we may be able to sell the product to schools to use in there IT suites

 

If you want to sell it globally then you must add language tool for different country users . Because if you see some good seller sites or blog then you can find that they have also added such tools to assist other country traffic and users can read review of your product in local language used by them .

 

Well if you have more US customers than UK customers, theres a few things that can read from this:
1. You should cater to the US customers by displaying US pricing
2. Even though you display UK pricing, US customers are still buying so if you do change, ensure that you track how it affects your sale.


Regards the school idea, you would need to do some research into whether schools already have this, need this, can afford this, etc. You could then produce a marketing pack with information regarding your product to send to the schools or you could visit your local schools. This could be a fantastic way to grow your business.


What sort of marketing, promotion, advertising, etc. are you offering currently?

 

Thanks for all the feedback, currently we're marketing on a few parenting forums and blogs, we've added it to clickbank for affiliates as well.

Do you guys think the £12.99 price tag is too high? Thats what I am starting to think!

 

I've never thought about purchasing such a browser nor do I have kids so I'm really not sure how much parents are willing to fork out for this. Did you do some research into what people would pay before launching? How is your pricing compared to your competitors?

I just did a quick search, there are a lot of competitiors. 1 was providing for free and the other for $50.

I think when it comes to a parents safety they don't mind forking out the extra dollars if it's worth it. You really need to make it clear to parents that they really need your browser or there children are in danger. You could add some statistics such as xx% of children have viewed xxxxx on the internet, etc.

How does your browser work? Does your browser have a list of sites that are acceptable and that are not or some other way?

 

You're right, the price range of our competitors is massive, and of course you can't put a price on child safety. Our research that we carried out pre launch revealed that most parents would be happy to pay up to £19.99 for a software that protects there children online effectively.

This is how our browser works: The parent adds websites they would like their children to surf, say for example, I had a son who needed to do his homework, and he needed to research history, I know that wikipedia is a good website for history, so I would open up the web browser, and add wikipedia to the website list, but I would not add any other website. The software then recognizes the domain 'wikipedia.com' and will allow my son to surf this website, but if he tried to click on an external link to another website, it would not load! Once I've added wikipedia to the website list I put it into 'lockdown mode' and my son is not able to close the software without the master password (which only I know!). It is the parents job to moderate websites for their content and decide whether they are suitable or not, although we are planning to launch a side product that lists 100+ websites that are safe for children to surf, but only once sales improve.

 

So what happens if they need to do research on a project and would like to use a source other than wikipedia, usually you would search a certain topic and there are websites purely dedicated to that topic so the parent would need to be with the child to add those websites everytime, I think the add-on list of safe websites easily solves this issue.

100+ websites? I would say 10,000+ websites that are entirely safe for children. I think this would be extremely easy to achieve!

There are so many websites that would be safe for kids and it would really help in selling your product. So that way you have a database of preapproved sites which the parents can add to if they find sites which they think are acceptable for their child and you could use these sites added by the parents to build your large database of acceptable sites. Obviously some parents would let their children view some sites that others wouldn't, possibly there could be levels of censorship.

Does your browser allow parents to keep a log of what their children do?


What about a referral/recommendation program? Most parents are apart of networks of other parents. Refer a friend and win a prize, get a discount, your friend gets a cheaper price, etc.


Why don't you have screenshots or a demo of your browser?



Brennan

 

When I said 100+ websites it was just an example not a definitive number, and yes I agree 10,000 would be an easy number to achieve.

As we've just launched we've not set up a referral program yet, although that is a great idea, how could we go about doing this?

We have got screenshots of the software on the features page, we're trying to get a demo version setup as we speak.

 

For the referral program you could give your customers a coupon/discount code to offer their friends, I believe that PayPal has some sort of feature which will help with this.

Sorry I didn't realise you had screenshots because your features page was all messed up. You can see here how it looks.

If your looking for a demo version, I know someone on DP who makes custom flash tutorials/demos.

Am I correct in assuming that the customer pays a one-off fee and then you never earn a cent from them again?
I'm not sure how many customers you have, if it's a lot you could start up a newsletter and promote other parental related products and earn a comission.

 

Ok, the referral program can be done through paypal as you said, so we will look into that.

Can I ask what browser you're using to get the features page to show up like that?!

Could you provide us with his details? We do already have a software developer who can make us a demo.

The customer pays a one off fee of £12.99 and all updates that we make to the software are free after that!

 

I am using Internet Explorer 7 (this page is all messed up: http://securinu.com/pitch.html?hop=0), you might want to look into this considering it's a browser used by a lot of people.

There MSN is

Well hopefully once you create a list of safe sites you might be able to sell it to your customers to maximise your profits as well as some other nice upgrades.

So how long have you been selling this and how many customers do you have?

 

Thanks Brennan for referring us Jon1771, you can look up http://www.niceurl.in/s/flash for some of the tutorials we had done so far if you like.

MSIE is always a pain to comply with

 

We have been selling it for 2 and a half weeks and we have 13 customers so far.

We already new the site didn't work in IE7, and we use transparency on our website which isn't compatible with IE7

 

Transparency is compatible in IE7, I think you mean IE6.