My strategy — to be proven out this year — is to always have a “hook” that can justify asking people to pay for your product. For example, we are developing a game that encourages children to play cooperatively. It works for all kids, but is especially designed to assist those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in recognizing the value of positive social interaction. But that’s not a hook. The hook is that we have a formal clinical study from UC Irvine which we hope will establish that it actually does work. That’s something we can promote.

In another case, we are developing two social games with a special mode that’s uniquely appealing to a certain demographic. A business partner is developing a suite of games with this feature, and will market all of them as a “destination” site for this particular mode of play. They need product; we need users. Mutually beneficial arrangement that should help gain those precious eyeballs and turn them into actual paying players.

On my 6 month old Nexus I have 38 apps downloaded and a number I deleted quickly after realizing they added nothing. Of those 38 active apps 1 has received significant revenue from me – Amazon. The rest nothing. Though I have been experimenting with paid advertizing on Facebook on another device and it has yielded 0 results in terms of new customers. FB’s new monetization to gain “likes” tries to make you feel good while you pay them money – they do a decent job of “that” but I suspect if anyone can ever actually measure the real results they will start wondering if it is a total waste. I believe FB will flounder once real metrics can be pulled out of the NSA data bank :-))

37 developers/vendors THINK I am a potential customer. Maybe 5 of these work on the model that if they give me a little for free I will (when I go over their initial limit e.g. dropbox and such) pay the extra to extend the service. They may be right but so far they have not been.

Of the rest I have not clicked on nor even noticed their tiny little ad blocks. The vendors who insist I sit through a 20 to 30 second ad are always consigned to the digital coffin.

How many apps are there in the Google Play store? How many lines of code have been chomped out in the name of the great god “potential”.

Dave’s gloom is right on, Berni

I have been wrestling with this problem for well over ten years. I am frustrated by seeing inferior services take business away because they are (a) free or (b) marketed more aggressively.

I began by offering a year of service for free because we had zero customers at the time. Ever since we have been in revenue, we have not offered our services for free but have provided a taste for prospects. Today, we even have a link on our home page that allows anyone to try us out to see if we’re compatible with their infrastructure. (We run in HTML5 these days and are compatible with any modern platform.)

If you charge, you must be willing to spend 25-50% on sales and marketing. It’s a tough market out there, especially in education, which is our market. Secondly, you must decide on retail or wholesale. We chose the latter because we just weren’t interested in building a large sales organization. That would distract from our core strengths. Others work the other way around and so become potential partners for us — a nice synergy when it works.

Every potential customer for every online service is overwhelmed by the options and number of companies asking for their business. You must find a way to stand out, to get past the market noise and get in front of the decision maker.

I wish I had a better solution, but I am stuck with the old-fashioned grunt work of finding distribution channels even in this amazing era of technology. I spend time every day looking at news that may impact me and introduce me to a new partner. That is how I managed to get to California State University with whom I know have a contract.

Wouldn’t it be nice is you could just FaceBook or Twitter your way to success. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and you’d be buried in the landslide. We have the best product by far in our space and continue to work hard for every sale.

You have answered some important questions that have been on my mind.

Thank you!