Basic business theory

I've been lookng at vBSEO for the past couple of weeks and spoken to lots of other vB devs about running it on our forums.

Two features come up in every conversation - the price is insane and the enforced copyright is a non-starter

I realise that vBSEO may be a great hack and that the devs are gifted programmers, but basic business theory dictates that you've got to make changes fast.

I live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and even with a great $US exchange rate at the moment - $149 is madness. What on earth must everyone else think of this price if they live in a poorer nation.

vbaGallery is a superb product that has taken months to develop, it has tons of features and yet it only costs $60

Most other hacks also allow you to remove branding for just $30, but vBSEO won't even put a price on it. Is it really worth turning away customers who don't want the copyright message, just so that you can get an extra link back to your site - to me that sounds like commercial suicide

Lastly, you're going to have make these changes fast. You're not the only people who are building SEO hacks and soon enough you may find that someone has taken every one of your customers with their great new product. If you only drop your price after the competition arrives, they'll use your old price against you in their marketing

Simple economics - $150 = ? sales, but $30 could = ?x10 sales = twice the revenue

I think you guys need to sit down with your accountant and business manager

Don't take this the wrong way, I hope you'll take this as good business advice - remember, you learn most from those that disagree with you. You have lots of potential customers on your own forums saying exactly the same thing, but nothing seems to be changing.

Every time someone agrees with your current price and business model, you're reassured that you have a happy customer, but you're still left with many more unhappy potential customers.

Test the market and see for yourself. Run a one week/month sale on your products for $50/60 (including no copyright) and see how many sales you make. If it works well, stick to it.

Best of luck, but remember, time is running out and your competitors have a great opportunity to steal the show.

Cheers

xsimple

currently you can consider vbseo as the microsoft in SEO of vbulletin, as soon as another similar better hack comes out thats when vbseo will suffer.

I can say it currently suffers from not offering copyright removal and will continue to do so. If another plugin like this comes out at the same price but offers copyright removal I will buy it and bin this.

Yep, except that a copy Windows XP costs less

Oh, I forgot to say, what's going on with the encoded script? Another massive mistake in business. You can never protect yourself 100% and so if someone really wants to know what you're doing, they will. At the end of the day it only hurts you, your customers and your potential customers - many of whom won't buy your products because they can't see what your script is doing to their site.

You make it appear as though this company is a) in dire redundancy, b) not getting any customers, c) got lots of worthwhile competition. All A, B, C are certainly not the case. Although i agree with the basic morals you are projecting i dont feel this price, copyright, encoding etc ... will never change, and that the better everyone accepts this and stops moaning, (you forget, this isnt the first, second, twentieth topic to tackle this issue) the better.

I certainly never intended it to sound as though A,B or C was the case - only suggesting that without change - A, B and C will almost certainly happen.

The comments should be taken as constructive criticism, which is something that large and successful companies spend millions on trying to get from their customers - and that's one of the reasons why they're large and successful companies

Wait do you feel the above things will never or ever change? (Sorry trying to understand what you mean, just in case it was a typo).

I do believe people who want to remove copyright are in the minority (probably), but the likes of vbulletin still offer it, and probably make quite allot of extra income, just from a little piece of text.

They would be getting more customers if they had the copyright option, I am open minded, so doesn't bother me as much at the moment, I'd only hope they introduce the branding free option or someone else makes a similar product.

plus it keeps the customers happy...

Originally Posted by xsimple

I certainly never intended it to sound as though A,B or C was the case - only suggesting that without change - A, B and C will almost certainly happen.

The comments should be taken as constructive criticism, which is something that large and successful companies spend millions on trying to get from their customers - and that's one of the reasons why they're large and successful companies

I would personally disagree, if the company is selling licenses now then it will continue to sell licenses after this time, the demand for a .html SEO optimized page with a simple install is unpresidented.

Originally Posted by xsimple

I've been lookng at vBSEO for the past couple of weeks and spoken to lots of other vB devs about running it on our forums.
...snip
Best of luck, but remember, time is running out and your competitors have a great opportunity to steal the show.

Cheers

xsimple

I agree with you about FORCED copyright; I don't like it at all. About price, good products cost money as you know.

Originally Posted by Michael

I would personally disagree, if the company is selling licenses now then it will continue to sell licenses after this time, the demand for a .html SEO optimized page with a simple install is unpresidented.

That's bizarre logic that would lead to failure in any business. Selling today is absolutely no guarantee of being able to sell in the future.

I guess you mean that the supply of a simple-to-install vB SEO script is unprecedented. That may be the case, but first to market doesn't guarantee future success either.

I told Juan that I thought vBSEO should be copyright-free, unencrypted, and should only cost 2 dollars. No luck yet .

Agreed, the price is high, compared to other vBulletin plugins on the market. However, there are no comparable products. vBSEO is the only one of its kind, other similar solutions don't compare. In many cases (judging from testimonials on this forum), people are getting thousands of pages listed in Google as a result of using vBSEO. The cost of the plugin should be easy to recoup from placing Adsense (or other advertising) on the newly-listed pages. Compared to other SEO, paid listing, or pay-per-click solutions, $149 is a very low price for the increase in traffic. From an ROI perspective, this is one of the best deals in circulation right now.

Unfortunately, before the vBSEO beta test was even complete, someone had copied the vBSEO concept and even illegally inserted vBSEO's trademarked name in their website meta tags to try and attract the same customer base. This isn't very out of the ordinary. In fact, it happens so often that software companies typically have to act pre-emptively to prevent it.

Watch for the copyright method to "relax" a little as the product matures. Most programmers prefer to release their code as free and open as possible, but it's not always a business-savvy move if you want to focus on the long-term success of your product.

Can I ask what do you mean by "relax", will you still retain copyright notice?

also by "product matures" do you mean, when you start selling well and everyone is aware of your product or when it isnt selling well and you want to make extra income or do you mean something else?

Not sure about the exact copyright specifics, you'd have to ask Juan. I do know that the copyright requirements have already been loosened once, and it's reasonable to expect something similar in the future. There's a balance to be struck between ensuring the future of the product, and ensuring the future of the customer base -- both of which are crucial to the success of any software product.

vBSEO is still very "young" now. In this case, by "matures", I had meant when the product has gone through more revisions, and data can be collected as to the effectiveness of the software, the viability of the marketing strategy, and customer feedback -- in threads like this one.

thanks Jonathan, I see your point but also consider vbulletin offer brand free option, and I doubt that has made their product less effective, since all you have to do is ask in, almost any forum out there and they'd tell you about vbulletin.

If someone wanted to know how I had made my URL's seo friendly, I'd tell them but I would not advertise vbseo, in terms of a copyright notice on all my pages.

also just noticed that even pages which are not made seo friendly by vbseo contain the copyright notice, you guys should make it so only vbseo powered pages contain the copyright notice.

Originally Posted by xsimple

Best of luck, but remember, time is running out and your competitors have a great opportunity to steal the show.

Cheers

xsimple

I was talking John last night (the guy who did the arcade for vB). He said he was coding a SEO system for vbulletin (that uses mod_rewrite for url changing) and was going to release it for free and only charge if you wanted to get rid of the branding stuff like hes doing with the new arcade.

very interesting tadden, I'm gona ask him, already have his brand free v3arcade installed