Bingo Card Creator was in maintenance mode for approximately 48 weeks of the year again, with two experiments done with a site redesign and incorporation of direct ability to charge credit cards (via Stripe) rather than using Paypal or Google Checkout. The experiments were, taken together, a smashing success.
Bingo Card Creator makes bingo cards, mostly for elementary schoolteachers. It had far-and-away its best year ever, despite being in maintenance mode. This was largely driven by organic growth of the business and huge increases in conversion rates following the redesign and Stripe integrations, covered here. The differences are very apparent if you look at conversion rates for any month after May and compare it to the year previous, which is necessary since BCC traffic and sales are very heavily seasonal. Or you could, you know, just take a look at the sales graph.
Why bother doing a productized consulting offering when I have software businesses and standard consulting to keep me busy? Partially, I love trying new things and just wanted an excuse to experiment. Also, consulting is working out fantastically well, but it routinely requires me to spend multiple weeks abroad on business, and that is less and less attractive to me as I get more and more married. So if I could replace on-site consulting with a consulting-like offering that I could execute on here from Ogaki, that would be a bit of a win.
Note: Annual prepays are well-loved by SaaS owners but not loved by SaaS purchasers. Why? Some folks, when contemplating a purchase, actively promote annual prepays to (essentially) stripmine the next year of revenue from the business, then sell, which tends to a) inflate the TTM revenue (when reviewed by a less-savvy buyer or broker) and inflate the sales price while b) decreasing the MRR going forward and c) sticking the new owner with the cost-of-goods associated with the unearned revenue.
Practically speaking, this means that the market wants your website to be on WordPress and your technology stack to be something very, very mainstream, like Rails or PHP. That ensures that, when they want to hire someone to work with it, that person will exist in quantity and be inexpensive. The market highly dislikes software which is written in something more esoteric (the new Javascript hotness, Golang, Erlang, etc) because that adds substantial risk and cost to operating the business.
I used FEI to sell Bingo Card Creator. A+++ with regards to that transaction; would do business again. (If this suggests something about what mailing list you should be on with regards to opportunities about other software businesses, well, cough.)
Linking agreements: BCC owes some percentage of its link juice to its association with me personally. I committed to not removing existing links (like, say, the one on my kalzumeus.com front page) for a certain period of time.
I promised the buyer about 20 hours of my time over a month, and (for reasons mutually agreed) she ended up getting a bit more over about two months. The majority of it was spent doing things like going over marketing/SEO/etc strategy with her, making some not-too-difficult changes to the site, and helping her select and onboard a freelancer to deal with ongoing maintenance and development.
I think every founder has their own relationship with their business. My history with BCC was pretty intense. It was one of the only things keeping me going in my dark days as a salaryman. It got me out of that situation. It was a cornerstone of my public image for years and, sometimes, even my identity. I was The Bingo Guy.
Employee: I employed Sugar (who handles the CS for BCC) through Pepper Virtual Assistants. It is unlikely in the extreme that BCC would have continued to operate without her services over the last four years. Accordingly, I decided to retroactively cut her in for 5% of the business. Props to Pepper for accommodating this request, as it is somewhat non-standard. ("Can you invoice me a substantial amount of money and promise me that you will pay a particular employee of yours a bonus of the same amount, net only of taxes?" "We can do that.") Sugar's participation makes the business much more salable than it would be otherwise, since she's capable of continuing to operate the business under new management (which decreases risks). I assisted the new owners and Pepper in transitioning her employment to the new firm.
Acquirer: BCC was purchased by Two Teachers, LLC. The principals are a married couple who are both long-time schoolteachers. They wanted to run a business (for freedom/lifestyle reasons) and were considering purchasing e.g. a Subway franchise, but a friend with an Amazon FBA business told them "The Internet is a much better option these days." (I don't know his reasoning but, if you asked me, I'd say "Vastly lower costs to get started; much better risk profile; more schedulable around other work/obligations than having 'business hours'; did I mention you don't have to cut sandwiches open for minimum wage because that seems important.)
The Custom Fields power-up allows for a user-editable text field which is displayed on the card front. Trello's Butler allows for automated filling-in of Custom Fields. However, it's unclear if there's a Butler action to fetch the username, which is the break in the chain.
I have a board that I use to track my current projects and requests. I got tired of seeing cards appear and having no idea who added them.Using Butler, I created a rule that uses the variable @username to add a member that creates a card to the card they created.
Find and customize one of the thousands of ready-made bingo cards, or use the simple bingo card generator to create your own. Then print as many cards as you need. You can even play virtual bingo using a computer, smartphone or tablet. It's fast and easy.
Enter the bingo title, select the size of your bingo card grid, and type your items into the squares. Whatever items you enter into the squares will be shuffled around when the bingo cards are generated.
By default, when your cards are generated, the items are shuffled over the entire card. In traditional bingo, items are fixed to a certain column (and only shuffled within their respective column). To enable that, check the "Shuffle items only within their column" checkbox.
When you create your card, you can flip over a square to enter a clue/question. Whatever you enter on the back of your square will appear in the call list for your bingo game. For example, to help kids learn animal words, you might put the word "Bear" on the front of the square, and a picture of the bear on the back. When you play the game, the image of the bear will appear in the call list for your students to see. If they recognize the literal word "Bear" on their card, they would mark it.
After generating bingo cards or finding an existing bingo card, enter the number of cards you want to print, and select how many cards you want to print per page. You can print 1, 2 or 4 cards per page. Make sure you switch to landscape print mode on your printer to print 2 cards per page.
The Trading Card tool gives students an alternative way to demonstrate their literacy knowledge and skill when writing about popular culture texts or real world examples. This interactive allows students to create their own trading card about a real or fictional person, place, object, event, or abstract concept.
These cards are can be used with any type of book students are reading or subjects that they are studying, and make for an excellent prewriting exercise for students who are writing narrative stories and need to consider characters, setting, and plot. Specific prompts guide student through the various types of cards, expanding students' thinking from the basic information and description of the topic to making personal connections to the subject.
The save capability gives students a way to work on a draft of their card and come back to it to rework and revise as necessary, and to save their finished product to share with friends and family. Images can be uploaded into the card to give the finished product a complete and polished look.
Cards can be bundled into a single, small collection (8 card maximum) so that students have a way of sort and grouping similar topics in one file. As an example, we have provided a collection of cards about Shakespeare. Feel free to download the .rwt file (right click the link and pick Save As) and upload it into the Trading Card interactive to see how collections can be used in your classroom!
The below card creator was made by Arkadij Liebau. The idea is that you can create any BattleForge card by embedding an image as the portrait, then changing and adding further characteristics like colour (orbs), abilities, card name, damage, life points and rarity etc.
4) add up to four orbs. once you click this area, a small pop-up window will allow you to select Fire, Frost, Nature, Shadow or colourless orbs.
click on an existing orb to delete it
this step determines the card's main colour which can't be changed otherwise
I've been setting up a request a while ago to make a new BFCC with new graphics and a lot more options, but I still need someone willing to code it. I can provide all the graphics necessary. Check out my thread and maybe we can bring the wonderful card creator back into our realm.
The Bingo Card Creator creates a custom set of sight words bingo cards. You can use one (or more) of the existing lists of sight words and/or use your own custom word list. To create your Bingo Cards:
A few months ago a friend sent me an interesting Kickstarter campaign - The Story Engine, a card game of writing prompts, helping people generate new stories or challenge themselves to write short fiction about whatever they draw. It offered five kinds of cards, each presenting you with a few options to choose, even after the initial random drawing happened.
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