<i>100 calls to talk to 10 people to get 1 in-person demo, frequently in another state. I got in the car, put on the suit, and did the demos. I put together some signage, set up a booth at ACTFL, IALLT, and military linguist conventions. My parents saw a lot of me (they live near a lot of colleges), I stayed in a lot of cheap motels, and slowly, I built a list of customers. Not a lot, never enough. Harvard, Yale, Brown, and other top schools were among my customers, but I never made the “big score” – the state school with tens of thousands of students.</i><p>This is, in a nutshell, why Bingo Card Creator has a price tag, a no-touch sales model, and no phone number. People write me, to this day, saying "I have a question about the product. Call me at 555 555-5555 between the hours of 3 PM and 4 PM." My response is a polite variant of "No."<p>I've had this discussion with a few people who make software for teachers/students and I hate to be the Business Guy, but just like "Buy for $2, sell for $1, make it up in volume" is not a sustainable plan, you can't use enterprise sales tactics (+) at consumer price points. If sales requires a phone call, we've low-bounded the product at hundreds of dollars. If it requires an in-person meeting, the lower bound is now $50k. That isn't "Could potentially be $50k if each of your 2,000 students pays $25", that's "You will be invoiced $50k."<p>+ Absent heavy modification. There are low-touch/high-touch hybrids which can work at the $100~$500 a month mark.<p>[Edit: The definitive article on this is Joel Spolsky's Camels and Rubber Duckies. <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...</a> Search for [The reason I bring this up is because software is priced three ways: free, cheap, and dear.] My only quibble is that both the pricing model and emerging standard marketing/sales model for SaaS companies have made the no-man's land he talks about a very interesting place to be in the ~10 years since this was written.]