The Harsh Business Realities of Peek-a-Boo

by Bob Clark

Pricing

Or, The Awkward Realities of Filthy Lucre

I like working on Peek-a-Boo. I’d do it for free if I could get away with it. Sadly we’re only given threescore and ten years, and while that varies from person to person, each day only has 24 hours. When playtime is over and I need to put food on the table, I’m forced to spend precious time doing something that makes money. If I can somehow get playtime to overlap money-making time, I can improve Peek-a-Boo, with these two implications:

1. On a purely selfish note, I get to spend more time doing things I like.
2. Peek-a-Boo gets better, faster.

The flip side is that your money is hard-earned too. I don’t want to cheat you out of your money. If you give Peek-a-Boo a test drive, discover that it’s not for you, and discard it, I’d still like to offer my sincere thanks for giving it a chance; maybe a different Clarkwood Software product will someday work for you.

Buying is Voting

If you visit the “old products” section of our Extras page you can see the products that have stopped being profitable. We worked hard on each of these, and each was at least partly a labor of love. In the end, the number of people buying these products dropped low enough that we had to make a cold, calculating, tough decision to put active development on hold. I’m not asking for sympathy; believe me, each of these products was rewarding in its own way. But finding the balance point for how much time to spend on new development needed a raw, harsh, intricate analysis, and in those cases we ended up concluding (usually reluctantly, and always wistfully) that our time, energy, and sweat were best expended elsewhere.

Whenever I face the hard choice of where to allocate my efforts, if a product’s revenue has been declining, it’s very hard indeed to justify putting more resources into it. This offers a natural feedback loop; that is, if a product’s revenue is trickling away to nothing then by definition there’s not much interest in it, and my efforts are best placed elsewhere. Pragmatically this means that someone buying a product is a de facto vote for me to keep working on it.

Security against piracy

It has been said that locks keep honest people honest. The same can be said about the security most software uses to protect against crackers and software pirates. The fundamental structure of a computer implies that, given enough time and patience, any program that runs can be analyzed. Techniques like encryption and obfuscation can make it harder or more time-consuming, but those in the software development industry generally acknowledge that it’s impossible to make a crack-proof software product.

Each software developer has his or her own preferred balance point between crack resistance and labor. We at Clarkwood Software generally rely on OS X’s built-in utilities such as openssl for our public/private key encryption. This lets us spend more time on the more productive (and more fun!) parts of development — new and improved features! And new and improved products!

Reminder mechanisms

There are probably hundreds or thousands of ways that software products remind you to pay... in fact, let’s dispense with the euphemisms. These products nag you. Peek-a-Boo is in this category. Yes, Peek-a-Boo nags you.

You’ve probably noticed the nagging messages that show up on Peek-a-Boo windows.

When you are testing out Peek-a-Boo to see whether it meets your needs, it will briefly display messages such as “Demo” over its windows.

Exploring the tension between a gentle reminder and an overly-irritating nag is a sensitive science indeed. Peek-a-Boo often tunes the balance point from release to release. For example, before Peek-a-Boo 2.6, the nagging severity escalated based on when you first opened Peek-a-Boo. So if you opened Peek-a-Boo once, then waited a month or two before you tried it again, the nagging was, to be frank, pretty severe. Peek-a-Boo 2.6 shifted away from that approach and now escalates the severity based on how long you’ve actually used Peek-a-Boo.

Finding a happy medium is an ongoing journey. If you’ve got thoughts about refining the balance point, drop a note on our feedback page.

If you open Peek-a-Boo for the very first time and the nagging is so severe that Peek-a-Boo is unusable, I haven’t kept up my end of our bargain. I’ve been unfair to you (by wasting the time you spent to download Peek-a-Boo) and I’ve been unfair to myself (because if you can’t try Peek-a-Boo there is zero chance you’ll buy it).

Although I haven’t seen it myself, I’ve heard troubling reports of exactly this failure! If Peek-a-Boo’s nagging is over-the-top when you try Peek-a-Boo, please double-check the version of your Peek-a-Boo application. The latest version is always downloadable from the Peek-a-Boo page, and if you accidentally open an earlier version you might be getting an older version of the nag escalation logic. If you continue to see this problem, please let us know.

(If you’ve opened Peek-a-Boo weeks or months ago, that might have explained overly-severe nagging up until version 2.6. After version 2.6, even that scenario shouldn’t have surprisingly-severe nagging.)

Personalizing software

Some software products have a brief serial number to unlock the product, or a secret key combination to mark it as paid for, or a number of other techniques. We’ve explored different solutions, but what we use for Peek-a-Boo is a personalization key that gets emailed to you.

When you buy via PayPal, you will receive an email with a subject like “Receipt for your Payment to Clarkwood Software, LLC.” This is the confirmation that your payment has been received and accepted. This usually happens within an hour. (A copy of this message is emailed to us at Clarkwood Software, so we are notified simultaneously.)

(If you buy via Kagi, it’s a virtually-identical process, except that your email from Kagi will have a subject of “Thanks for your purchase.”)

The next step is that we at Clarkwood Software send you your personalization information. As soon as we receive notification, we will send you a second email with a subject of “Peek-a-Boo Personalization Key.” We currently process this manually, so it may take up to two business days. Typically if we receive notification of your purchase during business hours, your “Peek-a-Boo Personalization Key” email will be sent out in a matter of hours.

When you receive this “Peek-a-Boo Personalization Key” message, it will contain a “blob” of strange-looking characters. The email will look something like this:

Copy this entire blob, then open Peek-a-Boo. Peek-a-Boo will detect a valid personalization “blob” and personalize itself.

We strongly recommend that you save both the “Receipt for your Payment to Clarkwood Software, LLC” message from PayPal (or the “Thanks for your purchase” message from Kagi) and the “Peek-a-Boo Personalization Key” message from Clarkwood Software, in case you need to re-install and re-personalize your copy of Peek-a-Boo.

Some email servers are very strict in their spam-prevention policies, and we’ve heard reports that legitimate email can be rejected from too-strict servers. Please ensure that your email will accept messages (“whitelist”) from clarkwood.com (for the “Peek-a-Boo Personalization Key” message). Email is how we prefer to communicate, so it’s very important for it to work!

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