TCF Email Miner

After five years we've hit over $25,000 sales on TCF Email Miner.

It's never been a product that set the world-alight but its one that consistently got us sales and when we needed cash and upped our marketing efforts it always delivered.

At its peak, it was selling 30 copies a month and hitting just over $2k in sales a month, and to be honest, if we'd put more consistent efforts into marketing it then we would have sold more.

In total the product has mined 9,855,181 emails for our customers over its life-span.

BUT it has sadly come to the end of its life-span. So from today 😲 we are no longer taking any new customers but will continue to support the ones we have.

Most of our efforts are now on zubbit.io but we might come back to an email lead generation tool at some point and maybe relaunch a new version of TCF Email Miner in the future.

A great little product and it also demonstrates that you don't need one massive winning product, sometimes these little tools/services that quietly deliver sales can be good to have in your business.

For now, we will miss you, TCF Email Miner.

But roll on zubbit.io

We still of course have active users on the platform so wait for a Ten Million Emails mined alert soon!!!

In the first few months of 2018 we did a review of the UI of TCF Email Miner and decided on a number of UI changes.

We basically removed functions that had been confusing customers. It's easy sometimes to add too many options and too many functions.

So we decided to strip TCF Email Miner back to do what it was best at in the most simple way.

We also revamped the pricing structure.

2017 had produced another great consistent year of sales which had paid many of the underlying costs and bills of the larger business.

I must admit our focus had gone slightly off TCF Email Miner in 2017 and more on to zubbit but whenever we needed money, TCF Email Miner would always deliver.

We did plan out some final UI changes for 2018 but nothing much on the function front, as it was more or less doing a great job without much change.

One issue we did have with TCF Email Miner was around the use of PayPal as our payment provider.

We found we were getting customers - in particular - from South Africa who would buy the product, use it hard, and then dispute the payment.

Based on PayPal's 180-Day terms it meant those customers had nearly 6-Months usage before they could dispute.

So what we did do was make sure our logging ability enabled us to prove to PayPal that these people had used the product, in terms of when and how much.

2016 ended with TCF Email Miner hitting its targets and getting us constant sales we could rely on.

Whenever we did a campaign of mail-shots, it always produced sales.

Our Support costs had also reduced massively in 2016 so our cost of sales had reduced dramatically.

What we did really realise in 2016 was that TCF Email Miner was never going to set the world alight and make us rich but was the sort of consistent product that we could rely on to pay the bills and keep money flowing in the business bank account.

So we then decided to fix most of our attention on our new product zubbit.io whilst still enhancing TCF Email Miner and keeping it fresh so it still won us new sales and customers.

One of the key things we found from the first year was being able to cut down the cost of support.

Although both @ronperkins and myself had a long history in Software and Support we both had limited time to support the product and push forward other projects.

So we decided to add in deeper system logging so if a customer had a problem, instead of us spending time talking to them and trying to find out what they had done, we could now track their journey automatically through the logs and see what had happened.

This started to reduce our support time down to a fraction of what it was. Nice Result!

By the end of 2015 we had made 43 sales and were pretty happy.

We weren't millionaires lol but we'd made some money and the TCF Email Miner was picking up the costs of running the business, so all was good.

Based on how we observed users using the product we also had a number of changes planned for the coming year in 2016.

Four days on from the first sale we'd made five more sales

We made three more $97 sales and two $67 sales so both packages were working nicely.

We also now had live users on the platform so we can monitor how it performed and how users were using it.

All useful data to help us further improve.

On 24th February we got our first sale.

Happy Days!

We initially priced the product at $97 so was pleased it had found a customer who was happy to buy our higher-level package on the first sale.

So on with more mail-shots and marketing and hopefully more sales!

So after the success of using TCF Email Miner as a lead-magnet in an Affiliate launch, we decided it was strong enough - with some improvements - to be a stand-alone product.

So in the 6 months since the Affiliate launch, we rebuilt the product to a much more polished state and improved its functions and built a new website to promote it, along with setting up a social media presence AND lots of videos and content to promote it.

It was a busy few months...But we had a new product!

We decided to go with several priced packages at $67 and $97. The $97 package offered much more capacity/function but only $30 more than our standard package, so the hope was people would just pay a little more to get the best version.