Looks like a very interesting tool, but I would reallllly recommend hiring someone else to narrate your videos. That woman has a very "unique" voice that made it hard for me to sit through.

That's a bit harsh. In case it wasn't clear from my posts or the website I am not a native English speaker nor is my friend or the woman in question. She is my sister and just wanted to help when we were starting. I didn't hire anyone to do anything in the website :)

Do you have bounce rate stats on the video? Those will tell you whether or not you should re-record narration with a professional. (And as far as costs go, that's not very expensive.)

I didn't mean to offend you, and it really shouldn't. I think very few people have voices that translate well to "radio". That's why voice-over artists have jobs ;)

I was having a browse of the website and think it would be really beneficial to have a comparison of all the products on a single page (e.g. a feature matrix). It's too much hard work clicking into each individual product to see why you'd want to spend more. Good luck with your project!

Yeah I agree it's a good idea. The thing is though that as we are selling to a very targeted market most people already know what they want when they come to the website. Other than that I don't know anything about html/javascript. I used free Shopify template for a winery, removed the bottles and that's how the website came to be. Adding a nice comparison table to that website would take a lot of hours which I prefer spending doing something more fun.

I just don't like doing marketing and I don't like convincing people what they should or shouldn't buy. I realize that maybe we are leaving some money on the table but on the other hand we get great reputation, a lot of word of mouth referrals and very small refund rate (below 1%) so that's good for mental health :)

Fair enough. I prefer coding to marketing myself. :)

Why did you chose to sell your software versus a subscription model? Was it just easier, or did you do research and find that selling was more profitable?

I tried to do research by asking more experienced people in the niche. I've got many conflicting suggestions and advice so I went with my gut feeling. I felt there was some reluctance in the gambling world against subscription model and I felt one time fee would maximize chances to get it going.

As to the cloud vs stand-alone dilemma, the reasons for choosing stand-alone were:

-everyone has a CPU at home and those could be utilized; building CPU heavy infrastructure so people could run it there would be very expensive and I have 0 clue how to go about it; it seems there are no CPU-heavy reasonably priced options on AWS for example (most instances are geared towards network/storage/RAM but there are none which are both decent when it comes to CPU performance and RAM, the ones which are the closest are very expensive)

-people who play for significant money don't trust cloud in general; especially for high stakes players it's important that no one could access their calculations

As to one time fee (and then maybe another for 2.0 version) vs subscription for updates, I feel maybe subscription for updates would be a better model but it was easier to start with something simpler. I had no idea if it's going to take off and I didn't like the idea of very few buyers demanding updates after 6 months or so when it's clear the product flopped (it didn't happen but it could).

It was a difficult decision though. I still don't know if I've got it right but I feel I did (some competition who went with cloud model didn't do as well from what I understand).

I had not considered the issue of trust in the cloud. I know that I trust privacy in the cloud, but I had not considered that customers might not.