Slow start to 2009

It is true, Australia does go to sleep in January. Having worked in financial services for many years I learnt that January is a month for planning not doing, as all advisers took their holidays in January so it wasn’t worth launching or promoting anything as they weren’t listening. Might be a little different this year with the markets being the way they are.

The IT industry doesn’t seem to be much different. Most contacts at the key ISPs that I have been targeting have also been away this week, some won’t be coming back till the second half of the month.

Regardless, I have spent some time planning this week, looking for some new markets to target and sourcing contacts that I should talk to. I have also spent some time managing administration issues for Carbonite. December was a good month, we trippled our November sales, so this created some additional admin work that we need to sort a more efficient process for.

In January we are also running a promotion, giving 2 bonus months when you purchase a 24 month subscription. It will be interesting to see how this goes. The December promotion worked well. We also hope to launch Carbonite to our AVG clients by the end of the month, offering them 3 bonus months when they subscribe. This should also add to site traffic and build awareness of the program.

Demand from Resellers is also picking up. Unfortunately our reseller system is not yet ready. The reseller program will really kick things along for us as they will be promoting the program for us. At the moment we only have the website from a promotional perspective as well as a growing trial database to work with. Adding the reseller program will make a big difference. It certainly makes a difference for AVG.

In the evenings after the kids are asleep, I have also spent some time researching a few personal projects of mine. One is foreign audio children DVDs. Having a Greek background I have tried to raise my children with Greek as their first language. Hopefully this will mean that they can learn to speak it and continue to speak it as they enter early schooling.

Something I have discovered is that buying DVDs with Greek audio can be very expensive. You could be paying $30 – $40 for a Disney DVD. What I also discovered however is that many Disney DVDs come with foreign audio so you can pick up a DVD at Big W for $13 that may also have Greek as the audio. Now I think there is a market for this sort of thing. So I have looked at developing a website to source these DVDs and point people in the right direction. The site is Greekkidsdvd.com. It is still in development but over the next month or so, with some late nights I hope to have it ready. It will also cover Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and many other European languages.

Next week should be a much bigger week. See you all then.