Envato Notes

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Powerful New Tool for Authors Posted: 02 Aug 2013 12:28 AM PDT We’ve just added something new for authors to Envato Extras, the best place to find apps, tools and resources to help you get more out of Envato. SalesGenius (website, Extras) is a web app that tracks the sales of each of your items and categories, and also offers useful projections and comparisons. Read on to learn how it can help you as an author, and hear the story about how it came to be developed. What is SalesGenius? SalesGenius has been created by the Elite author team Obox. They originally created the tool to keep track of their own sales, but realized it would be useful to other authors as well. It works for each Envato Marketplace. I was able to spend some time with Dave Perel (who’s half of team Obox) on Skype recently, and was given a fantastic demonstration of the app’s features. I was surprised – the app contains more details, graphs and charts than I realized from reading the feature list. If you’re an author who enjoys exploring your stats, do yourself a favor and take it for a test drive. There are free and Pro versions of the app, and the Pro version comes with a 30 day trial. So you’ll have no problems kicking the tyres to see if it meets your needs. You can sign up for an account on the SalesGenius website, as well as read about the app’s features in detail. I asked Dave about the personal side of how this app came to be. He shared with me the SalesGenius Story. You can read it for yourself below. The SalesGenius Story During the December holidays I bought a book called "American Icon" which is about the recovery of the Ford Motor Company. The saviour of the company was their new CEO, Alan Mullaly, and what made him unique to previous CEOs was his obsession with using data to make the right decisions – be it with his workforce or the cars they created. Through that obsession he managed to completely turn the company around – from almost certain death to one of the only car companies turning a profit. It's a compelling read. Once I got back to work in January, I realised that something Obox was severely lacking was proper data analysis around our products. So I asked our Head of Operations, Gavin, to maintain a spreadsheet listing up-to-date sales data from our profile on ThemeForest. Everyday Gavin would log in to our ThemeForest account and track the numbers of all our portfolio items. It was a mission, and it definitely was not scalable. Eventually we decided we needed to automate the process. Luckily we had just hired a new developer, Nic Malan, and since he was still fresh to Obox, we decided to point his attention to turning this data into graphs. Over the next three months we tracked everything we could in a dashboard using Envato's API, Twitter Bootstrap, and our experience in creating sales reports back when we were 18 and just out of school. It was a real 'see how it goes' operation. We'd learn things every day, and would often have to clear our database completely as we refined our reports and calculations. The great thing was that from the moment we started tracking data accurately, we could make informed decisions about our products and the net-result was close to a 30% increase in revenue. Not only on ThemeForest, but also on Obox itself. We could determine which categories to target, which themes to stop making, and where our developers’ attention should be focused. It was a breakthrough for us, and to this day we're still feeling the positive effects. Enter SalesGenius By April, we realised that we could turn our private web app into a genuinely useful product for all Envato Marketplace authors. We set about creating our own flexible CSS/HTML framework, which aligned with the Obox brand, and started migrating our rough data into a more user friendly layout and graphing system. The majority of the development was done by Nic Malan and myself, while Marc and Gavin contributed when necessary, and gave us a helpful second pair of eyes when we hit roadblocks along the way. We made sure to design everything as a mobile-first experience, and would test SalesGenius on a daily basis, no matter where we were or what we were doing. The end result is the most comprehensive and accurate sales tracking app available for the Envato network. It takes an author's sales data and turns it into a visual experience that is easy to understand and unmatched in the industry. Are you a SalesGenius user? What do you think of the app? How does it help? And if you haven’t checked our collection of resources at Envato Extras, why not spend some time exploring it this weekend?

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