21 ms·

Kalzumeus Software Year in Review 2016

402 points by mkeeter 10y ago

charlieirish 10y ago
Patrick never ceases to deliver on value to this community and many others. Even though this is a story about how he latest startup didn't go as planned (he's now full time at Stripe), he drops knowledge bombs for us all to learn: - knowing when to move on to something new (Appointment Reminder -> Starfighter) when he didn't have the 'fire in his belly'y any longer - financial planning using a simple spreadsheet: the retirement fund! - when to borrow money and how to calculate risk - when to join a company (rather than start something new) - the value of personal leverage (personal and professional development) - when and how to sell your startup - the trials of shipping (six weeks became three years) - setting goals for the future - the value of family I've added Patrick's year in review to a few other bootstrappers and solopreneurs that I have felt are helpful, instructive or inspiring: http://startupclarity.com/a/bootstrappers-2016-year-review/ http://startupclarity.com/a/bootstrappers-2016-year-review/
- gizmo 10y ago
  Patrick is an excellent writer and a great member of this community, but perhaps you should re-evaluate whether he's really this business genius dropping knowledge bombs. Not to be a downer, but none of his startups really worked out. None of his products turned into viable businesses. I think some of his business advice is downright dangerous. For instance his willingness to sacrifice his health (multiple times) on self-imposed death marches is very bad. Also I'm baffled by his evaluation of Appointment Reminder. If you don't want to run that kind of business, why start it in the first place? It just doesn't make sense. Don't start a restaurant if you don't like the grind of running a restaurant.
  - cityzen 10y ago
    I agree with this. I appreciate everything Patrick has spent his time writing and sharing but it's hard to reconcile the writing to the reality sometimes. There's a lot about his world I just don't understand. In this post (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/) he talks about a 30k/week "rack rate" (I don't really get this term), yet he closed down his most profitable revenue stream which would allow him a good salary (i'd guess more than Stripe is paying) for a mere six weeks of work per year. I don't know Patrick and don't know his motivations but there is always a good deal of talk about being a salaryman (sounded miserable) and charging a lot of money, so why the most lucrative business he had was shuttered is beyond me.
    - cperciva 10y ago
      Two things come to mind here: First, a "rack rate" typically means an advertised rate, which gets discounted under a variety of circumstances. Second, I believe that's gross, not net.
      - nstj 10y ago
        Net of what?
        cperciva 10y ago
        Expenses. ISTR that Patrick did a significant amount of travelling for consulting gigs. (Which may also be a reason for avoiding them now that he has a wife and child.)
        nstj 10y ago
        Sure - so let's say you have PI insurance of $100/week, and you do an international flight each week also at $1000/rt. This still leaves you with $28,900/week pre-tax? What other major expenses can you see with private software consulting?
        cperciva 10y ago
        A "rack rate" is not a typical rate, so he'd presumably take in less money than you're assuming. He lives in Japan and most of his customers would probably be in the USA, so if he wants to be able to function he should be flying business class. He also needs somewhere to stay, transportation, and food while in the customer's city; and it is the nature of consultancies to not have anywhere approaching 100% utilization, due to time spent on research, promotion, and networking, and the fact that gigs never fall neatly into your schedule. I'd guess that "full time consulting" would work out roughly along the lines of * Average billing per week of consulting: $15k * Round trip business class airfare: $3k * Hotel, food, transportation at destination: $2k * Profit per week of consulting: $10k * Weeks spent doing consulting per year: 20 * Take-home (gross) salary: $200k I'd guess this is more than Stripe pays him, but not dramatically more; and if I had a wife and child I would certainly prefer to not spend half the year away from them.
  - j_s 10y ago
    none of his startups really worked out Feels like 1/2 of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast! Which is to say, sharing the experiences when things didn't go as planned is also helpful.
- rick_perez 10y ago
  I've been following Patrick since the old BoS days. He is great at marketing, but isn't a very good example of a 'solopreneur' or a bootstrapper. If any of his companies were making him a good enough living, I don't think he would have gotten a day job at Stripe. "when he didn't have the 'fire in his belly'y any longer" I've been running my own company for almost 5 years after 5 years of side-projects and failures. To actually go from a project to a successful company, you need to do lots of boring work that has nothing to do with technology or development. Most of it is a slog, but is still required. You can eventually outsource this and hire other people, but this will take some time. You will lose your fire at some point, but you still need to push through this. I've tried to partner with many different friends over the years on different business ideas and ventures. They all failed at some point because my partner (usually another developer) would get bored when things got tough or they had to work on something other than a cool library. If you can't get through this, it's probably better to stick to working a job. The other problem with Patrick is that everything he builds is from a developer perspective. Starfighter was a cool concept, but much too complicated for most people (from the business side of things. You need to spend time and money with tutorials attempting to convince business owners why this new concept is better than what they are currently using).
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >He is great at marketing, but isn't a very good example of a 'solopreneur' or a bootstrapper. This is actually the lens through which I view his writings: master solo marketer. He's managed to build a brand around these parts that, when viewed critically, is hard to explain. That's not easy. Some of the business decisions described here are baffling.
    - sanderjd 10y ago
      > Some of the business decisions described here are baffling. Which ones?
      - forgetsusername 10y ago
        Running up $120k in credit card debt? Paying $3k per month in interest on that debt while piling money into an app where "expenses grew faster than revenue"? I know this stuff happens. I've been there, done that. But I don't have a reputation as a business guru, either.
- jodrellblank 10y ago
  - Appointment reminder: how to ignore a business for four years, while not improving it and giving you stress - financial planning using a spreadsheet, then moving to more expensive lifestyle, getting in debt and having the retirement fund turn negative when he has a wife and child and is closing down his companies. Something we can all learn from? - when to borrow money and how to calculate risk: Except he says not to trust his calculation of risk when he encourages the reader to play poker against him if possible because he's so bad at risk estimation. - when and how to sell your startup: again no, he says it put him in a bad position to be wanting to sell quickly, and he glosses over 'how' with "I know how because I've done it before". The only good read there is "don't wait until it is declining before selling, like Bingo Card Creator was". - the trials of shipping (six weeks became three years): the trials of promising and pre-selling a thing, then changing your mind and doing a startup instead, and trying to turn that into a positive. (Aside: Three years? I wonder how long before there's a reasonable chance that some of the purchasers died before the release?) - setting goals for the future: where he keeps saying he didn't meet his goals, or they have changed? - the value of family: "I had not felt as effective as a husband / father recently as I wanted to be" - the value of family is lower than a side-business he was bored of and wants to sell? Lower than a "huge amount of personal fulfillment" that he got instead during that time? Lower than the guilt of refunding customers over his video series? If you were a potential customer and he said "I choose to spend more time with my family, I can't do this work justice, sorry, here's a refund", wouldn't you be fine with it? I don't dislike him at all, I do respect him, and I like the transparent views into his life and businesses and plans and thoughts, but I'm not seeing the same things you are at all. If anything these are more cautionary tales along the lines of "you can sometimes get what you want with hard work, but it comes with a price".
  - notabeliever 10y ago
    brave post for not using your throw away account.
    - jodrellblank 10y ago
      Eh, there's limited utility in trying to hide how much of an idiot I am. If you want an honest comment, my main feeling was more of envy that patio11 could build and run and sell a six figure business he didn't really care about, and had the choice of a startup, a job, or consulting, with experience that he's well capable of all of them, and that he can stop off on the side to record some videos that even in a world of YouTube and online courses, people will pay in advance for, sight-unseen. I really do respect him. And I really don't want to follow him into a life of consultant marketing, business reminder software, on-call phone stress, sign-on funneling or salarymanship.
stevoski 10y ago
From the article: "Doing [meat-and-potatoes work on marketing and sales that the business needed] was a real joy back when I was running Bingo Card Creator, but repeating it felt a lot like repeating high school." Oh boy, that's exactly how I feel when I'm in the mood to make a new product. Patrick nailed it.
dsacco 10y ago
I owe a great deal of my own personal success to Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek, both of whom have been steadfast, consistent and generous advisors (both in public comments and in "hey can I bounce this off of you" emails). After following Patrick's writings and stories for a number of years now, I can confidently say that his relentless transparency has been one of the greatest gifts I received in the industry. His advice may not strictly work for everyone in the literal sense, but I believe that diligently attempting to use his suggestions as a template is, itself, a highly productive exercise in programming and business. There is one particular note I want to make about patio11's success: Patrick is a phenomenal marketer with remarkable business savvy who happens to be a programmer. He is not primarily a programmer, which is evidenced by his recent work at Stripe and the work he is best known for on HN (essentially, writing about shipping software, not the software itself). This is not to say he is not a good programmer - I simply can't comment on that, though I have reason to believe he is after seeing Starfighter's game. Rather, he leverages that skill set as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I think this is a really important point to make because I see many people who try to pursue significant career success by e.g. ranking up on TopCoder, or open sourcing impressive software. While those things can lead to success, there is a vast, long tail of people who are very capable programmers with no recognition doing those things. Healthy self-promotion and efficient improvement/maintenance of one's technical skills has a much higher probability of success than attempting to become Fabrice Bellard. This is demonstrative - in my opinion, the sum of all of patio11's advice can be summarized as follows: Don't be a programmer, be a $SOMETHING who happens to program, and program well.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  I've taken this lesson too, and I'm curious about what set of values for $SOMETHING is. In theory it is "everything", but in practice the two common values I see are "marketer" and "scientist". I really can't get excited about marketing, and it's difficult to justify going for a PhD. What are some values for $SOMETHING that others here have seen success with?
  - __derek__ 10y ago
    Interestingly, neither of those came to my mind until reading your comment. I would fill in analyst, strategist, or operations specialist. Honestly, though, outside of the self-described "tech industry," understanding software acts as a force multiplier as long as you are able to talk about it. It's similar to having a finance background, except that your special power tends to produce actual gains more easily.
tabbott 10y ago
Why were you unable to keep StockFighter running?
- tptacek 10y ago
  I've written this before on HN, so will re-share it to buy more time before completing a big write-up on Starfighter: All three of us are software developers. We like developers. We spend a lot of time talking to developers, in particular about their careers. We had no trouble finding clients, but a lot of trouble convincing clients to take the CTF model seriously; virtually all of them wanted us to function like a traditional recruiter, offering 10 candidate profiles for every open req. That's a job that is 90% saying "no" to people. It was dispiriting watching developers we knew to be strong get rejected for positions because they didn't have the right resume, or didn't solve some pen-and-paper programming puzzle quickly enough. It was a drag for all of us. It made us unhappy. Life is too short.
  - sogen 10y ago
    Why didn't you listen to your customers and do just that? I mean, change some puzzles/tests or simply recommend someone to the job if you knew he had the skills? Wasn't this what you were solving? Matching positions to great devs.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      No, that's not what we were solving. If we wanted to be conventional dial-for-dollars recruiters, we would have done that. I understand and appreciate the mentality that your comment comes from. But the premise of our startup wasn't Steve Blank-style customer development, where we started with a vague idea of the space we wanted to be in and then worked with customer prospects to figure out exactly what product we would end up building. Rather: the company we started was an experiment, a very opinionated one, to see if we could port a hiring model that had worked extremely well for us at one company to a larger set of companies. I think there's a way to make that model work, but I've become convinced that "contingency recruiter" isn't the way to deliver it.
mythrowaway99 10y ago
No offense, but how do you get $120,000 into credit card debt with the claimed $30,000 per week consulting income.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  He explained it in the article, though it was easy to miss. If you need a large amount of cash for something, and a lot of smaller figures coming in, you pay for everything with revolving debt and let your receivables stack up in a bank account. It's one way to save up money for a down payment on real estate, maybe the only way if your lifestyle is close to your income.
  - grobbles 10y ago
    I am the proud owner of the Brooklyn Bridge. Might you be interested in buying it? The giant consulting dollar nonsense was always total bullshit.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - jldugger 10y ago
    I can't imagine anyone accepting a downpayment when you have a downpayment's worth of revolving debt.
    - thefalcon 10y ago
      That's why Debt-to-Income ratio is a thing. If you're someone who's typically adverse to debt but willing to make an exception in the case of real estate, and you're living close to your means (while renting), then it can seem to make sense to get your necessary down payment (plus closing costs etc.) through revolving debt. As long as your DTI remains below the cutoff, lenders are happy to let you do it.
      - sjg007 10y ago
        Yep, quite common. Cheaper than a cash advance too... however it's changing now with 3% down...
grow91 10y ago
If anyone is interested in how much Appointment Reminder sold for: https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/6192-b2b-saas-professional-services-106k-mrr https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/6192-b2b-saas-prof...
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  $120,000 in credit card debt (with interest) for a sale of $215,000 (less taxes)? Something doesn't add up.
  - cperciva 10y ago
    He said there were four offers within two days, so the final price may have been significantly higher than the original asking price.
  - pja 10y ago
    patio11 can confirm or not as he chooses, but it sounds to me as if the $120,000 credit card debt was incurred whilst spinning up Starfighter.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      No. (I think the post is clear about this, too).
      - graeme 10y ago
        Oh. He perhaps he should clarify, as that's how I read it as well (I'm sympathetic to Patrick, so I wasn't reading that with a skeptical eye). He wrote something about taking equity out of AR to put into Starfighter, using credit card debt.
  - sethev 10y ago
    What are you implying? He said in the post he paid off most of his creditors after closing. If the final price was $215k it certainly seems possible to pay off most of $120k with that.
mutagen 10y ago
I'd love a series of interviews with the people you've dealt with over the years at your Ogaki bank and their perceptions and misconceptions about your account and the transactions that go in and out of it.
spitfire 10y ago
Patrick is such a tease. I want to know what that two week project at Stripe that /every/ company should have is now.
- gcr 10y ago
  Right? Half of us on HN would be dying to know. Maybe it's some kind of code review/search tool...?
  - erpellan 10y ago
    I'm going to guess one of: time tracking, holidays, expenses or internal directory with pictures and desk locations.
    - weaksauce 10y ago
      I doubt any of those would be trade secrets that he can't talk about.
    - mistermann 10y ago
      > internal directory with pictures and desk locations I sometimes wonder if no one will ever say out loud how much they'd love this (at bigger companies), or if it's just me that can't easily learn 100 new names/faces/roles/projects.
      - gcr 10y ago
        I struggle with names and faces too. I've been thinking of turning my coworkers into an Anki deck to study on the subway. That would really help me, come to think of it.
  - sync 10y ago
    Maybe generating fake data for testing/development purposes? Each company has to do this in a different way to suit their business needs.
- elevensies 10y ago
jonaldomo 10y ago
Great write up. Does anybody have more information on the attack near the end "...defrauded by Lithuanian hacker gang which figured out how to use our application to proxy a telephone call through Twilio’s phone number verification feature to a phone sex line in the Caribbean..."
- patio11 10y ago
  This is fixed now, but for historical context: Twilio has a feature to allow you to make calls which appear to come from a non-Twilio phone number. To do this, you have to make an API request (see here: https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/outgoing-caller-ids); https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/outgoing-caller-ids); Twilio then responds to your application with a code that the user needs to enter, you tell that code to the user (via e.g. displaying it to their web browser), and Twilio calls the user to ask for the code. If they key in the correct code on their phone, their number is verified for your account, and you can now use it as the caller ID for future calls from your application. Because this causes an actual real-world phone call but doesn't look like a phone call to either Twilio or Appointment Reminder, it (at the time of the attack) bypassed some protections like, to name one example, AR's anti-abuse rate limiting logic. The bad guys "attempted to verify" the phone sex lines in the Caribbean, in much the same way as a legitimate AR customer would attempt to verify their office phone number so that appointment reminders would appear to originate from their office (and they'd get callbacks) as opposed to originating from our 1-800 number. Some of our customers are at larger institutions, which require you to put in an extension prior to reaching the customer. Think "hospitals." The bad guys put in an extension with over 100k digits to keep their phone calls from timing out. (Dial a 5, wait a second, dial a 5, wait a second...) The economic incentive here is "If someone calls a premium-rate number that you control, you get paid money." The economic damage is "If someone calls a premium-rate number, that someone pays to do so", so all the money the bad guys made came from either Twilio or I.
  - sjg007 10y ago
    Seems like pure fraud and there should be contracts to prevent it...
whichdan 10y ago
Speaking of salary negotiation, Patrick's article[0] on it is one of the single most valuable things I've read in my career. I can probably attribute about 25% of my salary to it. [0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
- patio11 10y ago
  Thanks, that made my morning.
- jsmeaton 10y ago
  Agreed. I recently changed jobs for the first time since his article was written, and it was extremely useful to me. I strayed from some of the advice, but what that essay did was give me the confidence to negotiate and some very effective tools to use. So thanks Patrick, from another very happy 'customer'.
- cpach 10y ago
  Seriously, everyone should read this.
  - floodyberry- 10y ago
    "How to ensure everyone is paid fairly" would be a "must read". This is more of a "Employers and potential employees are expected to try and screw each other out of as much money as possible - Here's how you can help perpetuate that!"
    - packetslave 10y ago
      That's a pretty uncharitable view of it. I would characterize it as "Your potential employer is going to do everything it can to pay you as little as they can get away with. Here's how to maximize what they DO pay you."
__derek__ 10y ago
@patio11, there's a broken link to your post about salary negotiation. It's currently relative and needs a leading slash. <a href="2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/">previous writing on the subject</a>
- patio11 10y ago
  Fixed, thanks.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
idlewords 10y ago
I read these reports from Patrick with interest, but feel like he inhabits a different universe than I do. Pinboard made $256K last year, so I operate in at least the same financial ballpark. But I do my taxes on TurboTax and have never spoken to an accountant or lawyer. My business is a sole proprietorship. From my perspective, Patrick overcomplicates everything he undertakes with business processes and overhead. From his perspective, I'm probably a irresponsible slacker. The upshot is that there are as many ways to run an online business as there are people, and how you do it depends as much on your personality as on objective factors. Big props to him for writing about his experience so openly, and in a way that so many people clearly find helpful.
- biot 10y ago
  I imagine your taxes are fairly straightforward as a result. Have you considered spending $X,000 on an accountant to see if there are ways of structuring your income to minimize taxes?
  - idlewords 10y ago
    Structuring income to avoid taxes seems like a jerk move to me. But a bigger reason is that as long as my income is over some threshold, I'm happy. Dealing with business minutia reduces my happiness, so I avoid doing it.
    - arkitaip 10y ago
      I have no business telling you how to run your life but you would be surprised how much an accountant can help you in totally legal and ethical ways.
    - nodamage 10y ago
      I hope you are at least contributing to a tax-deferred retirement account? A solo-401k is a very good option for solo entrepreneurs, and I'd be surprised if anyone considered it a bad thing to take advantage of.
Epenthesis 10y ago
(I realize this is rather tactless, but I ask in the interest of fairly weighing the risk/rewards of startups/consulting vs. big tech) Is it fair to read this to mean that patio11's net worth is < 250 k$? (Based on the fact his liquid assets were negative prior to the sale of AR, and said sale netted less than the price of a house in Tokyo, median price: ~250 kUSD.).
- uiri 10y ago
  I would be very surprised if the median price of a house in Tokyo is ~$250k USD. I would ballpark it more to the $500-750k USD range. My impression was that he had liquid assets and took on debt in order to avoid potential cashflow issues should he deplete his liquid assets. I would hazard a guess that the value in the range of (new house, new house in Tokyo) refers to (sale of AR - $120k in debt) rather than his total net worth after the sale.
  - 0x1234 10y ago
    Prepare to be surprised :) http://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/what-is-the-average-price-of-a-house-or-condo-in-tokyo/ http://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/what-is-the-average-pr... We have a mental model from the 80s. Decades of recessionary prices catches up.
    - guy_c 10y ago
      ... and don't forget a shrinking population. Accommodation in Japan is surprisingly inexpensive.
pavlov 10y ago
I'm a bit surprised that he was running Appointment Reminder as a sole proprietorship. My business ventures have mostly sucked, but I've always found the separation of personal and business concerns afforded by proper incorporation to be invaluable, and not expensive at all in the big picture. (This was in Finland; I imagine Japan could be very different.) On the other hand, I guess that makes AR a fine example of a company that would have benefited from Stripe Atlas if it had existed back then? :)
- patio11 10y ago
  It was an LLC in the US, but Japan (and/or the Ogaki tax office) wanted me to treat it as a sole proprietorship here. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Ogaki tax office didn't want to have to figure out how 法人税法 (the corporate tax code) applied to a small foreigner-run Japan-docimiled foreign corporate entity.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  You are asking about the difference between C-Corp and LLC in the US. Really, your options are: (a) LLC (b) S-Corp (c) C-Corp The rules, AFAIK but IANAL: - Sole proprietorship (single person) can file taxes for an entity with TIN as LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp - S-Corp can elect to file as a C-Corp at any time - C-Corp can issue multiple classes of shares; S-Corp cannot - Easy to convert from an S-Corp to a C-Corp - Difficult to convert from a C-Corp to an S-Corp - LLC has lowest setup cost - C-Corp requires you to pay double taxes on some income. - LLC and S-Corp taxation effectively identical In my opinion it makes sense to incorporate an LLC, then decide between filing taxes as LLC or S-Corp at the end of the first tax year. If at any time you want to raise investment, file the requisite paperwork to convert the S-Corp into a C-Corp.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    Thanks for the explanation!
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Theoretically the big difference between an S-Corp and an LLC is that an owner/member/principal of an LLC can't simultaneously be an "employee", and so must be paid by profit sharing distributions rather than W2, which can be inconvenient. But as you point out, most LLCs can file taxes as S-Corps, which gets rid of the major difference. Fun fact: LLCs can also have multiple share classes.
emiliobumachar 10y ago
At least here in Brazil, credit card debt has a fame for having the highest interest rates of all possible forms of debt, by a wide margin. If you don't mind saying, did you ever considered other forms of debt, e.g. applying for a loan at the bank? If yes, what tanked it?
- __derek__ 10y ago
  Same in the US. While I can't speak for Japan, where credit cards are rare, I'd imagine it's the same. You pay for the convenience of instant credit.
- patio11 10y ago
  Yep! There used to be a product called a "signature loan" in the US which was an unsecured debt without a piece of plastic attached to it, at a rate materially lower than credit cards. These are very difficult to get these days; I was rejected three times, generally on a "You're asking for an amount of money that we'd find difficult to profitably underwrite and your business wouldn't qualify for it anyway; have a nice day; consolation prize we'd LOVE to give you a credit card" basis. This is complicated by my business being international in character, where banks in two countries both think that perhaps a bank in the other would be more appropriate.
  - chatmasta 10y ago
    Why does your US bank need to know that you are in Japan?
Ayraa 10y ago
Maybe the time and effort demands of both wouldn't have allowed it but given how Patrick's personal debt grew, it seems it would have helped to do at least a little bit of consulting while he was working on Appointment Reminder. Doing freelance / consulting work on the side while bootstrapping your product to profitability seems increasingly common now. Though this is definitely more sustainable in locales with lower costs of living while you also don't have to provide for a whole family.
- mooreds 10y ago
  I am doing some consulting while working on a company and man does it add some stress. Not that having zero money coming in would be stressfree.
foolsrushin 10y ago
Tl;dr I was FOS all along, suckers. I don't know what I'm doing I can't really run a microisv. Back to being a salaryman!
tbrooks 10y ago
Why host Jekyll on AWS Lightsail and not S3? It's simpler, faster, and cheaper. Plus you can use Cloudfront and use AWS Certificate Manager for SSL.
- jdboyd 10y ago
  I doubt it is cheaper if you already need the VPS for a seperate rails application.
grok2 10y ago
patio11, why does the ToS page on Appointment Reminder still list your name as the one the agreement is with? https://new.appointmentreminder.org/terms-of-service/ https://new.appointmentreminder.org/terms-of-service/
dennisgorelik 10y ago
It is hard for me to reconcile: 1) "Tokyo is a wonderful city and I love it a lot – enough to not regret the rent" 2) "the balance in my Excel file went progressively negative. This was expected, but caused me a bit of stress." Ogaki is a city where Patrick successfully launched his first startup - Bingo Card Creator. Patrick met his wife in Ogaki. Then McKenzie family moved to Tokyo, which "helped" Patrick: - to fail at his another startup - Starfighter and converted him from entrepreneur to an employee; - "not felt as effective as a husband / father"; - to accumulate "health debt". What is so "wonderful" about Tokyo and what is there "to love"?
- sgdesign 10y ago
  The fact that you're wondering why Tokyo is so wonderful compared to Ogaki makes me think you've never been to Ogaki… (or Tokyo, for that matter).
  - graeme 10y ago
    But Patrick previously wrote about how he loved Ogaki, and was in Japan because Ogaki was there. So it might well have made a mistake inflating lifestyle while cutting consulting AND before any of the businesses were "done". I have the good fortune of being in a low cost of living city that's also a real, wonderful city: Montreal. Excellent place to start and scale a solopreneur business. Currently scaling up my business processes (accounting, support, etc.) which increases business costs. I'd be very wary of moving anywhere more expensive until I've increased revenue to match. (This shouldn't be a problem – outsourcing the backend processes will let me move on several revenue generating projects I've been deferring while dealing with a backlog of administrative stuff)
- bobf 10y ago
  Tokyo is consistently ranked as one of the best cities to travel to or live in, in the world. I visited Tokyo recently, and found it to be exceptional in many ways. Aside from Patrick, I've never heard of Ogaki and I suspect most people wouldn't have either. Imagine the best of New York, San Francisco, etc. combined in an even larger city that is extremely clean, polite, hard working, and efficient.
patryn20 10y ago
Reading these is always interesting to me. Looking at these sorts of sites and the amount of articles and buzz they gather on Hacker News and other sites, I always assume they must be doing high six-figures in income. Yet the ones that are transparent are generally in the $300k a year or less revenue range. I've always considered my side projects and businesses failures, but judging by these numbers I've been more successful than I realized. So I feel good about that, but I think I really need to re-evaluate my goals and how I pursue them. Because I've been extremely negative about what are apparently successes. Perhaps I also need to be more open to hiring a broker next time I sell a project.

402 points by mkeeter 10y ago

Patrick never ceases to deliver on value to this community and many others. Even though this is a story about how he latest startup didn't go as planned (he's now full time at Stripe), he drops knowledge bombs for us all to learn: - knowing when to move on to something new (Appointment Reminder -> Starfighter) when he didn't have the 'fire in his belly'y any longer - financial planning using a simple spreadsheet: the retirement fund! - when to borrow money and how to calculate risk - when to join a company (rather than start something new) - the value of personal leverage (personal and professional development) - when and how to sell your startup - the trials of shipping (six weeks became three years) - setting goals for the future - the value of family I've added Patrick's year in review to a few other bootstrappers and solopreneurs that I have felt are helpful, instructive or inspiring: http://startupclarity.com/a/bootstrappers-2016-year-review/ http://startupclarity.com/a/bootstrappers-2016-year-review/

gizmo 10y ago
Patrick is an excellent writer and a great member of this community, but perhaps you should re-evaluate whether he's really this business genius dropping knowledge bombs. Not to be a downer, but none of his startups really worked out. None of his products turned into viable businesses. I think some of his business advice is downright dangerous. For instance his willingness to sacrifice his health (multiple times) on self-imposed death marches is very bad. Also I'm baffled by his evaluation of Appointment Reminder. If you don't want to run that kind of business, why start it in the first place? It just doesn't make sense. Don't start a restaurant if you don't like the grind of running a restaurant.
- cityzen 10y ago
  I agree with this. I appreciate everything Patrick has spent his time writing and sharing but it's hard to reconcile the writing to the reality sometimes. There's a lot about his world I just don't understand. In this post (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/05/01/talking-about-money/) he talks about a 30k/week "rack rate" (I don't really get this term), yet he closed down his most profitable revenue stream which would allow him a good salary (i'd guess more than Stripe is paying) for a mere six weeks of work per year. I don't know Patrick and don't know his motivations but there is always a good deal of talk about being a salaryman (sounded miserable) and charging a lot of money, so why the most lucrative business he had was shuttered is beyond me.
  - cperciva 10y ago
    Two things come to mind here: First, a "rack rate" typically means an advertised rate, which gets discounted under a variety of circumstances. Second, I believe that's gross, not net.
    - nstj 10y ago
      Net of what?
      - cperciva 10y ago
        Expenses. ISTR that Patrick did a significant amount of travelling for consulting gigs. (Which may also be a reason for avoiding them now that he has a wife and child.)
        nstj 10y ago
        Sure - so let's say you have PI insurance of $100/week, and you do an international flight each week also at $1000/rt. This still leaves you with $28,900/week pre-tax? What other major expenses can you see with private software consulting?
        cperciva 10y ago
        A "rack rate" is not a typical rate, so he'd presumably take in less money than you're assuming. He lives in Japan and most of his customers would probably be in the USA, so if he wants to be able to function he should be flying business class. He also needs somewhere to stay, transportation, and food while in the customer's city; and it is the nature of consultancies to not have anywhere approaching 100% utilization, due to time spent on research, promotion, and networking, and the fact that gigs never fall neatly into your schedule. I'd guess that "full time consulting" would work out roughly along the lines of * Average billing per week of consulting: $15k * Round trip business class airfare: $3k * Hotel, food, transportation at destination: $2k * Profit per week of consulting: $10k * Weeks spent doing consulting per year: 20 * Take-home (gross) salary: $200k I'd guess this is more than Stripe pays him, but not dramatically more; and if I had a wife and child I would certainly prefer to not spend half the year away from them.
- j_s 10y ago
  none of his startups really worked out Feels like 1/2 of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast! Which is to say, sharing the experiences when things didn't go as planned is also helpful.
rick_perez 10y ago
I've been following Patrick since the old BoS days. He is great at marketing, but isn't a very good example of a 'solopreneur' or a bootstrapper. If any of his companies were making him a good enough living, I don't think he would have gotten a day job at Stripe. "when he didn't have the 'fire in his belly'y any longer" I've been running my own company for almost 5 years after 5 years of side-projects and failures. To actually go from a project to a successful company, you need to do lots of boring work that has nothing to do with technology or development. Most of it is a slog, but is still required. You can eventually outsource this and hire other people, but this will take some time. You will lose your fire at some point, but you still need to push through this. I've tried to partner with many different friends over the years on different business ideas and ventures. They all failed at some point because my partner (usually another developer) would get bored when things got tough or they had to work on something other than a cool library. If you can't get through this, it's probably better to stick to working a job. The other problem with Patrick is that everything he builds is from a developer perspective. Starfighter was a cool concept, but much too complicated for most people (from the business side of things. You need to spend time and money with tutorials attempting to convince business owners why this new concept is better than what they are currently using).
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >He is great at marketing, but isn't a very good example of a 'solopreneur' or a bootstrapper. This is actually the lens through which I view his writings: master solo marketer. He's managed to build a brand around these parts that, when viewed critically, is hard to explain. That's not easy. Some of the business decisions described here are baffling.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    > Some of the business decisions described here are baffling. Which ones?
    - forgetsusername 10y ago
      Running up $120k in credit card debt? Paying $3k per month in interest on that debt while piling money into an app where "expenses grew faster than revenue"? I know this stuff happens. I've been there, done that. But I don't have a reputation as a business guru, either.
jodrellblank 10y ago
- Appointment reminder: how to ignore a business for four years, while not improving it and giving you stress - financial planning using a spreadsheet, then moving to more expensive lifestyle, getting in debt and having the retirement fund turn negative when he has a wife and child and is closing down his companies. Something we can all learn from? - when to borrow money and how to calculate risk: Except he says not to trust his calculation of risk when he encourages the reader to play poker against him if possible because he's so bad at risk estimation. - when and how to sell your startup: again no, he says it put him in a bad position to be wanting to sell quickly, and he glosses over 'how' with "I know how because I've done it before". The only good read there is "don't wait until it is declining before selling, like Bingo Card Creator was". - the trials of shipping (six weeks became three years): the trials of promising and pre-selling a thing, then changing your mind and doing a startup instead, and trying to turn that into a positive. (Aside: Three years? I wonder how long before there's a reasonable chance that some of the purchasers died before the release?) - setting goals for the future: where he keeps saying he didn't meet his goals, or they have changed? - the value of family: "I had not felt as effective as a husband / father recently as I wanted to be" - the value of family is lower than a side-business he was bored of and wants to sell? Lower than a "huge amount of personal fulfillment" that he got instead during that time? Lower than the guilt of refunding customers over his video series? If you were a potential customer and he said "I choose to spend more time with my family, I can't do this work justice, sorry, here's a refund", wouldn't you be fine with it? I don't dislike him at all, I do respect him, and I like the transparent views into his life and businesses and plans and thoughts, but I'm not seeing the same things you are at all. If anything these are more cautionary tales along the lines of "you can sometimes get what you want with hard work, but it comes with a price".
- notabeliever 10y ago
  brave post for not using your throw away account.
  - jodrellblank 10y ago
    Eh, there's limited utility in trying to hide how much of an idiot I am. If you want an honest comment, my main feeling was more of envy that patio11 could build and run and sell a six figure business he didn't really care about, and had the choice of a startup, a job, or consulting, with experience that he's well capable of all of them, and that he can stop off on the side to record some videos that even in a world of YouTube and online courses, people will pay in advance for, sight-unseen. I really do respect him. And I really don't want to follow him into a life of consultant marketing, business reminder software, on-call phone stress, sign-on funneling or salarymanship.

stevoski 10y ago

From the article: "Doing [meat-and-potatoes work on marketing and sales that the business needed] was a real joy back when I was running Bingo Card Creator, but repeating it felt a lot like repeating high school." Oh boy, that's exactly how I feel when I'm in the mood to make a new product. Patrick nailed it.

dsacco 10y ago

I owe a great deal of my own personal success to Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek, both of whom have been steadfast, consistent and generous advisors (both in public comments and in "hey can I bounce this off of you" emails). After following Patrick's writings and stories for a number of years now, I can confidently say that his relentless transparency has been one of the greatest gifts I received in the industry. His advice may not strictly work for everyone in the literal sense, but I believe that diligently attempting to use his suggestions as a template is, itself, a highly productive exercise in programming and business. There is one particular note I want to make about patio11's success: Patrick is a phenomenal marketer with remarkable business savvy who happens to be a programmer. He is not primarily a programmer, which is evidenced by his recent work at Stripe and the work he is best known for on HN (essentially, writing about shipping software, not the software itself). This is not to say he is not a good programmer - I simply can't comment on that, though I have reason to believe he is after seeing Starfighter's game. Rather, he leverages that skill set as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I think this is a really important point to make because I see many people who try to pursue significant career success by e.g. ranking up on TopCoder, or open sourcing impressive software. While those things can lead to success, there is a vast, long tail of people who are very capable programmers with no recognition doing those things. Healthy self-promotion and efficient improvement/maintenance of one's technical skills has a much higher probability of success than attempting to become Fabrice Bellard. This is demonstrative - in my opinion, the sum of all of patio11's advice can be summarized as follows: Don't be a programmer, be a $SOMETHING who happens to program, and program well.

sanderjd 10y ago
I've taken this lesson too, and I'm curious about what set of values for $SOMETHING is. In theory it is "everything", but in practice the two common values I see are "marketer" and "scientist". I really can't get excited about marketing, and it's difficult to justify going for a PhD. What are some values for $SOMETHING that others here have seen success with?
- __derek__ 10y ago
  Interestingly, neither of those came to my mind until reading your comment. I would fill in analyst, strategist, or operations specialist. Honestly, though, outside of the self-described "tech industry," understanding software acts as a force multiplier as long as you are able to talk about it. It's similar to having a finance background, except that your special power tends to produce actual gains more easily.

tabbott 10y ago

Why were you unable to keep StockFighter running?

tptacek 10y ago
I've written this before on HN, so will re-share it to buy more time before completing a big write-up on Starfighter: All three of us are software developers. We like developers. We spend a lot of time talking to developers, in particular about their careers. We had no trouble finding clients, but a lot of trouble convincing clients to take the CTF model seriously; virtually all of them wanted us to function like a traditional recruiter, offering 10 candidate profiles for every open req. That's a job that is 90% saying "no" to people. It was dispiriting watching developers we knew to be strong get rejected for positions because they didn't have the right resume, or didn't solve some pen-and-paper programming puzzle quickly enough. It was a drag for all of us. It made us unhappy. Life is too short.
- sogen 10y ago
  Why didn't you listen to your customers and do just that? I mean, change some puzzles/tests or simply recommend someone to the job if you knew he had the skills? Wasn't this what you were solving? Matching positions to great devs.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    No, that's not what we were solving. If we wanted to be conventional dial-for-dollars recruiters, we would have done that. I understand and appreciate the mentality that your comment comes from. But the premise of our startup wasn't Steve Blank-style customer development, where we started with a vague idea of the space we wanted to be in and then worked with customer prospects to figure out exactly what product we would end up building. Rather: the company we started was an experiment, a very opinionated one, to see if we could port a hiring model that had worked extremely well for us at one company to a larger set of companies. I think there's a way to make that model work, but I've become convinced that "contingency recruiter" isn't the way to deliver it.

mythrowaway99 10y ago

No offense, but how do you get $120,000 into credit card debt with the claimed $30,000 per week consulting income.

vinceguidry 10y ago
He explained it in the article, though it was easy to miss. If you need a large amount of cash for something, and a lot of smaller figures coming in, you pay for everything with revolving debt and let your receivables stack up in a bank account. It's one way to save up money for a down payment on real estate, maybe the only way if your lifestyle is close to your income.
- grobbles 10y ago
  I am the proud owner of the Brooklyn Bridge. Might you be interested in buying it? The giant consulting dollar nonsense was always total bullshit.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jldugger 10y ago
  I can't imagine anyone accepting a downpayment when you have a downpayment's worth of revolving debt.
  - thefalcon 10y ago
    That's why Debt-to-Income ratio is a thing. If you're someone who's typically adverse to debt but willing to make an exception in the case of real estate, and you're living close to your means (while renting), then it can seem to make sense to get your necessary down payment (plus closing costs etc.) through revolving debt. As long as your DTI remains below the cutoff, lenders are happy to let you do it.
    - sjg007 10y ago
      Yep, quite common. Cheaper than a cash advance too... however it's changing now with 3% down...

grow91 10y ago

If anyone is interested in how much Appointment Reminder sold for: https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/6192-b2b-saas-professional-services-106k-mrr https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/6192-b2b-saas-prof...

forgetsusername 10y ago
$120,000 in credit card debt (with interest) for a sale of $215,000 (less taxes)? Something doesn't add up.
- cperciva 10y ago
  He said there were four offers within two days, so the final price may have been significantly higher than the original asking price.
- pja 10y ago
  patio11 can confirm or not as he chooses, but it sounds to me as if the $120,000 credit card debt was incurred whilst spinning up Starfighter.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    No. (I think the post is clear about this, too).
    - graeme 10y ago
      Oh. He perhaps he should clarify, as that's how I read it as well (I'm sympathetic to Patrick, so I wasn't reading that with a skeptical eye). He wrote something about taking equity out of AR to put into Starfighter, using credit card debt.
- sethev 10y ago
  What are you implying? He said in the post he paid off most of his creditors after closing. If the final price was $215k it certainly seems possible to pay off most of $120k with that.

mutagen 10y ago

I'd love a series of interviews with the people you've dealt with over the years at your Ogaki bank and their perceptions and misconceptions about your account and the transactions that go in and out of it.

spitfire 10y ago

Patrick is such a tease. I want to know what that two week project at Stripe that /every/ company should have is now.

gcr 10y ago
Right? Half of us on HN would be dying to know. Maybe it's some kind of code review/search tool...?
- erpellan 10y ago
  I'm going to guess one of: time tracking, holidays, expenses or internal directory with pictures and desk locations.
  - weaksauce 10y ago
    I doubt any of those would be trade secrets that he can't talk about.
  - mistermann 10y ago
    > internal directory with pictures and desk locations I sometimes wonder if no one will ever say out loud how much they'd love this (at bigger companies), or if it's just me that can't easily learn 100 new names/faces/roles/projects.
    - gcr 10y ago
      I struggle with names and faces too. I've been thinking of turning my coworkers into an Anki deck to study on the subway. That would really help me, come to think of it.
- sync 10y ago
  Maybe generating fake data for testing/development purposes? Each company has to do this in a different way to suit their business needs.
elevensies 10y ago

jonaldomo 10y ago

Great write up. Does anybody have more information on the attack near the end "...defrauded by Lithuanian hacker gang which figured out how to use our application to proxy a telephone call through Twilio’s phone number verification feature to a phone sex line in the Caribbean..."

patio11 10y ago
This is fixed now, but for historical context: Twilio has a feature to allow you to make calls which appear to come from a non-Twilio phone number. To do this, you have to make an API request (see here: https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/outgoing-caller-ids); https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/outgoing-caller-ids); Twilio then responds to your application with a code that the user needs to enter, you tell that code to the user (via e.g. displaying it to their web browser), and Twilio calls the user to ask for the code. If they key in the correct code on their phone, their number is verified for your account, and you can now use it as the caller ID for future calls from your application. Because this causes an actual real-world phone call but doesn't look like a phone call to either Twilio or Appointment Reminder, it (at the time of the attack) bypassed some protections like, to name one example, AR's anti-abuse rate limiting logic. The bad guys "attempted to verify" the phone sex lines in the Caribbean, in much the same way as a legitimate AR customer would attempt to verify their office phone number so that appointment reminders would appear to originate from their office (and they'd get callbacks) as opposed to originating from our 1-800 number. Some of our customers are at larger institutions, which require you to put in an extension prior to reaching the customer. Think "hospitals." The bad guys put in an extension with over 100k digits to keep their phone calls from timing out. (Dial a 5, wait a second, dial a 5, wait a second...) The economic incentive here is "If someone calls a premium-rate number that you control, you get paid money." The economic damage is "If someone calls a premium-rate number, that someone pays to do so", so all the money the bad guys made came from either Twilio or I.
- sjg007 10y ago
  Seems like pure fraud and there should be contracts to prevent it...

whichdan 10y ago

Speaking of salary negotiation, Patrick's article[0] on it is one of the single most valuable things I've read in my career. I can probably attribute about 25% of my salary to it. [0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

patio11 10y ago
Thanks, that made my morning.
jsmeaton 10y ago
Agreed. I recently changed jobs for the first time since his article was written, and it was extremely useful to me. I strayed from some of the advice, but what that essay did was give me the confidence to negotiate and some very effective tools to use. So thanks Patrick, from another very happy 'customer'.
cpach 10y ago
Seriously, everyone should read this.
- floodyberry- 10y ago
  "How to ensure everyone is paid fairly" would be a "must read". This is more of a "Employers and potential employees are expected to try and screw each other out of as much money as possible - Here's how you can help perpetuate that!"
  - packetslave 10y ago
    That's a pretty uncharitable view of it. I would characterize it as "Your potential employer is going to do everything it can to pay you as little as they can get away with. Here's how to maximize what they DO pay you."

__derek__ 10y ago

@patio11, there's a broken link to your post about salary negotiation. It's currently relative and needs a leading slash. <a href="2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/">previous writing on the subject</a>

patio11 10y ago
Fixed, thanks.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

idlewords 10y ago

I read these reports from Patrick with interest, but feel like he inhabits a different universe than I do. Pinboard made $256K last year, so I operate in at least the same financial ballpark. But I do my taxes on TurboTax and have never spoken to an accountant or lawyer. My business is a sole proprietorship. From my perspective, Patrick overcomplicates everything he undertakes with business processes and overhead. From his perspective, I'm probably a irresponsible slacker. The upshot is that there are as many ways to run an online business as there are people, and how you do it depends as much on your personality as on objective factors. Big props to him for writing about his experience so openly, and in a way that so many people clearly find helpful.

biot 10y ago
I imagine your taxes are fairly straightforward as a result. Have you considered spending $X,000 on an accountant to see if there are ways of structuring your income to minimize taxes?
- idlewords 10y ago
  Structuring income to avoid taxes seems like a jerk move to me. But a bigger reason is that as long as my income is over some threshold, I'm happy. Dealing with business minutia reduces my happiness, so I avoid doing it.
  - arkitaip 10y ago
    I have no business telling you how to run your life but you would be surprised how much an accountant can help you in totally legal and ethical ways.
  - nodamage 10y ago
    I hope you are at least contributing to a tax-deferred retirement account? A solo-401k is a very good option for solo entrepreneurs, and I'd be surprised if anyone considered it a bad thing to take advantage of.

Epenthesis 10y ago

(I realize this is rather tactless, but I ask in the interest of fairly weighing the risk/rewards of startups/consulting vs. big tech) Is it fair to read this to mean that patio11's net worth is < 250 k$? (Based on the fact his liquid assets were negative prior to the sale of AR, and said sale netted less than the price of a house in Tokyo, median price: ~250 kUSD.).

uiri 10y ago
I would be very surprised if the median price of a house in Tokyo is ~$250k USD. I would ballpark it more to the $500-750k USD range. My impression was that he had liquid assets and took on debt in order to avoid potential cashflow issues should he deplete his liquid assets. I would hazard a guess that the value in the range of (new house, new house in Tokyo) refers to (sale of AR - $120k in debt) rather than his total net worth after the sale.
- 0x1234 10y ago
  Prepare to be surprised :) http://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/what-is-the-average-price-of-a-house-or-condo-in-tokyo/ http://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/what-is-the-average-pr... We have a mental model from the 80s. Decades of recessionary prices catches up.
  - guy_c 10y ago
    ... and don't forget a shrinking population. Accommodation in Japan is surprisingly inexpensive.

pavlov 10y ago

I'm a bit surprised that he was running Appointment Reminder as a sole proprietorship. My business ventures have mostly sucked, but I've always found the separation of personal and business concerns afforded by proper incorporation to be invaluable, and not expensive at all in the big picture. (This was in Finland; I imagine Japan could be very different.) On the other hand, I guess that makes AR a fine example of a company that would have benefited from Stripe Atlas if it had existed back then? :)

patio11 10y ago
It was an LLC in the US, but Japan (and/or the Ogaki tax office) wanted me to treat it as a sole proprietorship here. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Ogaki tax office didn't want to have to figure out how 法人税法 (the corporate tax code) applied to a small foreigner-run Japan-docimiled foreign corporate entity.
chatmasta 10y ago
You are asking about the difference between C-Corp and LLC in the US. Really, your options are: (a) LLC (b) S-Corp (c) C-Corp The rules, AFAIK but IANAL: - Sole proprietorship (single person) can file taxes for an entity with TIN as LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp - S-Corp can elect to file as a C-Corp at any time - C-Corp can issue multiple classes of shares; S-Corp cannot - Easy to convert from an S-Corp to a C-Corp - Difficult to convert from a C-Corp to an S-Corp - LLC has lowest setup cost - C-Corp requires you to pay double taxes on some income. - LLC and S-Corp taxation effectively identical In my opinion it makes sense to incorporate an LLC, then decide between filing taxes as LLC or S-Corp at the end of the first tax year. If at any time you want to raise investment, file the requisite paperwork to convert the S-Corp into a C-Corp.
- pavlov 10y ago
  Thanks for the explanation!
- tptacek 10y ago
  Theoretically the big difference between an S-Corp and an LLC is that an owner/member/principal of an LLC can't simultaneously be an "employee", and so must be paid by profit sharing distributions rather than W2, which can be inconvenient. But as you point out, most LLCs can file taxes as S-Corps, which gets rid of the major difference. Fun fact: LLCs can also have multiple share classes.

emiliobumachar 10y ago

At least here in Brazil, credit card debt has a fame for having the highest interest rates of all possible forms of debt, by a wide margin. If you don't mind saying, did you ever considered other forms of debt, e.g. applying for a loan at the bank? If yes, what tanked it?

__derek__ 10y ago
Same in the US. While I can't speak for Japan, where credit cards are rare, I'd imagine it's the same. You pay for the convenience of instant credit.
patio11 10y ago
Yep! There used to be a product called a "signature loan" in the US which was an unsecured debt without a piece of plastic attached to it, at a rate materially lower than credit cards. These are very difficult to get these days; I was rejected three times, generally on a "You're asking for an amount of money that we'd find difficult to profitably underwrite and your business wouldn't qualify for it anyway; have a nice day; consolation prize we'd LOVE to give you a credit card" basis. This is complicated by my business being international in character, where banks in two countries both think that perhaps a bank in the other would be more appropriate.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  Why does your US bank need to know that you are in Japan?

Ayraa 10y ago

Maybe the time and effort demands of both wouldn't have allowed it but given how Patrick's personal debt grew, it seems it would have helped to do at least a little bit of consulting while he was working on Appointment Reminder. Doing freelance / consulting work on the side while bootstrapping your product to profitability seems increasingly common now. Though this is definitely more sustainable in locales with lower costs of living while you also don't have to provide for a whole family.

mooreds 10y ago
I am doing some consulting while working on a company and man does it add some stress. Not that having zero money coming in would be stressfree.

foolsrushin 10y ago

Tl;dr I was FOS all along, suckers. I don't know what I'm doing I can't really run a microisv. Back to being a salaryman!

tbrooks 10y ago

Why host Jekyll on AWS Lightsail and not S3? It's simpler, faster, and cheaper. Plus you can use Cloudfront and use AWS Certificate Manager for SSL.

jdboyd 10y ago
I doubt it is cheaper if you already need the VPS for a seperate rails application.

grok2 10y ago

patio11, why does the ToS page on Appointment Reminder still list your name as the one the agreement is with? https://new.appointmentreminder.org/terms-of-service/ https://new.appointmentreminder.org/terms-of-service/

dennisgorelik 10y ago

It is hard for me to reconcile: 1) "Tokyo is a wonderful city and I love it a lot – enough to not regret the rent" 2) "the balance in my Excel file went progressively negative. This was expected, but caused me a bit of stress." Ogaki is a city where Patrick successfully launched his first startup - Bingo Card Creator. Patrick met his wife in Ogaki. Then McKenzie family moved to Tokyo, which "helped" Patrick: - to fail at his another startup - Starfighter and converted him from entrepreneur to an employee; - "not felt as effective as a husband / father"; - to accumulate "health debt". What is so "wonderful" about Tokyo and what is there "to love"?

sgdesign 10y ago
The fact that you're wondering why Tokyo is so wonderful compared to Ogaki makes me think you've never been to Ogaki… (or Tokyo, for that matter).
- graeme 10y ago
  But Patrick previously wrote about how he loved Ogaki, and was in Japan because Ogaki was there. So it might well have made a mistake inflating lifestyle while cutting consulting AND before any of the businesses were "done". I have the good fortune of being in a low cost of living city that's also a real, wonderful city: Montreal. Excellent place to start and scale a solopreneur business. Currently scaling up my business processes (accounting, support, etc.) which increases business costs. I'd be very wary of moving anywhere more expensive until I've increased revenue to match. (This shouldn't be a problem – outsourcing the backend processes will let me move on several revenue generating projects I've been deferring while dealing with a backlog of administrative stuff)
bobf 10y ago
Tokyo is consistently ranked as one of the best cities to travel to or live in, in the world. I visited Tokyo recently, and found it to be exceptional in many ways. Aside from Patrick, I've never heard of Ogaki and I suspect most people wouldn't have either. Imagine the best of New York, San Francisco, etc. combined in an even larger city that is extremely clean, polite, hard working, and efficient.

patryn20 10y ago

Reading these is always interesting to me. Looking at these sorts of sites and the amount of articles and buzz they gather on Hacker News and other sites, I always assume they must be doing high six-figures in income. Yet the ones that are transparent are generally in the $300k a year or less revenue range. I've always considered my side projects and businesses failures, but judging by these numbers I've been more successful than I realized. So I feel good about that, but I think I really need to re-evaluate my goals and how I pursue them. Because I've been extremely negative about what are apparently successes. Perhaps I also need to be more open to hiring a broker next time I sell a project.