4 ms·

I have participated kinda heavily on HN and a few other Internet outlets for a few years, and both of my software businesses have been cloned. BCC has been clo

by patio11 15y ago

I have participated kinda heavily on HN and a few other Internet outlets for a few years, and both of my software businesses have been cloned. BCC has been cloned multiple times, including by one regular user of a forum I spent a lot of time on, who is actually not lacking in savvy. I do not make a practice of hiding the core tricks as to why BCC works, in fact, I have practically written the complete business plan for cloning it five times and begged people to start using the core tactics. BCC is, at risk of stating the obvious, not the most technically challenging product. My observations are as follows: 1) No clones have caused my business to fail. 2) It is effing hard to convince people to rip off good ideas which require non-trivial work or savvy. Heck, it's highly nontrivial to get them to "rip off" those ideas when they pay five figures to have me write them down in a strategy document or build the prototype myself and hand them the working source code. I mean, take A/B testing. I have said "A/B testing prints money" so many times that some people are tired of hearing about it. Empirically, most of my clients, many of whom have read my blog for years, do not A/B test before I work with them. I talk to a lot of startups, some of whom are highly regarded. Very few A/B test as a regular thing. The savviest guy who cloned me doesn't bother A/B testing, either. Please, good HN readers, "steal" that idea from me (or any of the numerous other people you could steal it from, because I certainly stole it myself). The last company I successfully convinced to actually do it NDAed me vis-a-vis the impact. Let me hum a few bars: they offered to hire me at a quant's salary to do it full-time. (Cheapskates.) And yet when we check back on who A/B tests here in February 2013, do you know what we're going to see? A few articles about it, with wise comments like "A/B testing can only get you to a local maxima" and "Didn't we read an article just like this on Smashing Magazine in 2006?", and fairly few companies who actually have someone do it every week, even among the savvier folks. P.S. Would love to be wrong about that.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I don't know, Patrick. I've long been an "you can shout your idea from the rooftops and it won't matter" guy for a long time. All I'm trying to do here is point out that this isn't a blanket rule. Or at least I've stopped believing that it is. I think people see statements like yours and believe there is no tiny idea about execution that will generate immediate positive results if copied. But that's demonstrably not true. In fact, thousands of folks are chasing just such a thing. Folks know this instinctively. Perhaps nobody cares that much about the large concept of selling bingo cards or the broad hunk of small details it takes to make that happen? Perhaps if I describe in detail how to make 2K a month -- and it takes a huge amount of effort over a year and a few try to copy and flame out -- it just kinda proves my point? People naturally like jumping on a bandwagon. And don't forget that much of what you, I, and others blog about is how to make decisions, not step-by-step guides. For somebody looking for a quick fix (which I posit to be most readers), it's not that rewarding. So for my purposes I'm specifically talking about low-input, high-output ideas. Things like knowing the personal phone numbers of a dozen tech journalists and successful ways to pitch them. That is something you're not going to see. Not a huge corpus of text covering every general type of startup there is and the concepts that make them work. We have a lot of that. Heck, we've got dozens of HNers that are making a business providing the same kind of thing you're talking about. Sort of self-cannibalization. If the generalization were true -- if there were no way you could get people to follow your startup advice no matter how much you shouted -- we wouldn't have people paying for exactly the same advice from others. Something does not match up here. Detailed business plans with lots of blogging about A/B testing and so forth only serve to dull the audience to sleep. After all, who wants to really work at something over a period of years? (I hope I have learned the importance of this, but I suspect many just give the idea lip service) Thanks for the comment. I'd love to be wrong as well. I got the whole thing about how you could paint your idea on a wall and nobody would care, but that's not what I'm trying to get at. I'm talking about all the thrashing around that goes on around high-level concepts. That's not all just insignificant, especially if you are looking to a peer group for feedback. I probably mucked up the point. Sorry about that. I find that I have to read the same concepts many many times to be able to apply them to a different business model. Most times it doesn't seem like there's anything I can do with it. Many times I'm reading it going "yeah, but why in the heck do I want to chase 3% increase when I'm only making ten bucks anyway"? It's not that folks aren't publishing all kinds of instructions and broad generalizations and such, it's the tension between having nothing in your hand and actually being ramen profitable. A lot of these articles are written by guys who already have momentum. For them, yes, some of this matters. They're already months in, seeing money, and ready to stay for the long haul. But I'd bet the large majority vacillate between playing around with startup ideas and sitting back and observing. This post was meant for those folks. ADD: Apologies to the folks who are pointing out the poor structure of the article. While I was writing it, it definitely had a feeling to it of my viciously thrashing around an idea without actually getting to it. Fortunately Patio has helped me clarify what the thesis should have been all along: because of both the mixed messages we send and the size of the HN audience, we've actually created something we didn't mean to: an environment where lots of copying goes on, but not many are really working in a way that generates good learning about startups. Instead it's much more of a copycat, cool-for-a-day, chase-the-herd atmosphere. Don't do that.
euroclydon 15y ago
People are often copying the wrong ideas. Why copy a reading list site or make yet-another-alternative-HN-view site, when you could start a real business? I find Patrick's posts and comments invaluable. He's made a real business selling bingo cards to teachers. He pays contractors and venders thousands of dollars per year. He has this way of writing that makes what he does sound easy: "a SQL query here, A/B test there, and whoopsie, I just made $35K." I set out to copy BCC. I asked my wife, "Is there a software product you wish existed, but doesn't?" She wanted a site where she can make custom cupcake wrappers. So I set about making it. It's been nearly a year, and we're only now over $200/month in revenue and +150 unique users per day. It's been a lot of hard work, but along the way, interacting with customers, I realized there's an opportunity to build a real business. We're about to buy a cutting machine and custom dies so we can move from just selling PDFs to fulfilling physical orders. Who knows, with all the emails I've collected, we may start a selling custom web hosting for bakers and party planners. So, I just want to say: by all means copy something. Clone someone's successful website if you must, but copy their hard work. Copy their market validation. Build a real business.
- yirt 15y ago
  It's all about the zeros. Simple fact: there are orders of magnitude more people in the world struggling to use the most basic functions of Microsoft Word than there are people who can write Hello World. Anything which makes tasks easier for people in group A is valuable, even if it's already trivial for people in group B.
davidw 15y ago
BTW, speaking of A/B tests, you could show a little open source love to your project: 1. Move the git hosting to github, but keep the web page on your site. 2. Create a mailing list with Google groups or something like that in the hopes that you're not the only guy out there adding patches and stuff.
- patio11 15y ago
  Tell you what: I'll let your business make millions from my code for free. You can even host it anywhere and do community management. If you want me to do these things, that can be bought at my normal project rates.
  - geal 15y ago
    No need for a mailing list: I was able to reach you directly on Twitter for a bug report and patch :)
    - patio11 15y ago
      Shh! No, seriously: I apply patches which fit the vision, do not break the reference implementation on BCC, and do not cost me time from things I value in life. Happy to have them. That is, ballpark, half of patches. (The most common reason for not taking a patch is that people break Rails 2 behavior when trying to bug fix for Rails 3. The second is sometimes patches generate work, and if a "I have reasonable project rates" email is less work, that is what I'll usually do.)
  - davidw 15y ago
    I didn't mean that to sound demanding, it's just a suggestion. There is a middle ground between getting really involved, and just throwing the code over the fence, of course, such as responding to polite emails, with even a 'no thanks'. Perhaps you feel like you're already there, but my inclination is that if you're too busy, it'd be nice to set up something really simple where other people can coordinate. It's not as if you're not using a great deal of other people's free code yourself. Indeed, if I make millions, I'd be happy to share some with you when I'm done sharing with Linus, the GCC guys, the Rails guys, the Ruby guys, the Gnome guys, the Postgres guys, the LibC guys, the Debian and Ubuntu guys, and heck, even RMS. I wonder what he'd like. Actually, on a trip down memory lane, that sort of thing isn't entirely unheard of. Redhat and VA Linux both dished out shares to people involved in open source, which was pretty cool given how much of a pain in the neck it must have been.
robryan 15y ago
Any person that has read much of your stuff though would know cloning bingo card creator would be a mistake. Given what you know about SEO and the time you have spent actually acting on that knowledge it would be unlikely that a clone would ever outrank you. Your number show that even of they did it is a solid business but no path to riches. This might be different if you made the same product with horrible marketing and bad SEO.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  I think there is space globally for more than one BCC like site/app though. So whilst it would be a mistake, perhaps, if the goal was to be the top site it wouldn't necessarily be if the goal was to make a good product that raised some revenue. Indeed all it takes is for patio11 to get hit with a new Google update that 'thinks' he's doing something nefarious and you could well find yourself in top slot ...
xiaoma 15y ago
>I mean, take A/B testing. I have said "A/B testing prints money" so many times that some people are tired of hearing about it. I for one would like to thank you for your perseverance, Patrick. I've read your posts here and your blog for years and it's only recently that I've really gotten value out of it. From the very beginning, I practically nodded in approval at the suggestion to prioritize testing. I was a huge fan of your blog, but that wasn't enough to push me over the edge and get me testing. As you continued to write about it again and again, and I saw others using testing to great effect, it finally clicked in place for me. I've conducted a few A/B tests on my blog with fairly meager results due to low starting traffic, but I'm making adjustments and testing site-wide changes. Even more significant is testing in life in general. I may, just may have found a way to control my tendency towards being a night owl! This is after more than a decade of regularly staying up until dawn at least 3 nights a week. I've also significantly improved my effectiveness at work due to a few other "n=1 studies" as I call them.

by patio11 15y ago

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I don't know, Patrick. I've long been an "you can shout your idea from the rooftops and it won't matter" guy for a long time. All I'm trying to do here is point out that this isn't a blanket rule. Or at least I've stopped believing that it is. I think people see statements like yours and believe there is no tiny idea about execution that will generate immediate positive results if copied. But that's demonstrably not true. In fact, thousands of folks are chasing just such a thing. Folks know this instinctively. Perhaps nobody cares that much about the large concept of selling bingo cards or the broad hunk of small details it takes to make that happen? Perhaps if I describe in detail how to make 2K a month -- and it takes a huge amount of effort over a year and a few try to copy and flame out -- it just kinda proves my point? People naturally like jumping on a bandwagon. And don't forget that much of what you, I, and others blog about is how to make decisions, not step-by-step guides. For somebody looking for a quick fix (which I posit to be most readers), it's not that rewarding. So for my purposes I'm specifically talking about low-input, high-output ideas. Things like knowing the personal phone numbers of a dozen tech journalists and successful ways to pitch them. That is something you're not going to see. Not a huge corpus of text covering every general type of startup there is and the concepts that make them work. We have a lot of that. Heck, we've got dozens of HNers that are making a business providing the same kind of thing you're talking about. Sort of self-cannibalization. If the generalization were true -- if there were no way you could get people to follow your startup advice no matter how much you shouted -- we wouldn't have people paying for exactly the same advice from others. Something does not match up here. Detailed business plans with lots of blogging about A/B testing and so forth only serve to dull the audience to sleep. After all, who wants to really work at something over a period of years? (I hope I have learned the importance of this, but I suspect many just give the idea lip service) Thanks for the comment. I'd love to be wrong as well. I got the whole thing about how you could paint your idea on a wall and nobody would care, but that's not what I'm trying to get at. I'm talking about all the thrashing around that goes on around high-level concepts. That's not all just insignificant, especially if you are looking to a peer group for feedback. I probably mucked up the point. Sorry about that. I find that I have to read the same concepts many many times to be able to apply them to a different business model. Most times it doesn't seem like there's anything I can do with it. Many times I'm reading it going "yeah, but why in the heck do I want to chase 3% increase when I'm only making ten bucks anyway"? It's not that folks aren't publishing all kinds of instructions and broad generalizations and such, it's the tension between having nothing in your hand and actually being ramen profitable. A lot of these articles are written by guys who already have momentum. For them, yes, some of this matters. They're already months in, seeing money, and ready to stay for the long haul. But I'd bet the large majority vacillate between playing around with startup ideas and sitting back and observing. This post was meant for those folks. ADD: Apologies to the folks who are pointing out the poor structure of the article. While I was writing it, it definitely had a feeling to it of my viciously thrashing around an idea without actually getting to it. Fortunately Patio has helped me clarify what the thesis should have been all along: because of both the mixed messages we send and the size of the HN audience, we've actually created something we didn't mean to: an environment where lots of copying goes on, but not many are really working in a way that generates good learning about startups. Instead it's much more of a copycat, cool-for-a-day, chase-the-herd atmosphere. Don't do that.

euroclydon 15y ago

People are often copying the wrong ideas. Why copy a reading list site or make yet-another-alternative-HN-view site, when you could start a real business? I find Patrick's posts and comments invaluable. He's made a real business selling bingo cards to teachers. He pays contractors and venders thousands of dollars per year. He has this way of writing that makes what he does sound easy: "a SQL query here, A/B test there, and whoopsie, I just made $35K." I set out to copy BCC. I asked my wife, "Is there a software product you wish existed, but doesn't?" She wanted a site where she can make custom cupcake wrappers. So I set about making it. It's been nearly a year, and we're only now over $200/month in revenue and +150 unique users per day. It's been a lot of hard work, but along the way, interacting with customers, I realized there's an opportunity to build a real business. We're about to buy a cutting machine and custom dies so we can move from just selling PDFs to fulfilling physical orders. Who knows, with all the emails I've collected, we may start a selling custom web hosting for bakers and party planners. So, I just want to say: by all means copy something. Clone someone's successful website if you must, but copy their hard work. Copy their market validation. Build a real business.

yirt 15y ago
It's all about the zeros. Simple fact: there are orders of magnitude more people in the world struggling to use the most basic functions of Microsoft Word than there are people who can write Hello World. Anything which makes tasks easier for people in group A is valuable, even if it's already trivial for people in group B.

davidw 15y ago

BTW, speaking of A/B tests, you could show a little open source love to your project: 1. Move the git hosting to github, but keep the web page on your site. 2. Create a mailing list with Google groups or something like that in the hopes that you're not the only guy out there adding patches and stuff.

patio11 15y ago
Tell you what: I'll let your business make millions from my code for free. You can even host it anywhere and do community management. If you want me to do these things, that can be bought at my normal project rates.
- geal 15y ago
  No need for a mailing list: I was able to reach you directly on Twitter for a bug report and patch :)
  - patio11 15y ago
    Shh! No, seriously: I apply patches which fit the vision, do not break the reference implementation on BCC, and do not cost me time from things I value in life. Happy to have them. That is, ballpark, half of patches. (The most common reason for not taking a patch is that people break Rails 2 behavior when trying to bug fix for Rails 3. The second is sometimes patches generate work, and if a "I have reasonable project rates" email is less work, that is what I'll usually do.)
- davidw 15y ago
  I didn't mean that to sound demanding, it's just a suggestion. There is a middle ground between getting really involved, and just throwing the code over the fence, of course, such as responding to polite emails, with even a 'no thanks'. Perhaps you feel like you're already there, but my inclination is that if you're too busy, it'd be nice to set up something really simple where other people can coordinate. It's not as if you're not using a great deal of other people's free code yourself. Indeed, if I make millions, I'd be happy to share some with you when I'm done sharing with Linus, the GCC guys, the Rails guys, the Ruby guys, the Gnome guys, the Postgres guys, the LibC guys, the Debian and Ubuntu guys, and heck, even RMS. I wonder what he'd like. Actually, on a trip down memory lane, that sort of thing isn't entirely unheard of. Redhat and VA Linux both dished out shares to people involved in open source, which was pretty cool given how much of a pain in the neck it must have been.

robryan 15y ago

Any person that has read much of your stuff though would know cloning bingo card creator would be a mistake. Given what you know about SEO and the time you have spent actually acting on that knowledge it would be unlikely that a clone would ever outrank you. Your number show that even of they did it is a solid business but no path to riches. This might be different if you made the same product with horrible marketing and bad SEO.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
I think there is space globally for more than one BCC like site/app though. So whilst it would be a mistake, perhaps, if the goal was to be the top site it wouldn't necessarily be if the goal was to make a good product that raised some revenue. Indeed all it takes is for patio11 to get hit with a new Google update that 'thinks' he's doing something nefarious and you could well find yourself in top slot ...

xiaoma 15y ago

>I mean, take A/B testing. I have said "A/B testing prints money" so many times that some people are tired of hearing about it. I for one would like to thank you for your perseverance, Patrick. I've read your posts here and your blog for years and it's only recently that I've really gotten value out of it. From the very beginning, I practically nodded in approval at the suggestion to prioritize testing. I was a huge fan of your blog, but that wasn't enough to push me over the edge and get me testing. As you continued to write about it again and again, and I saw others using testing to great effect, it finally clicked in place for me. I've conducted a few A/B tests on my blog with fairly meager results due to low starting traffic, but I'm making adjustments and testing site-wide changes. Even more significant is testing in life in general. I may, just may have found a way to control my tendency towards being a night owl! This is after more than a decade of regularly staying up until dawn at least 3 nights a week. I've also significantly improved my effectiveness at work due to a few other "n=1 studies" as I call them.