7 ms·

> He started from the worst job in software, and clawed his way out with (all due respect to Patrick) possibly the least technically ambitious product in the hi

by chc 14y ago

> He started from the worst job in software, and clawed his way out with (all due respect to Patrick) possibly the least technically ambitious product in the history of commercial software development. I don't mean to disagree, per se, but I don't think this is exactly a fair statement. Making a successful business out of selling bingo cards to teachers on the Internet is actually pretty ambitious as far as I can tell. Yes, the bingo card production itself is basically RNG on Rails, but that isn't what made him successful. I could put up a precise clone of Bingo Card Creator and it wouldn't even pay for its hosting. Put another way: If I picked some crappy niche and put up "Hello World" attached to a built-in algorithm, do you really think I'd do as well as he did? (I don't think desire is the difference, as I certainly desire for that to be true, in much the same way I desire for ice cream to not have any calories.) He did an amazing job with practically nothing — do you really disagree with that? It's obviously not impossible, but it's certainly not normal or the preceding statement wouldn't be true. Painting it as impossible is wrong, but trivializing it has the opposite effect of what you want: It makes it look more impossible than it is, because it isn't actually trivial.

tptacek 14y ago
Put another way: If I picked some crappy niche and put up "Hello World" attached to a built-in algorithm, do you really think I'd do as well as he did? $$\ $$\ $$$$$$$$\ $$$$$$\ $$\ \$$\ $$ |$$ _____|$$ __$$\ $$ | \$$\ $$ / $$ | $$ / \__|$$ | \$$$$ / $$$$$\ \$$$$$$\ $$ | \$$ / $$ __| \____$$\ \__| $$ | $$ | $$\ $$ | $$ | $$$$$$$$\ \$$$$$$ |$$\ \__| \________| \______/ \__| You missed only two extra details: * Keep at it for a year or two, in your scarce spare time, and * Carefully study how best to present your offering to your target market
- chc 14y ago
  Oh, snap. I just got ASCII-arted by tptacek. You know what? I'm going to do this, just so I can settle this once and for all and be right on the Internet. I'll throw up a crap product, work on it like five hours a week, and we'll see how far in the hole I am from hosting costs. Incidentally, it's the second part ("Carefully study how best to present your offering to your target market") that I believe to be tremendously difficult and that I don't believe I will have much chance at. From where I'm standing, one of three things happens: 1. You get lucky and happen to be very good this. 2. You get lucky and happen on the right approach without actually being good at this in general. 3. Your product earns back nearly 10% of its expenses.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Curious: apart from methodical patience, what super power do you believe Patrick was "very good at"? I'm confirming too many people's biases by commenting on a 'patio11 thread about 'patio11, but the deliberately assumed helplessness of HN'ers when it comes to business is one of those things that drives me fucking bananas. In this case, so bananas that I have deployed ASCII art on HN for the first time ever. :)
    - chc 14y ago
      > Curious: apart from methodical patience, what super power do you believe Patrick was "very good at"? In a word: marketing. Finding the right ways to efficiently reach his target market. I've tried marketing before — it's hard! Many BigCos seem to have the same problem. I can write whatever software I want, and I can study people for hours on end, but that doesn't mean the study will actually teach me the things I need to know to get the people to use the software.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        I think the marketing you're thinking of when you think about Kalzumeus --- blog posts, year-end summaries, podcasts, email newsletters, video courses --- is stuff that did not matter when he was bootstrapping. There you'd be confusing cause with effect: the adept marketing you see today is a product of his nuts-and-bolts execution selling a product as a microISV and paying close attention to what was working. There is a super power at play here, but it doesn't take a radioactive spider to get it. People who can simultaneously speak "customer service" and "technology" are rare. Many of the world's most successful software businesses have noticed that and achieved billions just by arbitraging a trivially corrected ineptitude common to programmers.
        chc 14y ago
        I'm actually thinking more of his bazillions of well-chosen targeted landing pages (e.g. "Dolch sight words bingo"), his ability to rank highly enough in search engines for the right words that interested visitors flow into his site (you can't be profitable with 40 uniques a day) — that sort of thing. In essence, yes, you need to pay attention to what is working, but first you need to find something that works in order to pay attention to it. > There is a super power at play here, but it doesn't take a radioactive spider to get it. People who can simultaneously speak "customer service" and "technology" are rare. Many of the world's most successful software businesses have noticed that and achieved billions just by arbitraging a trivially corrected ineptitude common to programmers. I agree, this is one thing that really benefits him. But from the standpoint of someone starting out with nothing, I'd say shoddy customer service is a pretty good problem to have — it means you have customers who need serving! If you can't do customer acquisition, customer retention becomes a moot point. Dutifully serving two people who each pay $20 a month will not make you billions of anything. Patrick actually mentioned this on his blog some years back: He had a tiny customer base and knew he needed to find a way to grow it. The conclusion of the story was something along the lines of "I did marketing and then it was OK." That's where a lot of people's stories would have gone differently.
- daliusd 14y ago
  I guess it might be a little bit more complex. For example I have todoteria.com (shared todo lists service + app). It is up for 5 months. I doubt that extra 7-19 months will change anything for me. I have ideas/plans but it would be interesting to hear your opinion on that.
graeme 14y ago
It's not like Bingo Card Creator let him quit his job overnight. In fact, if you look at the profits from BCC (not revenues) it's far from his main source of income. As I understand Patrick's story (someone please correct me if I'm wrong): * He accidently found something that produced small profits. * He built on that and iterated. * At no point was BCC insanely lucrative. * But at every point, it made sense for him to work on it. * He didn't need to put in many man-hours to increase returns. * If BCC's ROI for time invested ever became negative, he could have stopped. * Once he hit that point, he put it in maintenance mode * Based on his BCC case studies, people wanted to hire him. * Consulting is where he makes most of his money. Steps for someone wanting to replicate: 1. Find a niche where you can make some amount of money. 2. Work at it, intelligently, until you hit a maxima. 3. Talk about the good stuff you do. 4. Look for logical extensions of your business where you can leverage your new experience (more lucrative niche, consulting, better job, etc.)
- chc 14y ago
  > It's not like Bingo Card Creator let him quit his job overnight. That's true, but it was consistently making about enough to pay my rent one year later. I would consider that to be an astonishingly good return on just a few hours of work per week. > 1. Find a niche where you can make some amount of money. I suppose that "some" there is the important part. I don't think finding a niche where you can make $500 a month profit right out the gate is that easy. It's not a ton of money, but I'd consider that very encouraging.

by chc 14y ago

tptacek 14y ago

Put another way: If I picked some crappy niche and put up "Hello World" attached to a built-in algorithm, do you really think I'd do as well as he did? $$\ $$\ $$$$$$$$\ $$$$$$\ $$\ \$$\ $$ |$$ _____|$$ __$$\ $$ | \$$\ $$ / $$ | $$ / \__|$$ | \$$$$ / $$$$$\ \$$$$$$\ $$ | \$$ / $$ __| \____$$\ \__| $$ | $$ | $$\ $$ | $$ | $$$$$$$$\ \$$$$$$ |$$\ \__| \________| \______/ \__| You missed only two extra details: * Keep at it for a year or two, in your scarce spare time, and * Carefully study how best to present your offering to your target market

chc 14y ago
Oh, snap. I just got ASCII-arted by tptacek. You know what? I'm going to do this, just so I can settle this once and for all and be right on the Internet. I'll throw up a crap product, work on it like five hours a week, and we'll see how far in the hole I am from hosting costs. Incidentally, it's the second part ("Carefully study how best to present your offering to your target market") that I believe to be tremendously difficult and that I don't believe I will have much chance at. From where I'm standing, one of three things happens: 1. You get lucky and happen to be very good this. 2. You get lucky and happen on the right approach without actually being good at this in general. 3. Your product earns back nearly 10% of its expenses.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Curious: apart from methodical patience, what super power do you believe Patrick was "very good at"? I'm confirming too many people's biases by commenting on a 'patio11 thread about 'patio11, but the deliberately assumed helplessness of HN'ers when it comes to business is one of those things that drives me fucking bananas. In this case, so bananas that I have deployed ASCII art on HN for the first time ever. :)
  - chc 14y ago
    > Curious: apart from methodical patience, what super power do you believe Patrick was "very good at"? In a word: marketing. Finding the right ways to efficiently reach his target market. I've tried marketing before — it's hard! Many BigCos seem to have the same problem. I can write whatever software I want, and I can study people for hours on end, but that doesn't mean the study will actually teach me the things I need to know to get the people to use the software.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      I think the marketing you're thinking of when you think about Kalzumeus --- blog posts, year-end summaries, podcasts, email newsletters, video courses --- is stuff that did not matter when he was bootstrapping. There you'd be confusing cause with effect: the adept marketing you see today is a product of his nuts-and-bolts execution selling a product as a microISV and paying close attention to what was working. There is a super power at play here, but it doesn't take a radioactive spider to get it. People who can simultaneously speak "customer service" and "technology" are rare. Many of the world's most successful software businesses have noticed that and achieved billions just by arbitraging a trivially corrected ineptitude common to programmers.
      - chc 14y ago
        I'm actually thinking more of his bazillions of well-chosen targeted landing pages (e.g. "Dolch sight words bingo"), his ability to rank highly enough in search engines for the right words that interested visitors flow into his site (you can't be profitable with 40 uniques a day) — that sort of thing. In essence, yes, you need to pay attention to what is working, but first you need to find something that works in order to pay attention to it. > There is a super power at play here, but it doesn't take a radioactive spider to get it. People who can simultaneously speak "customer service" and "technology" are rare. Many of the world's most successful software businesses have noticed that and achieved billions just by arbitraging a trivially corrected ineptitude common to programmers. I agree, this is one thing that really benefits him. But from the standpoint of someone starting out with nothing, I'd say shoddy customer service is a pretty good problem to have — it means you have customers who need serving! If you can't do customer acquisition, customer retention becomes a moot point. Dutifully serving two people who each pay $20 a month will not make you billions of anything. Patrick actually mentioned this on his blog some years back: He had a tiny customer base and knew he needed to find a way to grow it. The conclusion of the story was something along the lines of "I did marketing and then it was OK." That's where a lot of people's stories would have gone differently.
daliusd 14y ago
I guess it might be a little bit more complex. For example I have todoteria.com (shared todo lists service + app). It is up for 5 months. I doubt that extra 7-19 months will change anything for me. I have ideas/plans but it would be interesting to hear your opinion on that.

graeme 14y ago

It's not like Bingo Card Creator let him quit his job overnight. In fact, if you look at the profits from BCC (not revenues) it's far from his main source of income. As I understand Patrick's story (someone please correct me if I'm wrong): * He accidently found something that produced small profits. * He built on that and iterated. * At no point was BCC insanely lucrative. * But at every point, it made sense for him to work on it. * He didn't need to put in many man-hours to increase returns. * If BCC's ROI for time invested ever became negative, he could have stopped. * Once he hit that point, he put it in maintenance mode * Based on his BCC case studies, people wanted to hire him. * Consulting is where he makes most of his money. Steps for someone wanting to replicate: 1. Find a niche where you can make some amount of money. 2. Work at it, intelligently, until you hit a maxima. 3. Talk about the good stuff you do. 4. Look for logical extensions of your business where you can leverage your new experience (more lucrative niche, consulting, better job, etc.)

chc 14y ago
> It's not like Bingo Card Creator let him quit his job overnight. That's true, but it was consistently making about enough to pay my rent one year later. I would consider that to be an astonishingly good return on just a few hours of work per week. > 1. Find a niche where you can make some amount of money. I suppose that "some" there is the important part. I don't think finding a niche where you can make $500 a month profit right out the gate is that easy. It's not a ton of money, but I'd consider that very encouraging.