5 ms·

Patio11 on his 362 day work year & what he does in his break

55 points by marklittlewood 13y ago

peterwwillis 13y ago
If a company is big enough and should have documented their network for liability insurance, either A. I know places who didn't have it, or B. I know places that hid it, or C. it isn't always required. Weird.
onion2k 13y ago
If this article is designed to promote the Business of Software I think it's failed entirely in my case. Working every day of the year aside from 3 days at a conference is not something I have any desire to emulate, nor do I want to hang out with people who think that's a good idea. Work should be fun, interesting, challenging, and something that you can put away occasionally to do other things. If you can't, you're doing it wrong.
- patio11 13y ago
  The 362 days thing is (very) figurative, and was less aimed at "Days work versus days off" than at "Rough percentage of my time is spent dealing with daily tactical minutiae of running business versus get-away-from-it-all opportunities to think about where I want things to be in one year, five years, etc."
- marklittlewood 13y ago
  As Patrick has already responded, I don't think there is too much to add but apologies if you feel the line is misleading. Anyone that runs their own business is likely to be spending a lot of time thinking about the detail of what they are doing and not have the time to step back and think about working 'On' their business. We try to create an environment that allows people to step back from the day to day, and learn from each other. We also happen to believe that far too many people spend their time as entrepreneurs telling other people how hard they work etc, and that frankly is not healthy. This is also a little 'tongue in cheek'.
  - spindritf 13y ago
    > Chris This is OT but I have mixed feelings about the practice of using someone's first name when responding to them on HN. On one hand, it's a bit e-stalky, especially when the handle bears no resemblance to the name and just... sound off. On the other, it's a rather elegant, understated way of distinguishing comments made in some more or less official capacity from regular opinions.
    - marklittlewood 13y ago
      Oops. Edited an unintentional. I just happen to know who it was. My bad.
ig1 13y ago
It's a shame BoS have started selling the videos of talks when most conferences are going in the other direction and releasing videos for free. Given that many speakers are doing so to contribute back to the community and build their own reputations it would be nice if conferences like BoS would be run by the community for the sake of the community rather than by commercial entities. I'd be curious to know what percentage of the video sales price goes to the speakers as royalties.
- marklittlewood 13y ago
  BoS releases all of the talks for free within a year of them being made. We, like many organisations are working hard to find a sustainable business model for content. In some cases, the speakers ask that we do not release the talk fro free. We do not share royalties with the speakers but then the cost of preparing the videos is far in excess of the revenue we make from selling early access. If you have been to BoS you would know how community minded it is. It takes a huge amount of work to put something like BoS on and to be honest, we think we do a pretty good job of hosting and producing an event that is both very different and refreshingly uncommercial in outlook.
  - ig1 13y ago
    I've been involved with running events so I appreciate that things like venues, staffing, speaker expenses, etc can build up to a considerable amount and that those costs have to be met somehow. If it's a case of the event not being financially sustainable without additional non-ticket revenue then maybe charging for videos is what has to be done, but if the videos aren't bringing in a significant revenue stream while presumably significantly reducing the number of viewers I'd have to ask if that's a worthwhile trade-off ? Obviously the answer for that is going to be different if you're optimising for profit or for community benefit, but that's why I'd rather have community events run sustainably by non-profits than on a purely commercial for-profit basis. [I have no issues with videos being charged for / with-held at the speakers request though]
- dudurocha 13y ago
  If they do depend on the sales of BoS videos, I'll not complain, Although, BoS is one of the best conferences I won't be able to go, and I would love to watch the keynotes for free.
NZ_Matt 13y ago
Ha! I read the first few paragraphs and then scrolled down until I got to the P.S. Brilliant!
asmithmd1 13y ago
Whoa! - $2500 for a three day conference. The "Business of Software" conference is a pretty good business. I know, I know - They rented a hotel ballroom and give you lunch and snacks. It's too bad the self-organizing bar-camp thing kind of died when the great recession ended. I thought it might kill expensive conferences like Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds.
- marklittlewood 13y ago
  Not nearly as good a business as you might think I can assure you and we make a lot of effort to have a single customer - the delegate. There are no sponsor panels, exhibition booths etc that make events a lot more profitable. We have consciously decided to avoid these and focus on making the event as valuable for paid attendees as we possibly can. Please don't forget we have a relatively high ticket price a finite number of places and very significant fixed and variable costs. This is not a software business. We also try hard to incentivize early booking and offer discounts to encourage this so the average ticket price is significantly lower than $2,500. (Tickets cost $1,800 at the moment and we have sold almost 3/4 of them.
- runako 13y ago
  I'm guessing that for the target audience, the 3 days of actual time is the more significant expense.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    That would assume an annual salary of > $216,000 or so.
    - user24 13y ago
      Not really. Opportunity cost and all that.
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        True
dudurocha 13y ago
http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... I think this is one of the best talks I ever watched. It's about startup life, without glamour, false-hope or delusional expectations. The fact that it's not a twenty-something year old guy, who sold it's business for millions of dollars in only 2 months, makes an excellent talk to anyone who has a SaaS software, consultancy business or is looking in join the startup bandwagon.
- mp99e99 13y ago
  She quotes calculating churn as 1/churn rate.. in this example she said her churn was 2.2% month meaning lifetime value of 45 months. But that doesn't make sense, since its compounding/exponential.. its really only 32 months (not 45). Then she talks about having to explain the math to the VC. Am I missing something here, because I find this fairly alarming coming from a successful company.
  - patio11 13y ago
    Let C be the original number of companies (or their billings, doesn't matter.) In month 1, we have 1 * C companies. In month 2, we have 1 * .978 * C companies. .978 is the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn. In month 3, we have 1 * .978 * .978 * C companies. Given that we are most keenly interested in how many company-months we rack up over time, we can solve for this with sum of an infinite geometric series. The formula is C / (1 - s) for s is the survivorship rate, or C / (churn). Exactly like Gail said it was.
    - graphene 13y ago
      the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn That's an odd definition of survivorship rate though, isn't it? Suppose churn is 75%, that would give a SR of 1.333, which doesn't make sense to me... More logical I think would be SR = (1-churn). Of course, .978 is close enough to 1.0 that it doesn't matter, and I don't understand how the grandparent arrived at 32 months. Edit: your two formulas for total company-months also imply that sr = (1-churn), so maybe I'm missing something?
michaelmartin 13y ago
The analogy at the top of this needs a little work. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) wasn't in the Social Network (Jesse Eisenberg) Both great movies though :)
- nollidge 13y ago
  It's a joke.
- marklittlewood 13y ago
  Great comment below the blog post... Matias, this phenomenon is known as the “Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” A movie fan cannot know whether a character is played by Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera with any degree of confidence until he observes the whole movie. This is because the parts played by these two actors can only be accurately modeled by a complex wave-like function. Cinematic physicists are not sure, but it seems likely that, for any given movie, the part of the geeky outcast is played by both Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera simultaneously. Only when you watch the movie does the waveform collapse and you observe one or the other actor.
  - michaelmartin 13y ago
    Haha, fair enough, I stand corrected then. Well played.
antidaily 13y ago
TL;DR He goes to the Business of Software Conference.
nicpottier 13y ago
Am I the only one starting to get tired of these 'sell the shovels' sales pitches directed at SAAS startups? I respect Patrick and what he's done, but to me he is coming off more and more sleazy and this particular post doesn't help the case. Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? Is it getting worse or am I just getting more sensitive to it? That's an honest question, shlock like this just makes my skin crawl these days, but maybe I'm in the minority.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rschmitty 13y ago
  I think its getting so bad that in addition to the 'sell the shovels' there are lots of 'how to sell the shovels' or 'how we can help you sell the shovels' posts going around. Don't dig for gold, sell shovels! Want to learn how to sell shovels? Subscribe to our newsletter where we teach you 3-4 things and then end up with us trying to sell you on stuff that will help you selling shovels. Next thing you know, you are paying for 50 different services so you can "focus on selling shovels"
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    You could probably describe most economic activity that way, we have relatively simple core wants and needs (we want sex not SaaS). We spend our lives trying to acquire things that help us satisfy those by increasingly indirect means.
  - emhart 13y ago
    Selling shovels to the shovel sellers.
  - mesozoic 13y ago
    Well sometimes the shovels are made of gold.
- ojbyrne 13y ago
  It lost me at "362" which patio11 has described below as "(very) figurative"
dsr_ 13y ago
This... has the voice of a paid shill trying to work in references to the Next Amazing Offer. It didn't read to me like patio11's essay or HN comment tone at all. [ed] Is this more effective at attracting the kind of people who pay to attend the BoS conference than his usual voice?
dschiptsov 13y ago
Who cares?
norswap 13y ago
I think the problem with this kind of approach to marketing is that you have to be a marketing geek to enjoy it. I wish there was a minimal approach for people who find marketing bothersome. Also, this is more controversial, but I think patio11 should make his points faster. His posts tend to be overly long for what they bring to the table.
- wikwocket 13y ago
  The default approach for people who don't want to market themselves or their wares is to get a salaried job that doesn't deal with customers. A perfectly acceptable option for those who want to just hack/just write/just do their thing. Probably all of us struggle to see where on the continuum of [stereotypical hacker who fears sunlight] to [real estate agent that also writes code] we lie, and what sort of job/career/ambition we best fit into.
knes 13y ago
Nice way to sell your brand patio11.
summerlunch 13y ago
Why is everybody saying that this post seems sleazy? Am I the only one that's not seeing it like that? He is only trying to encourage people to attend the BoS conference by telling us about the benefits. How else would you do it?
- nandemo 13y ago
  I don't think it's sleazy at all. It's simply enthusiastic.

If a company is big enough and should have documented their network for liability insurance, either A. I know places who didn't have it, or B. I know places that hid it, or C. it isn't always required. Weird.

onion2k 13y ago

If this article is designed to promote the Business of Software I think it's failed entirely in my case. Working every day of the year aside from 3 days at a conference is not something I have any desire to emulate, nor do I want to hang out with people who think that's a good idea. Work should be fun, interesting, challenging, and something that you can put away occasionally to do other things. If you can't, you're doing it wrong.

patio11 13y ago
The 362 days thing is (very) figurative, and was less aimed at "Days work versus days off" than at "Rough percentage of my time is spent dealing with daily tactical minutiae of running business versus get-away-from-it-all opportunities to think about where I want things to be in one year, five years, etc."
marklittlewood 13y ago
As Patrick has already responded, I don't think there is too much to add but apologies if you feel the line is misleading. Anyone that runs their own business is likely to be spending a lot of time thinking about the detail of what they are doing and not have the time to step back and think about working 'On' their business. We try to create an environment that allows people to step back from the day to day, and learn from each other. We also happen to believe that far too many people spend their time as entrepreneurs telling other people how hard they work etc, and that frankly is not healthy. This is also a little 'tongue in cheek'.
- spindritf 13y ago
  > Chris This is OT but I have mixed feelings about the practice of using someone's first name when responding to them on HN. On one hand, it's a bit e-stalky, especially when the handle bears no resemblance to the name and just... sound off. On the other, it's a rather elegant, understated way of distinguishing comments made in some more or less official capacity from regular opinions.
  - marklittlewood 13y ago
    Oops. Edited an unintentional. I just happen to know who it was. My bad.

ig1 13y ago

It's a shame BoS have started selling the videos of talks when most conferences are going in the other direction and releasing videos for free. Given that many speakers are doing so to contribute back to the community and build their own reputations it would be nice if conferences like BoS would be run by the community for the sake of the community rather than by commercial entities. I'd be curious to know what percentage of the video sales price goes to the speakers as royalties.

marklittlewood 13y ago
BoS releases all of the talks for free within a year of them being made. We, like many organisations are working hard to find a sustainable business model for content. In some cases, the speakers ask that we do not release the talk fro free. We do not share royalties with the speakers but then the cost of preparing the videos is far in excess of the revenue we make from selling early access. If you have been to BoS you would know how community minded it is. It takes a huge amount of work to put something like BoS on and to be honest, we think we do a pretty good job of hosting and producing an event that is both very different and refreshingly uncommercial in outlook.
- ig1 13y ago
  I've been involved with running events so I appreciate that things like venues, staffing, speaker expenses, etc can build up to a considerable amount and that those costs have to be met somehow. If it's a case of the event not being financially sustainable without additional non-ticket revenue then maybe charging for videos is what has to be done, but if the videos aren't bringing in a significant revenue stream while presumably significantly reducing the number of viewers I'd have to ask if that's a worthwhile trade-off ? Obviously the answer for that is going to be different if you're optimising for profit or for community benefit, but that's why I'd rather have community events run sustainably by non-profits than on a purely commercial for-profit basis. [I have no issues with videos being charged for / with-held at the speakers request though]
dudurocha 13y ago
If they do depend on the sales of BoS videos, I'll not complain, Although, BoS is one of the best conferences I won't be able to go, and I would love to watch the keynotes for free.

NZ_Matt 13y ago

Ha! I read the first few paragraphs and then scrolled down until I got to the P.S. Brilliant!

asmithmd1 13y ago

Whoa! - $2500 for a three day conference. The "Business of Software" conference is a pretty good business. I know, I know - They rented a hotel ballroom and give you lunch and snacks. It's too bad the self-organizing bar-camp thing kind of died when the great recession ended. I thought it might kill expensive conferences like Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds.

marklittlewood 13y ago
Not nearly as good a business as you might think I can assure you and we make a lot of effort to have a single customer - the delegate. There are no sponsor panels, exhibition booths etc that make events a lot more profitable. We have consciously decided to avoid these and focus on making the event as valuable for paid attendees as we possibly can. Please don't forget we have a relatively high ticket price a finite number of places and very significant fixed and variable costs. This is not a software business. We also try hard to incentivize early booking and offer discounts to encourage this so the average ticket price is significantly lower than $2,500. (Tickets cost $1,800 at the moment and we have sold almost 3/4 of them.
runako 13y ago
I'm guessing that for the target audience, the 3 days of actual time is the more significant expense.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  That would assume an annual salary of > $216,000 or so.
  - user24 13y ago
    Not really. Opportunity cost and all that.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      True

dudurocha 13y ago

http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/ http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-... I think this is one of the best talks I ever watched. It's about startup life, without glamour, false-hope or delusional expectations. The fact that it's not a twenty-something year old guy, who sold it's business for millions of dollars in only 2 months, makes an excellent talk to anyone who has a SaaS software, consultancy business or is looking in join the startup bandwagon.

mp99e99 13y ago
She quotes calculating churn as 1/churn rate.. in this example she said her churn was 2.2% month meaning lifetime value of 45 months. But that doesn't make sense, since its compounding/exponential.. its really only 32 months (not 45). Then she talks about having to explain the math to the VC. Am I missing something here, because I find this fairly alarming coming from a successful company.
- patio11 13y ago
  Let C be the original number of companies (or their billings, doesn't matter.) In month 1, we have 1 * C companies. In month 2, we have 1 * .978 * C companies. .978 is the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn. In month 3, we have 1 * .978 * .978 * C companies. Given that we are most keenly interested in how many company-months we rack up over time, we can solve for this with sum of an infinite geometric series. The formula is C / (1 - s) for s is the survivorship rate, or C / (churn). Exactly like Gail said it was.
  - graphene 13y ago
    the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn That's an odd definition of survivorship rate though, isn't it? Suppose churn is 75%, that would give a SR of 1.333, which doesn't make sense to me... More logical I think would be SR = (1-churn). Of course, .978 is close enough to 1.0 that it doesn't matter, and I don't understand how the grandparent arrived at 32 months. Edit: your two formulas for total company-months also imply that sr = (1-churn), so maybe I'm missing something?

michaelmartin 13y ago

The analogy at the top of this needs a little work. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) wasn't in the Social Network (Jesse Eisenberg) Both great movies though :)

nollidge 13y ago
It's a joke.
marklittlewood 13y ago
Great comment below the blog post... Matias, this phenomenon is known as the “Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” A movie fan cannot know whether a character is played by Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera with any degree of confidence until he observes the whole movie. This is because the parts played by these two actors can only be accurately modeled by a complex wave-like function. Cinematic physicists are not sure, but it seems likely that, for any given movie, the part of the geeky outcast is played by both Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera simultaneously. Only when you watch the movie does the waveform collapse and you observe one or the other actor.
- michaelmartin 13y ago
  Haha, fair enough, I stand corrected then. Well played.

antidaily 13y ago

TL;DR He goes to the Business of Software Conference.

nicpottier 13y ago

Am I the only one starting to get tired of these 'sell the shovels' sales pitches directed at SAAS startups? I respect Patrick and what he's done, but to me he is coming off more and more sleazy and this particular post doesn't help the case. Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? Is it getting worse or am I just getting more sensitive to it? That's an honest question, shlock like this just makes my skin crawl these days, but maybe I'm in the minority.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rschmitty 13y ago
I think its getting so bad that in addition to the 'sell the shovels' there are lots of 'how to sell the shovels' or 'how we can help you sell the shovels' posts going around. Don't dig for gold, sell shovels! Want to learn how to sell shovels? Subscribe to our newsletter where we teach you 3-4 things and then end up with us trying to sell you on stuff that will help you selling shovels. Next thing you know, you are paying for 50 different services so you can "focus on selling shovels"
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  You could probably describe most economic activity that way, we have relatively simple core wants and needs (we want sex not SaaS). We spend our lives trying to acquire things that help us satisfy those by increasingly indirect means.
- emhart 13y ago
  Selling shovels to the shovel sellers.
- mesozoic 13y ago
  Well sometimes the shovels are made of gold.
ojbyrne 13y ago
It lost me at "362" which patio11 has described below as "(very) figurative"

dsr_ 13y ago

This... has the voice of a paid shill trying to work in references to the Next Amazing Offer. It didn't read to me like patio11's essay or HN comment tone at all. [ed] Is this more effective at attracting the kind of people who pay to attend the BoS conference than his usual voice?

dschiptsov 13y ago

Who cares?

norswap 13y ago

I think the problem with this kind of approach to marketing is that you have to be a marketing geek to enjoy it. I wish there was a minimal approach for people who find marketing bothersome. Also, this is more controversial, but I think patio11 should make his points faster. His posts tend to be overly long for what they bring to the table.

wikwocket 13y ago
The default approach for people who don't want to market themselves or their wares is to get a salaried job that doesn't deal with customers. A perfectly acceptable option for those who want to just hack/just write/just do their thing. Probably all of us struggle to see where on the continuum of [stereotypical hacker who fears sunlight] to [real estate agent that also writes code] we lie, and what sort of job/career/ambition we best fit into.

knes 13y ago

Nice way to sell your brand patio11.

summerlunch 13y ago

Why is everybody saying that this post seems sleazy? Am I the only one that's not seeing it like that? He is only trying to encourage people to attend the BoS conference by telling us about the benefits. How else would you do it?

nandemo 13y ago
I don't think it's sleazy at all. It's simply enthusiastic.