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Patrick McKenzie AMA on BetaList
- keesj 13y agoJust a heads up: AMA has now ended. Patrick was gracious enough to extend his time from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. There's some real gems in those Q&A's. Definitely recommend checking it out. (Disclosure: I'm the founder of BetaList)
- swanson 13y agoSo how do I view the Q/A? Going to that link just has his bio and an email signup form... The banner at the top of the page says "See questions and answers below". What am I missing here?
- jbigelow76 13y agoThe AMA is in the Disqus comments
- keesj 13y agoLike jbigelow76 mentions the AMA happened in the Disqus comments. I didn't realize some people might disable it, so I'll make sure to show them a message asking them to enable it.
- hobs 13y agoThank you, most people I know actually disable disqus comments as they do any service offered for free that is embedded on multiple websites. The tracking is just too obvious. Same idea with gravatar.
- venus 13y agoSeems like Disqus was a pretty poor choice for comments on this. I don't find them easy to read, they take ages to load, and worst of all they apparently dropped several of the guest's comments! If this is going to become a regular thing, Betalist, I would recommend a proper comments system. Disqus is OK for blogs but if you intend to have a high value conversation then it's a bad choice, IMO.
- minimaxir 13y agoDisqus is, for better or for worse, the best comment system out there. (somewhat tied with Facebook Comments depending on use case) There isn't an effective embedded real-time "AMA" type platform that exists to my knowledge. Wouldn't be a terrible idea for a startup (but it could be argued that it's redundant with Facebook/Twitter)
- patio11 13y agoI recall being asked to do an AMA on two YC-funded AMA platforms. (My guess: somebody told the founders "Patrick is in that happy intersection of 'people who have something interest to say' and 'people for whom doing lots of writing for free sounds really attractive.' Why don't you ask him?") AFAIK, both companies no longer do that as their line of business.
- clarky07 13y agoSeems like if you are doing an AMA, reddit is the place to do it. I can't imagine any blog comment system working well for the task, and I can't imagine a way to build a profitable company that makes an AMA solution.
- jbigelow76 13y agoAdd 2 cups of Node, a dash of Redis, 3 table spoons of two way data binding a la Angular; garnish liberally with some well thought out UX and you have yourself the recipe for the Storify of AMAs. Somebody get pg on the horn and find me a cofounder! :)
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- cordie 13y agoAwesome. Can't wait to read through all the comments! Thank you so much for doing this!
- patio11 13y agoThat was fun. I apparently wrote approximately 4,500 words in 90 minutes. Also: my brain is now absolutely mush, so if you have anything you'd want me to add, please, find my inbox so I can get to it when my brain is not mush. I think that's the most exhausting writing task I've ever done -- it's harder being in a CS email firehose, which is already exhausting. At least when doing CS you have macros to help, and 80% of customer service can be done without engaging more than 2% of your mental faculties.
- tptacek 13y agoThis is something I like about message board writing; there's a feeling of time pressure to it. You have to think a little bit faster than you would writing a long-form blog post.
- Cass 13y agoYou mentioned in one of the comments that you get a lot of business from referrals, but don't track the number of referrals in any way. Would it make sense to have some sort of rewards program, e.g. one month off for every customer someone refers to you? I don't expect that would do much for you in the (presumably most lucrative) enterprise space, so maybe it's not something that would make sense to spend time implementing, but I could imagine it working out quite well with e.g. owners of massage parlors.
- patio11 13y agoBidirectional referrals were a crashing failure for BCC, the one time I implemented it. I also don't like the interaction that makes my customers have with their friends, particularly not in a B2B context. (I mean, wouldn't it put an undesirable thought in the back of your head reading my stuff if you had to wonder every time you heard me say, e.g. "Twilio is the best thing since sliced bread", whether that was being tracked and compensated?) P.S. A lesson I learned early in AR's career: don't call massage therapy practices "massage parlors". That is one of a couple of word choices which massage therapists are really really touchy about: http://www.massagetherapy.com/articles/index.php/article_id/690/The-Parlor-Problem http://www.massagetherapy.com/articles/index.php/article_id/...
- liquidcool 13y agoFirst, thanks for this. However, I'll have to wait until I get to my desktop because this is broken on mobile (Galaxy Note 2 Chrome). In landscape the text extends beyond the screen and portrait shows a few words per line. Zoom appears to be disabled. If web analytics show low engagement on mobile, that would be why.
- keesj 13y agoThanks for the note. I did try and optimize the site for phones and tablets, but wasn't able to test it extensively. Will look into fixing landscape mode shortly.
- charlieirish 13y agostatupclarity has posted a digest in easy to read format: Startup Advice from Patrick McKenzie: http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/startup-advice-patrick-mckenzie/ http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/startup-advice-patrick-mc...
- keesj 13y agoWe've created a PDF with a summary of the questions and answers. Great for reading on your tablet. → http://btl.st/KiNU0L http://btl.st/KiNU0L (PDF, 394 KB)