14 ms·

Kalzumeus Software Year in Review 2014

391 points by JayNeely 12y ago

sadpanda5 12y ago
This may be a unpopular opinion, but this guy needs to cofound a company with someone else. He is one of the smartest dudes I know for optimization, but seems to have some of the most tame/boring ideas for 'startups' (if you can call them that). Bingo card creator? Appointment reminder? He needs a cofounder who compliments his skills. Mainly, good ideas and good sales skills. The bottom line is you can only optimize so much via a/b testing and whatnot from marginal ideas at best.
- mooneater 12y ago
  I feel his $ numbers are shockingly low given his obvious calibre.
  - liquidise 12y ago
    I would expect that "publicly available plans" excludes enterprise offerings, where i would anticipate a considerable income given his past posts.
    - mooneater 12y ago
      That makes sense
    - unreal37 12y ago
      He said in that post that his enterprise revenue was "$50K < X < $100K".
  - soundlab 12y ago
    Aside from a salesperson, I wonder if Patio11 has considered a dedicated content marketing person to build on that SEO and maintain some level of growth for both businesses? I get it that the goal is to not get buried with work and to achieve some level of passive income, but if you lose the SEO and sales are declining, what are you left with?
    - malyk 12y ago
      He's the guy that loudly banged the drum for content marketing with BCC. The basic gist is that he hired a teacher (iirc) to write a few pages of "Bingo Cards for <x>" every month to have a unique page for a lot of different things. Try typing "US Presidents Bingo" or something and you'll probably get BCC as the first result. Patrick outsourced that page to someone working part time. There area /a lot/ of those pages on BCC. Also, he made $4,000 an hour on BCC, so it seems like he's left with a lot! And even so, business come and go all the time. Doing nothing on BCC as it fades from $60k a year to $0 over the course of a decade while doing minimal work on it for the last half of that decade doesn't sound like a bad idea to me at all. Sounds like 'free' money.
  - pnathan 12y ago
    He out and out said that money qua money wasn't his reason for optimizing at this point. (He could do more, but he doesn't have to, which is a great place to be).
- aw3c2 12y ago
  Obligatory: http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/09/08/the-fisherman-and-the-businessman/ http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/09/08/the-fisherman-and-the-... Happiness is different things for different people. Don't be condescending if you do not understand another person's way of life.
  - sadpanda5 12y ago
    I never said he shouldnt be happy. I said if he intends to make lots of money, he needs to come up with better ideas and have better skills at being a salesman. This is the classic programmer dilemma. They built a great product and dont understand why its not winning in the market. Its VHS vs Beta Max. Sales is so important for this (as is having a good idea) - He seems to fail on both counts.
    - kasey_junk 12y ago
      He specifically mentions that he isn't interested in making lots of money. Further, patio11 is one of the few programmers to have written extensively on how to become a good salesman. To say that he doesn't understand why it's not winning in the market is extremely condescending to someone who specifically writes a public post to address this.
    - jacalata 12y ago
      You didn't say anything of the sort. There was literally not a single conditional in your post.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  A great post summarizing this point is The Genius and Tragedy of Patrick McKenzie, by Sebastian Marshall (username lionhearted on HN): http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-patrick-mckenzie http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-patri...
  - crazypyro 12y ago
    I wouldn't describe it as a "great" post and furthermore, its pretty much outdated. He's making a lot more than $60,000 currently. Also he is running his own business/monetary life and that is something very few great entrepreneurs can still say these days. Hard to put a price on that, especially since he acknowledges he values the freedom of not being tied to investors in this very post.
    - sadpanda5 12y ago
      I know a fresh out of college Rails developer who makes more than Patrick. He is not making that much money for his skill set. Maybe hes a masochist, who knows. He obviously lacks the ability to see he is working on ridiculous ideas. The fact he cant get them funding alone is a huge deal, because I imagine anyone would fund the guy just because of who he is. But when it comes down to it, he must truly have no knowledge of scale.
      - deleted 12y ago
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      - JamesBarney 12y ago
        I think it's pretty obvious that if Patrick wanted to optimize for more money he definitely could have by focusing on consulting instead of AR. Also he owns Appointment Reminder and he didn't count the appreciation of that asset. Lets assume the total profit for AR went from 100k to 135k. Now lets make the assumption that it is valued at a 5x multiple, this means that he increased his net worth by 175k. Thus his total "profits" for the year would be under estimated by 175k.
- ropman76 12y ago
  I will take his tame/boring "starups" any day over a large percentage of the startups I see on TechCrunch and Pando (which I am starting to see many that have tame/boring ideas at scale anyway). His business is profitable, he doesn't need to worry about the problems that come along with accepting VC money, and can sleep in during rush hour (sold me right there LOL). Many startups are high risk with a high reward long shot with just as high failure rate. So I will take lame but profitable ideas to the bank anytime.
- deleted 12y ago
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- tptacek 12y ago
  It's not an unpopular opinion; it's just concern trolling.
- surfy 12y ago
  I like his ideas. He needs someone to do the marketing and increase those numbers.
- surfy 12y ago
  I like his ideas. He needs someone to do the marketing and increase those numbers.
- staunch 12y ago
  patio11 should have teamed up with cperciva to work on Tarsnap years ago. They still should. They'd make a billion for sure.
  - wglb 12y ago
    Take a look at this: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ 'cperciva likes how the business is.
- krapp 12y ago
  On the other hand, "boring" ideas stick around longer. Who's going to react negatively to a bingo card creator? Who doesn't need to be reminded of appointments? These are not sexy, world-changing, paradigm shifting ideas but they can be stable money makers.
- robryan 12y ago
  Is appointment reminder really a small market/ boring idea? I think there is massive potential there. Granted I think it needs a sales team to really get at a lot of the market.
- Dewie 12y ago
  I guess you have to excuse him for not pursuing the particular status jockeying of nerds, namely working on the absolute most hard, cutting edge and exciting problems/domains.
mooneater 12y ago
I am a huge fan of yours patio11, you have gifted us so much useful knowledge. How do we ever repay you? =)
- patio11 12y ago
  Tell me what advice worked or didn't work when you implement it in your own business. It makes me happier than anything else, businesswise.
  - ufmace 12y ago
    I used your salary negotiation piece, among other sources, to negotiate a ~15% boost in my offer at the company I started at about a year ago. Most money I ever made from a 3-sentence email and a 5-minute phone call.
    - patio11 12y ago
      High five.
    - austinsharp 12y ago
      I too benefited greatly from the negotiation piece (got the signing bonus from the offer I didn't want from the company with the offer where I did want to work) and it's become part of my standard package of advice and resources for friends looking for software jobs. Thank you!!
    - NamTaf 12y ago
      It was also the first thing I looked up when negotiating on my position I start next month. I've secured a 10% raise upfront, with a further 15% + access to a max. 25% yearly bonus arranged once I get a qualification in the first quarter of the new year. It took a little bit to map the software eng. assumptions to a mech eng. role such as my own (especially given the market is terrible for me right now where I am) but it paid off in dividends for me. So thank you so much!
  - Silhouette 12y ago
saturdayplace 12y ago
> The only time in recent memory I used it myself was when a Redditor asked for anti-Bitcoin bingo cards, a request which I am unquestionably the best qualified person in the world to answer.) Apropos of nothing, it seems that if you're interested in piquing the interest of someone busy, discovering the venn diagram for which they're one of a small population in the intersection might be the way to go. Or, it might just be really creepy.
fdsary 12y ago
Congrats on the kid & move to 中目黒！
- adregan 12y ago
  Nakameguro is a great area, but I'll bet those rents really do sting. I've always been partial to Nakano, Koenji, and Kichijoji. I'll always be a Chuo liner in my heart.
wallflower 12y ago
> Ruriko and I were blessed by the birth of our daughter, Lillian. Congratulations patio11!
- trcollinson 12y ago
  I really hate to "me too!" on comments. But I have followed a lot of what patio11 says on HN (I've gone through his comment history even, to learn quite a bit!) and I am a fan. Thank you for all of your information and congratulations to you and your wife on having Lillian! Many happy returns.
applecore 12y ago
Why is Appointment Reminder on a .org top-level domain?
- saturdayplace 12y ago
  SEO. It's a an exact match for the search term he was gunning for, and the .com wasn't available but the .org was. Exact-match domains get hit with the +15 wand of visibility in search results, and the whole .com vs .org distinction isn't as black/white as it used to be.
  - itsprofitbaron 12y ago
    There was an EMD (Exact Match Domain) update in September 2012 to fix this.
    - unreal37 12y ago
      That's a myth. It "reduced" the bonus, but the bonus clearly still exists. But I love that others think that domain name is no longer relevant for SEO. Keep thinking that. :)
      - shostack 12y ago
        It's reduced to the point of not being worth insane prices for EMDs. The majority of his ranking is likely due to his backlink profile and relevant content vs. the domain. I'm sure it doesn't hurt things though.
        ericd 12y ago
        Yeah, having the name of the company be the same as the top-level keywords makes it so a huge percentage of the backlinks have the anchor text he wants.
        unreal37 12y ago
        Can't speak to "insane prices". But Patrick got AppointmentReminder.org for $8. He classifies it as the best ROI he's ever made. "cars.com" is still the #1 result for searching "cars". And "business.com" is still on page 1 for searching "business". The death of the EMD has been greatly exaggerated, IMHO.
unreal37 12y ago
I bet it must be an amazing relief to be able to talk specifics of AR, after so long of having to be quiet about the details. Congrats on your success, Patrick.
- patio11 12y ago
  It is, oddly enough. Partly it's that -- I love talking about things and having AR be the exception made me feel phony. (That's irrational, but there you go.) Partly, in recent I finally feel like I know what I want from having that business in the portfolio and I have some idea of where it goes from here. Partly that frees me up to think "OK, aside from fatherhood, what happens next?"
  - unreal37 12y ago
    I totally get that. Not odd at all.
simonswords82 12y ago
Hey @patio11, hopefully you'll lurk a bit later... Congrats on the kid! Balancing a newborn and any amount of business is no joke (source: I have two startups, a software company and an 18 month old). I wanted to ask about this: > To build out that software and get the team spun up, I had to actually sit down and document our business processes I'd love to here a bit more about how you went about that. You've got a great approach to documenting your thoughts and I'm sure I could learn a thing or two. I'm scaling our app http://www.staffsquared.com http://www.staffsquared.com in 2015 and working hard to share knowledge across our growing team. Keep up the great work!
- jcr 12y ago
  You may have missed it, but Patrick talked about it earlier this month. https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/sales_automation https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/sales_aut... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8773472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8773472
chrisan 12y ago
Thank you for sharing your story > I’m taking my own advice to charge more, and re-aligning those numbers with actual customer behavior rather than the numbers I guessed four years ago. How do people normally handle this? 1) Take it or leave it price hike 2) Give a X month grace period before new price 3) Grandfathered in and price only changes if they need to upgrade 4) ??
- unreal37 12y ago
  Actually, I'm always disappointed to see useful software priced out of the reach of small businesses - and low priced plans disappear in 1-3 years after a cool tool launches. Visual Website Optimizer, Hubspot, Leadpages, etc all get priced out of the reach of people making less than $10K per month online because its more profitable to go after lawyers and accountants.
  - siddharthdeswal 12y ago
    Visual Website Optimizer just introduced a $9 plan (I work there). I agree with your point in general, but the truth is most SaaS tools make far more profit when serving bigger customers.
    - unreal37 12y ago
      I didn't know that, and I'm happy to hear that. And I agree that it's more profitable to serve the bigger customers, but it's a shame nonetheless that I see things that I would love to try to use myself, and would pay for, just not worth $99 a month to me.
  - ssharp 12y ago
    Optimizely just changed their pricing and only have free and enterprise tiers now. Their free tier is much nicer than you'd expect, as well.
  - robryan 12y ago
    I think this has a lot to do with the 'do things that don't scale early on' mantra. Early on when these companies need to get some traction they will be more than happy to support the smaller customers. Later when they need to make many hires to support customers it is much better value to chase those bigger customers. That is assuming there is significant support cost.
porter 12y ago
Hey Patrick, thanks so much for your honesty in all of this. It's never easy talking about things that embarrass us. Not to mention in public. You'll probably get some haters, but just know that I look forward to your annual updates and they have encouraged me to quit my job and start my own software business too. This has been one of the best decisions of my life. I'm sure there are many more here who can say the same thing. So, to you good sir, thank you.
- eo3x0 12y ago
  I'm also very impressed with Patrick's ability to disassociate business success and failure from his personal success and failure. What I mean: if something I worked on "fell off a cliff" I'd be a lot more panicky and less likely to step back and say "that's ok" as he did in his post. I'd probably take it as a personal failure rather than rationalizing it as a matter of time investment trade offs. Lesson to learn: it's okay to let some things decay so that attention and focus can be paid to the right things.
  - ericd 12y ago
    Yeah, I've let projects die off in this fashion, but I still feel a pang of regret when I think about them and all the time I sank into them. It always feels like maybe I should have sold them off/given them away so that someone else could have helped them reach their potential. Then again, BCC seems to have reached much higher heights than I would have thought its potential was, so maybe it's more of a "Mission Accomplished" there.
gknoy 12y ago
[H]aving numbers publicly available would complicate [taking investment money in the future]. I don't understand why having publicly available numbers would complicate getting investment in the future. Would someone be gracious enough to explain that to me as if I have no knowledge (true in this case)?
- hayksaakian 12y ago
  Information is leverage in any negotiation. Patrick basically has all his cards on the table, and can't give much more than that
  - clarky07 12y ago
    while true, is there someone in venture capital that isn't getting the numbers contained in this post before giving people money? revenue, profit, expenses, etc seems pretty basic. I can't imagine investing in a company without asking, hey, how much money did you make last year?
- NhanH 12y ago
  I can't speak for patio11, but basically, having publicly available numbers reduce your choice: if it wasn't available, you can give it out as you want to. There is no choice to take the number back
ThomPete 12y ago
You can burn or you can last, but you can't do both. Patrick is a wonderful example of a person who takes the middle road and actually put quite a lot of effort into making sure he stays there rather than letting himself be sucked in by the grow like crazy game or the never launch anything game. He is happy, he is not trying to be happy. That alone is something most people will never experience and measured in that he is a billionaire.
- talltofu 12y ago
  'or the never launch anything game' I just realized that I am a part of this :(
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
krschultz 12y ago
Glad to hear Patrick is using Bench, those guys are awesome.
- ian_crosby 12y ago
  Thanks Kevin <3
jakobegger 12y ago
Thanks for being so open with your feelings. I always find it hard to talk about my own feelings, and it's great to hear how you are struggling with and overcoming the pitfalls of self-employment. Your open sharing of actual revenue numbers is invaluable. The tech press only loves to talk about all those billion dollar companies. But your blog posts put that into perspective, giving us a glimpse of how much money a small business can realistically make without shooting for the startup lottery.
davidw 12y ago
> I work mostly on what I want to work on, take a day off whenever I feel like it, and optimize the business for quality of life rather than for any particular growth or financial targets. There was some thread here where patio11 kind of snickered when someone called his business a "huge success"; probably because he knows a bunch of people that earn one or more magnitudes more money. But the above quote probably sums up "fantastic success" for me, and I think, a whole lot of the world.
- deleted 12y ago
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- derefr 12y ago
  Sure, but then "fantastic success" can be relative to cost of living, too. You can earn an order of magnitude less and still be experiencing "fantastic success" if you happen to live in e.g. Cambodia.
  - count 12y ago
    Given that he lives in Tokyo, which has one of the highest costs of living on the planet, I guess that's an important point as to HOW fantastic his success has been :)
    - mc32 12y ago
      I think he's mentioned Nagoya pref, which is kinda countrysideish and less expensive to live in. (and also houses can be of better build.)
      - deleted 12y ago
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      - csa 12y ago
        He moved to Tokyo earlier this year. This is mentioned in his post. For example: "Appointment Reminder’s key stat of interest is monthly recurring revenue on our publicly available plans, since this is the most predictable revenue in any of our businesses and thus lets me make consequential decisions like “Move the family to Tokyo, where rents are 5X what they were in Ogaki” (that happened, more later” or “Bring on help” (that also happened, more later)."
bbcbasic 12y ago
Patrick, Have you thought of launching an affiliate program for the BCC ? You can connect on forums like WarriorForum and find good affiliates. They will love that you have a proven product. Then give them 50-75%. Some will advertise on their existing sites, to their lists and may even pay for advertising. You take no risk and may get a lot for sales. Another option is Clickbank where affiliates may find you. There are alternatives like JVZoo, DigiResults etc. You could hire someone part time to do the customer support and bugfixes. In short you could keep BCC going nicely with very little effort on your part. And then after a few months, you have a low maintenance business that you can sell, rather than something that will slowly die. I know it may not seem worth your time, as you have bigger fish to fry. However all of this could be done in a couple of days, and maybe an hour a month to maintain. You may be able to sell it for $100k or more once it is in good shape again.
- shostack 12y ago
  I think one of the considerations here is what degree of professionalism he wishes to portray with this. The info products sold on sites like WF and such are what I'd lump into the "guru" category, and are oftentimes just lots of fluff or something the writer paid someone off Odesk to write for them. Overall, they don't come off as terribly professional and can quite readily be identified as living within the "Get rich quick" bucket. Affiliates can be helpful, but I'd be really careful about picking ones that won't damage the brand image and credibility he's built for himself.
  - curiously 12y ago
    I agree with this. Those type of folks may not be the best representation nor the most successful. If you browse WF you will get a sense of the demographic.
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    Of course, you shouldn't let anyone be an affiliate. I think with JVZoo and Digiresults you get to approve or disapprove affiliates. You could ask the potential affiliate to fill in a form with some information about their site, how they will promote before you accept them in. You can also build relationships on the forum, so you know who can be trusted with your brand. There are plenty of OK marketers, who may have a popular website on there. But you are right there are plenty of get-rich-quick types you have to filter through. I think the affiliate idea has merit even if you don't use the Warriorforum. You could for example run your own affiliate program using a script, and then contact sites you like directly.
mattste 12y ago
As a young software developer interested in what happens on the business side of things, this was a fantastic read. Thanks Patrick.
shostack 12y ago
Re: your SEO comment: "AR is virtually guaranteed to be a mortal lock on the query [appointment reminder] due to the combination of the exact match domain bonus and the fact that most links to it naturally cite the name of the company." Wasn't that largely made irrelevant a while back? I'd be willing to bet the majority of your relevancy comes from the backlinks and content on their pages vs. your exact match domain. Hopefully you're not building a link profile focusing on that link text as there have been reports of people getting dinged for that.
- AznHisoka 12y ago
  No, he's 100% correct because in his case the keyword is the same as his brand name. And when you search for a brand, Google shows you the brand homepage 99.9% of the time. In his case, his brand is also highly relevant to the term 'appointment reminder', which pretty much locks up the #1 spot for that term.
  - the_rosentotter 12y ago
    A shame the website is so utterly horrible though. Sorry, but it's true. Huge walls of text, stock MS Office clipart, "news" a year and a half old. It looks amateurish and smells of abandonware.
    - noahc 12y ago
      And your point exactly? He already knows it could be much better, obviously. It is his business after all. And yet despite your finely tuned ability to detect amateurish abandonware he managed to bring in ~$75,000 revenue in on public plans, and if I had to take a guess anywhere between 1x - 1.5x in non-public plans. As a general rule, we shouldn't use the obvious to tear someone down.
  - shostack 12y ago
    But that's what a ton of other site who were dinged were doing. They'd buy up EMDs, slap a company name on it where "brand name = EMD" and then drive backlinks to it with the brand name/EMD in the link text. Many of them dropped quite a bit when this rolled out in 2012. What would make his case different from theirs other than his backlink profile?
curiously 12y ago
Is it better to have a low churn rate per month with lower MRR or a higher churn rate with higher MRR ? Can you counter churn rate by acquiring new customers?
- sunir 12y ago
  Low churn rate is better. The longer you have a customer relationship the longer they think about you. You have an opportunity to sell them more value as you develop it and get them to refer you more customers.
staunch 12y ago
Congrats on the baby!
dennisgorelik 12y ago
> Ruriko ... does not love Ogaki ... and wanted a change. Did she consider US cities? Tokyo is very expensive and an unusual choice to move into for family with a child. Any US city would put you in a better touch with your business and would be less expensive than Tokyo.
- paulsutter 12y ago
  Tokyo is a wonderful place to live, and I can assure you there is nothing unusual about families with children in Tokyo. Life is about making choices.
  - dennisgorelik 12y ago
    What's wonderful about Tokyo? 5x price increase, small apartments (instead of houses), higher babysitter costs -- these are all downsides. What is better in Tokyo than in, say, Austin, TX?
    - kasey_junk 12y ago
      Access to family?
      - dennisgorelik 12y ago
        Patrick's family is in the US. But fine, let's consider just Ruriko's family: they are mostly in Ogaki, not in Tokyo. I understand that Tokyo has some advantages (any city in the world would have some advantages), but overall it seems to be a sub-optimal choice.
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        Kliment 12y ago
        It's not your choice to make, nor mine. Virtually every part of my family (with one exception) lives in a place I dislike and would not live in. Let people live where they're happiest, rather than trying to impose your criteria upon them.
toumhi 12y ago
I completely understand for your neglect of Appointment Reminder. I've also had my share of projects I'd start but lose interest in it because, well, I was not consumed by the problem I was solving. So during the years I worked sequentially (or sometimes at the same time) on a gift certificate template gallery, a travel insurance comparator, a body-mass-index calculator website, a file sharing solution for businesses targeted at the french market. The reasoning behind all these projects was to make "passive income". And by running multiple websites I would make a nice income from them all combined. After developing and marketing the last of these projects (file sharing one, post-mortem here: http://www.sparklewise.com/post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-with-my-first-online-product/ http://www.sparklewise.com/post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-wit... ) I realized that the most important thing is not to have a "good idea" but to work on a problem you want to solve and with people you can relate to or at least that you enjoy working with. That's why I now focus on serving SaaS businesses, because that's actually something I care about and will likely care about for years to come. Thanks for all the transparency Patrick and for setting an example for the rest of the HN crowd. And good luck with the fatherhood :-)
sogen 12y ago
Is there a way to reach patio11? I emailed him while taking his course but never got a response.
- patio11 12y ago
  Email is generally the best way to get in touch with me. Twitter works as an escalation method. In general, while I try to response to everyone who emails about stuff I write for free on the Internet, it can get bumped from the priority list by a lot of things, including (in the instant case) being at home with a baby.
  - sogen 12y ago
    thanks, escalating!
billsossoon 12y ago
The comment about BCC being Hello World with a random number generator is amusing, but the fact that you were able to generate profit from a simple web app is really a testament to your marketing and business skill.
daxelrod 12y ago
Bravo for candidly writing about your failures as well as your successes. I don't think a lot of us would have the guts to write publicly about times that we didn't measure up the way you have; but your doing so is wonderfully instructive. Congratulations on fatherhood!
JunkDNA 12y ago
This might be one of my most favorite posts of Patrick's ever. It's often so much easier to start something new than it is to sustain something old. Hanging around HN too long makes you an addict of "new". Guess what: growing and sustaining a business for the long haul is hard, even for patio11.
Permit 12y ago
>Most of our customers are on the Professional plan, which annoys the heck out of me, but it’s my fault. Since I was thinking personal services, where 100 appointments a month barely sustains a sole practitioner (it implies $3k to $8k gross revenue), I thought any sizable business would be forced to pay more meaningful amounts of money. It turns out that you can run a nice boutique law office with sales in the high seven figures or an architectural consultancy with millions in revenue on less than 100 appointments a month. Believe me, I know several examples. If you could go back in time how would you change the pricing model here? Would you remove the professional plan altogether? How could your pricing model differentiate between the small personal services with < 100 appointments/month and the law firms with < 100 appointments/month?
Permit 12y ago
>Most of our customers are on the Professional plan, which annoys the heck out of me, but it’s my fault. Since I was thinking personal services, where 100 appointments a month barely sustains a sole practitioner (it implies $3k to $8k gross revenue), I thought any sizable business would be forced to pay more meaningful amounts of money. It turns out that you can run a nice boutique law office with sales in the high seven figures or an architectural consultancy with millions in revenue on less than 100 appointments a month. Believe me, I know several examples. If you could go back in time how would you change the pricing model here? Would you remove the professional plan altogether? How could your pricing model differentiate between the small personal services with < 100 appointments/month and the law firms with < 100 appointments/month?
Permit 12y ago
>Most of our customers are on the Professional plan, which annoys the heck out of me, but it’s my fault. Since I was thinking personal services, where 100 appointments a month barely sustains a sole practitioner (it implies $3k to $8k gross revenue), I thought any sizable business would be forced to pay more meaningful amounts of money. It turns out that you can run a nice boutique law office with sales in the high seven figures or an architectural consultancy with millions in revenue on less than 100 appointments a month. Believe me, I know several examples. If you could go back in time how would you change the pricing model here? Would you remove the professional plan altogether? How could your pricing model differentiate between the small personal services with < 100 appointments/month and the law firms with < 100 appointments/month?
xzlzx 12y ago
"...a lot of folks have wanted me to roll the dice on a funded startup with big put-a-dent-in-the-universe ambitions. At times, I wanted to want that for myself, but for the moment I was content to keep running my business in the traditional fashion. I work mostly on what I want to work on, take a day off whenever I feel like it, and optimize the business for quality of life rather than for any particular growth or financial targets." We share the same viewpoint. Well said.
manto 12y ago
Patrick's writing serves as a great supplement to PG's essays: real world analysis of "slower" growth software businesses. For engineers interested in alternate models of creating a company, these annual write ups help one develop an outline for the financial, business, and engineering lifestyle required to get something off the ground. Thanks Patrick, after working at VC backed startups, these types of posts actually encouraged me to go out on my own!
UtahDave 12y ago
My favorite quote from Patrick's post: "The slip date shipped repeatedly."
mherrmann 12y ago
I have been working on an AR clone in Austria since mid September (https://www.terminerinnerung.org https://www.terminerinnerung.org). I focus on getting enterprise customers. My website is hardly visited (so far). I got my first two customers by simply walking into their offices and asking whether they'd be interested. I asked them to pay me for 12 months in advance, so I have earned 5368€ (6565 US$) since I started. I'm hoping that I will earn this again in 2016, when it comes to renew the contract for these first two clients. My approach is more high-touch - I don't rely on people searching for "Terminerinnerung" ("Appointment reminder") and then coming to my website. I think most doctors don't do that. I go out and talk to them. I also by default offer to develop integrations into the customer's existing appointment reminder system - because the majority (~66%) of my potential customers here already have some computer system. This means reverse engineering the customer's existing system to be able to continuously export its data. I did this successfully for one of my customers (it was a Java/MySQL application). The other customer I developed a web calendar for. I have now completed the development for my first two customers (I hadn't completed development when I sold the service to them. I just pretended I had, to make the sale). At the beginning of next year I'll start to acquire more (enterprise) customers. I'm happy to talk about this via email if anybody's interested. My address is [my first name]@[my last name].io (Michael Herrmann).
- dietervds 12y ago
  I'm doing the same for Belgium actually, and possibly The Netherlands, in time. (http://afspraakherinnering.be http://afspraakherinnering.be) It's in it's early stages. I'm waiting to e-mail Patrick when I can say "Thanks to you I now have >500€ MRR" :-) I sent you an e-mail to talk about it some more and share experiences! Always great to learn of similar endeavours.
  - mherrmann 12y ago
    I already replied to your email :-) A few other people also got in touch. Cool! :-)
- mherrmann 12y ago
  I've received a few emails from other people around the globe working on AR clones in their countries. We started a mailing list. Email me if you want to be in on it!
tome 12y ago
Patrick, if you're reading I have a question about Appointment Reminder. The website says this: > We do our level best to answer all emails within 24 hours. All questions are answered by our lead engineer. (Your business is too important to trust to a call center.) This sounds like it won't scale well. How do you plan to cope with support when your number of customers grows?
- Cass 12y ago
  Not Patrick, but I could see at least two good ways to scale this: - Make it a selling point for the higher tiers of accounts. "If you choose the Serious Business plan, all your questions will be answered by our lead engineer. (Your Serious Business is too important to trust to a call center.)" If you want to keep the selling point of competent and personal support for all customers: All questions are answered directly by our highly-trained customer support reps, Anna and Thomas [Picture of Anna and Thomas smiling winningly and looking nothing like That Anonymous Incompetent Dick I Get Every Time I Call The Phone Company.] In the rare cases where they can't solve your problem, they'll immediately refer you to our lead engineer."

391 points by JayNeely 12y ago

This may be a unpopular opinion, but this guy needs to cofound a company with someone else. He is one of the smartest dudes I know for optimization, but seems to have some of the most tame/boring ideas for 'startups' (if you can call them that). Bingo card creator? Appointment reminder? He needs a cofounder who compliments his skills. Mainly, good ideas and good sales skills. The bottom line is you can only optimize so much via a/b testing and whatnot from marginal ideas at best.

mooneater 12y ago
I feel his $ numbers are shockingly low given his obvious calibre.
- liquidise 12y ago
  I would expect that "publicly available plans" excludes enterprise offerings, where i would anticipate a considerable income given his past posts.
  - mooneater 12y ago
    That makes sense
  - unreal37 12y ago
    He said in that post that his enterprise revenue was "$50K < X < $100K".
- soundlab 12y ago
  Aside from a salesperson, I wonder if Patio11 has considered a dedicated content marketing person to build on that SEO and maintain some level of growth for both businesses? I get it that the goal is to not get buried with work and to achieve some level of passive income, but if you lose the SEO and sales are declining, what are you left with?
  - malyk 12y ago
    He's the guy that loudly banged the drum for content marketing with BCC. The basic gist is that he hired a teacher (iirc) to write a few pages of "Bingo Cards for <x>" every month to have a unique page for a lot of different things. Try typing "US Presidents Bingo" or something and you'll probably get BCC as the first result. Patrick outsourced that page to someone working part time. There area /a lot/ of those pages on BCC. Also, he made $4,000 an hour on BCC, so it seems like he's left with a lot! And even so, business come and go all the time. Doing nothing on BCC as it fades from $60k a year to $0 over the course of a decade while doing minimal work on it for the last half of that decade doesn't sound like a bad idea to me at all. Sounds like 'free' money.
- pnathan 12y ago
  He out and out said that money qua money wasn't his reason for optimizing at this point. (He could do more, but he doesn't have to, which is a great place to be).
aw3c2 12y ago
Obligatory: http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/09/08/the-fisherman-and-the-businessman/ http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/09/08/the-fisherman-and-the-... Happiness is different things for different people. Don't be condescending if you do not understand another person's way of life.
- sadpanda5 12y ago
  I never said he shouldnt be happy. I said if he intends to make lots of money, he needs to come up with better ideas and have better skills at being a salesman. This is the classic programmer dilemma. They built a great product and dont understand why its not winning in the market. Its VHS vs Beta Max. Sales is so important for this (as is having a good idea) - He seems to fail on both counts.
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    He specifically mentions that he isn't interested in making lots of money. Further, patio11 is one of the few programmers to have written extensively on how to become a good salesman. To say that he doesn't understand why it's not winning in the market is extremely condescending to someone who specifically writes a public post to address this.
  - jacalata 12y ago
    You didn't say anything of the sort. There was literally not a single conditional in your post.
w1ntermute 12y ago
A great post summarizing this point is The Genius and Tragedy of Patrick McKenzie, by Sebastian Marshall (username lionhearted on HN): http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-patrick-mckenzie http://sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-patri...
- crazypyro 12y ago
  I wouldn't describe it as a "great" post and furthermore, its pretty much outdated. He's making a lot more than $60,000 currently. Also he is running his own business/monetary life and that is something very few great entrepreneurs can still say these days. Hard to put a price on that, especially since he acknowledges he values the freedom of not being tied to investors in this very post.
  - sadpanda5 12y ago
    I know a fresh out of college Rails developer who makes more than Patrick. He is not making that much money for his skill set. Maybe hes a masochist, who knows. He obviously lacks the ability to see he is working on ridiculous ideas. The fact he cant get them funding alone is a huge deal, because I imagine anyone would fund the guy just because of who he is. But when it comes down to it, he must truly have no knowledge of scale.
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - JamesBarney 12y ago
      I think it's pretty obvious that if Patrick wanted to optimize for more money he definitely could have by focusing on consulting instead of AR. Also he owns Appointment Reminder and he didn't count the appreciation of that asset. Lets assume the total profit for AR went from 100k to 135k. Now lets make the assumption that it is valued at a 5x multiple, this means that he increased his net worth by 175k. Thus his total "profits" for the year would be under estimated by 175k.
ropman76 12y ago
I will take his tame/boring "starups" any day over a large percentage of the startups I see on TechCrunch and Pando (which I am starting to see many that have tame/boring ideas at scale anyway). His business is profitable, he doesn't need to worry about the problems that come along with accepting VC money, and can sleep in during rush hour (sold me right there LOL). Many startups are high risk with a high reward long shot with just as high failure rate. So I will take lame but profitable ideas to the bank anytime.
deleted 12y ago
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tptacek 12y ago
It's not an unpopular opinion; it's just concern trolling.
surfy 12y ago
I like his ideas. He needs someone to do the marketing and increase those numbers.
surfy 12y ago
I like his ideas. He needs someone to do the marketing and increase those numbers.
staunch 12y ago
patio11 should have teamed up with cperciva to work on Tarsnap years ago. They still should. They'd make a billion for sure.
- wglb 12y ago
  Take a look at this: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/ 'cperciva likes how the business is.
krapp 12y ago
On the other hand, "boring" ideas stick around longer. Who's going to react negatively to a bingo card creator? Who doesn't need to be reminded of appointments? These are not sexy, world-changing, paradigm shifting ideas but they can be stable money makers.
robryan 12y ago
Is appointment reminder really a small market/ boring idea? I think there is massive potential there. Granted I think it needs a sales team to really get at a lot of the market.
Dewie 12y ago
I guess you have to excuse him for not pursuing the particular status jockeying of nerds, namely working on the absolute most hard, cutting edge and exciting problems/domains.

mooneater 12y ago

I am a huge fan of yours patio11, you have gifted us so much useful knowledge. How do we ever repay you? =)

patio11 12y ago
Tell me what advice worked or didn't work when you implement it in your own business. It makes me happier than anything else, businesswise.
- ufmace 12y ago
  I used your salary negotiation piece, among other sources, to negotiate a ~15% boost in my offer at the company I started at about a year ago. Most money I ever made from a 3-sentence email and a 5-minute phone call.
  - patio11 12y ago
    High five.
  - austinsharp 12y ago
    I too benefited greatly from the negotiation piece (got the signing bonus from the offer I didn't want from the company with the offer where I did want to work) and it's become part of my standard package of advice and resources for friends looking for software jobs. Thank you!!
  - NamTaf 12y ago
    It was also the first thing I looked up when negotiating on my position I start next month. I've secured a 10% raise upfront, with a further 15% + access to a max. 25% yearly bonus arranged once I get a qualification in the first quarter of the new year. It took a little bit to map the software eng. assumptions to a mech eng. role such as my own (especially given the market is terrible for me right now where I am) but it paid off in dividends for me. So thank you so much!
- Silhouette 12y ago

saturdayplace 12y ago

> The only time in recent memory I used it myself was when a Redditor asked for anti-Bitcoin bingo cards, a request which I am unquestionably the best qualified person in the world to answer.) Apropos of nothing, it seems that if you're interested in piquing the interest of someone busy, discovering the venn diagram for which they're one of a small population in the intersection might be the way to go. Or, it might just be really creepy.

fdsary 12y ago

Congrats on the kid & move to 中目黒！

adregan 12y ago
Nakameguro is a great area, but I'll bet those rents really do sting. I've always been partial to Nakano, Koenji, and Kichijoji. I'll always be a Chuo liner in my heart.

wallflower 12y ago

> Ruriko and I were blessed by the birth of our daughter, Lillian. Congratulations patio11!

trcollinson 12y ago
I really hate to "me too!" on comments. But I have followed a lot of what patio11 says on HN (I've gone through his comment history even, to learn quite a bit!) and I am a fan. Thank you for all of your information and congratulations to you and your wife on having Lillian! Many happy returns.

applecore 12y ago

Why is Appointment Reminder on a .org top-level domain?

saturdayplace 12y ago
SEO. It's a an exact match for the search term he was gunning for, and the .com wasn't available but the .org was. Exact-match domains get hit with the +15 wand of visibility in search results, and the whole .com vs .org distinction isn't as black/white as it used to be.
- itsprofitbaron 12y ago
  There was an EMD (Exact Match Domain) update in September 2012 to fix this.
  - unreal37 12y ago
    That's a myth. It "reduced" the bonus, but the bonus clearly still exists. But I love that others think that domain name is no longer relevant for SEO. Keep thinking that. :)
    - shostack 12y ago
      It's reduced to the point of not being worth insane prices for EMDs. The majority of his ranking is likely due to his backlink profile and relevant content vs. the domain. I'm sure it doesn't hurt things though.
      - ericd 12y ago
        Yeah, having the name of the company be the same as the top-level keywords makes it so a huge percentage of the backlinks have the anchor text he wants.
      - unreal37 12y ago
        Can't speak to "insane prices". But Patrick got AppointmentReminder.org for $8. He classifies it as the best ROI he's ever made. "cars.com" is still the #1 result for searching "cars". And "business.com" is still on page 1 for searching "business". The death of the EMD has been greatly exaggerated, IMHO.

unreal37 12y ago

I bet it must be an amazing relief to be able to talk specifics of AR, after so long of having to be quiet about the details. Congrats on your success, Patrick.

patio11 12y ago
It is, oddly enough. Partly it's that -- I love talking about things and having AR be the exception made me feel phony. (That's irrational, but there you go.) Partly, in recent I finally feel like I know what I want from having that business in the portfolio and I have some idea of where it goes from here. Partly that frees me up to think "OK, aside from fatherhood, what happens next?"
- unreal37 12y ago
  I totally get that. Not odd at all.

simonswords82 12y ago

Hey @patio11, hopefully you'll lurk a bit later... Congrats on the kid! Balancing a newborn and any amount of business is no joke (source: I have two startups, a software company and an 18 month old). I wanted to ask about this: > To build out that software and get the team spun up, I had to actually sit down and document our business processes I'd love to here a bit more about how you went about that. You've got a great approach to documenting your thoughts and I'm sure I could learn a thing or two. I'm scaling our app http://www.staffsquared.com http://www.staffsquared.com in 2015 and working hard to share knowledge across our growing team. Keep up the great work!

jcr 12y ago
You may have missed it, but Patrick talked about it earlier this month. https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/sales_automation https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/sales_aut... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8773472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8773472

chrisan 12y ago

Thank you for sharing your story > I’m taking my own advice to charge more, and re-aligning those numbers with actual customer behavior rather than the numbers I guessed four years ago. How do people normally handle this? 1) Take it or leave it price hike 2) Give a X month grace period before new price 3) Grandfathered in and price only changes if they need to upgrade 4) ??

unreal37 12y ago
Actually, I'm always disappointed to see useful software priced out of the reach of small businesses - and low priced plans disappear in 1-3 years after a cool tool launches. Visual Website Optimizer, Hubspot, Leadpages, etc all get priced out of the reach of people making less than $10K per month online because its more profitable to go after lawyers and accountants.
- siddharthdeswal 12y ago
  Visual Website Optimizer just introduced a $9 plan (I work there). I agree with your point in general, but the truth is most SaaS tools make far more profit when serving bigger customers.
  - unreal37 12y ago
    I didn't know that, and I'm happy to hear that. And I agree that it's more profitable to serve the bigger customers, but it's a shame nonetheless that I see things that I would love to try to use myself, and would pay for, just not worth $99 a month to me.
- ssharp 12y ago
  Optimizely just changed their pricing and only have free and enterprise tiers now. Their free tier is much nicer than you'd expect, as well.
- robryan 12y ago
  I think this has a lot to do with the 'do things that don't scale early on' mantra. Early on when these companies need to get some traction they will be more than happy to support the smaller customers. Later when they need to make many hires to support customers it is much better value to chase those bigger customers. That is assuming there is significant support cost.

porter 12y ago

Hey Patrick, thanks so much for your honesty in all of this. It's never easy talking about things that embarrass us. Not to mention in public. You'll probably get some haters, but just know that I look forward to your annual updates and they have encouraged me to quit my job and start my own software business too. This has been one of the best decisions of my life. I'm sure there are many more here who can say the same thing. So, to you good sir, thank you.

eo3x0 12y ago
I'm also very impressed with Patrick's ability to disassociate business success and failure from his personal success and failure. What I mean: if something I worked on "fell off a cliff" I'd be a lot more panicky and less likely to step back and say "that's ok" as he did in his post. I'd probably take it as a personal failure rather than rationalizing it as a matter of time investment trade offs. Lesson to learn: it's okay to let some things decay so that attention and focus can be paid to the right things.
- ericd 12y ago
  Yeah, I've let projects die off in this fashion, but I still feel a pang of regret when I think about them and all the time I sank into them. It always feels like maybe I should have sold them off/given them away so that someone else could have helped them reach their potential. Then again, BCC seems to have reached much higher heights than I would have thought its potential was, so maybe it's more of a "Mission Accomplished" there.

gknoy 12y ago

[H]aving numbers publicly available would complicate [taking investment money in the future]. I don't understand why having publicly available numbers would complicate getting investment in the future. Would someone be gracious enough to explain that to me as if I have no knowledge (true in this case)?

hayksaakian 12y ago
Information is leverage in any negotiation. Patrick basically has all his cards on the table, and can't give much more than that
- clarky07 12y ago
  while true, is there someone in venture capital that isn't getting the numbers contained in this post before giving people money? revenue, profit, expenses, etc seems pretty basic. I can't imagine investing in a company without asking, hey, how much money did you make last year?
NhanH 12y ago
I can't speak for patio11, but basically, having publicly available numbers reduce your choice: if it wasn't available, you can give it out as you want to. There is no choice to take the number back

ThomPete 12y ago

You can burn or you can last, but you can't do both. Patrick is a wonderful example of a person who takes the middle road and actually put quite a lot of effort into making sure he stays there rather than letting himself be sucked in by the grow like crazy game or the never launch anything game. He is happy, he is not trying to be happy. That alone is something most people will never experience and measured in that he is a billionaire.

talltofu 12y ago
'or the never launch anything game' I just realized that I am a part of this :(
- deleted 12y ago
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krschultz 12y ago

Glad to hear Patrick is using Bench, those guys are awesome.

ian_crosby 12y ago
Thanks Kevin <3

jakobegger 12y ago

Thanks for being so open with your feelings. I always find it hard to talk about my own feelings, and it's great to hear how you are struggling with and overcoming the pitfalls of self-employment. Your open sharing of actual revenue numbers is invaluable. The tech press only loves to talk about all those billion dollar companies. But your blog posts put that into perspective, giving us a glimpse of how much money a small business can realistically make without shooting for the startup lottery.

davidw 12y ago

> I work mostly on what I want to work on, take a day off whenever I feel like it, and optimize the business for quality of life rather than for any particular growth or financial targets. There was some thread here where patio11 kind of snickered when someone called his business a "huge success"; probably because he knows a bunch of people that earn one or more magnitudes more money. But the above quote probably sums up "fantastic success" for me, and I think, a whole lot of the world.

deleted 12y ago
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derefr 12y ago
Sure, but then "fantastic success" can be relative to cost of living, too. You can earn an order of magnitude less and still be experiencing "fantastic success" if you happen to live in e.g. Cambodia.
- count 12y ago
  Given that he lives in Tokyo, which has one of the highest costs of living on the planet, I guess that's an important point as to HOW fantastic his success has been :)
  - mc32 12y ago
    I think he's mentioned Nagoya pref, which is kinda countrysideish and less expensive to live in. (and also houses can be of better build.)
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - csa 12y ago
      He moved to Tokyo earlier this year. This is mentioned in his post. For example: "Appointment Reminder’s key stat of interest is monthly recurring revenue on our publicly available plans, since this is the most predictable revenue in any of our businesses and thus lets me make consequential decisions like “Move the family to Tokyo, where rents are 5X what they were in Ogaki” (that happened, more later” or “Bring on help” (that also happened, more later)."

bbcbasic 12y ago

Patrick, Have you thought of launching an affiliate program for the BCC ? You can connect on forums like WarriorForum and find good affiliates. They will love that you have a proven product. Then give them 50-75%. Some will advertise on their existing sites, to their lists and may even pay for advertising. You take no risk and may get a lot for sales. Another option is Clickbank where affiliates may find you. There are alternatives like JVZoo, DigiResults etc. You could hire someone part time to do the customer support and bugfixes. In short you could keep BCC going nicely with very little effort on your part. And then after a few months, you have a low maintenance business that you can sell, rather than something that will slowly die. I know it may not seem worth your time, as you have bigger fish to fry. However all of this could be done in a couple of days, and maybe an hour a month to maintain. You may be able to sell it for $100k or more once it is in good shape again.

shostack 12y ago
I think one of the considerations here is what degree of professionalism he wishes to portray with this. The info products sold on sites like WF and such are what I'd lump into the "guru" category, and are oftentimes just lots of fluff or something the writer paid someone off Odesk to write for them. Overall, they don't come off as terribly professional and can quite readily be identified as living within the "Get rich quick" bucket. Affiliates can be helpful, but I'd be really careful about picking ones that won't damage the brand image and credibility he's built for himself.
- curiously 12y ago
  I agree with this. Those type of folks may not be the best representation nor the most successful. If you browse WF you will get a sense of the demographic.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  Of course, you shouldn't let anyone be an affiliate. I think with JVZoo and Digiresults you get to approve or disapprove affiliates. You could ask the potential affiliate to fill in a form with some information about their site, how they will promote before you accept them in. You can also build relationships on the forum, so you know who can be trusted with your brand. There are plenty of OK marketers, who may have a popular website on there. But you are right there are plenty of get-rich-quick types you have to filter through. I think the affiliate idea has merit even if you don't use the Warriorforum. You could for example run your own affiliate program using a script, and then contact sites you like directly.

mattste 12y ago

As a young software developer interested in what happens on the business side of things, this was a fantastic read. Thanks Patrick.

shostack 12y ago

Re: your SEO comment: "AR is virtually guaranteed to be a mortal lock on the query [appointment reminder] due to the combination of the exact match domain bonus and the fact that most links to it naturally cite the name of the company." Wasn't that largely made irrelevant a while back? I'd be willing to bet the majority of your relevancy comes from the backlinks and content on their pages vs. your exact match domain. Hopefully you're not building a link profile focusing on that link text as there have been reports of people getting dinged for that.

AznHisoka 12y ago
No, he's 100% correct because in his case the keyword is the same as his brand name. And when you search for a brand, Google shows you the brand homepage 99.9% of the time. In his case, his brand is also highly relevant to the term 'appointment reminder', which pretty much locks up the #1 spot for that term.
- the_rosentotter 12y ago
  A shame the website is so utterly horrible though. Sorry, but it's true. Huge walls of text, stock MS Office clipart, "news" a year and a half old. It looks amateurish and smells of abandonware.
  - noahc 12y ago
    And your point exactly? He already knows it could be much better, obviously. It is his business after all. And yet despite your finely tuned ability to detect amateurish abandonware he managed to bring in ~$75,000 revenue in on public plans, and if I had to take a guess anywhere between 1x - 1.5x in non-public plans. As a general rule, we shouldn't use the obvious to tear someone down.
- shostack 12y ago
  But that's what a ton of other site who were dinged were doing. They'd buy up EMDs, slap a company name on it where "brand name = EMD" and then drive backlinks to it with the brand name/EMD in the link text. Many of them dropped quite a bit when this rolled out in 2012. What would make his case different from theirs other than his backlink profile?

curiously 12y ago

Is it better to have a low churn rate per month with lower MRR or a higher churn rate with higher MRR ? Can you counter churn rate by acquiring new customers?

sunir 12y ago
Low churn rate is better. The longer you have a customer relationship the longer they think about you. You have an opportunity to sell them more value as you develop it and get them to refer you more customers.

staunch 12y ago

Congrats on the baby!

dennisgorelik 12y ago

> Ruriko ... does not love Ogaki ... and wanted a change. Did she consider US cities? Tokyo is very expensive and an unusual choice to move into for family with a child. Any US city would put you in a better touch with your business and would be less expensive than Tokyo.

paulsutter 12y ago
Tokyo is a wonderful place to live, and I can assure you there is nothing unusual about families with children in Tokyo. Life is about making choices.
- dennisgorelik 12y ago
  What's wonderful about Tokyo? 5x price increase, small apartments (instead of houses), higher babysitter costs -- these are all downsides. What is better in Tokyo than in, say, Austin, TX?
  - kasey_junk 12y ago
    Access to family?
    - dennisgorelik 12y ago
      Patrick's family is in the US. But fine, let's consider just Ruriko's family: they are mostly in Ogaki, not in Tokyo. I understand that Tokyo has some advantages (any city in the world would have some advantages), but overall it seems to be a sub-optimal choice.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - Kliment 12y ago
        It's not your choice to make, nor mine. Virtually every part of my family (with one exception) lives in a place I dislike and would not live in. Let people live where they're happiest, rather than trying to impose your criteria upon them.

toumhi 12y ago

I completely understand for your neglect of Appointment Reminder. I've also had my share of projects I'd start but lose interest in it because, well, I was not consumed by the problem I was solving. So during the years I worked sequentially (or sometimes at the same time) on a gift certificate template gallery, a travel insurance comparator, a body-mass-index calculator website, a file sharing solution for businesses targeted at the french market. The reasoning behind all these projects was to make "passive income". And by running multiple websites I would make a nice income from them all combined. After developing and marketing the last of these projects (file sharing one, post-mortem here: http://www.sparklewise.com/post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-with-my-first-online-product/ http://www.sparklewise.com/post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-wit... ) I realized that the most important thing is not to have a "good idea" but to work on a problem you want to solve and with people you can relate to or at least that you enjoy working with. That's why I now focus on serving SaaS businesses, because that's actually something I care about and will likely care about for years to come. Thanks for all the transparency Patrick and for setting an example for the rest of the HN crowd. And good luck with the fatherhood :-)

sogen 12y ago

Is there a way to reach patio11? I emailed him while taking his course but never got a response.

patio11 12y ago
Email is generally the best way to get in touch with me. Twitter works as an escalation method. In general, while I try to response to everyone who emails about stuff I write for free on the Internet, it can get bumped from the priority list by a lot of things, including (in the instant case) being at home with a baby.
- sogen 12y ago
  thanks, escalating!

billsossoon 12y ago

The comment about BCC being Hello World with a random number generator is amusing, but the fact that you were able to generate profit from a simple web app is really a testament to your marketing and business skill.

daxelrod 12y ago

Bravo for candidly writing about your failures as well as your successes. I don't think a lot of us would have the guts to write publicly about times that we didn't measure up the way you have; but your doing so is wonderfully instructive. Congratulations on fatherhood!

JunkDNA 12y ago

This might be one of my most favorite posts of Patrick's ever. It's often so much easier to start something new than it is to sustain something old. Hanging around HN too long makes you an addict of "new". Guess what: growing and sustaining a business for the long haul is hard, even for patio11.

Permit 12y ago

>Most of our customers are on the Professional plan, which annoys the heck out of me, but it’s my fault. Since I was thinking personal services, where 100 appointments a month barely sustains a sole practitioner (it implies $3k to $8k gross revenue), I thought any sizable business would be forced to pay more meaningful amounts of money. It turns out that you can run a nice boutique law office with sales in the high seven figures or an architectural consultancy with millions in revenue on less than 100 appointments a month. Believe me, I know several examples. If you could go back in time how would you change the pricing model here? Would you remove the professional plan altogether? How could your pricing model differentiate between the small personal services with < 100 appointments/month and the law firms with < 100 appointments/month?

Permit 12y ago

xzlzx 12y ago

"...a lot of folks have wanted me to roll the dice on a funded startup with big put-a-dent-in-the-universe ambitions. At times, I wanted to want that for myself, but for the moment I was content to keep running my business in the traditional fashion. I work mostly on what I want to work on, take a day off whenever I feel like it, and optimize the business for quality of life rather than for any particular growth or financial targets." We share the same viewpoint. Well said.

manto 12y ago

Patrick's writing serves as a great supplement to PG's essays: real world analysis of "slower" growth software businesses. For engineers interested in alternate models of creating a company, these annual write ups help one develop an outline for the financial, business, and engineering lifestyle required to get something off the ground. Thanks Patrick, after working at VC backed startups, these types of posts actually encouraged me to go out on my own!

UtahDave 12y ago

My favorite quote from Patrick's post: "The slip date shipped repeatedly."

mherrmann 12y ago

I have been working on an AR clone in Austria since mid September (https://www.terminerinnerung.org https://www.terminerinnerung.org). I focus on getting enterprise customers. My website is hardly visited (so far). I got my first two customers by simply walking into their offices and asking whether they'd be interested. I asked them to pay me for 12 months in advance, so I have earned 5368€ (6565 US$) since I started. I'm hoping that I will earn this again in 2016, when it comes to renew the contract for these first two clients. My approach is more high-touch - I don't rely on people searching for "Terminerinnerung" ("Appointment reminder") and then coming to my website. I think most doctors don't do that. I go out and talk to them. I also by default offer to develop integrations into the customer's existing appointment reminder system - because the majority (~66%) of my potential customers here already have some computer system. This means reverse engineering the customer's existing system to be able to continuously export its data. I did this successfully for one of my customers (it was a Java/MySQL application). The other customer I developed a web calendar for. I have now completed the development for my first two customers (I hadn't completed development when I sold the service to them. I just pretended I had, to make the sale). At the beginning of next year I'll start to acquire more (enterprise) customers. I'm happy to talk about this via email if anybody's interested. My address is [my first name]@[my last name].io (Michael Herrmann).

dietervds 12y ago
I'm doing the same for Belgium actually, and possibly The Netherlands, in time. (http://afspraakherinnering.be http://afspraakherinnering.be) It's in it's early stages. I'm waiting to e-mail Patrick when I can say "Thanks to you I now have >500€ MRR" :-) I sent you an e-mail to talk about it some more and share experiences! Always great to learn of similar endeavours.
- mherrmann 12y ago
  I already replied to your email :-) A few other people also got in touch. Cool! :-)
mherrmann 12y ago
I've received a few emails from other people around the globe working on AR clones in their countries. We started a mailing list. Email me if you want to be in on it!

tome 12y ago

Patrick, if you're reading I have a question about Appointment Reminder. The website says this: > We do our level best to answer all emails within 24 hours. All questions are answered by our lead engineer. (Your business is too important to trust to a call center.) This sounds like it won't scale well. How do you plan to cope with support when your number of customers grows?

Cass 12y ago
Not Patrick, but I could see at least two good ways to scale this: - Make it a selling point for the higher tiers of accounts. "If you choose the Serious Business plan, all your questions will be answered by our lead engineer. (Your Serious Business is too important to trust to a call center.)" If you want to keep the selling point of competent and personal support for all customers: All questions are answered directly by our highly-trained customer support reps, Anna and Thomas [Picture of Anna and Thomas smiling winningly and looking nothing like That Anonymous Incompetent Dick I Get Every Time I Call The Phone Company.] In the rare cases where they can't solve your problem, they'll immediately refer you to our lead engineer."