> 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.
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.
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 :)
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)."
For the most part, I hear you on that. However, if you start a biz that when fully optimized can gross $10MM or $100MM a year, but because one is focused on Q of L issues, that biz only grosses $1MM a year, I think that's selfish behavior and obviously detrimental to one's employees and/or shareholders.
Of course, the downvote. Any critique, no matter how thoughtful or balanced, of any of the HN sacred cows (patio11 in this case) will guarantee you downvotes.
To respond to your original comment, you're right if you have external shareholders. If you don't, it's pretty much up to you. Your employees aren't owed a maximum possible amount of growth either. It's a free market - they can stay or leave.
Fair enough, but in all seriousness it really should be a site requirement for either the downvoter to identify themselves, or post a note as to why they are downvoting. The process is just too opaque.
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.
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.
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.
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-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 :-)
I have been working on an AR clone in Austria since mid September (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).
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
There's an easy answer in most cases: pre-announce the coming price increase and say "Anyone who signs up before then gets grandfathered in at that level for life." Boosts signups temporarily, avoids any blowback to customers who supported you early on, and has virtually no long-term impact to your pricing structure since, to a first approximation, as time approaches infinity all revenue for a SaaS company comes from people who are not currently customers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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!!
In case it's of any interest/satisfaction, I appreciate your posts not just for the insights and data you generously share, but also for giving me something I can link to for the ninety-something percent of people I work with who could benefit from some of the same ideas but don't hang out on sites like HN themselves.
For what it's worth; the main component of your success I can't figure out how to replicate is ranking for your keyword.
From my perspective your business model seems to be:
1. Pick a niche and figure out keywords for that niche.
2. Perform the Magic SEO Incantation to rank high in Google.
3. Sell well to the visitors that gets you.
I can do 1 and 3 fairly well; partially based on your talks/information. Number 2 still seems like sheer black magic to me though...
This is rather different for Bingo Card Creator and Appointment Reminder. For BCC, see the numerous articles on my www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ page about content creation/SEO. It's fairly straightforward -- nobody else on the Internet wants to rank for [owls of east asia bingo cards], I do, I win by default.
For AR, the entirety of the magic incantation is a) getting a small handful of links to it and b) exact match domain name for [appointment reminder]. I'm literally embarrassed that this is the only thing I've done. I mean, I knew it would work, and it did work, but I have always felt like I should be doing substantially more and more complicated marketing.
Your insights on software development and pricing have directly influenced how I run a sports science and training company. I think your work is directly applicable to many other industries, because duh, it's just entrepreneurship done right.
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.
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 in 2015 and working hard to share knowledge across our growing team.
[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)?
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
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?
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
I made my first money online in the SEO/IM scene at Wickedfire/Digitalpoint/Sitepoint/etc. Those guys are really good at what they do.
It's funny to hear you call the WaFo products "guru" here on HN (I would agree they are), because HN itself is subject to the same kind of guru-bullshit. There are multiple people on HN who make money selling info products purely to the HN crowd. I would classify them as "guru" as well. I enjoy watching it play out, because as HN builds as a community, it seems a lot of trends are evolving in the same way the IM community did. Someone makes money, makes a blogpost, gains a following, writes an ebook, makes more money. I would call that "guru", but people on HN pay for it. I will say, however, that the content the "gurus" on HN produce is far better than 99% of the shit coming out of WaFo.
Relatedly, it's amazing how quickly people on HN will dismiss the SEO and affiliate marketing industry. It's a massive market. The "marketplace" forums on WF, WaFo, and BHW process five figures of transactions per day. That's mostly SEO services, some spammy, some not. Outside of that, there are multiple affiliates on those forums doing six figure daily revenues. The AM industry as a whole is ~6billion annually.
Despite all the money in SEO/AM, commenters on HN are quick to degrade the industry as spammy/blackhat/assholes/whatever, and yet most of those people are making more on their own than anyone here. It's quite funny, honestly.
I agree with many of your points, and have recognized the same pattern here before in terms of info products like you mentioned. Can spot those a mile away now.
The distinguishing factor is that a large % of the businesses here attempt to really add tangible value, vs. just selling a dream that they hope some newbie suckers buy into.
Again, quality over quantity. For example, Mike Hartl sells an info product. It also happens to be the definitive bible on Ruby on Rails and has helped numerous people start learning the language, including getting jobs as developers. Contrast that with some random person's "WaFo Special" and I think the difference is pretty stark.
I'd further add that I'm not dismissing SEO at all. I think it is quite important under the "Content" umbrella, but trying to game it is not sustainable and a waste of resources in the big picture. These days it is about creating linkable, high-density/value content, and then getting relevant backlinks for it. That has never really changed in the SEO space. A lot of the random attempts at gaming the signals you send search engines has.
The distinguishing difference between the crowds seems to stem from the differing skillsets. WaFo has more non-programmers than HN, and consequently differs in market dynamics from HN.
"Gurus" on HN, considered in a context parallel to that of WaFo, enjoy the privilege of writing actionable content because most readers can program, and therefore can take a different route to profit from non-programmers. Thus books from HN authors can simultaneously promote profit and add value, unlike those from WaFo authors, which create a bullshit-cycle by selling things to each other. Then again, maybe that's just good business...
>, that the content the "gurus" on HN produce is far better than 99% of the shit coming out of WaFo.
That makes quite the difference though. It's like comparing Jon's consulting thread to McKinsey or Boston Consulting.
>Relatedly, it's amazing how quickly people on HN will dismiss the SEO and affiliate marketing industry.
The opposite is also quite amazing too. WF is full of people who think they are running "real business", while making the most childish (and arrogant) statements and opinions.
Also, out of those $6bn, majority is incremental sales for legit operations (mostly ecommerce, some financial services) through CJ, SaS, Zanox. Pills and bizops through Maxbounty/Neverblue are quite small in total numbers, not to mention pretty dissatisfying to run.
My point is, it's not that much money. The holy grail "10k/day CEO" is just 3.6M/year. I'm sorry but this looks more like event budget than total revenue. What makes it particularly unappealing is the complete lack of predictability. I recognize your username from WF, so I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
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.
Definitely agree. We use affiliates in our business but they are all PREVIOUS CUSTOMERS who are very happy with the product. Incentivizing evangelism from people who are already pleased with your content/product is an incredibly valuable proposition for your business.
If you do it with your current customers, you can also often exchange account credit for referrals. If you toss on a discount for the person they refer, customers love it as it lets them hook their friends and family up with a discount on a service they love.
These internal referral programs are how Dropbox and many other companies have kicked off great acquisition campaigns.
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.
"...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."
It wasn’t the world’s most inspired naming choice, but the $8.95 I paid for the domain name is probably the best ROI of anything I’ve ever bought. (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. The fact that it is a .org is irrelevant, except in that the .org was $8.95 and the company which owned the .com wanted $30,000 for it.)
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's the value of never having another farcical performance review?
What's the value of being able to devote tomorrow to reading a Phyiscs (or whatever) book if you don't feel like going in to work? Or going out to a movie?
What's the value of being able to pick your kid up from daycare no-hassle when they run a fever?
What's the value of never ever having to dress some way you don't want to, to travel at times that annoy you, etc.?
When you're an employee, or a tightly-scheduled professional, or in a high-velocity startup, you give up all of these things. Sometimes it's worth it, but often it's not.
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.
This is an important point. You cannot directly compare salary to business income. The day you quit your $150,000/year dev job is the day you income hits zero. Compare that to BCC that he effectively quit four years ago.
2007 $6,200 / 100 hours / $60/hour
2008 $10,700 / ?? hours /
2009 $18,525 / 130 hours / $125~$150/hour
2010 $25,904 / 115 hours / $200~250/hour
2011 $25,000 / 35 hours / $700/hour
2012 $38,598 / 38 hours / $1,000/hour
2013 $23,000 / 23 hours / $1,000/hour
2014 $20,000 / 5 hours / $4,000/hour
Rough total is $170,000 from 550 hours of effort. Lets assume it ticks over for a few more years. You've basically earnt quarter of a million from equivalent of 3 or 4 months effort.
He still has to be very focus on projects. And any project, however fun it starts to be, will become less exciting over time. In the end, it feels just like work.
That said, the freedom to choose whatever city you like to live in, is priceless.
Tokyo is expensive, but its the best city to raise kids in that I have ever seen.
Its high density and superb transportation mean you don't need a car -- go almost everywhere with your kids by walking, bicycle, or extremely frequent convenient train. Riding in the car sucks for kids (and adults, IMO).
There is access to all kinds of world-class health care, and all of it is free for your kids.
Tons of great educational institutions from the best universities down to preschool (and although the preschools can take some time to get into due to capacity, they are by and large terrific).
Great food of virtually every variety except Mexican. Most of Tokyo is extremely clean, safe and crime-free. Multiple always-open industry-redefining convenience stores, same-day Amazon prime deliveries, synchronous 1Gbps fiber optic Internet connections for $50 a month, a regular taxi system that is better than the Uber you always hear Americans raving about, one-hour cold beer delivery... in other words, the kind of fundamental lifestyle convenience level that is good when you are single, but becomes way more important once you have kids.
Source: I live in Tokyo with my wife, 2-year-old, and 2-month-old.
Well, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say the main factor is the high cost of living, especially rent/mortgage expense. I have several friends who moved out of Tokyo to have kids for financial reasons (but usually not without some regret).
Tokyo is pretty awesome, but you do have to be able to afford it. I would assume it's a lot more expensive to live here than Austin, TX, but I know it is cheaper (and IMO way better for raising kids) than say, San Francisco.
It is instructive to think about those 'other things' -- because each person will value those in different ways.
To some people, a smaller house is a good tradeoff if it comes with abundance of extremely awesome restaurants, shopping, and riverside parks nearby. For others, having a big personal space is more important.
Some people get a lot of satisfaction from having a Porsche or (more likely, with kids) a well-appointed Audi Q7. I think the best car is not having a car at all (at least until the robo-cars arrive) -- but to me that means public transit + bicycle is literally so good that I can get where I am going faster than I could with a car. The only cities I have lived in where that is true are Tokyo and Amsterdam.
So yeah, depending on what you value most, you might be better off in Tokyo even on $120k. But if you want the car and big personal space, then probably not.
In Tokyo, Children ride the subway alone to school with no worries at all. Bicycles are left unlocked. Central Tokyo has more Michelin restaurants than Paris, London, and New York put together.
Let me know when you visit Tokyo. I'd be happy to show you around. Any HN user is welcome to ask me for Tokyo advice.
Safety/crime, international connectivity, climate/sunshine, quality of architecture, public transportation, tolerance, environmental issues and access to nature, urban design, business conditions, pro-active policy developments and medical care.
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.
I you think I want Patrick to do what I want him to do -- that is NOT the case.
My goal here is to disassemble Patrick's choice, learn from it whatever I can, try to make a prediction about the effect of that move on his life, see what Patrick thinks about the move to Tokyo 1-3 years later and learn again.
So far I think the move would have slightly negative impact, mostly because increased cost of living. That would force Patrick to deviate from his goals more, do more enterprise consulting (as opposing to product development) and add more stress to his life.
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.