Patrick McKenzie (patio11)'s Mixergy Interview | Hacker News Reader

Patrick McKenzie (patio11)'s Mixergy Interview

mixergy.com

Some day, Patrick is going to move back to Chicago (we're the best city in the country, after all) and he's going to be doing business with people here, and he's going hear a lot of, "oh, you're that bingo guy the big crazy security guy won't stop babbling about!". I'm working hard to make that happen for him.

I can't remember the context, but in the earlier version of this interview that we had to scrub due to technical issues, I mentioned "I don't intend on being 'the bingo guy' for forever." I have to knuckle down on creating the next thing though -- crikey, where did April go.

I fully appreciate that you're going to move on, but you should appreciate what an awesome calling card "bingo guy" is.

I'm honored, humbled, and (once in a while) a wee bit scared of it.

Don't worry, I am sure your next initiative will be even more successful and you will be called the "whatever-you-choose-to-do" guy.

I wouldn't mind being called the bingo guy

Especially if you like wearing gold chains and/or cowboy hats.

I've been trying very hard for the last decade to stop being 'that webcam guy' but so far without success.

Diversification is a lot harder than it seems!

Best of luck, I'll be following your adventures closely, maybe I can learn from you where I'm going wrong, one very big selfish reason why I hope that you will succeed ;)

In Sydney, an small marketing firm is getting sick of the bingo guy.

I teach kindergarten and my solution to the Bingo Card Making Problem is to write the words on the board (at which time we talk about the definition, use them in sentences, etc.), then I hand out paper and have each student draw the grid and write the words down randomly (gets them comfortable with learning spelling and writing). That all takes about 5 minutes. But your solution works, too.

If you guys have any questions, fire away.

I saw you mention http://whichtestwon.com on a different interview you did. I spent literally the whole day going through it and picking it apart. I know you frequent HN, BoS, and SeoMOZ. Do you have any other websites you'd like to share?

You're probably thinking SEOBook (where I am a moderator), although SEOMoz's blog is great and responsible for about half of my "book learning" on SEO. (SEOBook is the other half.)

Most of the HN crowd probably already knows about most stuff I read, considering y'all introduce me to so much of it. Nothing really jumps out aside from those sites. Besides, at the end of the day I actually have to do stuff rather than just reading and commenting about it. :)

Oh, one thing: Slideshare. If you get interested in any sort of technical topic, and you don't have infinite budget to attend conferences where people drop their secrets about it, go to Slideshare and view the slides instead. I've learned so much there is is incredible: everything the YSlow guys have said about front-end performance is solid gold, the recent Startup Lessons Learned conference was a veritable bonanza of good information (expect me to steal more ideas from it), etc etc etc.

If you like Slideshare, you'll like Note and Point even more. It's Slideshare, but curated to keep just the best. | http://noteandpoint.com/

Note and Point seems like more of a design gallery than a place to find good content. Having to download a PDF to view a presentation is especially irritating.

There is also http://abtests.com/ which is an interesting take. Though they limit to two versions and don't offer that many insights.

Plus, if you are particularly interested in A/B testing case studies, we have A/B IdeaFox: a search engine for case studies - http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ideafox.php

Sorry about the video. A new editor started working with me this week and we're working out the kinks.

My takeaway:

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ is waaay better than Google Website Optimizer.

Can anyone besides pat verify?

shameless plug: I launched a beta for my startup a few days ago, http://press9formoreoptions.com

It's an A/B testing web app for developers and designers. Developer API, real time data, and an HTML/CSS editing test designer built because GWO is pretty lacking.

Me, the founder :)

Here are the testimonials if you need more validation: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/testimonials.php

Two of my favorite people on the web in one place!

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