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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks in advance guys. I mean this sincerely: I probably couldn't have done it without you.

I don't generally ask for things on HN, but just this once: y'all know that links my website gets gives me more ability to rank for search terms of importance to me. If I've said something which helped you or you otherwise want to go give me a Christmas present, please take a few minutes out of your day, go to your blog, and write up a few sentences with a link to the front page. I'd really, really appreciate it.

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Hey Patrick,

Congratulations on having another 'leg' under your business, I've placed a homepage link on ww.com for you. I had to step back and check because it's a .org and not a .com, aren't you concerned you'll end up sending a bunch of people to that placeholder ? (they got at least one visitor more today than they should have....)

I've used 'never miss another appointment' as the link text, if you want another one let me know. And what was that again about there not being a scalable way to build links, it seems you may have found one ;)

Maybe structurally add the .org to the name to differentiate it from the .com ? If you call it just 'appointmentreminder' I think there will be some confusion.

I agree about reinforcing the mental branding of .org, because people are really dot com brainwashed. This could even become a distinguished part of mental recall: What was that reminder site again? Oh yeah, AppointmentReminder.ORG! The only drawback of that is if he does eventually acquire appointmentreminder.com, which appears to be held by domain name investment company domainnamesales.com.

Any anchor text you would particularly like people to use? I do quite a bit with SEO, and imagine you want to avoid too many "over here" anchors!

His title is "Appointment Reminder | Phone, Text Message / SMS, and Email Reminders", but knowing Patrick, he's probably going to start "Hair Dresser Appointment Reminders", "Massage Appointment Reminders", "Yoga Class Appointment Reminders" really soon.

You're directionally accurate. I will probably have something to show off on that front in January or February.

This looks great Patrick. I've been consistently impressed whenever I read your HN input; I just sent a tweet promoting Appointment Reminders.

Hey Patrick, Won't you tell us what Anchor Text will you prefer? I want to write a post about your new business on my blog and want to link with a proper anchor text.

Pick something which comes natural to you. I'm #1 for "appointment reminder" and am loathe to give particular suggestions because over concentration on it will cause me to probably hit automatic filters, since this site is still relatively low-trust by Google standards.

Here you go: http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/appointment-reminder-pa...

Hope you like it :)

If I were a dentist I would probably search for "appointment software", "appointment scheduler", or "scheduling software".

Edit: According to Google's keyword tool "scheduling software" is a great place to be. Patrick, you may want to expand your software to handle scheduling as well.

Congrats, I hope this proves to be an excellent source of growth for your business.

I look forward to a post from you about how it went. :)

I know you probably worked hard on this, but I'm extremely disappointed that you might have just lifted Twilio's appointment script example (http://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/appointmentreminder), set up a billing frontend, and charging $79/month for this product. I wish you would've credited Twilio for much of the hard work.

As much as I want you to succeed, I don't know if this is the right way to do it.

If you think that all it takes to build this business is copying Twilio's code, then you should try making money off printing bingo cards.

Is this the new paradigm in Tech/Silicon Valley? Copying the crucial component of others' work and just building a business off of it?

I hope this is not how we create innovation going forward.

Which part of Silicon Valley do you think patio11 lives in?

When, exactly, did he claim that "innovation" was some critical portion of his business models?

One of Patrick's most charming features is his unwillingness to tie himself up in emotional knots over his status as an "innovator", or fret about whether or not his products sufficiently express the essence of his cutting-edge twenty-first-century personality. He just makes things that people want, and markets them systematically with a great deal of focus. And he writes about that.

My lawyer, my accountant, my dentist, my doctor, my grocer, and my pharmacist don't have particularly innovative business models. They just provide things that I want, and I pay for them. There is no sin in that.

"Tech/Silicon Valley". Didn't imply he lived in the Valley.

"My lawyer, my accountant, my dentist, my doctor, my grocer, and my pharmacist don't have particularly innovative business models."

This has nothing to do with his business model. It's about using someone else's work and passing it off as your own. I'm sure I'll get downvoted again, but I hate the blatant disregard for intellectual property. Twilio paid its $90-100K+ developer to program and document the appointment reminder script, and in the end, weren't credited for the crucial component of the work.

I yield to no one in my respect for IP, and my karma would be higher if I didn't feel the need to pipe up so frequently on the "we should be able to steal music" topics. But I did not actually use Twilio's sample code for my product. It is sample code. Really. Go try running it, come back when you find that it doesn't even have enough for Rails to load.

I didn't even use that code as a base for mine. Again, it is sample code. Take a look at the user experience or error handling -- they're clearly inadequate for a real product, but suffice to give a competent Rails developer a taste of what API it takes to actually have Twilio make a phone ring. After you can make a phone ring (in one line -- and, again, one line I don't even use), you only need the other 3,500 lines of AR to actually make that phone call worthwhile for business purposes.

Twilio wants him to do this. They created a fund that invests in startups like patio11's [1]. One of the Twilio people even wrote a comment on HN encouraging patio11 to apply [2].

[1] http://blog.500startups.com/2010/09/23/twilio-fund-for-500-s...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721822

"Twilio wants him to do this"

That's quite misleading. One of the workers encouraged him to apply. This was 75 days before the product actually launched.

How does the timeframe affect anything? patio11 has had a landing page up describing the product's functionality for months.

You should really stop and think about what you are saying. Do you understand the business Twilio is in? The entire point of putting example code out there is to get people to use it or be inspired by it so that Twilio can make money from its use.

I recall at one point they were actively soliciting people that were interested in the service but didn't have ideas to contact them and they would provide you with ideas and/or brainstorm.

They want people to take their ideas/code so they can make money. They aren't in the appointment reminders business but would love for anyone in that business to use their service.

It certainly isn't how you're going to go much further forward. Way to go go make a first impression like this.

Really, you're clueless about Patrick and just about everything else you're commenting on how about you spend some time familiarizing yourself with all the actors here before making snap judgments that are bordering on libel?

I used nothing of that code. Did you actually look at it? It is sample code not complete enough to even run, much less actually solve a customer need.

Its almost as if you don't realize that Twilio makes money on service usage -- that you don't understand that they're probably thrilled to see their half-formed example code encourage someone to create a real business on top of their for-pay developer APIs.

(Assuming Patrick is even using Twilio and that the code is in any way relevant.)

That's a bit like calling DropBox just rsynch with a billing frontend. It's not.

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