Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

These days BCC is in maintenance mode (i.e. I respond to emails, cut checks, and put out fires, but I don't do active development or marketing). It works out to a bit more than my old salary for roughly 69.5 less hours of weekly work.

I have two other businesses: I do consulting and I have Appointment Reminder. Appointment Reminder pays its own way now, but doesn't put a meaningful amount of money in my pocket. Consulting does (egads), but distracts quite a bit from working on AR.

View on HN

Patrick, if BCC pays you more than your old salary, did you consider giving up consulting and working solely on your startup business (i.e. Appointment Reminder or new product)

It seems like that would accelerate growth of your startup - while BCC revenues ensure that you have enough runway to grow the business.

Of course, it is possible that consulting adds in more value to the business (e.g. new domain knowledge, useful contacts ) besides pulling in revenue.

> Appointment Reminder pays its own way now, but doesn't put a meaningful amount of money in my pocket.

Do you think that, given enough time spent developing/marketing it, AR will provide as much recurring income as BCC?

I don't own a hat, but if AR doesn't become larger than BCC, I will buy a hat so that I have one to eat.

Aside from being owned by me, though, those two businesses are as alike as a kitten and a kumquat. (e.g. AR could take external investment, something which I am kicking around doing later. BCC would be an extraordinarily poor candidate for it.)

I'd be surprised if you don't do well with AR too. You could probably benefit from an active sales force a lot, though I could certainly understand why one wouldn't want to go down that route. The place I get my hair cut at, for instance, makes dozens of these calls a day yet would probably never hear of your service without a cold call.

Or a referral

Hey Patrick, any chance for an affiliate account with your service (as opposed to your white label)? I'd gladly refer my barber, dentist, plumber, etc. As a stats junkie, Id like to see how many of my referrals actually sign up. Getting a reward for it would also be pretty sweet.

This bears pointing out. People like knowing about their influence, so affiliate program may not need to give out money, just rewards and kudos.

It may just be my setup but on your http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-chart page the yellow text on the yellow background isn't even readable. Is it the same for the rest of you? Update: Looks like it rotates through colors for every refresh... So, if you refresh enough you can read all the sections of the pie chart.

Yes. When I squint, I can tell that it says Advertising, in case you can't make it out.

Colors get chosen randomly on page load, so just refreshing will probably sort you out. (The actual stats are cached, the presentation layer not so much.) I have a string around my finger to fix that someday but today is not a good day and tomorrow not looking great either.

With such a vast shift away from desktop downloadable applications, I'm curious to see what you've done from a marketing standpoint to get those numbers. How did you promote your application and drive sales?

The overwhelming majority of my customers are on the online version now, since I've exiled the downloadable version to electronic Siberia. If no customer ever found it again I would be happy.

With regards to marketing, see my blog (www.kalzumeus.com), but the short answer is I use organic SEO and AdWords. My one trick pony for organic SEO is scalable content generation, and what a beautiful, loyal pony it is.

Can you describe what you mean by "scalable content generation"? Sounds very interesting!

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

summary: "Data You Can’t Get Anywhere Else"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com