Software Businesses In 5 Hours A Week | Hacker News Reader

Software Businesses In 5 Hours A Week

kalzumeus.com

159 pointsjohns35 comments

IMHO Patrick is the smartest guy in software at the moment. I can think of any number of bigger, more profitable and more exciting software businesses, but none that make the owner quite as radiantly happy as BCC makes Patrick. I feel slightly uncomfortable talking in such a hippyish manner, but there's a certain Zen quality to the way Patrick does business; Like a rock garden, BCC is at once a metaphor for life and something purely abstract. His way of doing things seems as much about being a better person as it is about running a better business.

If you desperately want a squillion dollars, read PG. If your idea of fun is running a big office, read Spolsky. If you have other priorities, I can't think of a wiser voice than patio11.

After reading this and another insightful comment of yours today, I couldn't resist checking out http://bitovod.com/hn/best-of?username=jdietrich&limit=7... :)

Thanks, that is high praise.

FWIW, I think even small software businesses have a lot to learn from pg and Spolsky (among others).

Oh come on. I think Patrick is awesome too, but you're going a bit far.

And if you think Patrick is some kind of monk doesn't want a "squillion dollars" you haven't been paying very close attention.

Patrick is a smart (and very nice) guy with some really useful knowledge and a very analytical mind. He's also exceptionally good at communicating.

It's that last part that he has in common with PG and Spolsky.

His actual advice and experience is severely lagging behind his ability to promote and communicate. Certainly his ideas about how to run a business are far from proven. He hasn't even repeated the success of BCC himself yet.

PG's startup advice is directly responsible for dozens of very successful companies. Probably hundreds. Spolsky's advice on running a software company improved the way thousands of them are run.

Patrick may get there eventually (he's got all the right skills), but let's not get too carried away yet.

"He hasn't even repeated the success of BCC himself yet."

This is the doubt that inevitably sneaks up on the hope you get when you read small business advice. If what you say is true, why are you spilling the beans? Why don't you protect your secret and reap all the reward for yourself?

Most of the things that go into building a little software empire like this don't need to be kept secret. And by its very nature, it's not something that you want to repeat too many times.

Imagine you had a business that took 20 hours of your time each month and brought in $10k/mo. Your options now are:

A.) go surfing. forever.

B.) build another business that takes up another 20 hours of your month and brings in another $10k/month.

If you iterate this out enough times, you'll notice that option A goes away after a few cycles, and suddenly you have a full time job. Sure, you're bringing in more money, but your quality of life is back to that of every other schmuck with a full time job.

Since the stated goal of the enterprise is "pay for me to have fun with the least possible effort", it just doesn't make sense to find ways to add effort and subtract fun from that equation.

By being such a good communicator, patio11 has managed to land himself what would appear to be some very high paying consulting gigs that will pay for lots of development time on his projects.

I don't think that, working alone, he could "reap all the rewards" because he just couldn't cover N small niche businesses like BCC.

Also, he's not selling advice beyond consulting, so it seems quite authentic.

On one level, money is much less motivational to me than praise. On another level, there is a direct path between "Be generous with what I know" and "Sell more stuff." See the iceberg part of the speech. Every time I am cited I get a bit better SEO juice for bingo.

Similarly, some smart people trust me regarding knowledge, execution ability, and character. This is largely a function of being generous with what I know. If you were hypothetically in Ogaki and bought me coffee, I would happily talk about your problems until I ran out of breath. There exist people who are happy to buy that, and they generally pay substantially more than coffee, for example to guarantee availability or reschedule the chat from ogaki to 18 hours east.

Joel hired Pat [1] for the advice and experience that you say is lacking. Pat managed to move the needle on their conversions, which is pretty impressive. So while I've always been amused at the tendency of people to create and fawn over software heroes, I've found his advice very useful over the years.

[1] http://blog.fogcreek.com/our-marketing-is-up-fog-creek-and-w...

Edit: obviously the advice and experience in question is fairly narrow and Joel wouldn't hand the keys of FC to Pat, but to solo and micro startups, his advice is gold.

> And if you think Patrick is some kind of monk doesn't want a "squillion dollars" you haven't been paying very close attention.

I don't think that he's either a monk or avaricious. I think that he prioritises balance. He has written both about the 80-hour weeks that drove him to quit his day job, and the problem of what to do with yourself if your day job takes five hours a week.

PG and Spolsky give really good advice on how to run a good company. Patrick gives really good advice on how to live as a software entrepreneur.

In his seminal essay How to Start a Startup, PG describes a startup as "Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing". He sees a startup as inevitably stressful and growth-led and focussed on an exit - he'd be a lousy investor if he advised his proteges to do otherwise.

Spolsky places a great deal of emphasis on creating a great working environment for himself and his employees, but he still basically understands "work" to mean sitting in an office for 40 hours a week. Spolsky seems to find running a mid-size company intrinsically satisfying, which is fine but not for everyone. I don't want to sit in an office.

Patrick is the only person I know writing so intelligently about creating companies where the wellbeing of the founder is the primary objective. He seeks to get Pareto's 80%. He seems to often leave money on the table because he doesn't see it as being worth the hassle. I don't see anyone putting so much thought into building companies that practically run themselves.

Regardless of whether Patrick has the right answers, he's asking the right questions, something I see as far more important. I see too many people in the startup world who are sick with stress, malnourished from ramen and pizza and chronically sleep-deprived. Our culture is streaked with the idea that killing yourself for your business is a badge of honour.

Thinking about how to make money is smart. Thinking about how to live well is wise.

Although it shares most of a title with an old blog post of mine, this is actually a new hour-long presentation that I did at Microconf this year, with slides and textual accompaniment. Comments are appreciated as always.

It's a good talk, but the audio quality is poor. How was this recorded?

So I can't help but find the salaryman thing to be creepy and strange (not that you did this but rather that anyone does).

Is this a common situation to find oneself in?

Does someone explain the rules or do you just figure it out by what every else does?

Does no one complain or quit in frustration?

Does anyone try to stop this practice?

Approximately 30% of the Japanese workforce is salarymen. The rest runs the gamut in terms of working conditions -- the key difference from the Japanese perspective is that salarymen are guaranteed against virtually all risk from the time they join the company until death. I'm not married -- the company was willing to take care of that. I had problems with my landlords? The company would have taken care of that. I needed intercession on visa/tax/etc issues? The company took care of that. We had a bad year and people needed to get cut? They'd sooner dissolve the company than fire seishain -- we cut contractors/etc instead.

People get explained the rules in the same fashion that Americans learn that work starts at nine, being late is discouraged, and that accepting bribes is improper -- yeah, if you slip up, you'll be reminded of them, but they're for the most part cultural background. Do you remember the first time you found out that your dad had to go to the office every day? Imagine finding out, that day, that he was going to be there until 11 PM. And that's just how it was, for nearly everybody you knew. And if it wasn't the case for your friend's dad, you'd keep quiet about it, because you didn't want to embarrass your friend that his dad had a crap job. That's the kicker: these jobs are the brass rings that people aspire to. (And if you wonder why I go on the warpath when folks suggest the Valley-esque work/life balance is to be emulated, there is why.)

More than quitting in frustration, the bigger phenomenon is younger folks just dropping out of the traditional labor force, which is a large (though probably exaggerated because it is shocking) phenomenon in Japan today.

The government and industry have made a lot of noise about humanizing working conditions for the last generation. We get reminders to stretch now! Yay! Seriously though, the cult of salarymanhood is very gradually losing cultural hegemony, partially because some companies are abandoning the lifetime employment guarantee (without which it is a very, very raw deal), partially because the Japanese labor force is broadening away from Men Doing Men's Work Like Manly Men which was always the core of the system, and partially because all cultures change over time.

Really good talk. I'm curious if you can expand on how you would optimize for maximum benefit of an exact match domain. It's a singular event obviously, so do you need to lead up to it with relevant content or will it just sell itself because people are already searching for it? Are there ways to get a multiplicative effect out of it, say use it to boost other products? Also, how do you keep taking advantage of it even after the event passes?

So exact match domains are certainly not limited to events on the calendar, but to the extent that mine are:

1) The way to get extra benefit out of Halloween is to, well, wait 12 months.

2) Getting people's email address is the single best way to boost other products, if there is any overlap in customer needs. (This is my single biggest d'oh should do more with that in my business, for five years running.)

3) If you have their email address and permission to contact them, the party never stops.

Fabulous. I would have bailed due to sound quality (I don't hear speech real well in general), but the content was worth squinting my ears for an hour.

Woot, patio11 is engaged! Congrats.

We're not officially engaged yet, but suffice it to say that, if October were to set another record this year, that would be fortuitously timed.

I'm more curious about the tptacek consulting tips now, than BCC. :)

I don't remember anything from the video about tptacek consulting tips. Could you fill us in?

Update: OK, I see. It's in the Quitting The Day Job section starting at "Also at Christmas I had a conversation with Thomas Ptacek".

Will have to check this out this weekend. Any idea if the other MicroConf talks will be posted? I'd like to see the talks from Justin Vincent (from Techzing) and Noah Kagan.

I heard from Rob that they don't have any particular plans to use the talks at the moment, but might if they decide to do the conference again next year. That means that the raw video files go out to the individual speakers. Whether they post it is up to the individual speaker -- actually doing so takes a bit of work.

I wish I could download this video to my iPad to see it later, while on a couch. The flash player turned up my MBP fan :S

The video should be iPad-enabled. Is that not working for you?

If you absolutely need an offline copy, see http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/files/video/patrick-mcke... It is 400 MB and not set up for streaming, so I'd strongly suggest using the one on the blog, but if you need to download it go ahead.

Pat, any audio only option?

Give me a while, I'll get it to you. Drop me an email.

I'd be interested in signing up for an audio-only "podcast" of your appearances and interviews. Have you considered setting something like that up? (Any chance people like BoS and techzing would let you effectively reprint stuff you did for them?)

I'm often in a situation (driving, for example) where I can listen to stuff on my ipod-alike but not watch anything.

You might find this helpful: http://huffduffer.com/

It only works for things that are already audio files, but it lets you create a customized podcast feed of the random talks you find online.

> A major multinational advertising firm with an anomalously > high number of PhDs on the payroll

Was that Google?

I agree with many of his points, but I think it very much only applies to the burgeoning stages of a bigger vision or a solo ran / small vision product.

As many, many successful entrepreneurs have said before, outsourcing will absolutely not equate to quality in the long run. You need more control over execution to build the best product.

Now don't get me wrong, I respect Patrick for the business he's built - it's a lot more than most. We should all give props.

So keep the product inhouse and outsource stuff where quality is checkable or irrelevant.

For sure. But if you're in certain competitive markets you are going to need to eventually level up those checkable areas either before the competition or in response.

Also, I'd like to think nothing is irrelevant. If it really doesn't matter at all, why are you even outsourcing it?

hope the presentation answers why is solo startup better than to partner with someone

It depends on the scope of the project, among other things. Some projects are too big for one person to tackle. Others are too small to pay more than one founder.

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