Ask Patrick McKenzie (patio11) anything | Hacker News Reader

Ask Patrick McKenzie (patio11) anything

anyasq.com

154 pointsjroes52 comments

I used to poor, like seriously, food was an issue, poor.

Both of my parents and other close relatives started many businesses. They all failed. They are all intelligent people but they all suck, and I mean SUCK at running/growing a business.

I'm a pessimist. I have zero risk appetite, and I mean 0, zip, zilch, no thank you. And as an experienced software engineer, I make a quite a bit of money.....

....but darn it, Patrick's going to push me into staying up late, starting one side business after another, until one of them catches on, and I can quit my day job.

And I've never even met the guy!

Thanks Patrick!

You're welcome, and thank you. That kind of feedback makes me very, very happy.

In that case, I'll heap some more on.

I've been prevented from doing anything meaningful on a startup of my own for ~5 years, primarily because I was intimidated by the big picture of how much went into making a "real business". But in that same time frame (and in front of my over HN-ed eyes), Patrick has done great things and inspired me to refocus on small, incremental progress that adds up over time. Now I make sure I don't let a single week go by without doing something to improve my technical and business situation.

Patrick is inspiring because he seems like so much more of a relatable Everyman that more developers can relate to. Plus he's a super nice guy!

What I like is that, even more so in the past, the financial figures are just so small in comparison to what we normally read. So many HN stories are about billion dollar valuations and million dollar investments, but with Patrick we see $30k presented in epic detail and with pride because for a humble side project I imagine it's been quite a journey. (I have a side project too that grew from a bit of mucking around to enough passive income that I could entertain a modest retirement, so I know where he's coming from.)

Could you tell us more about your side project? Your comment made me very curious!

Catalogue of interior design photos for inspiration. Got lucky with SEO so I don't think there's much value in describing it in detail like Bingo Card Creator though - entire site didn't take much to put together. The parallel I wanted to draw was watching the numbers (sales, ad clicks, whatever) come through each week and sometimes pinching yourself.

His answer for why he lives in Ogaki is amazing. Excerpt:

By total accident, that job was in Ogaki. I'm not much of a poet but I would write love sonnets for this town. I love the air, I love the water, I love my friends, I love my community, I love my little church, I love the little sushi shop I've been going to for seven years where everybody knows my name, and I love my girlfriend.

Tokyo is a nice place. New York is a nice place. Chicago is a nice place. But I want to live in Ogaki.

Also this part:

I live in Ogaki. Ogaki is in Japan. If Ogaki were in Kansas, I would live in Kansas.

I see they asked you about writing a book. I've been waiting for you to write the definitive book on SEO.

Have you thought about bypassing a publisher and just producing a PDF and selling it directly? Then the only cost you'd have would to pay for a good editor and the rest would be profit.

I'd gladly pay $50 to learn everything you know about SEO. I'd bet you could sell a couple thousand copies on HN alone. Would that be enough money for it to be worth your while?

I'd gladly pay $50 to learn everything you know about SEO

I would too. The problem is, there are people that will gladly pay 500x that amount for some of what he knows about SEO.

Yet some of the most successful consultants have written books on the subject of their expertise.

Somehow I don't think a book would discourage consulting clients. They want him looking at their situation and data with the benefit of everything he's learned since writing the book.

If it gives him a higher profile it might actually result in more consulting gigs.

If it gives him a higher profile it might actually result in more consulting gigs.

So if you take one gram of sodium and add it to a room filled with chlorine gas, you end up with a wee little pile of salt. Pumping more gas into the room does not increase the amount of salt you get, because the sodium is the limiting reagent.

The limiting reagent in the number of consulting gigs I do every year is not the number of people who wish me to consult for them. It is closer to "How many weeks do I want to spend consulting?" That number is about ten to twelve weeks a year. I can fill my dance card at that number without needing to work very hard on getting the word out to new people.

It might make sense if I wanted to scale a consulting business up by hiring employees, training them to be Mini Me, and then closing clients on consulting engagements with fulfillment to be done by the Mini Mes. That is an option. It isn't one which really fits in with my plans for life at the moment.

Your answer to the "why don't you write a book" question was as concise and cogent as can be imagined (a priceless summary of what can make the conventional trade a sucker game for authors) - that said, I can't help but see a book in your future at some point, even if someone has to hog-tie and torture you to give it up. Your public will demand it.

If you have too many customers for the time available, why not increase the price?

And about the book, you can write down a somewhat detailed point-by-point walkthrough and outsource the actual writing of the book. Then sell it as an info product on your website for, say, $150 -- it is easily worth the money, which you get to keep most of and you can A/B test it like crazy.

Heck you could dictate the book while traveling and never have to write a line.

If you have too many customers for the time available, why not increase the price?

There are, however, three possible upsides you are did not address.

1. The experience of writing what you know down in an organized form is an excellent way of refocusing your thoughts. (OK, you do so much of that anyways that this is not an issue.)

2. An increased demand for your consulting services can result in an increased rate for you.

3. The feedback you might get on a book could make you think of things you have never thought about.

Writing a book is probably not going to increase the high-end demand for Patrick's work, which is where his money is at. He is already turning down work from clueful Patrick-hour investors.

  >> closing clients on consulting engagements with fulfillment to be done by the Mini Mes

Your experience was gained over many years. The process of training Mini Mes would start to make the option of writing a book seem attractive by comparison.

Our solution to that problem is time-honored: don't hire mini-people.

Wow! A simple no would have been fine.

His answer was interesting. A 'no' would not have been interesting.

Thanks for playing.

Sure, but if 500x more people would pay $50 than $(50x500)... :)

Private presentations and consulting work don't show up on bittorrent as quickly as downloadable PDFs.

Actually if you use software out there that takes the name you use on the credit card to buy the book and puts it on every single page of the PDF it has been proven to be a pretty good deterrent for the bit torrent problem.

This actually pisses me off, a lot. I don't put my ebooks up on torrenting sites or distribute them - but seeing my own email address show up on every page of my ebook means that I'm not going to buy from you again, ever.

Really? I completely disagree.

I think it's a perfectly good deterrent for most people without adding on annoying DRM or anything else that actually impedes the reading experience.

(By the way, you do know that Apple silently embeds your name and email in every DRM-free music file you buy from iTunes, right?)

To me, there's a distinctive difference between adding a non-audible watermark to a audio file vs. watermarking text with text. I can listen to purchased iTunes music all day long and never even be aware of the watermarking existing, but I can't look at a single page of my [one and only] Packt Publishing ebook without their giant logo, my name, date of purchase and my address being displayed in the footer.

If they wanted to watermark my info into the file to prevent file sharing, that's fine. Printed on every page? Obnoxious. It's another case of legitimate purchases having a disincentive that piracy doesn't. I bought the book, I know I bought the book, I don't need to be reminded 272 times in the process of consuming it.

I do - but having my email embedded into a part of the file that I'm not going to see while I'm regularly using the file isn't a problem. I'm not distributing, and I don't mind that the file's identified to me. Having my email on every single page of the ebook I'm reading is a waste of space that only serves to frustrate me - why is my email there? How does having my email there improve the reading experience? It doesn't.

It might not be as intrusive as annoying DRM, but it still makes reading my ebooks frustrating.

Yes it is probably a good deterrent for most people. The problem is you need something that'll work for everyone. Otherwise one person won't be deterret, will edit out the details, and put it on a torrent site. Then anyone who wants to pirate it, can pirate it.

I didn't know that about Apple, but I would imagine they are not the entity that encouraged such behavior. I'm glad I don't use iTunes at all, and now, I never will use it.

Too easy to edit out. Even a little sed could do it.

in my opinion, SEO moves way too fast to make it worthwhile to write a book like this as a big one-time project. what's most interesting in SEO are the individual questions which come up along the way.

Oh, Patrick's presentation on marketing to minorities is simply too awesome. (Linked in the answer about the female market; just in case: http://businessofsoftware.org/video_10_pmckenzie.aspx)

For me, I can only sign in with my facebook or twitter account? Is that actually intended?

I am uncomfortable using those two accounts to sign in.

If I could sign in, the question I would ask patio11 is this: What advise would you give to someone who wants to run a solo software business so he/she can live anywhere and travel anytime?

Have you read Rob Walling's "Start Small, Stay Small"?

It's the best book of practical advice I've read on the subject in a while.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=...

n.b. I upvoted that recommendation and am quoted on the cover of the book as saying something like "This is the book I wish I had when I started my business."

Dude, disclose affiliate links on HN please.

Dude, I certainly don't participate here to get rich off of affiliate links, and am not going to foist crap off on people to make a quick buck (my reputation is more important than that), but I'm certainly not going to disdain a few dollars for more books to read.

If you don't believe in making money, perhaps this isn't the site for you.

I make plenty of money from affiliate marketing, but this isn't the place to use them without disclosure.

Just go ahead and downvote it instead of whining. Either the link was to something useful and relevant or it wasn't.

The fact that there's an affiliate link has no bearing on that.

If someone's spamming the site with affiliate links, they ought to be banned. If someone posts a link with one from time to time, I see absolutely no harm in it. I think it's pretty clear what's what.

I'm not whining, it's just in bad taste. I actually up voted your post because it was useful, and I DID buy that book this morning (just not through your affiliate link).

This isn't the place to be using undisclosed affiliate links. Had you disclosed it, I would have happily bought it through your link as it would be a legitimate referral.

Thanks much!

Patrick- this part is especially interesting to me - "This might be shocking, but many of my software buddies do not have fully automated fulfillment. If you buy their software, they get an email, and then they have to do something to get you what you bought. This is insane in this day and age for commodity software purchases. BCC will automatically generate a Registration Key for you (for the downloadable version), and takes a variety of steps to automatically upgrade the software without the customer's interaction. If they ordered a CD, it uses an API at SwiftCD to arrange for that CD to be shipped without my involvement. Bookkeeping entries get made automatically. etc, etc "

Although some of that process will be eliminated as more "app stores" proliferate, it's still a huge and "non-core" part of the process for most software application providers which should be outsourced, as credit card processing has become. I remember the days 5 or 6 years ago where you had to write your own payment gateway, etc, etc.

If you are interested in reselling this as a package to startup software companies let me know, I would love to be involved, I think it fits a need.

I'm 29 today.

Ah, Happy Birthday then! Thanks for all the insights you share on HN and your blog.

"It is a moral imperative that any job which CAN be done by a computer SHOULD be done by a computer, because the alternative is a waste of an actual human's life. We used to have clerks whose only job was to be MS Excel's summation function. Hour by hour, day by day, they summed columns of numbers. After Excel exists, the existence of that job is a sin: hour by hour, day by day, they are wasting their lives doing something when they could be doing something more important, more worthy of their talents, which uniquely added value to the world."

This is so true. Does that mean that unemployment is not so bad after all?

I think it has little to do with unemployment on the long term. Humanity has been "automating" jobs since the invention of the steam machine. Some might say even further: since the invention of the horse and carriage, since the invention of the wheel.

If you look at the amount of automation we've got going on compared to 50 years ago, 10% unemployment is surprisingly low. Apparently, our skill in automation is only surpassed by our skill in finding new problems.

Rationally speaking, sure. If we replace 10% of jobs with computers running at 10% of the cost, that should mean that 9% of the workforce can now sit at home for all the economy cares.

The fact that it doesn't shake out this way in real life is quite straightforward to explain.

Is there some ridiculous character limit for questions on anyasq.com? Most appear to be squashed, truncated or generally just tweet-like in appearance; for example:

  How do you create niche when you are entering a crowded
  market like travel..what would u hv done if thr ws bingo
  cc alre 

  You've consulted with FogCreek and Matasano, some
  heavies(literally and figuratively).What was your
  gauge for success?

If you want to release an e-book with a little less overhead (and keep a large fraction of the proceeds) you could go with lulu.com or createspace.com

One thing that surprised me in the interview was the fact that Patrick went with a sole-proprietorship model. When I started my B2B service as a side project, I went crazy looking at all the possible angles (a business suing you for a bug causing them loss of revenue, not being able to have a merchant account without a proper LLC etc) and back then it made a lot of sense to stick with the LLC model to create that shield in case something happened. Heck, one lawyer I consulted with even suggested I buy insurance.

Either, I have too much to loose and I am not a risk taker or there is something wrong with the advice I have paid for/read online :)

But the lesson is learned, from this point on, I will go with a sole-proprietorship model and avoid paying over ~$1K for the LLC..

patio11 Thank you for your all your advice and insight, it is truly motivational.

Have you always been so cheerful or is it a product of your environment in Ogaki, or maybe even your success?

> If we stopped onanastically solving the non-existent problems of poor white techy twenty-somethings and started producing actual value, nobody would say word one about prices.

I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what onanastically means. I was pleasantly surprised to learn it means "in a masturbatory manner", though I think it is spelled onanistically.

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