Bingo Card Creator (etc) Year In Review 2011 | Hacker News Reader

Bingo Card Creator (etc) Year In Review 2011

kalzumeus.com

221 pointsjoshuacc74 comments

Hi Patrick,

As someone who's just starting down the road that people like you have paved, I can't express enough thanks for showing us that a) it's possible and b) that it's OK to not want what everyone else does (i.e. full-time employment or the big start-up exit). Not to mention doing a pretty good job of spelling out exactly how we can have the same results for ourselves. Here's to your continued success!

BUT, like other posters have said and you've sort of addressed in the OP, $55,000 for 10 weeks of work comes up to $5500/week. I'm your average joe 26-year-old rails crud+ajax monkey and they charge me out for more than that.

I personally know a consultant (who coincidentally is also a former JET) whose rates are two orders of magnitudes higher than yours, and his main spiel is cutting through politics, selling people on conversion and then getting internal tech resource to install google website optimizer.

He works for a couple of weeks a year, then spends the rest of his time advising startups he likes for free, working on his own projects, and trying to get his sci-fi novel finished. He has some technical knowledge, but most HN users could code circles around him.

You quite often advise us young engineering types to negotiate better and get paid more. Well here it is right back at you. Charge more. I honestly thought you were charging those sort of rates and I was a little shocked to read otherwise.

Quoting the post: I typically quote fairly high rates and mostly stick with them, unless there is another reason I really, really want an engagement to happen.

That said: drats, thought I had edited out that 10 weeks number. Memo to self: hire an editor.

$550k per week? That pencils out to $1375 per hour, a pretty astronomical rate in any industry.

Edit: dropped a 0 earlier. I meant to say $13,750 per hour. Nice work, if you can get it.

Apologies if I was misleading, not as high as that but in six figures.

A week?

I don't want to belabour this point too much, but yes.

The conversation does not look like this:

"Hey guys, I have 10 years of experience doing consulting, my rates are $3000 / hour, hire me for two weeks and to improve your conversion."

According to my consultant friend, it's a lot more like this (bad maths all mine, also note that I have no idea what real numbers here would look like, so I could be wildly off-base):

A: "So you currently do $20 million in revenue through your website. Based on initial analytics me and the tech team have put in place, we estimate that one out of a hundred visitors to your site become paying customers, in other words you have a 1% conversion rate. All things being the same, what would it mean to your annual revenue if I could increase that rate by 0.5 of a percent, to 1.5% over the course of a year?"

B: "Well, if you could do that it would mean an increase in revenue by $10 million."

A: "Right, so what I propose is that you bring me on board for a couple of weeks to put systems in place to monitor that conversion and test ideas for increasing it in a way that makes sense for your organisation. My fee for this would be $200,000."

To be perfectly honest I don't have any specifics or solid facts to back this up, just the single anecdote and even that is second hand. The point I was trying to press home is that patio11 is selling himself short.

Thanks. That's a great way to sell.

$1k/hr is not unusual for a good lawyer.

Unless you work a 400 hour week, you seem to have missed a zero.

Assuming a 40 hour week, $550k is $13750 per hour.

I really don't know what to make of Bingo Card Creator.

Sure, it's great that Patrick's found a profitable niche, and can use it as a platform to give others business advice and advance his own craft.

But it really seems as if BCC is a painful reminder of how terrible the computing experience is for most people in 2011. Patrick refers to BCC as Hello World attached to a random number generator, seemingly as an example of how business is not solely about technical prowess but fulfilling people's needs and providing a useful service as well. Yet I can't help but feel that people sitting in front of incredibly powerful general purpose computers paying someone else to make bingo cards for them is a failure of the "personal computer" vision.

This line of thinking usually gets the response "most people do not want to program their computers as they're much too busy with other things", but I really don't think this is an example of a task that requires some inordinate amount of computing skill. If it's too complex for a nontechnical user to print a bingo card with a computer today, that complexity is incidental (i.e. a bug) and should be fixed.

I don't think it's a question of complexity, but of where you want to invest your free time. If I wanted to create bingo cards, would I design them myself? Absolutely not - I have better things to do with my time. If I can instead pay $30 and be done with it, that's an awesome timesaver for me.

really don't think this is an example of a task that requires some inordinate amount of computing skill

You live in a reality which is far removed from the one inhabited by most of my customers.

I am aware that there exists a dish called risotto. I don't actually know what risotto is. Supposing I one day wanted to eat risotto, I know that with absolute certainty going to an Italian restaurant and saying "I'll have the risotto" means I get good risotto. If I had to cook it, that would be problematic for me, because a) I am not a good cook, b) I lack the ingredients, and c) I don't know what risotto actually is.

Unlike most of my customers, I am capable of rectifying my lack of knowledge on how to prepare risotto, because while I am not a good cook I am not totally unaware of cooking primitives like "cookbook", "punchfork.com", "boil water", "slice it fine with a knife", etc. This is where the analogy breaks down. Imagine if I were trying to cook risotto without being first aware that either water, fire, or cutting implements existed, and also unaware of the steps by which, given that I have been told there exists a substance called "water", I could discover how to manipulate water in such a way that it turns into risotto.

That is approximately where my customers are at.

That is a phenomenal example. I am going to steal this example to discuss it with 'business people'.

[PS: Congratulations on the engagement! :) You are an inspiration.]

I'm in the same boat. After reading this, I'm ready to get married too!

While I like your analogy, I think tree's point is that a bingo card generator is the programming equivalent of making toast, not risotto.

It's really not, though. I'm not a programmer, but I can solve Fizzbuzz and Hello World in Ruby, and I still wouldn't know where to start with a bingo card creator.

I could manage to randomly reorder a series of words, but putting them into a nice graphical layout and programmatically making sure that short words and long words both look okay without anything getting squished or cut off is already beyond what I can do without hours of research. And that's as a geek who's generally interested in programming. My mom, who's far more likely to need bingo cards, panics every time I minimize a window.

And if you don't know how to get fire or bread, or how to make bread, or how to get bread, then you don't know how to make toast.

I encourage you to make risotto; it's a really easy dish to make. And there's a million variations depending upon what you want to add.

Completely aside, I love to cook. It's my therapy from programming. Creating things in the real world! That I can share with my friends and family! That I don't have to explain! And there's almost never bugs in my food!

They could either think up, arrange and print a set of random bingo cards each time they have to run a lesson, or they buy it once so they can run the app and print each time, and go have dinner.

They're really buying lower stress in producing future classroom activities for a range of lessons.

P.S. congrats Patrick :) Doesn't your family read your blog? Think they'd miss the reference at the bottom?

I can't help but feel that people sitting in front of incredibly powerful general purpose computers paying someone else to make bingo cards for them is a failure of the "personal computer" vision.

I would disagree and think that it's the perfect embodiment of all the wonderful things that are possible with personal computers.

Average, common people now longer have to do the boring grudge work that takes up their time. It directly affects and improves the lives of people.

It doesn't matter that the machine is really powerful, and isn't being used to solve Really Hard Serious Problems™, it's only a machine! It doesn't have feelings, it's not going to get upset or hurt because it's doing boring work. However the user does have feelings, and dislikes doing boring work. If it's a choice between "make the machine do boring work" and "make the human do boring work", then we should make the machine do it!

Machines & Computers are there for our usage, and to make our lives better.

Great to hear about your continued success, especially the engagement.

One minor issue with the title. The ampersand is a ligature representing the Latin word "et". To make the title grammatically and typographically correct, you'd need to go with either "etc." or "&c.". Though the latter may be too pretentious. :-)

Hope you have an awesome 2012!

Patio11 why is it that you make so little money? I mean you could be a senior programmer at some startup in the valley at more than 100k, health insurance and zero issue with immigration.

I would gladly (and have) trade half of my income for the freedom to work on what I want, where I want, when I want. You simply cannot compare working on your own stuff from a home office with working a salary job for someone else in an office.

That said, it rarely works out that way for the best developers, who end up making more than they could if salaried. Particularly in the long run and when value of your time is considered. Did you catch that he worked about 15 hours on BCC, made $55k in "a few weeks of consulting" and put AR in a place to explode in 2012 and 2013? He doesn't say how much time he spent on AR, but I doubt the total of all of those was equivalent to the stress of working 60+ hour weeks as a "senior programmer" at some valley startup.

Not to mention that Patrick is WAY past the senior programmer level :)

Sebastian also had a similar thought:

http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-p...

Discussion on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1720244

And here's what Patrick replied to him.

"Well, I'm happy that people like me and are invested in my success. I'm also a little discomfited by the psychoanalysis. I'm pretty happy with where I am in life, have a pretty decent career trajectory at the moment, and life is improving in non-career ways which matter more to me anyhow. That's about all I think I need to say."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721309

I think what he has written is still valid. Hope you got the answer.

Money isn't hugely motivating for me. I mean, if I wanted more of it, I could have more of it, but I'm clearly not really optimizing for income-this-year. I have all my needs covered, live a comfortable middle-class life, have health insurance, etc. Also, ahem, $70k is not exactly a life of poverty.

Things I really enjoy other than money: my kinda quirky work-life balance, a fair deal of freedom in how I arrange my affairs, not being bossable, etc.

Longer-term, I wish all SV senior programmers at startups every success and happiness, but I don't see myself going down that path. I could get 0.5% in a funded startup with a modest chance of success, too... by giving away the other 69.5% of it after raising a seed round.

   Joe Heller

   True story, Word of Honor:
   Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
   now dead,
   and I were at a party given by a billionaire
   on Shelter island.
   I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
   to know that our host only yesterday
   may have made more money
   than your novel 'Cach-22'
   has earned in its entire history?"
   And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
   And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
   And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
   Not bad! Rest in peace!

   -- Kurt Vonnegut

Patrick, thanks for being an inspiration for this philosophy.

http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/fisherman.html

Exactly.

I weigh free time as FAR more important than money. As long as I'm over some threshold of income, time is by far the most important outcome. Spending all my time working on someone else's projects is simply not an option to me (unless some new maximum of income were to be reached, of course, but that would have to be some kind of in-the-realm-of-fantasy sum).

Maybe I'm being naive, but how exactly do people stomach spending so much time on someone else's goals, away from the ones they truly love and their true passions?

That's a question I haven't seen much on HN, essentially: Why are you running your own business when you could be an employee?

I can guarantee you getting a job is twenty times easier than making money from an online venture. So yes, he could get a job that would net him twice as much. However scaling the business is easier than scaling himself at startupco.

Or, restated: Why are you working roughly half the year for $100k when you could be working full time for $100k?

Seems like it answers itself, eh?

Further, by the time you get a little software empire like the one the author describes ticking along into the six figure range, you can be confident that it'll continue to make you more money each year, proportional to how much effort you put into it. Check back 3 years from now and it'll be $500k/year. Silicon valley dev jobs hardly ever do that.

He is obviously not motivated by money and most people aren't when you dig deeper. Many geeks want to achieve mastery, succumb new challenges, etc. I recommend watching this [1] 10m video out about what drives us to understand this a little more.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer where I can.

she said yes. We’re announcing to our family on Christmas, as per our family tradition.

Congratulations, Patrick.

What I thought was, 'do none of them read his blog?' But I suppose they all know already, and that is just the 'official' announcement.

Well, given that it was at the bottom of a long, tech-heavy post, I wouldn't be surprised if his family members missed it.

Yes, congratulations! My wife and I just celebrated our 20th year anniversary, and it's been a blast.

Also, thanks for keeping us in the loop. I feel a little like a voyeur when I read your blogs, but I'm finding they are an excellent resource as I go through the stages of learning myself.

Best wishes for 2012!

Congrats Patrick (she said yes)! You have been an inspiration to tons of folks on HN that are starting out on their own. Wish you the best for 2012 and beyond.

Huge congrats on the business and personal accomplishments.

Can you talk a little more about the two paths for AR? Specifically, talk about the math behind growing it organically and why you couldn't grow it to $N million / year (or even $NN million / year) in the next five years without taking money?

From my perspective, you'd be crazy to take investment right now, but I haven't run the numbers and maybe there's a hard ceiling on your growth rate if you don't.

EDIT: The "crazy to take money" part is because of you saying this: Things I really enjoy other than money: my kinda quirky work-life balance, a fair deal of freedom in how I arrange my affairs, not being bossable, etc.

If you raise money, all that goes out the window. Not only do you now have new cofounders to answer to, but they're expecting you to spend their money, which means hiring a team and growing quickly, working crazy hours, etc. Doesn't seem to fit you, does it?

Dharmesh Shah actually has covered this topic in much more depth than I could. Basically, for a SaaS business, cost of customer acquisition is going to put you into the red for each customer for the first X amount of time of their customer life. My CoCA for "a small number of self service accounts per time period" is very, very low. My CoCA for "a scalable number of enterprise accounts" would be very, very high. The Take Over The World From Hollowed-Out Volcano Lair plan would likely involve hiring a team of sales reps to get accounts with LTVs in the 6 figure region. I don't have their salaries in my back pocket.

The math for getting to a modest, profitable business with $N0k of monthly revenue, on the other hand, is fairly similar to BCC with radically higher per-customer values. Work on SEO and paid traffic acquisition strategies, convert people in a scalable fashion, business supports approximately 1 employee at full wages per 125 paying accounts, gradually hire out things that don't increase number of accounts added per time period so I can focus on things that do, optionally go after a few low-hanging-fruit enterprise sales.

(n.b. There exist enterprise deals in this space where I could literally just be "The company that provides reminder services for $ONE_PARTICULAR_CUSTOMER" and that would support a very profitable company with a modest number of employees.)

But surely if you've demonstrated the ability to print money by covering your CoCA in 6-12 months with a LTV of 24-36 months or whatever, you have additional options beyond selling off a big chunk of your business. Isn't this the ideal scenario for debt financing?

What about doing creative deals with your first few enterprise customers, where you give them a 50% discount in exchange for a larger upfront payment, which you can then plow back into sales and marketing for the next group of customers. You cut your profits down for those customers, maybe even to zero, but you get the cashflow immediately. What about doing sales distribution deals with companies in a similar space, so you can piggyback on their sales and marketing efforts, thus reducing your need for upfront CoCA?

Come on, you're so creative at finding ways around these kinds of things that I have a hard time believing all that's left is to take a pile of VC like everyone else does.

You have a product people want. The main thing that will get investors aboard aren't numbers so much as proof that you have a scalable acquisition channel.

Once you get that, the money will be on great terms. I don't understand why you're putting any attention on BCC or consulting. What is stopping you from rocking this?

Could you expand on your reference to Sendgrid? What problem does that solve for your business? I have not experienced a lot of problems in the past with getting emails out to customers, but maybe you are referring to marketing emails? I know you have emphasized the conversion rates from marketing to email lists in the past. Thanks.

Basically, I'm the world's most overpaid sysadmin for doing stupid commodity work like making sure postmaster stays up and email gets delivered. Email costs me $80 a month. Stuff lands in inboxes. Time spent worrying about configurations / RBLs / etc: zero.

One might also note that this lets me trivially spin up does-not-share-trust-metrics-with-me-or-my-other-customers system on behalf of a high-volume enterprise client if that were hypothetically a requirement.

Hey Patrick, first of all congrats on your engagement and your business success.

Secondly, I was wondering if you could share a bit about how you decide which ideas to invest your time in. Why did BCC and AR make the cut, while other ideas didn't (I assume you had a lot of other probably-good ideas along the way)?

It seems with a 1% conversion rate you need to make something the other 99% would be interested in paying for. There must be something for the same market you can make that can convert some % of that 99%. It is like the low hanging fruit asking for you to pluck it off of the tree.

I could make a second product for teachers, but Achievement Unlocked already with regards to most of the things in that area. It is approximately as much work to create AR, where I have publicly available plans that cost $2.5k a year that real people actually buy, as it is to make another teaching tool. I'm allocating resources efficiently.

Plus, buying myself another five years of "Optimize this software until you stop getting 'MY GOOGLES GOT A VIRUS' from email addresses ending in aol.com" is not on the agenda.

You know how you keep talking about underserved markets? The customers look like that. Perhaps the large set of engineering talent going to build yet another TODO list app are saving themselves the heartburn.

You mentioned "homegrown bookkeeping software" ... what was wrong with all the other bookkeeping software out there?

P.S. Congrats.

It didn't publish stats directly to my website. (http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/)

At some point I'll do the sane thing and just use Quickbooks like everyone... but I always put it off.

You may find the Ledger[0] accounting program useful. It's a CLI parser for a specially-formatted text file, and should be pretty easy for you to integrate with your existing infrastructure.

I don't know what sort of API Quickbooks offers, but I'd be surprised if it's easier to rig up than appending to a text file and running a couple commands.

[0] http://ledger-cli.org/

I'm always surprised to hear just how much money you make off this for a website that is not to my taste to put it nicely!

This isn't a negative criticism, but it's a point of interest to me to keep reminding myself that what I want and expect when I go online and buy something can often be different to what the customer actually wants or responds to.

You give frequent detailed and excellent information, thanks for keeping it up with no obvious benefit to yourself!

What it should really teach you is the efficacy of A/B testing.

And the knowledge that the goals and demands of actual users (in this case, teachers) are vastly different from the demands of techno-geeks like us.

It's pretty difficult to see the world through your users' eyes instead of your own, but Patrick seems to do this on a regular basis, which I find quite inspiring.

> not to my taste to put it nicely

The question really is if it were designed to more refined appearance standards, would that make a noticeable difference or would it not. That'd be an awesome A/B test. And, logically, if I were Patrick, I would set up a separate website with a polished design (like the "front page of Dribbble" polished, not "the best a programmer can do" polished) and pose it as a competitor. It'd be interesting to see if it would borrow people from the original BCC site or if it would pick up new customers.

Shouldn't be an expensive experiment to run too, the cost is mostly in design and that's up to 5K tops.

"45K in sales, 25K in profits from selling bingo cards on the Internet?"

The numbers increase each year when I read your new year-in-review, but the above thought remains the same, or better said, the thought is always a shock. Patrick, your yearly reports always tell me -- very clearly -- that there is something about both business and your customers that I may never comprehend. It's wonderful to see, and I really appreciate you sharing the information. Thank you.

Edit: (sigh) I quoted the full numbers from the summary, not just the BCC numbers.

Congratulations on your engagement!

One small thing to keep in mind with that, if I may proffer some advice not asked for, and without knowing beans about your family situation, is that marriage far away from home is fine, not such a big deal. It's a continuation of your life far away. Kids, on the other hand, are much more of a watershed moment. All of a sudden someone's parents are very, very far away from their grandkids, who will take several years to develop an interest in sitting still and talking on Skype, which is a poor substitute in any event for reading a story together on the couch or things like that.

Not that I'd do things differently, it's just something to plan for; hopefully you'll have enough money that you can fly around for long visits.

Also, while I hope appointment reminders continues to grow for you, the fact that it's not raking in millions makes your story all the more human, which I feel is what made so many people take an interest in the first place. Here's a guy who's not doing some huge, VC backed, high octane race for the stars but... bingo cards!

Congratulations on your engagement!

I've been in a similar situation (though with much less traveling and speaking) as you with consulting with US customers while living in Japan, Malaysia and now China and at the beginning it's really hard to gauge how much time is lost due to the overhead of finding customers, proposals, communicating across timezones and so on...

Thanks for sharing so much, Patrick. So much of people's professional lives is either a company secret or shared only in a distorted form for the purposes of self-promotion. One feeling I've always gotten from reading your blog is that despite your message of marketing, you're consistently coming a place of honesty.

Out of curiosity, what sort of things do you tend to do in your consulting engagements? You tend to label it as engineering, but based on your descriptions (e.g. the Fog Creek writeup), it sounds like mostly marketing for engineering companies. Do you think that's an accurate picture?

Advice, prototype, and occasionally implement systems and processes to help them sell more stuff. Code is a deliverable if the customer wants it to be a deliverable. I don't usually suggest that, since my clients typically have many very talented programmers on staff.

I wondered if he would be able to disclose his AR numbers considering the types of businesses he could easily end up dealing with, so while I'm sad he can't disclose them, I'm not surprised. Though I would not have guessed one of his reasons would be to take funding.

Hi Patrick,

Do you have an affiliate program for AR? I'll try to send you some business, and I want to know if I am winning. I don't know whether you want to run it in house. You could then vet the affiliates, but on the other hand, a bunch of douchbags running around hitting up doctors offices may not be all bad.

I am a few years ahead of you in terms of a bootstrapped business. A few orders of magnitude more revenue, and I highly recommend keeping the affiliate program in house. If the affiliate looks good, then you can cookie tag the affiliate based on referrer, and get all the link juice. If they are shady, then refer them to your bullshit affiliate program at clickbuy/CJ/etc. This is the best strategy, IMO.

Interesting that credit card processing did not beat PayPal. There's quite a misnomer, especially among the HN set, that you can increase conversions by ditching PayPal for credit card processing. Fact is, in situations where large percentages of prospective buyers may not be familiar with the seller, PayPal can be a much more comfortable option.

Would be interesting to see you offer both PayPal and credit card processing. Does e-junkie support that?

It just goes to show that all advice and success stories are purely situational. It should reinforce the message that it's necessary to actually test whether adding a payment option (or anything else) really improves the situation or not.

Huh, it was really interesting to me how he used a .org for his (commercial) Appointment Reminder website to get an exact match and rank #1 for that phrase on Google. To quote:

'Exact match domain names. ”Hey Patrick, how is it that with no marketing budget and nearly no marketing work you rank #1 for [appointment reminder]?” I told everybody that I was buying the .org specifically because that would happen but apparently folks didn’t believe me.'

Congrats on your continued success Patrick! Meeting you at startup school was one of my highlights of this year.

Patrick, have you ever thought about re-designing? Im not sure a full re-design would have a huge effect, but I my work else where wants me to believe you could squeeze some additional income out of a better UI/UX.

There is one in the works at the moment for AR, tentatively scheduled to launch in late January. I might have Keith do one for BCC eventually if we have a week free and are bored.

Spoiler - sales $100,000, profit $70k - give or take.

He got the girl!

Congratulations on your new adventure into familyhood <3

Could you give a breakdown of the expenses for BCC ?

Congrats on the 3 words!

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-chart?...

2011 is 404, here's 2010. All prior to 2010 and the "all time" are also 404.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-chart?...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com