Bingo Card Creator (etc) Annual Report

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/12/17/bingo-card-creator-etc-year-in-review-2010/

by patio11 • 16 years ago

288 88 16 years ago

patio1121• 16 years ago

If you have any questions, feel free. I can't answer the obvious juicy ones regarding acquisitions or clients, but other than that, I aim to please.

w1ntermute2• 16 years ago

On average, how many hours do you work per week overall? And on which days (weekdays, weekends, etc.)?

patio1121• 16 years ago

It bounces all over the place. I spent some time at client sites and worked 9 ~ 5 or 10 ~ 6 at their preference. There was about a month in the summer where I probably did 10 hours a week in a good week. November, when I was pulling the hard yards on Appointment Reminder, was generally six hours a day. (Sometimes a very quirkily scheduled six hours: between a bad cold and longstanding bad habits, I often got up at noon and started working around two or three.)

I generally don't work on weekends, with the exception of customer support emails and an evening or two prior to the AR launch. I mean, crikey, until the very end they even gave me weekends off when I was a salaryman: working weekends would be moving in the wrong direction.

ph0rque• 16 years ago

For the average Joe Dev, what would be the recommended pathway to becoming proficient at SEO?

patio1121• 16 years ago

Spend two weeks reading SEOMoz and SEOBook like it is your job. Then, do SEO. I'd pay particular attention to the parts where programming is an unfair advantage, such as scalable content creation. (See blog Greatest Hits for lots of discussion of this.)

acangiano3• 16 years ago

I don't have a question, though I do have a suggestion, Patrick. At risk of spreading yourself too thin, you could leverage your fame among the crowd at both hacker news and Joel's forum to deliver a how-to ebook in which you summarize and methodically organize advice on how to go from zero to hero with a software product. If you were to sell such an ebook at somewhere around $29-49, you could very easily stand to make make six figures out of it.

tptacek4• 16 years ago

Dear Patrick,

Please write an ebook for $49. I will buy two of them.

Love,

Your consulting client who now feels like he overpaid.

patio1121• 16 years ago

Probably not going to happen. Writing is a lot of work. Promotion is a lot of work which I generally dislike. I rather prefer doing stuff as opposed to being a paid commentator about doing stuff: it means I get to post on HN without having the implicit disclaimer "Trying to sell you his get-rich-quick-in-only-half-a-decade-for-values-of-rich-which-are-not-quite-rich guide."

I also think, no offense, that HN is a terrible, terrible market to sell to. Among many other signs: if the price point a hypothetical customer goes to for "Actionable advice which stands to make my business a lot of money" is "thirty bucks", I have negative a billion desire to be in a business relationship with them. No offense intended to anybody here. Instead of spending six weeks writing and then a year wheedling people to part with their $50 as if that were a meaningful amount of money, I could pick up a phone tomorrow morning, call one of a couple CEOs, and say "So, still want my help?", and then do six weeks of consulting. There would be very little wheedling over $50 involved.

wallflower2• 16 years ago

What do you like to do when you are not working on your businesses? (e.g. you seem to spend so much time producing - what do you consume?)

What holds you back from selling your knowledge via a webinars or eBook?

How do you track/manage life outside AR,BCC,Consulting? (e.g. do you A/B test life or do you just go with your instincts?)

Congratulations and thank you for inspiring!

patio1121• 16 years ago

you seem to spend so much time producing - what do you consume?

Time with family and friends. Trashy urban fantasy and science fiction novels (approximately fifty in 2010 -- they will take my Kindle from my cold, dead hands). Hacker News. Video games, though I find myself enjoying them less these days. Gym (for health, rather than enjoyment). Dates. Church.

I don't have any intention of dating a simple random sample of women, so A/B testing life would be kind of difficult. "Organized and methodical" is something that I have never been described as outside of work or school.

phr• 16 years ago

Any thoughts on Heroku, now that you have some paid experience with it?

patio1121• 16 years ago

I like it, in a qualified fashion. For apps at the scale I operate at, which don't really benefit from the scale-to-the-moon aspect, the main selling point is the ease of deployment. You have to balance this with there being many, many headaches if you decide to use gems/libraries which interact poorly with Heroku's view of the world. I had to do an awful lot of R&D to get a client's project working, and that was for a wee little website which mostly turned strings into other strings.

Personally, at my combination of developer and sysadmin ability, I find using VPSes is a better use of my time. For client work where I want to hand over a product which doesn't require my ongoing involvement? Heroku all the way.

marilyn• 16 years ago

Would you be willing to give a rough breakdown of you $16,685.24 in expenses last year for Bingo Card Creator, please?

patio1121• 16 years ago

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

aneesh• 16 years ago

Do you have any designers you've worked with that you'd recommend, and have bandwidth for extra work? I'm awful at design, so I'm always on the lookout.

cperciva4• 16 years ago

Why are you bothering with BCC when consulting is so much more lucrative?

(I can think of a few good reasons, but I'd like to hear what your reasons are.)

patio1121• 16 years ago

I really enjoy being a product guy. BCC has a very desirable property in that it mostly works in my sleep. Consulting is quite lucrative and intellectually engaging, but it often disrupts my life in ways that BCC does not: for example, flying off to $BIG_CITY_ACROSS_OCEAN for a few weeks is wonderful once or twice a year but would get tiresome if I were doing it every month. I very rarely get tired of BCC, and with the exception of a trivial amount of support all of my work for it is at my absolute discretion to schedule. I mean, my little brother is graduating college this spring and, without even looking at the calendar, I can say "Sure, no problem, I'll be there. Tell me the day sometime."

Money is also not a huge motivator for me. I like it, don't get me wrong, but after I've got the rent and necessities covered (oh look, bingo) money generally has to be the icing on the cake to motivate me to do something. (Shh, no telling the consulting clients.)

tptacek4• 16 years ago

Why are you bothering with Tarsnap when consulting is so much more lucrative?

(Not being snarky).

sdrinf• 16 years ago

Other than linkjuice, what help would you like, and accept from HN?

(I think this is only fair: for I feel the transaction between you, and HN (or at least me, personally), is in massive inequality, and if there's a scalable way of repayment, now's your chance to figure it out ;) )

patio1121• 16 years ago

I really like hearing when my advice helps someone out. Negative confirmation ("We tried it... and it didn't work!") helps, too. Hearing via a blog post with a link to one of my businesses is, of course, double the fun.

necrodome• 16 years ago

Do you ever feel like you should be working on bigger, more important projects and you are wasting your time with current ones? (by important, i mean impacting more people's lives on large scale). And how do you approach what to work on?

patio1121• 16 years ago

I taught a couple hundred thousand kids last year, adding somewhere around a dozen full-time teachers to the US via efficiency gains. I'm feeling pretty groovy with regards to social impact of my work.

ig12• 16 years ago

Do you use Facebook Ads ?

I've been spending a lot of time optimizing Facebook ads for my own startup over the last month or so, and I've been shocked at how poor the information out there is regarding it.

In a month of doing my own tests I've probably got more info on how to optimize Facebook Ads than is on any blog / website out there.

Given your love for A/B testing it be great to hear if you've any experiences with Facebook ads that you'd like to share ?

nickfromseattle• 16 years ago

I, along with other members of the community would be interested in that information. Care to display it in a blog post?

patio1121• 16 years ago

"Like setting money on fire." describes everything I know about it.

cullenking• 16 years ago

I just figured out a good amount of info myself, by using a $50 coupon from them. Their ads way under perform google ads for me as well, but in the last two weeks I was almost able to squeeze an equivalent CTR, even if my conversion rate (signup for free account) through FB ads has been dramatically lower. I can pull a 15-20% conversion rate from google ads, but FB is only 5.7% right now. My CPC is about $0.15, which is down from $1.00 when I started.

The biggest difference I am seeing in performance between adwords and FB ads is that adwords works well for exploratory searches (obviously), whereas the only FB ads that are performing worth a damn are the ones calling out our competitors. My slew of ads have crap performance except the two titled "Tired of Map My Ride?" and "Tired of Garmin Connect?", with map my ride and garmin connect being our two big competitors.

So, to wrap up a long winded reply, I agree with Patrick. For most, it's probably equivalent to lighting money on fire.

_pius• 16 years ago

Do you A/B test your pricing (including one-time fee versus subscription service)?

karlv• 16 years ago

How has the USD-YEN exchange rate impacted your income and year over year numbers?

il• 16 years ago

Thanks for sharing your numbers, they are refreshingly honest.

I wonder if conversion rate from free to paid accounts is similar in other industries.

If so, the numbers are quite sobering.

If even a successful, highly targeted and well marketed SaaS product with 100K users and millions of pageviews makes as much profit as someone working for minimum wage flipping burgers, it seems that most startups don't stand a chance of ever getting ramen profitable.

I'm not deliberately trying to be negative, but I'm wondering why your revenues are so low even with such a massive amount of traffic.

Is your free offering so good that most people don't feel the need to upgrade?

patio1121• 16 years ago

I don't think conversion numbers are comparable across industries, products, etc etc. Heck, BCC's aren't even comparable across BCC! They're quite sensitive to, most prominently in my market, the season and traffic mix: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/conversion-rates

There are a lot more parents in the world than teachers, by necessity. Parents typically don't need 16+ cards. The free trial lets you print 15, which means it is essentially free for parents.

My mental frame of comparison is usually "young Japanese salaryman" rather than "guy flipping burgers."

rms2• 16 years ago

I have an 8% conversion rate to sale per unique visitor. I wish I knew what I was doing right.

steveklabnik3• 16 years ago

I think it has to do with your product, frankly. I imagine there's a lot of buying intent there.

akronim• 16 years ago

Patrick's is 0.18%, amazing to see the range - especially considering the Bingo Card Creator funnel is pretty optimized.

pwim• 16 years ago

We started going down the whitelabeling path with Doorkeeper, but ran into the issue that we were competing for mindshare with the whitelabeled version. I'd be interested to hear how you plan to approach the whitelabeling of Appointment Reminder.

xiaoma• 16 years ago

Have you ever tried making software targeted at the Japanese market? From what I understand, you might find a lot of niches as of yet unserved.

patio1121• 16 years ago

I had an agreement with my employers that I would not, prior to quitting my job recently. I think there are likely huge, huge unexploited opportunities here, but the language barrier (I speak Japanese, but I speak English very well, which rather helps when doing copywriting) and my lack of familiarity with the contours of the Japanese-speaking Internet (I couldn't name a major Japanese blogger if I tried, for example) always make me reach for the USA first.

rgrieselhuber• 16 years ago

The agreement was that you wouldn't work in the Japanese market at all? I agree with you about the huge, unexploited opportunities. ;-)

dminor• 16 years ago

Seems like there's a bunch of recurring credit card payment services out there now; what made you choose Spreedly?

patio1121• 16 years ago

A recommendation on a Rails blog. Investigated: sane pricing, painless API, worked with Paypal. That was my shopping list.

jeremydavid• 16 years ago

Hey Patrick,

I don't have a question, but I just want to say that you're a huge inspiration... and I'm so close to getting ready to take the plunge, get off my ass, and start working on my own projects.

Thanks for being so open with your experiences.

alex_c• 16 years ago

>so close to getting ready to take the plunge, get off my ass, and start

How close is that again? :p

jeffiel• 16 years ago

"Aside from frightening my bank a few times when I got large wire transfers from America, charging a lot of money is a great idea in every possible way."

That is a classic, congrats Patrick!

ameyamk• 16 years ago

I am know AR is still new, but can you shade light on traffic numbers related to AR?

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Go to the lower third of the article.

shushan• 16 years ago

If you had to live only from BCC's profits alone (25k~ this year), would you be able to?

patio1121• 16 years ago

Yep. Ramen profitable for me is about $2k a month, counting taxes. Japan would be cross with me, though: the unofficial "below this line you are stealing our jobs" mark is three million yen a year. It is not maximally relevant to Immigration that I created the job to steal it.

ido• 16 years ago

    the unofficial "below this line you are 
    stealing are jobs" mark is three million 
    yen a year.

Still a bit below the mark here (~2.4-2.5k euros/month for Austria, which is ~3.2-3.3m yen/year).

Kind of annoying when you have enough money to not need a job but not enough to not lose your work/residency permit.

tropin• 16 years ago

Matasanos is the Spanish slang for doctor (literally, means "healthy killer").

rumpelstiltskin• 16 years ago

Patrick, considering your chops (I think anyone who's read your posts on HN for a while will agree that you're in the '10x programmer' range), is there a reason why you won't launch a full fledged startup? Maybe even try out for HN? BCC is clearly at a point where it can be run on the side and that can take care of your 'ramen' needs while you focus on building something great.

patio1121• 16 years ago

AR looks an awful lot like a "real" startup I'd you squint at it the right way. If I were willing to commit to the growth curve (and implied lifestyle) that taking investment commits you to seeking, I'd do it and start hitting up people for money. At present, that doesn't fit in with my plans at the moment, but if I ever decide to roll the dice YC will be among the first to know.

JabavuAdams• 16 years ago

Why do people start startups? Two reasons that come to mind are: 1) To build something cool. 2) To work more now in order to have the option to work less later.

Patrick already seems to have met these goals, so why would he start a startup just to start a startup?

In my case, I'm currently doing almost exactly what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. The problem is my bank-account is not trending in a sustainable way. So, for my part my efforts are directed towards being able to do what I'm doing now, indefinitely.

kschua• 16 years ago

Thanks for sharing

bradly• 16 years ago

Patrick,

I'm curious why you worked as a salary man for the time that you did. You enjoy spending time with family/friends and money isn't a huge motivator, so why submit your self to the 70 hour work weeks and 3 hour commute?

And as other have said, thanks for the inspiration and information.

Bingo Card Creator (etc) Annual Report

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