Bingo Card Creator (etc) Year In Review 2011

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/21/bingo-card-creator-etc-year-in-review-2011/

by joshuacc • 15 years ago

221 74 15 years ago

kalzumeus.com

patio1111• 15 years ago

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

davidhansen• 15 years ago

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

Congratulations, Patrick.

gwern• 15 years ago

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.

dhimes• 15 years ago

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!

eposts• 15 years ago

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.

ryanwaggoner3• 15 years ago

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?

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.)

joeag• 15 years ago

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.

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.

johnthedebs• 15 years ago

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)?

gscott• 15 years ago

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.

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.

Natsu• 15 years ago

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

P.S. Congrats.

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.

joshuacc• 15 years ago

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!

tomjen3• 15 years ago

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.

ryanwaggoner3• 15 years ago

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 :)

solutionyogi2• 15 years ago

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.

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.

kalid• 15 years ago

   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.

js22• 15 years ago

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

itmag• 15 years ago

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?

dean• 15 years ago

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?

rokhayakebe• 15 years ago

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.

jasonkester• 15 years ago

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.

danberger• 15 years ago

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

gommm• 15 years ago

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...

jcr• 15 years ago

"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.

runevault• 15 years ago

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.

twog• 15 years ago

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.

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.

abcd_f• 15 years ago

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

revorad• 15 years ago

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

TomGullen• 15 years ago

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!

daed• 15 years ago

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

mluiten• 15 years ago

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.

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

> 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.

xiaoma• 15 years ago

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.

chc• 15 years ago

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?

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.

makira• 15 years ago

Could you give a breakdown of the expenses for BCC ?

Congrats on the 3 words!

patio1111• 15 years ago

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

glimcat• 15 years ago

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?...

alinajaf3• 15 years ago

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.

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.

phil• 15 years ago

$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.

alinajaf3• 15 years ago

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

joshu• 15 years ago

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

jgeralnik• 15 years ago

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

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

apsurd• 15 years ago

He got the girl!

Congratulations on your new adventure into familyhood <3

tree_of_item• 15 years ago

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.

mootothemax• 15 years ago

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.

patio1111• 15 years ago

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.

solutionyogi2• 15 years ago

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.]

apetresc• 15 years ago

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.

js22• 15 years ago

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!

richardw• 15 years ago

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?

rmc2• 15 years ago

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.

davidw• 15 years ago

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!

pbreit• 15 years ago

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?

emmett• 15 years ago

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.

jcampbell1• 15 years ago

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.

benhoyt• 15 years ago

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.'

Bingo Card Creator (etc) Year In Review 2011

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