Patio11 on his 362 day work year & what he does in his break

http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/08/hello-ladies-patrick-mckenzies-362-day-working-year-other-secrets-of-his-success-a-guest-post-from-patio11/

by marklittlewood • 13 years ago

55 47 13 years ago

businessofsoftware.org

onion2k• 13 years ago

If this article is designed to promote the Business of Software I think it's failed entirely in my case. Working every day of the year aside from 3 days at a conference is not something I have any desire to emulate, nor do I want to hang out with people who think that's a good idea.

Work should be fun, interesting, challenging, and something that you can put away occasionally to do other things. If you can't, you're doing it wrong.

patio112• 13 years ago

The 362 days thing is (very) figurative, and was less aimed at "Days work versus days off" than at "Rough percentage of my time is spent dealing with daily tactical minutiae of running business versus get-away-from-it-all opportunities to think about where I want things to be in one year, five years, etc."

marklittlewood6• 13 years ago

As Patrick has already responded, I don't think there is too much to add but apologies if you feel the line is misleading. Anyone that runs their own business is likely to be spending a lot of time thinking about the detail of what they are doing and not have the time to step back and think about working 'On' their business. We try to create an environment that allows people to step back from the day to day, and learn from each other.

We also happen to believe that far too many people spend their time as entrepreneurs telling other people how hard they work etc, and that frankly is not healthy. This is also a little 'tongue in cheek'.

spindritf• 13 years ago

Chris

This is OT but I have mixed feelings about the practice of using someone's first name when responding to them on HN. On one hand, it's a bit e-stalky, especially when the handle bears no resemblance to the name and just... sound off. On the other, it's a rather elegant, understated way of distinguishing comments made in some more or less official capacity from regular opinions.

ig12• 13 years ago

It's a shame BoS have started selling the videos of talks when most conferences are going in the other direction and releasing videos for free.

Given that many speakers are doing so to contribute back to the community and build their own reputations it would be nice if conferences like BoS would be run by the community for the sake of the community rather than by commercial entities.

I'd be curious to know what percentage of the video sales price goes to the speakers as royalties.

marklittlewood6• 13 years ago

BoS releases all of the talks for free within a year of them being made. We, like many organisations are working hard to find a sustainable business model for content. In some cases, the speakers ask that we do not release the talk fro free. We do not share royalties with the speakers but then the cost of preparing the videos is far in excess of the revenue we make from selling early access.

If you have been to BoS you would know how community minded it is. It takes a huge amount of work to put something like BoS on and to be honest, we think we do a pretty good job of hosting and producing an event that is both very different and refreshingly uncommercial in outlook.

ig12• 13 years ago

I've been involved with running events so I appreciate that things like venues, staffing, speaker expenses, etc can build up to a considerable amount and that those costs have to be met somehow.

If it's a case of the event not being financially sustainable without additional non-ticket revenue then maybe charging for videos is what has to be done, but if the videos aren't bringing in a significant revenue stream while presumably significantly reducing the number of viewers I'd have to ask if that's a worthwhile trade-off ?

Obviously the answer for that is going to be different if you're optimising for profit or for community benefit, but that's why I'd rather have community events run sustainably by non-profits than on a purely commercial for-profit basis.

[I have no issues with videos being charged for / with-held at the speakers request though]

dudurocha2• 13 years ago

If they do depend on the sales of BoS videos, I'll not complain, Although, BoS is one of the best conferences I won't be able to go, and I would love to watch the keynotes for free.

marklittlewood6• 13 years ago

We hope you will always get to watch the keynotes for free, even if they are released over the course of the year.

In most cases they are though we may get asked to not release a video to the public if a speaker has said something that they wish they hadn't, in one case a speaker discussed a company that they then started teaching an MBA class on and realized that the students could just watch the video instead of doing the classes, someone was once very unintentionally indiscreet about a co-founder and some investors...

We try to respect the wishes of the speakers.

NZ_Matt• 13 years ago

Ha! I read the first few paragraphs and then scrolled down until I got to the P.S.

Brilliant!

asmithmd1• 13 years ago

Whoa! - $2500 for a three day conference. The "Business of Software" conference is a pretty good business.

I know, I know - They rented a hotel ballroom and give you lunch and snacks. It's too bad the self-organizing bar-camp thing kind of died when the great recession ended. I thought it might kill expensive conferences like Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds.

marklittlewood6• 13 years ago

Not nearly as good a business as you might think I can assure you and we make a lot of effort to have a single customer - the delegate. There are no sponsor panels, exhibition booths etc that make events a lot more profitable. We have consciously decided to avoid these and focus on making the event as valuable for paid attendees as we possibly can.

Please don't forget we have a relatively high ticket price a finite number of places and very significant fixed and variable costs. This is not a software business.

We also try hard to incentivize early booking and offer discounts to encourage this so the average ticket price is significantly lower than $2,500. (Tickets cost $1,800 at the moment and we have sold almost 3/4 of them.

runako• 13 years ago

I'm guessing that for the target audience, the 3 days of actual time is the more significant expense.

jiggy20113• 13 years ago

That would assume an annual salary of > $216,000 or so.

wikwocket2• 13 years ago

Lesson one in the "business of software" (or, in "business"), is price things according to value, not cost-plus! Of course you can get lunch in a hotel and someone to talk to you for less than $2500, but what value can you derive from these particular speakers on these particular topics? Plus, free lunch!

We can be shocked and complain about the price, or we can say, hmm, maybe there's something to this "provide demonstrably great value and charge an appropriate price for it" idea... ;)

dudurocha2• 13 years ago

http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...

I think this is one of the best talks I ever watched. It's about startup life, without glamour, false-hope or delusional expectations. The fact that it's not a twenty-something year old guy, who sold it's business for millions of dollars in only 2 months, makes an excellent talk to anyone who has a SaaS software, consultancy business or is looking in join the startup bandwagon.

mp99e99• 13 years ago

She quotes calculating churn as 1/churn rate.. in this example she said her churn was 2.2% month meaning lifetime value of 45 months. But that doesn't make sense, since its compounding/exponential.. its really only 32 months (not 45). Then she talks about having to explain the math to the VC. Am I missing something here, because I find this fairly alarming coming from a successful company.

patio112• 13 years ago

Let C be the original number of companies (or their billings, doesn't matter.)

In month 1, we have 1 * C companies. In month 2, we have 1 * .978 * C companies. .978 is the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn. In month 3, we have 1 * .978 * .978 * C companies.

Given that we are most keenly interested in how many company-months we rack up over time, we can solve for this with sum of an infinite geometric series. The formula is C / (1 - s) for s is the survivorship rate, or C / (churn).

Exactly like Gail said it was.

michaelmartin2• 13 years ago

The analogy at the top of this needs a little work. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) wasn't in the Social Network (Jesse Eisenberg)

Both great movies though :)

nollidge• 13 years ago

It's a joke.

marklittlewood6• 13 years ago

Great comment below the blog post...

Matias, this phenomenon is known as the “Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” A movie fan cannot know whether a character is played by Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera with any degree of confidence until he observes the whole movie. This is because the parts played by these two actors can only be accurately modeled by a complex wave-like function. Cinematic physicists are not sure, but it seems likely that, for any given movie, the part of the geeky outcast is played by both Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera simultaneously. Only when you watch the movie does the waveform collapse and you observe one or the other actor.

michaelmartin2• 13 years ago

Haha, fair enough, I stand corrected then. Well played.

antidaily• 13 years ago

TL;DR He goes to the Business of Software Conference.

nicpottier• 13 years ago

Am I the only one starting to get tired of these 'sell the shovels' sales pitches directed at SAAS startups? I respect Patrick and what he's done, but to me he is coming off more and more sleazy and this particular post doesn't help the case.

Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? Is it getting worse or am I just getting more sensitive to it? That's an honest question, shlock like this just makes my skin crawl these days, but maybe I'm in the minority.

rschmitty• 13 years ago

I think its getting so bad that in addition to the 'sell the shovels' there are lots of 'how to sell the shovels' or 'how we can help you sell the shovels' posts going around.

Don't dig for gold, sell shovels! Want to learn how to sell shovels? Subscribe to our newsletter where we teach you 3-4 things and then end up with us trying to sell you on stuff that will help you selling shovels.

Next thing you know, you are paying for 50 different services so you can "focus on selling shovels"

jiggy20113• 13 years ago

You could probably describe most economic activity that way, we have relatively simple core wants and needs (we want sex not SaaS). We spend our lives trying to acquire things that help us satisfy those by increasingly indirect means.

emhart• 13 years ago

Selling shovels to the shovel sellers.

mesozoic• 13 years ago

Well sometimes the shovels are made of gold.

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

It lost me at "362" which patio11 has described below as "(very) figurative"

larrys• 13 years ago

Reminds me a bit of back in the day when you used to walk the bookstore and pick up the nth book on "how to be good at marketing" or "how to manage people" which you would take home and hopefully read. At a certain point you realized that you had to spend time actually doing and not taking the easy route of reading on how to do something. Getting tips and suggestions only goes so far.

This also applied to programming books in the 90's. Buy another O'reilly book when you hadn't even gotten to the 3rd chapter in the previous O'Reilly book. And spend time browsing for the next book about something when you hadn't even begun to understand or master the previous thing.

Going even further back this wasn't that much of a problem though. There were very few bookstores that carried computer books (I had to drive to the Princeton U bookstore) and when you got there there might have been 1 or 2 books on a subject so you couldn't get distracted with unlimited content and information.

SyneRyder• 13 years ago

Not just you, I had a similar reaction when it hit my inbox.

The line that stood out for me was "Nuremberg, Germany... [is] a bit far away from the tech-industry in-crowd". Nuremberg's a 1 hour flight from Berlin & 1 hour by train to Munich, both of which have vibrant tech/startup scenes. That line didn't ring true to me, so that's where I archived the email & moved on.

mechanical_fish2• 13 years ago

Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing?

If your definition of "success" doesn't include selling software, then sure, you can be a success without selling software.

But BoS is a conference about the business of software – hence the name – and sales is a primary concern for BoS attendees, because that's the whole point of the software business. The competitive advantage of software is that you only have to build it once. (And, if it's well-written, it costs as little to maintain as possible.) Then you sell it as many times as you can. That's what our professional pursuit of "scalability" is really about: The more "scalable" the product, the less time a company needs to spend worrying about how much work the software can do and the more time the company spends trying to convince people to give the software more things to do. The ideal software company would spend 100% of its time thinking about sales and customer satisfaction and 0% of its time thinking about software.

If you or your peers are noticing sales happening more often, it may be because you're becoming more aware of how the software business actually works. You'll need to figure out how to cope with this knowledge. You can choose to embrace it. Or you can choose to avoid working in the software business, which is easy to do. (Most programming jobs are not part of the software business, and even those that are often have nothing to do with the strategic side of the business. Though, I have to warn you, once you've learned to see the strategic side of the software business it is hard to un-see. And the power to change the real world at scale is addictive and is not lightly discarded.)

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

There is a earning ceiling for software developers who do not sell, or are not lucky in the equity lottery.

That ceiling is around 100 USD an hour. It may vary geographically but its really a ceiling.

And guess what, on my little business park where I have an office, the owners of many of the businesses do not experience that ceiling. They sell.

I like their nice cars. I want one too. So I am learning to sell.

I also have "The Little Schemer" open next to me, and dream of the time when children learn the 4 r's - reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and recursion.

Just because I want to sell, does not mean I am abandoning my principles or my profession. I hope to contribute further. But I want to be more secure, and earning more will help that a lot.

dsr_• 13 years ago

This... has the voice of a paid shill trying to work in references to the Next Amazing Offer. It didn't read to me like patio11's essay or HN comment tone at all.

[ed] Is this more effective at attracting the kind of people who pay to attend the BoS conference than his usual voice?

peterwwillis• 13 years ago

If a company is big enough and should have documented their network for liability insurance, either A. I know places who didn't have it, or B. I know places that hid it, or C. it isn't always required. Weird.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

Who cares?

norswap• 13 years ago

I think the problem with this kind of approach to marketing is that you have to be a marketing geek to enjoy it. I wish there was a minimal approach for people who find marketing bothersome.

Also, this is more controversial, but I think patio11 should make his points faster. His posts tend to be overly long for what they bring to the table.

wikwocket2• 13 years ago

The default approach for people who don't want to market themselves or their wares is to get a salaried job that doesn't deal with customers. A perfectly acceptable option for those who want to just hack/just write/just do their thing.

Probably all of us struggle to see where on the continuum of [stereotypical hacker who fears sunlight] to [real estate agent that also writes code] we lie, and what sort of job/career/ambition we best fit into.

knes• 13 years ago

Nice way to sell your brand patio11.

summerlunch• 13 years ago

Why is everybody saying that this post seems sleazy? Am I the only one that's not seeing it like that? He is only trying to encourage people to attend the BoS conference by telling us about the benefits. How else would you do it?

nandemo• 13 years ago

I don't think it's sleazy at all. It's simply enthusiastic.

Patio11 on his 362 day work year & what he does in his break

Related Stories