I hate sounding like a hippy, but I'm going to sound like a hippy for a minute: create more value than you capture.

I've been pretty open with my business for the last 5 years, blogging about it and talking about what it has taught me on e.g. HN, forums, conferences, and what have you. After a while, some folks got the impression that I knew what I was talking about, so they asked me what I would do in their circumstances. I told them. Some reported back "Hey, we tried that and it worked. Cool."

Back in December 2010, right prior to quitting the day job, I went home for Christmas and arranged to have coffee with a HN buddy of mine (tptacek) who happens to run a consulting/software company in the security space. He and a colleague interrogated me over coffee for three hours about what I would do for their SEO, because tptacek trusted me from years of giving good advice that kept producing results for myself and other people. At the end of the coffee, he told me that I should have charged him to talk for those three hours. I said "Meh, that would probably be $100 an hour, and what is $300 worth when I have Christmas to prepare for anyhow?" He threw out a number he would have been willing to pay for my advice. It was substantially north of $300.

After that, when people asked "Hey Patrick, would you be interested in consulting with us on ...", I stopped saying "Gee I'm flattered but I don't think I can do that."

How to market a consulting business? Find people who have money and problems. Solve their problems, publicly. Communicate to those people that you have solved their problems.

I don't specifically say "OK, today, I'm going to market myself as a consultant", but when somebody says "Hey Patrick would you do a presentation for our conference" I say "Oh heck yes. I'd be happy to." Folks often want to talk afterwards. Sometimes that goes in interesting directions.

When there's a meetup of startup-y folks, I chat, I mingle, and I ask about what kind of problems they're having. Oh, you're having problems with customer acquisition? What a coincidence. Have you tried SEO? Here's something you might think about: ... I have a blog post about it, want me to send you an email with a link? That often results in an interesting conversation.

Frequently I just get an email out of the blue. "Hiya, Patrick, I'm $X and I heard about you from $Y who knows you from $Z and I have a problem. Can we talk about it?" The answer is yes. That conversation is often interesting.

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Running my own business is one of the best decisions I ever made in increasing my own happiness and ability to do good things for other people. I bounce out of bed most mornings. Five years in I am still possibly the happiest guy most people know.

Let's talk cons first, shall we?

1) Running a one-man business makes you an oddity among everyone you know (and this is even more true in Japan, where I live). You're signing up for years and years of well-intentioned remarks from family like "Hey, I was just thinking, maybe you should go to graduate school? Then you could get a nice safe government job... with a pension! Wouldn't that be wonderful?" To the extent that social status matters to you -- and if it doesn't, wait until you are asking a young lady's mother for permission to marry her daughter -- a one-man software business is strictly inferior to other options which are easily achievable, such as being an engineer at Google, going to law/med school, etc etc.

2) I don't work all that much anymore, but my lifestyle is very, very isolating on the weekdays. I could get up in the morning and go to bed at night without *ever* speaking to another human being. If that scares you, I recommend either a) having coworkers or b) figuring some way to hack the system such that you get something which is morally equivalent to a coworker.

3) This isn't so much a con for me, but some people don't understand it, so here you are: running a software business is 10% software and 90% business. DO NOT START A BUSINESS BECAUSE YOU LIKE WRITING SOFTWARE. If you like to write software, go get a job at Google, they are hiring. As a businessman, you'll be doing customer support, marketing, accounting, taxes, marketing, hiring, management, marketing, SEO, marketing, and the like, and only *very occasionally* opening up your IDE of choice and making stuff happen.

Pros:

1) I have more freedom in arranging my day to day schedule than a salaried employee can imagine. If I wanted to take my girlfriend to see a 3 PM showing of Harry Potter on a Wednesday, sure, why the heck not? I work exactly as much as I want to work. (People say running your own business sucks your entire life away. Trust me: that is optional.)

2) I went from working 90 hours a week for $ALMOST_NOTHING to working ~20 hours a week for $RATHER_MORE_THAN_NOTHING.

3) I have virtually unlimited flexibility to do things that are theoretically business-related but not necessarily aimed at making a buck today. I can write OSS code when I want, or do an AMA on AnyAsq because somebody asked me to, or contribute an article to an academic journal. It is like being a university professor except without having to grade papers or sit on committees: you get paid to live the Life of the Mind and produce stuff which creates value for other people. I love the heck out of that.

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One of the downsides to running your own business is that you have no coworkers. I find it *enormously* helpful, and motivational, to be able to talk through stuff about business with similarly interested smart folks. So outlet, yes.

I participate quite a bit on the Internet, including on my blog, on HN, on other forums, and I guess on this page. This has lead to major opportunities for me that I would not otherwise have gotten. So it's a boon, yes.

Is it an addiction? That phrasing tends to ruffle my feathers a little bit. Do you know a real addict? Do you think there's any daughter of an alcoholic or meth addict or problem gambler who is thinking "Phew, I dodged a bullet: Dad could have 60,000 HN karma instead"?

Alright, is it *colloquially* an addiction then? I7d put it closer to "hobby." If you were a similarly well-adjusted person in my father's generation, you might on any given day spend some time reading a paper, chatting with your buddies at the water cooler, or shooting an email to colleagues about business over your blackberry. HN is all of these things to me.

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I will be doing a presentation partially on this issue at TwilioConf.

Short version: 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.

I used to work in a call center. The vast majority of employees at it were midwestern housewives. One of our jobs was calling customers of a major office supply chain to tell them that their order for paper was successfully received via fax, entered into the computer, and they would receive their paper the day after tomorrow. If you have never worked in a call center, you have no idea how soul-crushing of a job this is. You make five phone calls. Two fail to reach anyone. Two hit answering machines. One hits a live person. About one time in three, as soon as you say "Hiya, this is Patrick from $COMPANY", he'll say "#)$()#( YOU STOP CALLING ME!" and you get to call back and try to inform him that his secretary has placed an order and you would greatly appreciate if he stopped swearing long enough to take a message for her.

This paid for me to go to college. Now, though, that entire process can be done better, faster, more efficiently with a script. We can refocus those soul-sucking hours recovered on places where human touch actually adds value, like e.g. answering customer queries or helping little old ladies decide which of 37 varieties of paper is the right paper for printing resumes on.

There are many, many women who are in jobs which cannot be replaced solely by a computer but can be replaced by a computer and a telephone working in concert. We should do that ASAP. Similarly, there are many women who would have a better user experience with something they urgently need to get done today if they had a perfectly functioning 24-7 computer/phone system available for call instead of a 6.5 hour call center where they reached an employee with two months of experience who was still crying from her last call. They should have the better experience, ASAP.

I could talk for an age and a half about how Twilio makes any phone into a smartphone and how that will eventually be bigger for poor nations than the Internet. Corner me at TwilioConf and say "smartphone."

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

Some years ago, when graduating college, I had a concrete plan for Where I Was Going In Life. That plan was a) move to Japan to firm up business Japanese b) come home and get a nice safe job at Microsoft in the Japanese Office division c) retire at 55. This was because I thought I was not great shakes as a programmer, and would be uncompetitive with the hordes of great programmers India and China were producing every year.

(I have since learned many things about life, the universe, and everything. Don't judge 20 year old me too harshly.)

Anyhow, I successfully executed step A, and got a job as a tech translator at a prefectural technology incubator. 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.

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Cost-plus is not a good way to do business. It rewards costing more. Is there *any* sense for my customers or the world in me driving up e.g. my cost of customer acquisition from $15 to $45 so that I can charge $50, instead of the $30 I charge right now?

I saved American schoolteachers conservatively 25,000 hours last year. That's better than adding a dozen full-time teachers to the US. This cost less than $45k. That is screamingly good value for the money, societal-wise. Teachers got back to doing individual instruction for their students without doing soul-crushing manual labor. Try making 30 bingo cards by hand sometimes. It is a lot of fun.

I'm really not too worried about whether I create value or not. If I had a worry in that general vein, it would be "Am I resting on my laurels with regards to value creation?"

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Largely, because I have been unable to focus as much on it as I would like to. There are a variety of reasons for this. Some of them are happy reasons, some of them are less happy. Most are extrinsic to the business.

One reason which is not extrinsic to the business is that I keep getting offered sums of money for consulting which are impossible to turn down. That's great, but it means that 1 ~ 3 weeks that I had budgeted for AR go down the rabbit hole. I'm taking money that I've been squirreling away from these consulting engagements to hire someone to help me do the things that I should be doing when I'm out rainmaking.

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You make hiring employees profitable. This is not a trivial thing to do, but the absolute worse way to approach it is to pass a law saying that humans should be used to do things that computers can do better in every possible way.

I'm a techno-optimist. I think it is a *wonderful* thing that we got everybody out of the scraping-in-the-dirt-to-harvest-just-enough-to-live-on business. I want people out of the moving boxes in a warehouse business. I want people out of the making phone calls with a script business. I want people out of the being a REST API to a SQL query business.

If this means we need to teach people more to get them to do more useful things, sure, then we do that. I want their teachers out of the bingo card creation business, though. I do that better and faster than they can hope to.

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The short version: find what you're doing manually, outsource, automate, or eliminate it.

Some specific examples for BCC:

I used to spend a lot of time looking at Analytics stats. This does not generate value for the business. I stopped doing it. To satiate my desire for constant feedback, I pulled the key numbers I look at onto my customer support dashboard, which I check about once every day. (They are cached, so I cannot mash refresh for more feedback without manually resetting the cache. This prevents me from playing WoW in my browser -- ooh look, more purple pixels!)

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

When you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of users who are not the technically savviest knives in the drawer, customer support can be a bit of a burden. Generally, 80% of the email is caused by 20% of the issues, so you reword your web pages to avoid that confusion, redesign systems to give people automated self-help options, etc etc. For example, a common customer question about BCC is "Does every bingo card end up different?" This is the entire reason the software exists. Count how many times I say variations of that on my front page and interface: every time I have to write an email to that effect, I consider saying it one more time.

A huge portion of the work involved in promoting BCC is creating content pages for the website. For example, take a look at

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/bingo-cards/seasons/autumn

Notice that making this page requires some text, a GIF, and a downloadable PDF. The GIF and PDF are produced automatically by software I wrote for the task. Coming up with the activity and words related to e.g. Fall Bingo I outsource to a freelancer. She gets a Wordpress-esque interface on the backend of my website to do her work in, and I only have to check by once a month to batch approve new activities (one click, naturally) and cut her a check. 942 activities on my website: this has taken me substantially less than 40 hours, total. (The first one, which I did manually, took two hours.)

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I'd probably be good at it. I also know what the lucrative affiliate markets are. They're almost universally seedy: PPC (in this context it means Porn, Pills, Casino), payday loans, etc etc.

I do not dislike money, but clearly it isn't really up there on things which push my motivational buttons. Why would I do something distasteful in return for mere money?

You should see some of the offers I've gotten for turning BCC into a bingo casino affiliate, by the way. Not interested. I did not spend the last five years of my life building this to help you separate little old English ladies from their pension checks.

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This question is rather broad, because "freemium business model" is so broad as to be incoherent. It's like saying "What do you think about charging people money?" I haven't thought it over today but, yeah, I suppose I am in favor of charging people money?

Let me make some assumptions about the type of freemium business we are probably talking about. If this doesn't square with your assumptions, feel free to ask a follow-up question.

Many freemium businesses will have per-user lifetime values LTV in the "handful of dollars" range. This means that you need approximately a hundred thousand users, a year, to cover the cost of your first engineering employee. You need to be *darn* confident on your ability to grow EXTREMELY BIG and EXTREMELY FAST if your LTV is going to be about $2. (n.b. That is not a terribly poor approximation for, e.g., Facebook games.)

Additionally, low LTVs will severely handicap your ability to spend money to acquire more customers. Software as a service businesses really, really start to shine once they have a pathway where spending $X predictably generates a customer at the margin worth more than $3X or so. If you have that, and it works at scale, then you beg/borrow/raise/steal as much money as you can and explode. Yay you. If, however, your LTV is $2, then your maximum per-customer cost of acquisition is $0.66, and $0.66 won't buy you much of anything. So you'd better hope you have a fairly massive source of free customers. There exist businesses which, famously, nailed this. You may nail it. I would not bet the farm on it, though.

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I have considered writing a book. Can we talk about the realities of technical/business publishing for a moment? As a first time author, I would write a query letter, proposed outline, and sample chapter and give that to Apress. After some dickering over contractual terms, they would give me an advance check for $5,000. I would then spend the next several months totally committed to writing the book.

Then about a year passes.

Then I would have to spend every waking moment promoting the book. In return, of the ~$25 sale price of the book, I would receive about $3. That starts to "earn back" the advance -- i.e. my royalty check starts with a balance of -$5,000 and I have to sell a few thousand copies until they actually start paying me money.

Let me talk about the microeconomics of a competing IP good. Pretend you're a teacher and you buy a copy of Bingo Card Creator for $29.95. I pay Paypal about $1.50 and pocket the rest. There is no advance to earn out prior to receiving "royalty" checks. I have complete control over the marketing and pricing of Bingo Card Creator, and have a process by which marketing largely happens in my sleep rather than requiring me to e.g. go to a book signing (across the ocean from my home, community, girlfriend, etc) and attempt to move books at retail.

Additionally, if I really really wanted a check for $5,000 tomorrow, I could pick up the phone to a consulting client and get it. I'm not comfortable with talking rates, but suffice it to say that it would not be "Several months of dedicated work." for that $5,000.


There are non-monetary reasons to write books. It can help establish one's reputation as an expert on something. I don't really have a Need To Be Known As Expert hole in my resume at the moment. It could help get you consulting leads. I don't need those either. Some people enjoy writing. I enjoy writing *a lot*, but understand that being an author is about 10% writing and 90% promotion, and I hate promotion with a passion unmatched by a thousand burning suns.

If I were possessed by a desire to write words and sell them for money, I would release then as an e-book by myself, sell it for rather more than a traditional book, and not leak 95%+ of the sale price to a business model which needs to exploit me to survive.

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This is pretty much my entire blog and at least tangentially subject of every presentation I've ever done. So, I guess first off:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

My most important bit of advice: LAUNCH. Asking me questions is not launching. Reading about the topic is not launching. Launching is launching. All good things come from launching. My business went from conception to launch in 8 days. Put a red mark on your calendar: 8 days from now, a month from now, whatever. Launch something by that day.

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I actually have longstanding self-confidence issues, believe it or not. Showing confidence, as opposed to having confidence, is a learned skill. You can even practice it.

There are situations in business where it is highly advantageous to be able to show confidence even if, in your heart of hearts, you are terrified and believe yourself to be the least competent person in the room. One thing I have found is that it is entirely possible that *everyone* thinks they are the least competent person in the room. Don't let that stop you.

People almost always come away with the impression that I'm a nice guy. If that were routinely not happening, that would worry me. In support of a diagnosis of "nice guy", a hypothetical observer might note that I am very generous in trying to help other people and very rarely mean. As long as folks see me as a nice guy, self-confidence doesn't read as cocky, it reads as intelligent.

It is entirely possible that some customers/strangers might not like me. I have at least a few passionate anti-fans. There is no moral or practical reason why you would need *everyone* to like *everything* you do.

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1) By the time I quit my day job, I was routinely exceeding my salary (which was rather low -- Japanese salarymen make much less than American engineers at equivalent experience levels) with my sales from Bingo Card Creator. I expected this would likely continue to be the case in the future.

2) Roughly contemporaneously with making the decision to quit, I discovered (via a conversation with a buddy of mine from HN) that if I stopped saying "No, I'm sorry, I have a day job" when people asked if I would consult for them on e.g. how to market their software better online, people would pay me money for that sort of thing. This eliminated any risk that, e.g., seasonal fluctuations in the bingo market could have me breaking into my savings to continue eating.

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Thomas Ptacek, Joel Spolsky, Aaron Wall, and Michael Pryor have given me great advice. Much of it was extremely useful. That list is not exhaustive, but so many people have been generous with me that thanking them all individually would tax this poor little server's database.

I don't know if it quite fits the definition of "mentorship" but I've also learned a thing or two from individuals on forums I frequent.

I met them on the Internet. As to why they'd spend time with me when all have many things they could be doing with their day, see the answer about marketing a consulting business. I share some stuff with them, they (very generously) share some advice with me.

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SEO is so important because Google has become the primary form of navigation on the Internet and because understanding SEO empirically, repeatedly makes staggering amounts of money.

Hypothetically assuming that I was being gamed by the Googles, Wall Street, the Illuminati, and the Ogaki City tax office in pursuit of their own separate agendas, why would that change what I did tomorrow?

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HN is my filter for news.

I really like SEOBook and SEOMoz's blogs, particularly around 2006. (That is when I got my "book" learning on SEO.)

Other than that, I religiously read jakonrath.blogspot.com. He's an author who writes about the business of selling horribly gory murder mysteries, and in particular, how technology is disrupting his industry. It is some of the best business writing on the Internet.

That's not five, but that's all I read on a regular basis. Obviously, pg, Joel Spolsky, etc, whenever they publish a new essay.

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Blog post on this topic coming up in the next few weeks.

1) I often recommend geeks raise prices because we pervasively underprice. That is generally good advice.

2) "Egads, the economy is bad right now" is not a reason why your software should cost $20/month instead of $100/month for a business with top line revenues of $10 million which spends $500 a month on toilet paper.

3) 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. (If this sounds like a hobbyhorse of mine, guilty as charged.)

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There existed a lot of ways to create bingo cards prior to the existence of Bingo Card Creator. My primary differentiation, aside from not sucking so badly (which I recommend), was in not going after the "bingo cards" market but rather going after the "X bingo cards" micro-markets where X is something that elementary schoolteachers have reason to care about.

There are great flowing rivers of cash in travel, and most of them focus on things like "New York City hotels" and arbitraging against the existing travel brands. ("Arbitrage" in the SEO sense of the word means that some user has already heard of the Four Seasons and your site, despite not being directly affiliated with the Four Seasons, attempts to rank for brand keywords related to them.) There almost certainly exist better ways to do these things.

Additionally, there is an entire world of customers out there who are not well-off tech-savvy Americans and whose options for travel on the Internet are terrible. Pick an addressable market there, and fill the hole in the Internet for them.

There are also options to be truly disruptive, like Airbnb. I don't usually worry about those so much, but if you want to build a billion dollar business, you should probably set your sights on that sort of thing rather than trying to do a travel affiliate 2% better than the next travel affiliate.

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I'm 29 today. Some people want to have sold a startup or have made a million dollars by 35. I would be happier with a wife and kids. Does that count as a project?

Businesswise, I'm not sure that I really need a next project, but if I ever come up with a great idea for one I bet I'll blog about it.

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I used to spend a lot of time on the Business of Software forums Joel Spolsky and company run, but don't so much anymore:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz

I occasionally duck into the SEOBook forums at http://www.seobook.com You'd have to pay for access to those. I think that's a good idea if your business makes significant amounts of money on organic search traffic, or you intend it to.

I once spent a lot of time under a pseudonym on another forum, largely unrelated to business. I'll elide that because private info was involved and I wouldn't want folks attaching it to my real name, though that wouldn't be terribly difficult. Prior to that, I ran a forum for college debaters, an old hobby of mine. I'm not active on it at present.

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You know what I've wanted to do for the last couple of years? Learn to salsa dance. Why? It sounds like it would be cool to try. I haven't signed up for lessons, though. Things keep getting in the way. So, clearly, learning to dance salsa is less important to me than whatever I've been doing for the last couple of years.

Building a huge Internet business might be cool. As cool as salsa dancing? Maybe.

It is entire possible that one day I'll learn to dance salsa.

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"Are you happy with the work we did together?"

Two for two! (And I was terrified about it, too!)

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Sole proprietorship, at the moment. I pay all taxes that I am legally required to pay in Japan, the United States, and their political subdivisions. That is less work than you might think it requires, but it gets complicated at times. (Imagine going to the Japanese social security administration in rural Japan and explaining to them that you needed official certification of a particular fact to trigger your exemption for US self-employment taxes under the US/Japan Social Security Totalization Agreement.)

My visa situation is complicated. Ask me in a month after my renewal goes through. It is my favorite "hacking a non-technical system" topic.

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*Nobody* is more shocked than me about BCC's growth. Five years ago, I thought that with continuous TLC and some elbow grease it would eventually reach the commanding heights of $200 a month.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

I think there is probably more room to grow, but additional time spend on BCC is not the future source of growth for my business. (I'm working more on consulting these days, but Appointment Reminder at https://www.appointmentreminder.org is my best guess for The Next Big Thing for the business, as of today at any rate.)

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All the cool kids were using it!

No, seriously, I tried ruby for a few minutes on _why's tutorial site and fell hopelessly in love.

Ruby/Rails also made me a MUCH better Big Freaking Java Web Applications programmer, by the way, but that's a long story for another day.

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First, I come up with the general idea for a topic. This is often something I have been working on recently, thinking about recently, or spoken about with someone recently.

I jot a few ideas about the idea in my notebook. 75% of posts die at this point, as they don't sound meaty enough. (I used to write non-meaty blog posts, too, but I found that wasn't a tremendously valuable use of my time.)

Then, I sit down at my computer and write, stream-of-consciousness style, into Wordpress. Basically, I pretend that you -- my reader -- is sitting down with me, and I tell you something, in my normal conversational style. Sort of like I am doing right now. I create graphs/screen captures/etc in order, at the point where I need to insert them.

Then I go back through for a quick editing pass (I'm not too thorough at this -- mostly I catch infelicities in language rather than spelling mistakes). Then comes the big hurdle.

See, pretty much anything I write hits the HN front page these days. That's partially because I write interesting stuff and partially because I have a reputation for writing interesting stuff. I do not want to take up peoples' time with drek that gets voted because I have, at other times, produced valuable things. So, that's the filter that things go through: if it isn't good enough for the HN front page, it stays in the drafts folder.

About 50% of posts never leave the drafts folder.

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Hacker News should really count as a hobby for me.

Aside from that, I read. A lot. My Kindle reports that it has 186 items in it. At least ~175 of those are novels that I've completed. I bought my Kindle in October 2010: you do the math. My favorite genre as of late is urban fantasy. I joke that I am probably the only heterosexual male in the world who can say that. (The genre is similar to the bastard lovechild of fantasy and romance. Think Twilight, but for adults only. Capital A Capital O, in many cases, which is one more reason I should not like the genre, but I can't seem to help myself. As soon as I hear "Ooh ooh the mechanic fell in love with a fiery redhead who is really a dragon!" I have to read it.)

I am also something of a gamer, although less in recent years. (Once upon a time I ran a WoW guild. It was like running a business, except with more work, more drama, more dragons, and worse loot.)

My current passion in gaming is League of Legends. Games tend to run about 45 minutes in length, which makes getting 2 or 3 a perfect way to kill part of an evening prior to going to the gym or dinner with a book. I do this once or twice a week.

I also enjoy dates, hanging out with friends, church, and going to the gym. Actually, I detest going to the gym, but I do it anyway.

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I did a fairly well-received presentation on this once. The video is here. I won't spoil the surprise if you haven't seen it already.

http://businessofsoftware.org/video_10_pmckenzie.aspx

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Not great yet!

It covers its costs, but makes a lot less than BCC does. Any one white label deal going through would fix that in a hurry. Sadly, when one finally does go through, I will likely be NDAed about it, so I purposely do not commit to transparency with regards to that.

Hypothetically supposing I was making $500 a month off individual subscriptions and $10k a month off an NDAed deal, it is greatly against your interests and my interests to tell you "I am making $500 a month off individual subscriptions."

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I'd consider doing just about anything. I consider going back to full-time employment all the time. I haven't done it, but people I respect give very attractive offers to cause it and I give them due consideration.

Candidly, you'd have to have a darn good pitch *and* you'd probably have to have known me for a while for me to need to think very hard about my answer.

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Hardware: Right now, I'm using a Dell laptop running Windows 7 (ouch, there goes my chance to speak at a Rails conference). It has 8 GB of RAM and a 256 MB SSD hard drive. I use VMWare to run Ubuntu, which is my primary development environment. (I prefer Windows for general web browsing and gaming.)


My main browser is Chrome. I use Firefox with Firebug for debugging web applications.

With the exception of the legacy downloadable version of BCC (written in Java Swing on Eclipse), most of my development is in Ruby on Rails. I use Netbeans. Notable APIs/plugins/gems include Twilio, A/Bingo, Delayed::Job, Prawn, etc. I write PHP code when I absolutely have to, largely for adding features to my marketing sites (AR's runs on a Wordpress blog, and my blog/brochure site is also on Wordpress) or for clients' use. I do most of my PHP coding in nano because vim hates my Japanese keyboard and I was too disinterested in figuring out why to fix that.

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Achievement Unlocked: Sold Products To Teachers For Five Years. I kinda want new challenges. Preferably new challenges who think that $80 a month is not a lot of money.

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Do I burst with excitement answering the question "Hey Patrick, I just lost my computer's memory to a virus and now I need to download my bingos but I can't find them. What is my bingos number?" for the 800th time? No.

Do I bounce with enthusiasm about getting the 943rd bingo activity (no, really) up on the website? No.

Does the business routinely present new challenges to keep my interest? Yes.

On days when I don't feel like doing BCC, I simply don't do BCC. (But for customer support emails, obviously.)

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I think Andrew Warner is using me as an example in a post on this subject later, so I won't steal that thunder, but it is a lot closer to "just SEO" than "had some customers lined up." For specifics, check Mixergy in the next few days.

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Well, either "not that great" or "embarrassingly successful", depending on how you look at it.

I mentioned that I haven't had enough time to really devote to AR recently. I did, however, do the first cut of scalable content generation for it, just to try some ideas out.

https://www.appointmentreminder.org/who-is-it-for

See those pages? They work: they collect search traffic, that traffic converts into paying users of Appointment Reminder, the LTV of those users is stupendously higher than the cost of those pages. At the moment, let's say the numbers are something like "I paid $100 to get content made which has so far attracted $X of LTV", for some value of $X which I won't share but which is well north of $100.

They would probably work with 1,000 of their closest friends, but I'm not fully happy with the model yet, so I want to refine a bit and THEN blow it up. Maybe in August, after I get this immigration stuff done.

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Japanese: The Spoken Language is my favorite Japanese textbook. Drill, drill, drill with the CDs. Talk to Japanese people. I highly recommend taking a course in college which forces you to speak every day.

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I've been WoW-free since about the launch of Burning Crusade. Prior to that, I think my /played was about 35 days. I started right at the beginning, so you can do the math there.

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I worked for two years managing the outsourcing operations of a Japanese megacorp to outsourcing firms in India and China.

Japanese people often think Americans can't do nuance. This is you, doing nuance.

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http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo is the best way to do A/B testing on Ruby on Rails. MIT license. Go nuts.

Other than that, no. I use ideas from BCC in consulting work all the time, but not extractable code.

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That's a boring counterfactual that is impossible to answer. Let me guess the thrust behind it: "Can I have a successful software business without being [Patrick sticks his tongue firmly in cheek] Internet famous?"

The answer to that question is, clearly, yes. I can't tell you specifics, because they have no desire to have competition pointed at them, but suffice it to say I know people with businesses that could lose BCC in the petty cash drawer. You haven't heard of them. They solve problems and charge money for it. That's fundamentally all it takes.

At least some of my buddies have businesses which, if I gave you the one-sentence pitch, would not sound hugely more lucrative than "bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers."

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