
Bingo Card Creator (and other stuff) Year in Review 2012 - Sujan
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/29/bingo-card-creator-and-other-stuff-year-in-review-2012/
======
davidw
> partly because I get a lot of leads via voicemail, which I don’t deal with
> very well. Many of them are poorly qualified, and as a result I find myself
> dreading listening to voicemail to call back and talk for 10 minutes (at 2
> AM in the morning) only to discover that they’re not good fits for AR.

Interesting. I find phone communication to be a frustrating bit of LiberWriter
for a couple of reasons:

* It's very time consuming, and clawing back some of the time/effort is more difficult than with email, where I can keep a catalog of standard answers to mix in with a few personalized lines. People find highly automated phone systems to be somewhat annoying.

* It's harder to outsource, since it's difficult to keep tabs on what was said, something that is much easier with email.

* Like patio11 says, it doesn't mix as well with "non US" time zones. I don't want to be answering phone calls when sitting down to dinner with my family.

On the other hand, when you do take the time to talk to someone, it _very_
often leads to a sale, so it's difficult to blow it off entirely.

~~~
ig1
Why not have the outsourced phone calls go over skype/twillio where you can
record them ?

~~~
davidw
It still means listening in on calls every once in a while, which is far
slower than email.

~~~
ig1
Get them transcribed ?

~~~
davidw
I'm sure there are ways to handle everything, it's just a lot more time
consuming/expensive/complicated, depending on the tradeoffs you make, compared
to email.

------
kirinan
Patio, Quick question. I have had some trouble getting my first consulting
gig. Its not the meeting per se that gets them, I can get meetings with
people. They say I lack experience. Should I do pro bono work, or should I
lower my prices (I charge a lot because I like to dedicate my time to doing a
fantastic job and giving customers (if I had any) exactly what they want (or
what they think they want). How do you get the first gig/job?

~~~
patio11
_They say I lack experience._

This is customerese for "You have failed to convince me you are capable of
delivering positive ROI on this engagement" rather than being any commentary
on your experience. The easiest way to diffuse the objection is by getting
better at sales, not by getting experience. _Everybody_ in the industry got a
paying gig when they had, at the time, no history of paying gigs.

I'm not generally a fan of pro-bono work for technologists, since the market
is hot enough at the moment that you shouldn't need to do it. Also, the client
dynamics of pro-bono work are leagues away from the dynamics of paid work.
Even offering free work scares the heck out of good clients. Conversely,
people who will agree to the arrangement may treat your time as if it is
totally valueless, which will frequently compromise your ability to succeed at
the engagement. The free engagement doesn't enhance your credibility if it
ends up sucking due to lack of "client" cooperation, so that doesn't help you
any.

You've got some sort of portfolio, right? Side projects you could show off?
Blog posts about the development process? You can turn these into something
which visibly demonstrates that you're capable of executing on your promises.

~~~
kirinan
I do have a github with a few apps that Ive messed around (Im a mobile and web
guy). Thats very insightful, I never thought about the ROI thing. I guess I
need to learn how to convince people Im worth the price. Tons of people in my
area undercut by a huge margin just to get jobs. I do write essays too. How do
you better at sales? Are there particular things that you say? I know being
friendly and available seem to work, but is there something better? What would
you recommend to get better at selling?

~~~
patio11
I'm totally on your side of this and rooting for you. I mention that to soften
the following: "a github with a few apps that Ive messed around" does not
necessarily suggest to me that you're capable of shipping software projects.
(Github is a terrible platform for showing customers you can produce things
that they care about, guys. Github shows off source code. Most customers want
to buy business outcomes. Source code is rarely a business outcome. If you
tried to present a very very compelling business outcome caused by source code
via Github, just the nature of hosting it on Github would de-emphasize the
business outcome in favor of the source code... which is, by the way, _totally
impenetrable_ to many buyers of custom software.)

A better way to present a business outcome is a case study: here's the
business, here's the problem, here's ( _a brief sketch off_ ) what we did,
here's the results. (You can write a case study on any blogging platform and
it will work better than just throwing the repo for that project on Github.)

Are you capable of shipping software projects? Shipping a software project
would persuasively demonstrate that you are. Conversely, if you've _never_
shipped a software project... well, the customers might not be totally crazy
about wondering why you'd command high prices.

 _How do you better at sales?_

I wish I had a better answer for you than "Read a little, practice a lot." but
I don't.

~~~
kirinan
Hmm, Yeah. You have me pegged there, I don't have any apps on the app store,
or any web applications I can pull up and demo to customers. I have a new goal
to work towards now, even if it is something simple. I will also make
documents about it, and make it a full "business" like solution.

As for you solution about the sales, I had a daunting feeling you were going
to suggest that. Oh well, I think life is about reading a little and doing a
lot.

Thanks for all your help!

------
patio11
Hiya guys. Feel free to ask any questions if you've got them. I'm generally
happy to answer, to the best of my capabilities.

~~~
tkahn6
Any plans for another podcast?

~~~
patio11
We do them every time Keith and I have both mutual availability and something
interesting to say. Sadly, as of late we've both been very busy. Hopefully
mid-January. (If you have a burning urge to hear my voice, I'm a guest on
other folks' podcasts more frequently than on my own.
<http://productpeople.tv/> has a recent interview about my business story and
Amy Hoy should be publishing a long interview about infoproducts (like our
courses), multi-product businesses, and consulting sometime in the next two
weeks or so.)

~~~
mijustin
Product People has two episodes with Patio11.

Part 1 has his complete back-story: everything from how he learned to program
with graph paper to how he built his first product business with $60.
<http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/19/patio11-part1/>

Part 2 has specific tactics for building your own software business:
<http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/>

Both episodes have full text transcripts, so you can listen or read.

------
larrys
"I want to explore flying to an industry conference as a sales channel for AR"

Have you ever considered direct mail or advertising in industry trade
journals? Or issuing press releases for those trade journals which are always
looking for material to fill their pages? Another thought (cheaper than
flying) would be to simply write a few articles for those journals speaking
about the general problem of appointment reminding and then having the byline
be you. It is something that others are doing. The same article could easily
be repurposed for different journals. Once you are "published" you can then do
reprints of your articles to DM or hand out at shows if that ends up being an
attractive route.

In looking for an example of "card packs" which I have successfully used (in a
different business) I came up with this which illustrates the direct mail
route:

<http://www.behance.net/gallery/Post-Card-Mailer/828394>

Cost to spray something like this to 10,000 offices is no big deal. You'd have
to repeat a few times to the same people I would imagine to get a desirable
response.

------
steveplace
Love the rundown of how well you're doing!

Since HN comments are a haven for unsolicited advice, here's a few things from
me:

$100 per email seems really high for mailchimp on a list of 5k. Looking at
their pricing they have a monthly rate of $75 for list sizes between 5k-10k.
That may be an easy expense cut for you.

Also, if you're looking at going to conferences to sell the high end
membership to A/R, you may want to consider doing sales webinars. These have
converted incredibly well for me personally and it seems it would be a great
fit for this product as well.

~~~
patio11
_$100 per email seems really high for mailchimp on a list of 5k. Looking at
their pricing they have a monthly rate of $75 for list sizes between 5k-10k.
That may be an easy expense cut for you._

One of my consulting clients, who runs an email marketing service, nearly went
ballistic when I told them about it. ;) The reason I pay per email rather than
paying monthly is I have something like 70k BCC emails in the same account
which I mail approximately never. That would eliminate the savings from
switching to monthly billing over pay-as-you-go. I suppose I could either re-
jigger things, purge dated emails, or open a new account, but "I saved a
couple hundred bucks on X" is probably _not_ going to be a line item in next
year's annual report, right? I want to focus on things that will be.

If I were thinking things through I would have separate accounts for them.
(n.b. Sharing SaaS accounts over several lines of businesses seems like a
time/money savings when you start doing it but gets crazy later in operations,
and God forbid you ever have to de-couple the businesses as e.g. a result of
sale. I suggest not starting.)

 _you may want to consider doing sales webinars_

Thanks for the advice. That is, indeed, on the list of things to try.

------
citricsquid
You made the front page of reddit today, I look forward to reading about how
this converts into clients in next years summary ;-)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/15n9x3/being_a_bit_op...](http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/15n9x3/being_a_bit_optimistic_there_arent_we_guys/)

------
ruswick
This practice just seems absurd.

What is the practical purpose of this type of post? Several people have
written pieces enumerating their various income sources and listing their
enviable accomplishments, and have gotten on the front page. These just seem
unbelievably self-congratulatory and conceited. Moreover, why does anyone else
have such an interest in the financials of Patrick?

I really don't understand this phenomenon. What is the impetus to write or
read these things?

~~~
patio11
I was in part inspired to actually get off my duff and write Bingo Card
Creator because somebody wrote about their experience with making and selling
skeet shooting software as a sideline business. Prior to reading that, it was
outside of my comprehension that you could successfully run a sideline
software business.

If you run or work at a closely held software business, you may have very good
estimates of e.g. what reasonably achievable conversion rates are, how
expenses break down for a small software business, or what global demand is in
terms of unique users for a very niche application. Most people do not run or
work at closely held software businesses, which makes a lot of those numbers
very non-obvious. They're of interest to people who might aspire to one day
running such a business or to people who run a business but would like to
compare their experiences to those of somebody else. They're also _very rarely
disclosed publicly_.

I would hope that the six-thousand odd words of narrative in the post and
copious linked material contains non-obvious useful tidbits such as "You can
increase the sales of a mature, six-year old software company by over 60%
solely by A/B testing while keeping all other factors constant. Here's a case
study." That is, I'd think, an interesting result which suggests something
that many people on HN could propose at their first meeting of 2013 at their
workplaces (or start implementing themselves). It is a substantially more
compelling result than having me say "You should A/B test. It works well.
(People hire me to do that but I usually can't talk about it, but trust me.)"

Those are mostly reasons why some folks might want to read this. As for
writing it: I find writing helps me crystallize my thinking, because I'm very
capable of bamboozling myself mentally but often less capable when I see the
half-formed rationalization in print. Also, even if nobody else ever read
them, having seven years of annual reports is useful for me, since it captures
at-a-comparative-glance what I've learned over time and how employing that has
actually worked.

If you don't like hearing about my businesses, I recommend avoiding posts from
kalzumeus.com domains. They're approximately 1/30th of the frontpage, once or
twice a month.

~~~
ruswick
But what practical purpose does breaking down your income serve to readers?
Will it help them increase conversions, save time, or increase efficiency?
Even if it did yield some practical value, expenses and income are so
idiosyncratic as to not be applicable to almost everyone.

Also, I wasn't just referring to you. For instance, in Nathan Barry's "year in
review," he intricately discusses his travels, personal relationships, etc.
This stuff is clearly superfluous to a business-minded audience, and I can
only read it as pretention.

~~~
ruswick
The halmark of HN: a myriad of down-votes with no elucidation.

~~~
learc83
You've made so many negative comments that I've started to recognize your
name.

A few pieces of advice from someone who was once a smart and shockingly
arrogant teenager:

Dial down the negative replies and stop commenting on everything as if you
were an expert. You lack experience and it shows in your writing. In 10 years
you will probably decide the majority of the opinions you now hold are wrong.
Try to remember that before you criticize.

Don't use "elucidation" when "explanation" will suffice. The purpose of
writing is to clearly convey an idea--using needlessly uncommon or archaic
words can break the flow of communication. (I had the same problem when I was
younger, and my teenage brother still does.) You'll find that your writing is
much more effective if it doesn't read like you spent half of your time
flipping through a thesaurus (even if you didn't).

------
ezl
Congrats, Patrick.

I wish more entrepreneurs were open about their trials and their successes --
It helps demystify the "overnight success" and makes it feel more accessible
to those that are a few years behind.

~~~
jacquesm
I think one of the reasons people are a bit reluctant to come forward with
such info is that it can easily be interpreted as bragging. Personal finances
are not something that people usually put out for the world to digest.

------
xiaoma
> _"The prototypical “good fit” for me is an established software as a service
> company with revenues in the eight figure range, a few dozen employees, and
> a company culture which focuses more on the product/engineering side of
> things than on the marketing/sales side of things."_

What is it that makes product/engineering companies a better fit for you than
those focused on marketing or sales?

~~~
akavi
My understanding: Mr. McKenzie's ability to add value is weighted heavily to
marketing/sales. It's therefore way more likely for him to be able produce
large improvements for a company if they haven't already invested a large
amount of effort/capital in optimizing that side of things.

------
alinajaf
Great to hear how you're doing Patrick, thanks for sharing.

> Even in weeks that I have blocked off to work on AR, I often find myself
> just lacking any desire to do it. The business isn’t intrinsically more
> boring that e.g. Bingo Card Creator, but the sort of things that I need to
> do to move it forward seem to hit my desire to work with a damp towel.

I seem to hit this phase with new product ideas around three months in and end
up never finishing anything.

I have a web application that gets new (albeit unpaid for) signups daily, but
even with a lot of free time[1] I lack the will to develop the
product/marketing further.

Two things I will probably try:

1\. MTFU, schedule some time, set some goals and force myself to do the work I
need to.

2\. Spec the work out and hire someone else to do it. Speccing the work out
will probably make 1 easier to get started with however.

[1] Though I did just have a baby, so I might be selling myself a little
short.

------
Egregore
Now I did a google serarch for Bingo Card Creator and kalzumeus domain came
first in search rezult, you might consider working on it, it's still a few
clicks away for customers.

By the way, haven't you considered moving to a SaS model, make some yearly
price instead of a lifetime one?

~~~
gabemart
>Now I did a google serarch for Bingo Card Creator and kalzumeus domain came
first in search rezult, you might consider working on it, it's still a few
clicks away for customers.

Google customizes results based on a bunch of user variables, so you can't
trust that the search results you see are what everyone else sees. There's no
one canonical set of rankings, but you can use tools to get an idea of what
the generic user sees (e.g. [1]).

From my quick assessment, it looks like bingocardcreator.com is #1 for
google.com

[1] <http://www.whatsmyserp.com/serpcheck.php>

------
atomical
Patrick,

Have you ever done anything with direct mail? It's something we don't hear
about in the startup world.

~~~
wtracy
I, too, would love to hear on this from Patrick or anyone else.

NextDoor.com is using direct mail (I know because I got a postcard from them!)
and I'm curious whether or not it's working.

------
tezza
_I’m going to try to pass off L1 support to a VA in 2013_

Can I ask what a _VA_ is in this context?

~~~
davidw
Virtual Assistant, unless I am very mistaken.

------
larrys
"I want to outsource 90% of the customer service load for Bingo Card Creator"

How are you going to go about doing this? (I know other people who are
interested in a solution to the same problem).

~~~
patio11
a) Figure out a way to split BCC support email from my main inbox. b) Give my
VA access to BCC support email, but not my main inbox. c) Write up a Google
doc with the five most common support issues and the responses to send,
including instructions for e.g. how to use my homebrew CS admin panel to e.g.
send a password reset email or re-generate someone's receipt. Tell the VA that
if there's anything not covered she's to mark it for me to answer and keep a
running tally of how many times a question like that gets asked. d) Add
anything which keeps coming up in Step C to the Google doc.

~~~
chockablock
From article and context it seems you do not have a VA yet--do you mean to
assume they will be female?

~~~
tome
According to this post he has a VA

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4983008>

------
d0m
Wouldn't selling BCC to the school as an enterprise software (rather than for
an individual teacher) bring more revenue? Schools have all kind of grants for
these kind of products while teachers are more limited and are more often than
not forced to use their own money.

Also, maybe a 5$ / month to get the "best bingo card of the month" would be
useful for them.

Lastly, why not cut the price a little if the teacher recommends it to a
couple colleagues?

~~~
patio11
_Wouldn't selling BCC to the school as an enterprise software (rather than for
an individual teacher) bring more revenue?_

Yes. I could sell BCC to a school district for maybe $250. For the same amount
of work, I might be able to sell a hospital system AR for $10,000. A month.
(Six years ago, when I started selling BCC, enterprise sales _wasn't_ an
option -- I could never make a phone call with customers and didn't know how
to even get started with it.)

 _Also, maybe a 5$ / month to get the "best bingo card of the month" would be
useful for them._

If I were starting the business from scratch today, I would _certainly_ build
in a recurring revenue component. It doesn't make sense today, as growing BCC
revenues is not the path forward for the business, and the development and CS
headaches associated with it swamp the marginal revenue.

 _Lastly, why not cut the price a little if the teacher recommends it to a
couple colleagues?_

My experiments with getting teachers to recommend BCC to other teachers have,
in general, been crashing failures. For example, I implemented "3 free cards
for you and a friend if you refer that friend to BCC", along the lines of the
Dropbox two-sided referral incentive model. That was a crashing failure -- it
generated very few trials (probably since I didn't work on the UX for the
viral spread nearly enough and probably because the market isn't really
optimal for it) and of those marginal trials only 2 ever upgraded to the paid
version.

~~~
d0m
Make sense, thanks. Yes.. I admittedly had the question "Why trying to sell
bingo cards rather than going after a more lucrative products" but thought you
had your own personal reasons for doing so.

------
bane
Congratulations on a great year and getting married!

------
bryanh
Don't forget, BCC A/B test results are usually posted here:
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo/results> (though I am not sure if it
is up to date).

Good for a few little "sparks" to finally get you testing something.

------
caw
Patrick - When you were starting your video course, how did you figure out how
to go about doing it? Did you seek any advise from Ramit, since you're friends
and he has multiple video info products?

------
porter
What does your enterprise sales process look like?

~~~
patio11
Imagine a blind and drunken rat placed in a very complicated maze with cheese
at the end, then take away his keen sense of smell. It looks sort of like
that, except the rat can at least write software.

No, seriously speaking:

Most inbound leads are through organic SEO. Customers generally have a few
questions to ask me about e.g. pricing, features, or compatability with other
stuff they're doing. I answer them either over the phone with the
decisionmaker (followed by an email), or directly over email. My main
competitive advantages are that I'm reasonably priced, that I have an easily
accessible online demo (a surprisingly powerful win) and other scalable sales
stuff, and that while I suck at "sales" I'm fairly good at talking about the
product in the context of the customer's needs because, to quote a nurse
directly responsible for the biggest deal going through, "It is his baby. You
take care of your baby!", in a way which is difficult for a sales guy angling
for a $500 commission at one of the larger competitors to justify.

If they sound like they're a good fit, I ask if they want a formal quote. If
they do, I ask them what I can do to help them move the purchase along. Some
number of steps later, money arrives.

There is very little "process" worthy of the name here, hence why I'm hoping
to improve on that going forward.

------
vidar
So the lightning thing, did this actually happen?

------
porter
Who do you outsource your bookkeeping to and how do you manage that process?

~~~
patio11
I have the same homegrown bookkeeping software which I've used for forever.
(Don't do this folks. Use Quickbooks. The only reason I use the homegrown
stuff is because it publishes stats direct to my website.) I have a VA in the
Philippines who I hired through Pepper. Every month or two, I take all of my
credit card statements, zip them up, and send them to her. We have a standing
orders document (terribly out of date -- should fix that) of what expenses
count as business expenses and how to categorize them in the bookkeeping
software. (Expenses are the only part which requires manual entry -- my sites
do their own revenue tracking.)

There's a workflow hack or two to ensure that novel transactions get checked
by me, eventually. (e.g. I have a personal credit card in the mix, for those
rare times when both business cards fail, which means she sees a lot of
transactions which aren't business related and should filter them all out. It
wasn't obvious from the one-line description that e.g. my wedding venue is
probably not appropriate for deduction, but since it was marked as novel (and
ginormous relative to my expected expenses for that month), I caught it prior
to doing the year in review numbers.

I do a more in-deoth review of the big expense categories (AdWords and travel)
prior to doing my taxes and spot-check everything else. If e.g. a $60 software
purchase ends up getting missed that's unfortunate, but it is only about ~$20
of unfortunate, and a few slip-ups are substantially cheaper in opportunity
cost (and sanity) that having me do line-by-line review of all ~500 entries.

For general advice on how to work with VAs, I strongly recommend Rob Walling's
book and have heard good things about the 4 Hour Work Week (but have never
read it).

~~~
markdown
> I have a VA in the Philippines who I hired through Pepper.

Pepper?

~~~
joshkaufman
<http://www.peppervirtualassistant.com/>

~~~
markdown
Thanks

------
kvnn
Do you know how many hours were dedicated to your consulting revenues?

And, thanks :)

