
Bingo Card Creator (etc) Year In Review 2011 - joshuacc
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/21/bingo-card-creator-etc-year-in-review-2011/
======
alinajaf
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.

~~~
phil
$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.

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

------
tree_of_item
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.

~~~
patio11
_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.

~~~
apetresc
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.

~~~
Cass
It's really not, though. I'm not a programmer, but I can solve Fizzbuzz and
Hello World in Ruby, and I still wouldn't know where to start with a bingo
card creator.

I could manage to randomly reorder a series of words, but putting them into a
nice graphical layout and programmatically making sure that short words and
long words both look okay without anything getting squished or cut off is
already beyond what I can do without hours of research. And that's as a geek
who's generally interested in programming. My mom, who's far more likely to
need bingo cards, panics every time I minimize a window.

------
joshuacc
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
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.

~~~
patio11
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

       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.

------
patio11
If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer where I can.

~~~
davidhansen
_she said yes. We’re announcing to our family on Christmas, as per our family
tradition._

Congratulations, Patrick.

~~~
gwern
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.

~~~
w1ntermute
Well, given that it was at the bottom of a long, tech-heavy post, I wouldn't
be surprised if his family members missed it.

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

~~~
mluiten
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.

------
jcr
"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.

------
davidw
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_!

------
gommm
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...

------
xiaoma
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
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?

~~~
patio11
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.

------
runevault
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.

------
jcampbell1
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.

------
pbreit
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
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.

------
benhoyt
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.'

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

------
twog
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.

~~~
patio11
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
Spoiler - sales $100,000, profit $70k - give or take.

------
apsurd
He got the girl!

Congratulations on your new adventure into familyhood <3

------
makira
Could you give a breakdown of the expenses for BCC ?

Congrats on the 3 words!

~~~
patio11
[http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-
chart?...](http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-
chart?year=2011)

~~~
glimcat
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?...](http://www.bingocardcreator.com/expenses/expenses-pie-
chart?year=2010)

