This. I would find this post mildly creepy even if it were written about someone's who's an actual public figure. Writing it about someone whose claim to fame is writing a Bingo card generator and being #4-ranked in karma on a niche internet forum is just sick.
It may be inappropriate on some level, but calling it sick and scary is a little bit creepy itself. He's only saying out loud what many of us have been thinking.
If the suggestion is that you can't freely admire someone (and the praise was clearly served up as an extra helping to offset the criticism) based only on the quality and volume of writing that Patrick has produced, well, that's just extra creepy.
Patrick IS a public figure.
That article discusses only things that Patrick chose to share about himself.
If you feel creepy about that article -- that means there is something wrong with your perception of sharp ideas, not with the article.
You call him a genius, yet he spent 6 years promoting a product (which I might add only took him a few days to create) that is only now just breaking the $1000 or $2000/month mark. Most smart people would have cut their losses a few years ago. Especially since that market isn't very big (elementary school teachers are poor and most schools won't invest in such a product).
He is looked up to on the Joel on Software board and this forum as a marketing/business genius, yet he barely makes enough money to break the poverty level for one person (I can't imagine how he affords to live in Japan).
He has talent and perseverance, but he's not a model we should be following for business.
By what finish line are you judging him? He is well respected by his peers, he writes insightfully on difficult topics. he is independent and is spending his time as he chooses. And he is not done yet.
That's exactly where it's at. We can not look inside another persons head and this kind of 'reading the tea leaves' is bound to get it fantastically wrong in the longer term.
"By what finish line are you judging him? He is well respected by his peers, he writes insightfully on difficult topics. he is independent and is spending his time as he chooses. And he is not done yet."
This is all good. However, I have seen many articles claiming he is some sort of business genius. The numbers he has given from his products prove otherwise.
I believe his products are capitalizing quite well for his target audience. Indeed, I would go as far as saying he owns a fair share of that market and controls it quite well.
You just want to work on a larger scale, but don't be ignorant of the pieces coming together with a smaller puzzle... you're both still working on the same picture. Create a product, get it out there, make your target audience turn into a loving community, and make money.
No matter how much you turn business into some complex monster: the fundamentals will always remain the same.
6 years of promotion might be overselling the occasional night and weekend of work. He's had a wonderful playground available to learn anything he wanted to learn about SEO. He was a salaryman until recently, and now he has an upcoming product that will likely make better use of his SEO and A/B testing expertise.
You call him a genius, yet he spent 6 years promoting a product (which I might add only took him a few days to create) that is only now just breaking the $1000 or $2000/month mark.
He did that while working a substantially-more-than-full-time salary man job.
"He did that while working a substantially-more-than-full-time salary man job."
I know. He put lots of effort into his products. However, success is based on results, not effort. A successful business to me means you can pay all of your bills, the business's bills, and have some savings with revenue. If he isn't quitting his job, it means:
1) His business isn't making enough for him to survive or
or
2) It's making more than enough, but he still has enough time during the day to run his biz and hold down a full-time job.
Just looking at the numbers, it's obvious it was #1. Still, he only just quit his job after how many years?
A smart business person needs to know if there is a market for their product and if that market is profitable enough to sustain a business. It's obvious the bingo card market is very small and probably won't reliably sustain a business. Even the main users of the bingo card creator app are very cheap and probably won't be willing to pay for very much. So we have a small niche market with users that aren't willing to spend money a lot of money (or can't afford it).
The question is: if he finds out that his new service (the appointment reminder) has a small, unprofitable market, will he waste another 6 years trying to make it a success?
The 6 years of development of the product was done in his free time while he's working full time. The product has become a well-oiled money machine (however little) now that he doesn't need to pay a lot of attention. It's a nice additional income stream.
I am not sure why your comment got so many upvotes. Please do not discount BCC revenue as being only 2k/3k. He did not work on BCC full time. Not only did he work on it part time, he worked on his project while working 12+ hours at day job. Also, can you imagine a product like BCC brining in 3k a month? I think you are under estimating what he has pulled through.
There is born-genius and being genius through hard work and determination. I think Patrick is of the later kind. It took him a good amount of time to be the genius he is (I have been reading his posts from JoS/BoS days). Now that he has quit his day job, I have no doubt that he will be successful in any endeavour he takes on.
Also, the original article's estimate of 10k/month is VERY LOW. If he can make 3k selling to teachers (a very narrow niche), he will make a boat load of money selling to businesses. Let's say in first year, he has 100 customers (a very conservative estimate) on 79/month plan. That's 7900$ in revenue. Next year he adds 200 customers more, now you are talking about revenue of 24k. In 5 years, he can easily make 50k/month with minimum effort on his side. This business can give him the lifestyle we all dream about. Freedom to work your own hours, freedom to travel around the world, being your own boss etc.
I am sure Patrick will keep us updated on how his new product is doing and once Sebastian sees the results, he will realize that he underestimated Patrick's genius. :)
"yet he spent 6 years promoting a product (which I might add only took him a few days to create) that is only now just breaking the $1000 or $2000/month mark"
Absolutely, and Amazon spent about the same amount of time bleeding hundreds of millions of debt _every quarter_. Notch (of minecraft fame) spent several years making little java applet games with barely any fanfare and barely eking out an earning if at all (he had a few day jobs prior to breaking free and founding Mojang Specifications).
There's no time limit in creating or running your own business, and there is no marker of success except those defined by the founder's goals. Is it always a good idea to enter a market you don't care about just because it's big? Not really, or else everyone would be making operating systems and office suites.
Some of the author's points are interesting, but if Patrick took the advice, he'd basically turn into a clone of every other arrogant blowhard tech entrepreneur in the world. He might make more money, but he wouldn't be the patio11 that I've come to admire.
I pretty much started skimming when the gist of the article seemed to be that the author was karma-whoring by writing about patio11 in detail, instead of writing a general article about maximizing your potential for your own goals.
Let's hope DHH, Jason Fried, Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington and Tim Ferris don't all read this article and think "Damn, he's right, I need to be more self-aggrandising!"
Or possibly, he enjoys what he does, enjoys being his own boss, likes the challenges that the types of software he works on present, and values those things higher than going and shaving seconds off for some airline. If he is, his genius is more about finding a way of being happy than software, marketing, or anything else.
I know HN tends to be all about the money at times, but seriously, it's not everything.
It's the converse that tends to be true, but many people have trouble distinguishing between converse and contrapositive. Rich people tend to be smart.
There are lots of bright ideas. The few that turn into successful companies are the ones that, at a few critical points, didn't fail. A good way to fail is to make mistakes and do nothing. So, to avoid failure, one must learn from mistakes, which tends to make people smart and is something smart people tend to do.
The extra axiom necessary for showing smart->rich is risk taking. Smart people who don't take a chance and do something drastic are no more likely than anybody else to get rich. There are people who pay others to be smart, but they generally don't pay much more than a normal salary.
He makes some good points. A guy like Patrick could easily be pulling in $200-300K a year contracting with large companies. Since he is smart and knows how to hire people, he could start his own firm and break into the 7 figures annual salary leagues.
Money isn't everything, but with those type of business skills, spending a lot of time commenting on HN is most likely a waste of your considerable expertise.
While I agree with the praises directed towards Patrick, I don't think it's wise to make assumptions about his (or anyone else's) motivations. If Patrick wanted to, he could walk any of the paths mentioned in the OP.
We just don't know that Patrick isn't exactly where he wants to be in the long run. Maybe he doesn't want the things that come along with $100k, $200k, $1MM per year.
If it is his aspiration to make that kind of money, I wouldn't bet against him having a plan. Patrick's transparency about his work might give the illusion that we know what he wants in life. We don't.
Exactly. People are complicated, not two dimensional card-board cut-outs of wannabe rich guys. Whatever motivates Patrick is up to him and him alone.
This to me seems like helping a person to the other side of the street with the best intentions by frog marching them there only to find out they didn't want to be there in the first place.
The greater tragedy, perhaps, is this game we play where we tell the world how patio11, or Zuckerberg, or Jobs or whoever should do their stuff instead of improving what we do ourselves.
That's why I voted the submission up. Reading that post made me think of my own skills that need developed and promoted. I am a smart guy with some unique abilities; I'm confident that with some focused effort, I could be capable of providing great value and getting appropriately compensated for it.
I'm sure that the blog post was intended not only to encourage and promote patio11, but to give all of us a wakeup call that we, too, are capable of providing that same level of value with a little bit of work and dedication.
I think Patricks biggest contribution is that he's not a greedy person and willing to share his adventures to the betterment of all.
He has one thing he's very adamant about, he wants to have 100% of the thing he built. That's pretty limiting in terms of how far you can push it, my own idea is that I'd rather have a smaller part of something much larger, but we're not all built the same.
What I like most about Patrick's stuff is that he is such a vocal and visible contributor even though his personal start-up is such a realistic and achievable story. He doesn't make veiled references or never disclose his project(s) - he puts it all out there to the dollar. There's no outside investment, IPO, MSM press, etc. It's just one guy and his success in moving into self-employment. It's a happy life in Hobbiton (and I don't mean that in a condescending way at all).
Having read/skimmed Sebastian's article, it felt as though something ignorant and grand-standing had just trampled that.
Yeah, different people have different personalities. They have different motivations, different strengths and weaknesses. Money and fame are not universal drivers, it's that simple.
I'm not going to try to analyze Patrick. I enjoy reading most of his comments, and agree that he's valuable here, but I don't know him anywhere near well enough to think I have any insight into what makes him tick. I doubt very many other people do, either.
But I can talk about me! I have "money issues". I don't understand it the way that a proper businessperson should. All I understand are problems and solutions; poor people not having equal opportunities is a problem, in my mind, so I don't charge nearly enough. That means my business is constantly hamstrung and resource-short, and I work for less than minimum wage.
But, I couldn't respect myself if I doubled (or tripled) my fees and only focused on the people that could pay. It would make me far unhappier doing that, instead of struggling every month.
So, yeah: business isn't always a matter of rationality. If he's happy, then leave it alone. If he isn't, but doesn't ask for advice, then still leave it alone. If he ever asks for advice, think hard about whether you know him well enough to offer any.
You're the first to mention this, it's the first thing I though. I emailed Patrick with a few SEO questions a few months back, he logged into my analytics for a looks see, and sent me two quite detailed email replies (for free) with really good ideas, but said he wouldn't be able to help me any further as he had a consulting job he was working on. I think he quoted me an hourly rate for consulting, which was not high by any means, but would provide a very nice lifestyle if he was doing it full time.
So from what I know, I think this interpretation of him living a life of hardship is likely off the mark. As for this blog post, ya, its a little weird, but I think the author wrote it with his heart in the right place, I think perhaps he just isn't fully aware of patio11's real situation and it seemed unjust to him. Yes, it is probably inappropriate it many ways, but in my estimation far from the "creepiest blog post I've ever read" (as some have said).
By the way, I also met Patrick at a HN meetup in Tokyo, super nice down to earth guy. I doubt this post will cause him nearly the anguish it seems to be causing others here.
I think the best answer to "time to cash in on all those skills" is to note that he now does consulting, which is the very definition of what you are describing when you talk about who he could be helping.
About AppointmentReminder: you are presuming that somehow he is overlooking this huge potential goldmine that you so helpfully point out. The man in question is likely top diplomatic to say so directly, but I don't have any problem saying that this is a rather arrogant point of view.
Note that there are in fact more than three possible explanations for what he earns. And, why is it your business, anyway? Do you do this with other people, too? I think this kind of analysis is best done solely with yourself; the splinter in his eye vs.the plank in yours.
You are trying to help, but you aren't. And you just look bad on the process.
This is unbelievable. If the author absolutely can't resist giving patio11 a bunch of advice about how to live his life, then write an email. If the author wants to tell us how super important it is to self-promote and make a lot of money, then don't make an example out of a dude whose mind and motivations are clearly completely fucking opaque to you.
I couldn't agree more. This article was extremely uncomfortable to read; if it was me being written about I would be embarrassed and probably more than a little angry.
I would be like, "Wow, thanks for the advice and the ringing endorsement." The guy is obviously trying to help Patrick out in multiple ways. The author is trying to make him realize how amazing he is and tell as many people as possible how valuable he is.
Personally, I might be a bit uncomfortable while reading it. But sometime down the road I'd look back on it and be very thankful.
OK, point taken. It might have been more difficult, but it could definitely have been possible to give him a strong endorsement without the rest of the post. Then he could have sent Patrick an email with the rest, indicating that the blog post might be a good reference.
Not if you think the advice is worthwhile to others as well. There's no reason to assume shady ulterior motives when there is a perfectly simple explanation: it's just an error of judgement.
Ultimately such a critique implies that the author is an authority figure qualified to give such a critique. It's really hard to see it as anything but self-promotion, especially when done so visibly.
"if he was really thinking about Patrick he'd have emailed him the advice"
Well part of the post was telling the public that Patrick would be a bargain to hire at a $200,000 salary. That specific part works better in a public post.
I would go even further and say that "The Idiocy and Tragedy of Sebastian Marshall" is that he thinks earnings are some measure of a human being's self worth.
I'm not sure it's unbelievable. I'd say it's a mark of Patrick's success at building his personal brand that:
1) His words are watched
2) He inspires conversations and entire, lengthy blog posts
I completely disagree with the author's position and assumptions (as I've detailed in another comment) but this is hardly bad news for Patrick. We're all sitting here debating how much more money he should be making. This submission is the second-most popular story on HN right now.
This is an extraordinary win for Patrick's personal branding efforts, even if it comes with a pretty uncomfortable smell to it. It's unbelievable, inasmuch as Patrick has hacked a non-computer system for personal gain.
> This is unbelievable. If the author absolutely can't resist giving patio11 a bunch of advice about how to live his life, then write an email.
There was two other things I wanted to do - increase Patrick's profile in a positive way, and also make the point at the very bottom especially to young people in technology who are underpaid because they don't value/price their skills enough.
> If the author wants to tell us how super important it is to self-promote and make a lot of money, then don't make an example out of a dude whose mind and motivations are clearly completely fucking opaque to you.
He was saying he was upset when a public school teacher wanted wanted a discount because the teacher only made $60k - and he said he'd never made $60k.
Anyways, it looks like this has been popular with a lot of people and hopefully helpful, but also drawn some really strong negative reactions. I guess that's okay - ideally some good things comes out of this, I think it's quite possible. We'll see.
> especially to young people in technology who are underpaid
Young people who have built up a skillset similar to Patrick's are willing to sacrifice 60-120k paying jobs in their early years in favor of going out an learning how to build a company. It takes a lot of trial and error to get it right.
While Patrick may be making less at the beginning of his career, I guarantee he'll be making more than the average bay-area developer once he really begins to nail down how to build profitable companies.
Granting a discount to that particular teacher would have been an even greater insult to any of Patrick's other customers who don't make 60K (and I'm sure there are more than one). I mean come on, anyone who makes 60K should be able to spare $30 on something that makes his/her life easier.
For what it's worth, I didn't interpret that as him being upset that he wasn't making more money; I thought he was upset because the teachers are treating him like some amorphous business-entity instead of a normal, hard-working guy who deserves what they're paying him.
Beyond the fact that I consider it extremely rude to write something like this about a private person without permission, I am strongly negative about this piece because it reinforces the bizarre idea that making money is somehow a really good and important value to have. If you have a particular passion that requires a lot of money, like running a huge business, or helping a ton of people through charity, then great -- make some money and do it! But most things that humans like don't require a lot of money!
Imagine I wrote this post:
The Genius and Tragedy of Sebastian
Sebastian is a multi-faceted genius. He’s amazingly talented, I can’t even explain how talented he is. But all is not rosy... His story thus far is a story of tragedy and wasted potential. I assumed he was a successful chessplayer. He's very smart, and has a good memory. Then I read this comment Sebastian wrote earlier today:
"I like chess, but I wish my dad would stop bragging when he beats me (I'm not even a C-class player.)"
WTF? Sebastian, dude, with your focus and brains, you could be an international master. Even if you don't fully appreciate the beauty of chess, your tournament games would entertain hundreds of players online, and help educate and inspire young players. Anyone who says "I don't care about competitive chess" clearly hasn't thought about it very much.
[insert ten pages of chess advice]
I find that to be totally identical to your post about why he should try to make a lot of money.
> Imagine I wrote this post: ... Even if you don't fully appreciate the beauty of chess, your tournament games would entertain hundreds of players online, and help educate and inspire young players. Anyone who says "I don't care about competitive chess" clearly hasn't thought about it very much.
It's a little different than that - there's some smart and accomplished people who read my site, and I was hoping to introduce them and connect them with Patrick, maybe creating some opportunities. If you posted on a Chess blog and told all your readers to go look the person up if they wanted an exceptional Chess student, and I was looking to be apprenticed, then I'd appreciate that.
I don't know how it'll go over, we'll see what Patrick says. If he's displeased or this brings ill on him, I can edit or delete the post as suits him. I wrote it with good intentions, we'll see how it goes.
> It's a little different than that - there's some smart and accomplished people who read my site, and I was hoping to introduce them and connect them with Patrick, maybe creating some opportunities.
I'm sure that if that was your true goal that there would have been better ways of going about it.
There was two other things I wanted to do - increase Patrick's profile in a positive way, and also make the point at the very bottom especially to young people in technology who are underpaid because they don't value/price their skills enough.
The latter you could have done without using patio11's real name.
The former - you are misguided. I accept that you didn't intend it, but the thing reads like "this guy is too dumb to make money from his assets".
HN is growing and influential - a front page post can drive 10k+ quality eyeballs.
Patio is a public figure here, should unfortunately have some expectation of the glory that comes with pseudo-celeb status for better or for worse given that good comments likely see similar numbers of eyeballs.
For biz guys exposing talent to your network is about the biggest way to give back.
Maybe it's just linkbait for HN, but seems to me like it's written genuinely from the standpoint of exposing a guy that's providing a lot of value to a wider community.
Judging from the votes, the majority of readers feels this post was very inappropriate. What I don't understand is:
- Why it is massively upvoted anyway and
- Why people don't feel that it is equally inappropriate to personally attack the author and accuse him of all kinds of bad intentions, when an honest misjudgement is the more likely explanation.
To add to that, the post seems very personal to me, which is the part I find most distasteful. Yet, there are many many reams of comments here that are further dissecting patio11 on a personal level. It's like people don't seem to realize that patio11 is either reading these posts or soon will and it feels very much like people are speaking good/bad of him behind his back. A lot of this discussion and commentary will be linked to his real name and his future. For better or worse.
It feels like a room full of amateur psychologists diagnosing a person in public.
Judging from the commentary the majority of the commenters think this post was massively inappropriate.
It was massively upvoted because many, many people agree with a lot of the content of the article. If this was lesswrong or reddit, the post might have a negative score, it would certainly be controversial.
Personally attacking the author is okay because
(a) He's not remotely as active, committed or useful a commenter as Patrick.
(b) Obvious self-promotion is taboo among technical people and among their broader cultural peers, nerds, geeks, whatever. Demonstration of talent in the course of something else is the way to go. lsc has some great comments on this, and makes the point that business people are just not like this, at all. Sebastian is much, much more like them in this regard than Patrick.
But many people probably agree with him among the lurkers because not all of his comments on this thread are negative, they're hovering around 1 or 2.
Now personally I too think this was inappropriate, but if he had run it by Patrick, it'd have been fine. It's not like I, and the no doubt many other, habitual patio11 comment stalkers, couldn't have writted this or something like it<1>.
That said, this post probably wrecked Patrick's day. I felt uncomfortable reading it and I'm way less territorial or private than normal. It will probably occasion an Xing of his consulting rate though, which will leave Patrick more time for leisure or working on his own stuff, so distasteful as even I find it, it may in the long run turn out to be a _small_ favour. Maybe it accelerated his consulting trajectory a year. Whether that's worth what was no doubt a punch to the gut I don't know.
<1> also yummyfajitas, lsc, pg, tpatecek, tokenadult, cperciva, RiderOfGiraffes, ErrantX, btilly, moultano and nostrademons
The article is not exactly about advice to patio11, it's more about advice to many other Hacker News readers.
Besides, by giving advise the author is getting feedback on his own advise, which is important too.
I don't agree with several statements in the article, but I like the article overall.
Making $200k at a soul-sucking corporate contracting gig, probably somewhere other than Japan, is probably not what Patrick is looking for.
I have a feeling it's just a matter of a few more swings before he hits a home run. Meanwhile, he's building an impressive following which equips him with an instant audience the moment he decides to launch said home run.
Oh seriously, this is bullshit. A deep analysis based on a single post, taken far out of context, and completely misguided. I'm not surprised patio11 is not responding to this. Seriously, what the hell?
Self promotion is a tricky thing. In an ideal world, value should be recognized through the process of your work. Unfortunately, the transparency of your work is a multiplier in how people perceive your value.
That's why great coders aren't valued at 10x or 100x that studies say they should be from a productivity standpoint.
Self promotion is a further multiplier on your perceived value. Some people do it enough to counter act the transparency problem and some use it to mask their lack of intrinsic value.
TL,DR:
Perceived value = Intrinsic value * transparency of process * self promotion
I know the HN community looks up to Patrick as something of a "guru", and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him, the information he shares, and his contributions to the community. But...
You know, there are lots of people out there who are good at business, the details of AdWords/marketing, can write well, can recruit people, etc(I'm not one of them, but I know many who are).
The only reason you're aware of Patrick and not any other one of the thousands of entrepreneurs is because he engages with the community and promotes himself. patio11 has become a brand on this site- people say things like "oh, that's a patio11 comment" or "I wonder what patio11 would say about this".
I'm not trying to take anything away from what Patrick has accomplished- I'm just saying that maybe, just maybe, he's not as worthy of your adoring blog posts as you think.
>The only reason you're aware of Patrick and not any other one of the thousands of entrepreneurs is because he engages with the community and promotes himself.
Hmm. I don't have a dog in this hunt, but it sounds kind of like saying...
The only reason you think the space shuttle is cool is because it's a plane that flies in space.
The only reason you think a swimming pool is fun is because it's a huge bathtub where a bunch of people can swim.
The only reason you think airplanes are cool is because they let people fly through the air and cross distances in a short amount of time.
I mean, all of that doesn't lack unique value and power, you know?
I agree, but then you have to make a distinction: Do you think Patrick is cool because of his exceptional SEO/business knowledge, or do you think Patrick is cool because he is active in the community?
Two very different things.
Great marketing is a skill that is completely underrated. If you can convince an entire Internet community that you're a great guy, you probably deserve most of the accolades you get. There are tons of people with a large surface area on this site, and many posters are well-respected, but he's actually universally adored. In fact, your post may be the first ad hominem attack I've seen directed at Patrick.
I was actually struggling with wording my post so it didn't look like an attack in any way, because I really don't mean to be negative at all.
I'm not attacking Patrick at all! I think Patrick is a great guy! I think Patrick works very hard at what he does, which includes engaging with the community and branding himself in a certain way, and he deserves all of the respect this community gives him.
From a personal branding perspective, it's interesting to see someone rise from obscurity to pg-like levels of fandom simply through hard work and providing value. It's great as a case study/learning experience.
>> " But... You know, there are lots of people out there who >> are good at business, the details of AdWords/marketing, can >> write well, can recruit people, etc"
Just because Patrick isn't the only one to do this doesn't make his accomplishments any less worthwhile. And most of those others don't share their knowledge on HN.
Patrick isn't getting any great financial benefit from "promotes himself" here. If he wanted to invest his time and energies on promotion, it wouldn't be on HN. He does it for non-financial reasons. The other "thousands of entrepreneurs" you know aren't doing it for a good reason.
I would argue he could derive tremendous financial benefit from posting here in terms of furthering his career, networking, consulting gigs, etc. I'm not saying that's the reason he posts here, but it is a tangible fringe benefit.
Here's a thought experiment- How much money would you pay, tomorrow, for patio11 to announce that all of his posts on his blog and on HN have actually been ghostwritten by CapitalistCartr. What if he said the patio11 profile was actually a sockpuppet account run by CapitalistCartr, and all of the respect he has built up through his hard work and posts would now belong to you?
How much would that be worth to you? $1,000?$5,000?$10,000? I bet that intangible, what accountants call goodwill, is actually worth quite a bit.
Patrick is doing business in theory, but what he actually seems to enjoy is education. He likes teaching people with his comments and teaching with his blog posts. He focuses a lot on that, and less on the actual business and the money.
If Patrick is genuinely having fun, he may be tragic like a fox.
As soon as people are giving you money in exchange for your time and services, you're obliged to do a bunch of things you may not care about. Your time has been bought.
I don't know Patrick, but if you can go from working for the man 70 hours a week to doing your own thing entirely, that strikes me as quite an upgrade. Assuming cost of living is taken care of, that's a huge win. Your time is your own.
I admire Patrick's humble approach and I can't presume to know how his income tradeoffs affect his happiness.
Still, in my hypothetical I'd take paying the bills on my own to living large while in the service of clients that are less than fun. The case for Patrick's talent is well stated, though – I should think his skill would let him be selective with his clients if he chose.
Talking about someone I don't know but whose comments I like is so weird. Especially the income thing. Okay. I'm done now.
I think the big assumption (that is incorrect) is that his Bingo Card software is the only income for Patrick.
There is no reason you can't balance the "fun" work with other work that would brings in capital to continue building your vision. I'm doing that with my company. I'm building something that could be massive but right now I'm doing lots of web design projects to pay for the next business.
I also disagree that his Appointment Reminder software will be a small success. Patrick's bingo software is naturally a smaller venture. The market isn't gigantic. His Appointment Reminder software has a much larger market. If the average client pays $79/month, it would take ~1100 clients for him to be making a million a year. With his market, word of mouth will likely play a big role. I wouldn't be surprised if he had 1000+ clients at the end of 2 years.
Not only that, but he'll have inroads into law, accounting, and other professional markets that pay big. There's almost no limit to how big he can get, and he has the skills to do it, if he chooses.
> I should think his skill would let him be selective with his clients if he chose.
I would assume he gets multiple job offers every month and he may even honor one or two, so he is already selective, otherwise he'd be employed at a large figure instead of pushing forward on his own agenda.
His major asset at this point in time is his reputation, which he has been very careful to build up, if he wanted to take the 'easy money' route out I'm sure he'd be clever enough to do so.
The fact that he doesn't and that he's a smart fellow to me says that there will be lots more to come, but on Patricks time-table and nobody else's.
Incidentally, I did a poll earlier today about the possible downsides of openness I never saw a post like this one coming, all this is possible because Patrick chose to be frank with the world instead of miserly with the information about his business. No good deed goes unpunished.
It's true, yet this ends up pointing to the old trope about there being no such thing as bad press. Uncomfortable or no, you can't ask for better visibility than a story like this.
Why? I can't think of any ill that can come from this, beyond a bit of discomfort, and I can see plenty of upside.
Being public means public conversation. It's not always fun but it's a cost of doing business.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had the other day with a friend. This guy is very senior and has been around the bay for 25 years. His kids went to school with Steve Jobs' kids.
At a graduation, my friend observed all these people coming up to Steve Jobs, introducing themselves, and otherwise being a nuisance during a family event. Jobs' body language clearly communicated how little he enjoyed this.
This is a cost of doing business.
The other side of it is that Apple gets millions of dollars of free press attention every single year, thanks to this one guy's personality and visibility. Their buzz is tremendous every single time they launch a product. Jobs pays the price of this.
Clearly a more extreme example, but this is what comes of successful visibility. Some of it is great.
Some of it is posts like this.
But it points to one thing: patio11 is doing it right.
I've had a period where my business was very much in the spotlight here in NL, cover of 'Quote', big newspaper articles and so on.
That was all good as long as it was positive. But then I got the other side of the equation, the cranks and the attacks. I could have definitely done without those, as well as all the armchair generals telling you how to run your business for you.
The problem is that this is an extreme version of damning with praise, and it portrays Patrick as a smart guy that should not be near a business decision because 'he obviously can't do it'. It totally misses the point that Patrick has his own timetable, that he spent a metric ton of effort on getting out of situations where others determine his timetable and he's only just begun.
Stupid posts like these can damage your reputation, no doubt about it and if I were Patrick I would completely ignore the whole thing to stay above it.
It's not worthy of a reply by him, that would do it too much justice. I also think that you should not attack someone in such a veiled way to increase your own stature, because by implication the author tells you he knows better and so places himself above Patrick in his business abilities. That may very well be true, but I see no proof of that.
Hmm, thank you Jacques, I had not considered that angle. I can see how galling that is now.
I'm generally of the position that I don't care that much when people are wrong about me. At the same time, it wouldn't feel good to have someone hijacking my visibility to raise their own agenda, which I see now could be how this is going.
Take a guy who's well respected in the community, dish out praise and criticism, establish yourself as the authority figure and pull traffic based off his good name. He certainly has the self-aggrandizing part down...
His major asset at this point in time is his reputation
Agree completely. Reading the article, I couldn't help but imagine how Patrick would be perceived if he followed the OP's well-intentioned advice.
IMO, his humble persona, generosity/openness and consistent work ethic have made him the popular and approachable figure that he is today. It wouldn't be surprising if much of Patrick's inspiration came from Balsamiq's Peldi.
If you do business (by any means), 99% of the time you need to do stuff you don't like. I don't think he loves spending 1 hour to explain a teacher something step by step. Or write documentation for end users and millions of other small non-techy, non-fun stuff.
If you make money either from you own business or someone else's you have to do not-so-fun stuff all the time. That's the reality. Amount of not-so-fun stuff can change massively though.
You either slave of your boss or of your own customers :)
185 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadIf the suggestion is that you can't freely admire someone (and the praise was clearly served up as an extra helping to offset the criticism) based only on the quality and volume of writing that Patrick has produced, well, that's just extra creepy.
Hitting with one hand while praising at the same time never fooled anybody.
He is looked up to on the Joel on Software board and this forum as a marketing/business genius, yet he barely makes enough money to break the poverty level for one person (I can't imagine how he affords to live in Japan).
He has talent and perseverance, but he's not a model we should be following for business.
That's exactly where it's at. We can not look inside another persons head and this kind of 'reading the tea leaves' is bound to get it fantastically wrong in the longer term.
This is all good. However, I have seen many articles claiming he is some sort of business genius. The numbers he has given from his products prove otherwise.
You just want to work on a larger scale, but don't be ignorant of the pieces coming together with a smaller puzzle... you're both still working on the same picture. Create a product, get it out there, make your target audience turn into a loving community, and make money.
No matter how much you turn business into some complex monster: the fundamentals will always remain the same.
He did that while working a substantially-more-than-full-time salary man job.
I know. He put lots of effort into his products. However, success is based on results, not effort. A successful business to me means you can pay all of your bills, the business's bills, and have some savings with revenue. If he isn't quitting his job, it means:
1) His business isn't making enough for him to survive or
or
2) It's making more than enough, but he still has enough time during the day to run his biz and hold down a full-time job.
Just looking at the numbers, it's obvious it was #1. Still, he only just quit his job after how many years?
A smart business person needs to know if there is a market for their product and if that market is profitable enough to sustain a business. It's obvious the bingo card market is very small and probably won't reliably sustain a business. Even the main users of the bingo card creator app are very cheap and probably won't be willing to pay for very much. So we have a small niche market with users that aren't willing to spend money a lot of money (or can't afford it).
The question is: if he finds out that his new service (the appointment reminder) has a small, unprofitable market, will he waste another 6 years trying to make it a success?
There is born-genius and being genius through hard work and determination. I think Patrick is of the later kind. It took him a good amount of time to be the genius he is (I have been reading his posts from JoS/BoS days). Now that he has quit his day job, I have no doubt that he will be successful in any endeavour he takes on.
Also, the original article's estimate of 10k/month is VERY LOW. If he can make 3k selling to teachers (a very narrow niche), he will make a boat load of money selling to businesses. Let's say in first year, he has 100 customers (a very conservative estimate) on 79/month plan. That's 7900$ in revenue. Next year he adds 200 customers more, now you are talking about revenue of 24k. In 5 years, he can easily make 50k/month with minimum effort on his side. This business can give him the lifestyle we all dream about. Freedom to work your own hours, freedom to travel around the world, being your own boss etc.
I am sure Patrick will keep us updated on how his new product is doing and once Sebastian sees the results, he will realize that he underestimated Patrick's genius. :)
Good luck Patrick!
Absolutely, and Amazon spent about the same amount of time bleeding hundreds of millions of debt _every quarter_. Notch (of minecraft fame) spent several years making little java applet games with barely any fanfare and barely eking out an earning if at all (he had a few day jobs prior to breaking free and founding Mojang Specifications).
There's no time limit in creating or running your own business, and there is no marker of success except those defined by the founder's goals. Is it always a good idea to enter a market you don't care about just because it's big? Not really, or else everyone would be making operating systems and office suites.
I pretty much started skimming when the gist of the article seemed to be that the author was karma-whoring by writing about patio11 in detail, instead of writing a general article about maximizing your potential for your own goals.
I know HN tends to be all about the money at times, but seriously, it's not everything.
Seriously, I don't understand the expectation that there's a correlation between genius and riches.
There are lots of bright ideas. The few that turn into successful companies are the ones that, at a few critical points, didn't fail. A good way to fail is to make mistakes and do nothing. So, to avoid failure, one must learn from mistakes, which tends to make people smart and is something smart people tend to do.
The extra axiom necessary for showing smart->rich is risk taking. Smart people who don't take a chance and do something drastic are no more likely than anybody else to get rich. There are people who pay others to be smart, but they generally don't pay much more than a normal salary.
Money isn't everything, but with those type of business skills, spending a lot of time commenting on HN is most likely a waste of your considerable expertise.
We just don't know that Patrick isn't exactly where he wants to be in the long run. Maybe he doesn't want the things that come along with $100k, $200k, $1MM per year.
If it is his aspiration to make that kind of money, I wouldn't bet against him having a plan. Patrick's transparency about his work might give the illusion that we know what he wants in life. We don't.
This to me seems like helping a person to the other side of the street with the best intentions by frog marching them there only to find out they didn't want to be there in the first place.
I'm sure that the blog post was intended not only to encourage and promote patio11, but to give all of us a wakeup call that we, too, are capable of providing that same level of value with a little bit of work and dedication.
He has one thing he's very adamant about, he wants to have 100% of the thing he built. That's pretty limiting in terms of how far you can push it, my own idea is that I'd rather have a smaller part of something much larger, but we're not all built the same.
(see: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/02/new-trends-in-startup-in... , the last paragraph).
I think this is all about having your comfort zone and learning to walk before learning how to run.
Having read/skimmed Sebastian's article, it felt as though something ignorant and grand-standing had just trampled that.
I'm not going to try to analyze Patrick. I enjoy reading most of his comments, and agree that he's valuable here, but I don't know him anywhere near well enough to think I have any insight into what makes him tick. I doubt very many other people do, either.
But I can talk about me! I have "money issues". I don't understand it the way that a proper businessperson should. All I understand are problems and solutions; poor people not having equal opportunities is a problem, in my mind, so I don't charge nearly enough. That means my business is constantly hamstrung and resource-short, and I work for less than minimum wage.
But, I couldn't respect myself if I doubled (or tripled) my fees and only focused on the people that could pay. It would make me far unhappier doing that, instead of struggling every month.
So, yeah: business isn't always a matter of rationality. If he's happy, then leave it alone. If he isn't, but doesn't ask for advice, then still leave it alone. If he ever asks for advice, think hard about whether you know him well enough to offer any.
So from what I know, I think this interpretation of him living a life of hardship is likely off the mark. As for this blog post, ya, its a little weird, but I think the author wrote it with his heart in the right place, I think perhaps he just isn't fully aware of patio11's real situation and it seemed unjust to him. Yes, it is probably inappropriate it many ways, but in my estimation far from the "creepiest blog post I've ever read" (as some have said).
By the way, I also met Patrick at a HN meetup in Tokyo, super nice down to earth guy. I doubt this post will cause him nearly the anguish it seems to be causing others here.
I think the best answer to "time to cash in on all those skills" is to note that he now does consulting, which is the very definition of what you are describing when you talk about who he could be helping.
About AppointmentReminder: you are presuming that somehow he is overlooking this huge potential goldmine that you so helpfully point out. The man in question is likely top diplomatic to say so directly, but I don't have any problem saying that this is a rather arrogant point of view.
Note that there are in fact more than three possible explanations for what he earns. And, why is it your business, anyway? Do you do this with other people, too? I think this kind of analysis is best done solely with yourself; the splinter in his eye vs.the plank in yours.
You are trying to help, but you aren't. And you just look bad on the process.
Personally, I might be a bit uncomfortable while reading it. But sometime down the road I'd look back on it and be very thankful.
Well part of the post was telling the public that Patrick would be a bargain to hire at a $200,000 salary. That specific part works better in a public post.
I still hope this is just parody?
i'd love to read a psychoanalysis of this character type.
1) His words are watched
2) He inspires conversations and entire, lengthy blog posts
I completely disagree with the author's position and assumptions (as I've detailed in another comment) but this is hardly bad news for Patrick. We're all sitting here debating how much more money he should be making. This submission is the second-most popular story on HN right now.
This is an extraordinary win for Patrick's personal branding efforts, even if it comes with a pretty uncomfortable smell to it. It's unbelievable, inasmuch as Patrick has hacked a non-computer system for personal gain.
Bravo, patio11.
There was two other things I wanted to do - increase Patrick's profile in a positive way, and also make the point at the very bottom especially to young people in technology who are underpaid because they don't value/price their skills enough.
> If the author wants to tell us how super important it is to self-promote and make a lot of money, then don't make an example out of a dude whose mind and motivations are clearly completely fucking opaque to you.
He was saying he was upset when a public school teacher wanted wanted a discount because the teacher only made $60k - and he said he'd never made $60k.
Anyways, it looks like this has been popular with a lot of people and hopefully helpful, but also drawn some really strong negative reactions. I guess that's okay - ideally some good things comes out of this, I think it's quite possible. We'll see.
Young people who have built up a skillset similar to Patrick's are willing to sacrifice 60-120k paying jobs in their early years in favor of going out an learning how to build a company. It takes a lot of trial and error to get it right.
While Patrick may be making less at the beginning of his career, I guarantee he'll be making more than the average bay-area developer once he really begins to nail down how to build profitable companies.
Beyond the fact that I consider it extremely rude to write something like this about a private person without permission, I am strongly negative about this piece because it reinforces the bizarre idea that making money is somehow a really good and important value to have. If you have a particular passion that requires a lot of money, like running a huge business, or helping a ton of people through charity, then great -- make some money and do it! But most things that humans like don't require a lot of money!
Imagine I wrote this post:
The Genius and Tragedy of Sebastian
Sebastian is a multi-faceted genius. He’s amazingly talented, I can’t even explain how talented he is. But all is not rosy... His story thus far is a story of tragedy and wasted potential. I assumed he was a successful chessplayer. He's very smart, and has a good memory. Then I read this comment Sebastian wrote earlier today:
"I like chess, but I wish my dad would stop bragging when he beats me (I'm not even a C-class player.)"
WTF? Sebastian, dude, with your focus and brains, you could be an international master. Even if you don't fully appreciate the beauty of chess, your tournament games would entertain hundreds of players online, and help educate and inspire young players. Anyone who says "I don't care about competitive chess" clearly hasn't thought about it very much.
[insert ten pages of chess advice]
I find that to be totally identical to your post about why he should try to make a lot of money.
It's a little different than that - there's some smart and accomplished people who read my site, and I was hoping to introduce them and connect them with Patrick, maybe creating some opportunities. If you posted on a Chess blog and told all your readers to go look the person up if they wanted an exceptional Chess student, and I was looking to be apprenticed, then I'd appreciate that.
I don't know how it'll go over, we'll see what Patrick says. If he's displeased or this brings ill on him, I can edit or delete the post as suits him. I wrote it with good intentions, we'll see how it goes.
I'm sure that if that was your true goal that there would have been better ways of going about it.
Well, way to mess it up. Suppose he wanted to take your advice -- you've just undermined him in any future negotiations.
Negotiating with sharks is not the same as friendly banter with your hacker friends.
Idiotic!
The latter you could have done without using patio11's real name.
The former - you are misguided. I accept that you didn't intend it, but the thing reads like "this guy is too dumb to make money from his assets".
Patio is a public figure here, should unfortunately have some expectation of the glory that comes with pseudo-celeb status for better or for worse given that good comments likely see similar numbers of eyeballs.
For biz guys exposing talent to your network is about the biggest way to give back.
Maybe it's just linkbait for HN, but seems to me like it's written genuinely from the standpoint of exposing a guy that's providing a lot of value to a wider community.
- Why it is massively upvoted anyway and
- Why people don't feel that it is equally inappropriate to personally attack the author and accuse him of all kinds of bad intentions, when an honest misjudgement is the more likely explanation.
It feels like a room full of amateur psychologists diagnosing a person in public.
It was massively upvoted because many, many people agree with a lot of the content of the article. If this was lesswrong or reddit, the post might have a negative score, it would certainly be controversial.
Personally attacking the author is okay because
(a) He's not remotely as active, committed or useful a commenter as Patrick.
(b) Obvious self-promotion is taboo among technical people and among their broader cultural peers, nerds, geeks, whatever. Demonstration of talent in the course of something else is the way to go. lsc has some great comments on this, and makes the point that business people are just not like this, at all. Sebastian is much, much more like them in this regard than Patrick.
But many people probably agree with him among the lurkers because not all of his comments on this thread are negative, they're hovering around 1 or 2.
Now personally I too think this was inappropriate, but if he had run it by Patrick, it'd have been fine. It's not like I, and the no doubt many other, habitual patio11 comment stalkers, couldn't have writted this or something like it<1>.
That said, this post probably wrecked Patrick's day. I felt uncomfortable reading it and I'm way less territorial or private than normal. It will probably occasion an Xing of his consulting rate though, which will leave Patrick more time for leisure or working on his own stuff, so distasteful as even I find it, it may in the long run turn out to be a _small_ favour. Maybe it accelerated his consulting trajectory a year. Whether that's worth what was no doubt a punch to the gut I don't know.
<1> also yummyfajitas, lsc, pg, tpatecek, tokenadult, cperciva, RiderOfGiraffes, ErrantX, btilly, moultano and nostrademons
I have a feeling it's just a matter of a few more swings before he hits a home run. Meanwhile, he's building an impressive following which equips him with an instant audience the moment he decides to launch said home run.
Well - it's also the middle of the night in Japan. 04:28 according to the site I glanced at.
That's why great coders aren't valued at 10x or 100x that studies say they should be from a productivity standpoint.
Self promotion is a further multiplier on your perceived value. Some people do it enough to counter act the transparency problem and some use it to mask their lack of intrinsic value.
TL,DR: Perceived value = Intrinsic value * transparency of process * self promotion
So self promotion isn't bad in and of itself.
A restraining order?;-)
The only reason you're aware of Patrick and not any other one of the thousands of entrepreneurs is because he engages with the community and promotes himself. patio11 has become a brand on this site- people say things like "oh, that's a patio11 comment" or "I wonder what patio11 would say about this".
I'm not trying to take anything away from what Patrick has accomplished- I'm just saying that maybe, just maybe, he's not as worthy of your adoring blog posts as you think.
Hmm. I don't have a dog in this hunt, but it sounds kind of like saying...
The only reason you think the space shuttle is cool is because it's a plane that flies in space.
The only reason you think a swimming pool is fun is because it's a huge bathtub where a bunch of people can swim.
The only reason you think airplanes are cool is because they let people fly through the air and cross distances in a short amount of time.
I mean, all of that doesn't lack unique value and power, you know?
I'm not attacking Patrick at all! I think Patrick is a great guy! I think Patrick works very hard at what he does, which includes engaging with the community and branding himself in a certain way, and he deserves all of the respect this community gives him.
From a personal branding perspective, it's interesting to see someone rise from obscurity to pg-like levels of fandom simply through hard work and providing value. It's great as a case study/learning experience.
Just because Patrick isn't the only one to do this doesn't make his accomplishments any less worthwhile. And most of those others don't share their knowledge on HN.
Here's a thought experiment- How much money would you pay, tomorrow, for patio11 to announce that all of his posts on his blog and on HN have actually been ghostwritten by CapitalistCartr. What if he said the patio11 profile was actually a sockpuppet account run by CapitalistCartr, and all of the respect he has built up through his hard work and posts would now belong to you?
How much would that be worth to you? $1,000?$5,000?$10,000? I bet that intangible, what accountants call goodwill, is actually worth quite a bit.
Tim Robins makes more than 600k/year.
As soon as people are giving you money in exchange for your time and services, you're obliged to do a bunch of things you may not care about. Your time has been bought.
I don't know Patrick, but if you can go from working for the man 70 hours a week to doing your own thing entirely, that strikes me as quite an upgrade. Assuming cost of living is taken care of, that's a huge win. Your time is your own.
I admire Patrick's humble approach and I can't presume to know how his income tradeoffs affect his happiness.
Still, in my hypothetical I'd take paying the bills on my own to living large while in the service of clients that are less than fun. The case for Patrick's talent is well stated, though – I should think his skill would let him be selective with his clients if he chose.
Talking about someone I don't know but whose comments I like is so weird. Especially the income thing. Okay. I'm done now.
There is no reason you can't balance the "fun" work with other work that would brings in capital to continue building your vision. I'm doing that with my company. I'm building something that could be massive but right now I'm doing lots of web design projects to pay for the next business.
I also disagree that his Appointment Reminder software will be a small success. Patrick's bingo software is naturally a smaller venture. The market isn't gigantic. His Appointment Reminder software has a much larger market. If the average client pays $79/month, it would take ~1100 clients for him to be making a million a year. With his market, word of mouth will likely play a big role. I wouldn't be surprised if he had 1000+ clients at the end of 2 years.
I would assume he gets multiple job offers every month and he may even honor one or two, so he is already selective, otherwise he'd be employed at a large figure instead of pushing forward on his own agenda.
His major asset at this point in time is his reputation, which he has been very careful to build up, if he wanted to take the 'easy money' route out I'm sure he'd be clever enough to do so.
The fact that he doesn't and that he's a smart fellow to me says that there will be lots more to come, but on Patricks time-table and nobody else's.
Incidentally, I did a poll earlier today about the possible downsides of openness I never saw a post like this one coming, all this is possible because Patrick chose to be frank with the world instead of miserly with the information about his business. No good deed goes unpunished.
It's true, yet this ends up pointing to the old trope about there being no such thing as bad press. Uncomfortable or no, you can't ask for better visibility than a story like this.
Being public means public conversation. It's not always fun but it's a cost of doing business.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had the other day with a friend. This guy is very senior and has been around the bay for 25 years. His kids went to school with Steve Jobs' kids.
At a graduation, my friend observed all these people coming up to Steve Jobs, introducing themselves, and otherwise being a nuisance during a family event. Jobs' body language clearly communicated how little he enjoyed this.
This is a cost of doing business.
The other side of it is that Apple gets millions of dollars of free press attention every single year, thanks to this one guy's personality and visibility. Their buzz is tremendous every single time they launch a product. Jobs pays the price of this.
Clearly a more extreme example, but this is what comes of successful visibility. Some of it is great.
Some of it is posts like this.
But it points to one thing: patio11 is doing it right.
That was all good as long as it was positive. But then I got the other side of the equation, the cranks and the attacks. I could have definitely done without those, as well as all the armchair generals telling you how to run your business for you.
The problem is that this is an extreme version of damning with praise, and it portrays Patrick as a smart guy that should not be near a business decision because 'he obviously can't do it'. It totally misses the point that Patrick has his own timetable, that he spent a metric ton of effort on getting out of situations where others determine his timetable and he's only just begun.
Stupid posts like these can damage your reputation, no doubt about it and if I were Patrick I would completely ignore the whole thing to stay above it.
It's not worthy of a reply by him, that would do it too much justice. I also think that you should not attack someone in such a veiled way to increase your own stature, because by implication the author tells you he knows better and so places himself above Patrick in his business abilities. That may very well be true, but I see no proof of that.
It's not like Steve Jobs wrote that piece.
I'm generally of the position that I don't care that much when people are wrong about me. At the same time, it wouldn't feel good to have someone hijacking my visibility to raise their own agenda, which I see now could be how this is going.
Take a guy who's well respected in the community, dish out praise and criticism, establish yourself as the authority figure and pull traffic based off his good name. He certainly has the self-aggrandizing part down...
Agree completely. Reading the article, I couldn't help but imagine how Patrick would be perceived if he followed the OP's well-intentioned advice.
IMO, his humble persona, generosity/openness and consistent work ethic have made him the popular and approachable figure that he is today. It wouldn't be surprising if much of Patrick's inspiration came from Balsamiq's Peldi.
Thanks to both of you for setting a great example.
If you make money either from you own business or someone else's you have to do not-so-fun stuff all the time. That's the reality. Amount of not-so-fun stuff can change massively though.
You either slave of your boss or of your own customers :)