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Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator

274 点作者 paulsingh将近 15 年前

15 条评论

nicpottier将近 15 年前
For all those reading this thinking, man, I could never do this or be successful at my own business, follow his advice, JUST DO IT!<p>It isn't that hard, it is especially not that hard if you approach it like he did and grow very slowly and keep your costs down. I did the same thing with my best friend years ago, starting off while still having a job, then making a leap when things were slightly vetted.<p>Best decision of my life. I've travelled the world, set my own schedules, always worked on what I wanted to work on and had a far more interesting set of challenges than I would have staying coding at another startup.<p>The key is not to aim for the moon, aim to pay the bills. We reduced our expenses to $5k (pre tax) a month, then set that as our goal our first year. It was achievable, but more importantly we eventually grew to making far, far more than that. But I've still always kept my expenses low because I've always wanted the freedom to do what I wanted.<p>I'm now in Africa, doing a startup here because it is new and exciting and satisfies my need to do good. Never would have been here if I had stayed at the day job.<p>DO IT!
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m_eiman将近 15 年前
<i>While this was going on, their copy of Bingo Card Creator has been relentlessly polling the server: “Has she bought it yet? Has she bought it yet? Has she bought it yet?” It does this by passing the same random ID to a web service running on the server. If the transaction has been consumated, BCC will learn the Registration Key, and then automatically upgrade itself to the registered version. This removes a /major/ source of customer support complaints, since Registration Key management is a hard concept for many shareware customers to grasp. From the customer’s perspective, she just got done putting her details into Paypal, and by the time she closes the browser (after ignoring the instructions) and goes back to Bingo Card Creator, it already says “Thanks for your purchase!” That little psychic saves me hours every month in support email.</i><p>I wish all trial software did this!<p>A definite usability improvement and just generally better for both parties. The usual email with the reg key for later use should also be sent, of course, but saving that hassle for me when I just want to get on with using what I've just bought is a very nice touch.
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jswinghammer将近 15 年前
I can't help but always be totally impressed with Patrick. I admire the way he focuses on every detail of his business and is so thoughtful about everything he does. He is a big reason why reading the comments on this site can be so rewarding.<p>This was an excellent read.
troygoode将近 15 年前
Great article and always good to hear more from Patrick. I still find it incredibly humorous that one of the more influential startup stories on HN is a "simple" Bingo Card Creator. Patrick continually shows that there is no such thing as "simple" when you're striving to be successful.<p>Favorite bit from the article: "Prior to running a business I ran a WoW guild. It was rather substantially more work and more drama than running a business, for dramatically worse loot."
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skmurphy将近 15 年前
This was the best exchange in the interview:<p><pre><code> Q: Can you share the key metrics you watch on a daily basis? Why are they important to you? A: I have published a variety of stats but I don’t watch metrics on a daily basis because I don’t make metrics-based decisions on a daily basis, and absent making decisions watching metrics is only as productive as playing WoW.</code></pre>
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d_r将近 15 年前
"But if you <i>say</i> you’re booked solid with your children and yet you still find time to watch television and play online poker, then it is time to have a frank discussion about your true priorities in life."<p>Besides the very honest and insightful write-up (thank you!), this last sentence is worth its weight in gold. It's too easy to make excuses for not following your goals and blame something other than your own lack of motivation/focus.
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ecaradec将近 15 年前
I find really interesting that patrick build a pagerank on a totally different population than his customer base. He target hackers for pagerank building (and invest a lot of time writing articles who are probably not his first customers), but his customers lands on content created by freelancers (cheap, lesser quality content probably ).
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pwim将近 15 年前
<i>He lives in Japan and recently left his cushy full-time job</i><p>I don't think cushy is the word he'd use to describe it.
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jolan将近 15 年前
&#62; Apache has a habit of taking down memory-constrained VPSes when hit by large amounts of traffic<p>Give Nginx a spin if you can. I use 300MB VPSes running Nginx + PHP and have memory to spare to run the dropbox daemon, lightly loaded mysql, etc.
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JacobAldridge将近 15 年前
First time I heard about Appointment Reminder - Patrick's third second product - <a href="http://www.appointmentreminder.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.appointmentreminder.org/</a><p>Certainly a much bigger market than elementary school teachers, while clearly continuing to leverage the same key skills of making a mundane task automatic, and metric testing to consistently enhance the real world user experience. Perfect case study (assuming the market eats it up, of course!).
boredguy8将近 15 年前
And no credit for fixing his httpd.conf configuration :(<p>&#60;3 patio
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bryanh将近 15 年前
I love the dashboard screenshot. More of these Patrick! How about a tour of BCC someday?
tkahn6将近 15 年前
Patrick, this was really a great read.<p>It wasn't clear to me from the article, but it seems that a lot of the 'syncing' of information between databases and services was programmed by hand by you. How much time did you spend on this and if you had to re-setup your infrastructure, would you go with a service that does most of this for you (if one even exists)?
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TheSOB88将近 15 年前
It took me a minute to realize I was reading an interview. Make this more evident, please!
atomical将近 15 年前
"If you spend just a few minutes on Hacker News, you’ll come across Patrick McKenzie in one way or another"<p>You can say that again. I am starting to feel the overload.
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