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Kalzumeus Software Year in Review 2014

391 点作者 JayNeely超过 10 年前

32 条评论

davidw超过 10 年前
&gt; I work mostly on what I want to work on, take a day off whenever I feel like it, and optimize the business for quality of life rather than for any particular growth or financial targets.<p>There was some thread here where patio11 kind of snickered when someone called his business a &quot;huge success&quot;; probably because he knows a bunch of people that earn one or more magnitudes more money. But the above quote probably sums up &quot;fantastic success&quot; for me, and I think, a whole lot of the world.
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porter超过 10 年前
Hey Patrick, thanks so much for your honesty in all of this. It&#x27;s never easy talking about things that embarrass us. Not to mention <i>in public</i>. You&#x27;ll probably get some haters, but just know that I look forward to your annual updates and they have encouraged me to quit my job and start my own software business too. This has been one of the best decisions of my life. I&#x27;m sure there are many more here who can say the same thing. So, to you good sir, thank you.
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toumhi超过 10 年前
I completely understand for your neglect of Appointment Reminder. I&#x27;ve also had my share of projects I&#x27;d start but lose interest in it because, well, I was not consumed by the problem I was solving.<p>So during the years I worked sequentially (or sometimes at the same time) on a gift certificate template gallery, a travel insurance comparator, a body-mass-index calculator website, a file sharing solution for businesses targeted at the french market.<p>The reasoning behind all these projects was to make &quot;passive income&quot;. And by running multiple websites I would make a nice income from them all combined.<p>After developing and marketing the last of these projects (file sharing one, post-mortem here: <a href="http://www.sparklewise.com/post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-with-my-first-online-product/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sparklewise.com&#x2F;post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-wit...</a> ) I realized that the most important thing is not to have a &quot;good idea&quot; but to work on a problem you want to solve and with people you can relate to or at least that you enjoy working with. That&#x27;s why I now focus on serving SaaS businesses, because that&#x27;s actually something I care about and will likely care about for years to come.<p>Thanks for all the transparency Patrick and for setting an example for the rest of the HN crowd. And good luck with the fatherhood :-)
mherrmann超过 10 年前
I have been working on an AR clone in Austria since mid September (<a href="https://www.terminerinnerung.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.terminerinnerung.org</a>). I focus on getting enterprise customers. My website is hardly visited (so far). I got my first two customers by simply walking into their offices and asking whether they&#x27;d be interested. I asked them to pay me for 12 months in advance, so I have earned 5368€ (6565 US$) since I started. I&#x27;m hoping that I will earn this again in 2016, when it comes to renew the contract for these first two clients.<p>My approach is more high-touch - I don&#x27;t rely on people searching for &quot;Terminerinnerung&quot; (&quot;Appointment reminder&quot;) and then coming to my website. I think most doctors don&#x27;t do that. I go out and talk to them.<p>I also by default offer to develop integrations into the customer&#x27;s existing appointment reminder system - because the majority (~66%) of my potential customers here already have some computer system. This means reverse engineering the customer&#x27;s existing system to be able to continuously export its data. I did this successfully for one of my customers (it was a Java&#x2F;MySQL application). The other customer I developed a web calendar for.<p>I have now completed the development for my first two customers (I hadn&#x27;t completed development when I sold the service to them. I just pretended I had, to make the sale). At the beginning of next year I&#x27;ll start to acquire more (enterprise) customers.<p>I&#x27;m happy to talk about this via email if anybody&#x27;s interested. My address is [my first name]@[my last name].io (Michael Herrmann).
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wallflower超过 10 年前
&gt; Ruriko and I were blessed by the birth of our daughter, Lillian.<p>Congratulations patio11!
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jakobegger超过 10 年前
Thanks for being so open with your feelings. I always find it hard to talk about my own feelings, and it&#x27;s great to hear how you are struggling with and overcoming the pitfalls of self-employment.<p>Your open sharing of actual revenue numbers is invaluable. The tech press only loves to talk about all those billion dollar companies. But your blog posts put that into perspective, giving us a glimpse of how much money a small business can realistically make without shooting for the startup lottery.
saturdayplace超过 10 年前
&gt; The only time in recent memory I used it myself was when a Redditor asked for anti-Bitcoin bingo cards, a request which I am unquestionably the best qualified person in the world to answer.)<p>Apropos of nothing, it seems that if you&#x27;re interested in piquing the interest of someone busy, discovering the venn diagram for which they&#x27;re one of a small population in the intersection might be the way to go. Or, it might just be really creepy.
chrisan超过 10 年前
Thank you for sharing your story<p>&gt; I’m taking my own advice to charge more, and re-aligning those numbers with actual customer behavior rather than the numbers I guessed four years ago.<p>How do people normally handle this?<p>1) Take it or leave it price hike<p>2) Give a X month grace period before new price<p>3) Grandfathered in and price only changes if they need to upgrade<p>4) ??
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manto超过 10 年前
Patrick&#x27;s writing serves as a great supplement to PG&#x27;s essays: real world analysis of &quot;slower&quot; growth software businesses. For engineers interested in alternate models of creating a company, these annual write ups help one develop an outline for the financial, business, and engineering lifestyle required to get something off the ground. Thanks Patrick, after working at VC backed startups, these types of posts actually encouraged me to go out on my own!
mooneater超过 10 年前
I am a huge fan of yours patio11, you have gifted us so much useful knowledge. How do we ever repay you? =)
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ThomPete超过 10 年前
You can burn or you can last, but you can&#x27;t do both.<p>Patrick is a wonderful example of a person who takes the middle road and actually put quite a lot of effort into making sure he stays there rather than letting himself be sucked in by the grow like crazy game or the never launch anything game.<p>He is happy, he is not trying to be happy. That alone is something most people will never experience and measured in that he is a billionaire.
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simonswords82超过 10 年前
Hey @patio11, hopefully you&#x27;ll lurk a bit later...<p>Congrats on the kid! Balancing a newborn and any amount of business is no joke (source: I have two startups, a software company and an 18 month old).<p>I wanted to ask about this:<p>&gt; To build out that software and get the team spun up, I had to actually sit down and document our business processes<p>I&#x27;d love to here a bit more about how you went about that. You&#x27;ve got a great approach to documenting your thoughts and I&#x27;m sure I could learn a thing or two. I&#x27;m scaling our app <a href="http://www.staffsquared.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.staffsquared.com</a> in 2015 and working hard to share knowledge across our growing team.<p>Keep up the great work!
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gknoy超过 10 年前
<p><pre><code> [H]aving numbers publicly available would complicate [taking investment money in the future]. </code></pre> I don&#x27;t understand why having publicly available numbers would complicate getting investment in the future. Would someone be gracious enough to explain that to me as if I have no knowledge (true in this case)?
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shostack超过 10 年前
Re: your SEO comment:<p><i>&quot;AR is virtually guaranteed to be a mortal lock on the query [appointment reminder] due to the combination of the exact match domain bonus and the fact that most links to it naturally cite the name of the company.&quot;</i><p>Wasn&#x27;t that largely made irrelevant a while back? I&#x27;d be willing to bet the majority of your relevancy comes from the backlinks and content on their pages vs. your exact match domain. Hopefully you&#x27;re not building a link profile focusing on that link text as there have been reports of people getting dinged for that.
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Permit超过 10 年前
&gt;Most of our customers are on the Professional plan, which annoys the heck out of me, but it’s my fault. Since I was thinking personal services, where 100 appointments a month barely sustains a sole practitioner (it implies $3k to $8k gross revenue), I thought any sizable business would be forced to pay more meaningful amounts of money. It turns out that you can run a nice boutique law office with sales in the high seven figures or an architectural consultancy with millions in revenue on less than 100 appointments a month. Believe me, I know several examples.<p>If you could go back in time how would you change the pricing model here?<p>Would you remove the professional plan altogether? How could your pricing model differentiate between the small personal services with &lt; 100 appointments&#x2F;month and the law firms with &lt; 100 appointments&#x2F;month?
daxelrod超过 10 年前
Bravo for candidly writing about your failures as well as your successes. I don&#x27;t think a lot of us would have the guts to write publicly about times that we didn&#x27;t measure up the way you have; but your doing so is wonderfully instructive.<p>Congratulations on fatherhood!
billsossoon超过 10 年前
The comment about BCC being Hello World with a random number generator is amusing, but the fact that you were able to generate profit from a simple web app is really a testament to your marketing and business skill.
unreal37超过 10 年前
I bet it must be an amazing relief to be able to talk specifics of AR, after so long of having to be quiet about the details. Congrats on your success, Patrick.
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tome超过 10 年前
Patrick, if you&#x27;re reading I have a question about Appointment Reminder. The website says this:<p>&gt; We do our level best to answer all emails within 24 hours. All questions are answered by our lead engineer. (Your business is too important to trust to a call center.)<p>This sounds like it won&#x27;t scale well. How do you plan to cope with support when your number of customers grows?
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UtahDave超过 10 年前
My favorite quote from Patrick&#x27;s post:<p>&quot;The slip date shipped repeatedly.&quot;
JunkDNA超过 10 年前
This might be one of my most favorite posts of Patrick&#x27;s ever. It&#x27;s often so much easier to start something new than it is to sustain something old. Hanging around HN too long makes you an addict of &quot;new&quot;. Guess what: growing and sustaining a business for the long haul is <i>hard</i>, even for patio11.
bbcbasic超过 10 年前
Patrick,<p>Have you thought of launching an affiliate program for the BCC ?<p>You can connect on forums like WarriorForum and find good affiliates. They will love that you have a proven product. Then give them 50-75%.<p>Some will advertise on their existing sites, to their lists and may even pay for advertising. You take no risk and may get a lot for sales.<p>Another option is Clickbank where affiliates may find you. There are alternatives like JVZoo, DigiResults etc.<p>You could hire someone part time to do the customer support and bugfixes.<p>In short you could keep BCC going nicely with very little effort on your part.<p>And then after a few months, you have a low maintenance business that you can sell, rather than something that will slowly die.<p>I know it may not seem worth your time, as you have bigger fish to fry.<p>However all of this could be done in a couple of days, and maybe an hour a month to maintain. You may be able to sell it for $100k or more once it is in good shape again.
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xzlzx超过 10 年前
&quot;...a lot of folks have wanted me to roll the dice on a funded startup with big put-a-dent-in-the-universe ambitions. At times, I wanted to want that for myself, but for the moment I was content to keep running my business in the traditional fashion. I work mostly on what I want to work on, take a day off whenever I feel like it, and optimize the business for quality of life rather than for any particular growth or financial targets.&quot;<p>We share the same viewpoint. Well said.
applecore超过 10 年前
Why is Appointment Reminder on a .org top-level domain?
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fdsary超过 10 年前
Congrats on the kid &amp; move to 中目黒!
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mattste超过 10 年前
As a young software developer interested in what happens on the business side of things, this was a fantastic read. Thanks Patrick.
sogen超过 10 年前
Is there a way to reach patio11? I emailed him while taking his course but never got a response.
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krschultz超过 10 年前
Glad to hear Patrick is using Bench, those guys are awesome.
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staunch超过 10 年前
Congrats on the baby!
curiously超过 10 年前
Is it better to have a low churn rate per month with lower MRR or a higher churn rate with higher MRR ?<p>Can you counter churn rate by acquiring new customers?
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sadpanda5超过 10 年前
This may be a unpopular opinion, but this guy needs to cofound a company with someone else. He is one of the smartest dudes I know for optimization, but seems to have some of the most tame&#x2F;boring ideas for &#x27;startups&#x27; (if you can call them that). Bingo card creator? Appointment reminder? He needs a cofounder who compliments his skills. Mainly, good ideas and good sales skills.<p>The bottom line is you can only optimize so much via a&#x2F;b testing and whatnot from marginal ideas at best.
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dennisgorelik超过 10 年前
&gt; Ruriko ... does not love Ogaki ... and wanted a change.<p>Did she consider US cities?<p>Tokyo is very expensive and an unusual choice to move into for family with a child.<p>Any US city would put you in a better touch with your business and would be less expensive than Tokyo.
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