[ssharp]

Patio11 was blogging about his old Bingo Card software for many, many years and became one of the most high-profile members of Hacker News because of it. I don't think a flood of competing Bingo Card software came in.

A lot of the time, finding a good enough niche, a small enough niche, and understanding customer acquisition for that niche is all the "moat" you really need. Remember, your competitors likely don't know your market as well as you do and are probably fighting a harder battle than you initially fought since they have to compete against you.

[chebum]

The BCC was never profitable enough with constantly declining revenues. Patrick ended 2016 with $120,000 in debt and working in Stripe to pay it down.

Probably, revenues started to decline after bragging about them.

[patio11]

I swear sometimes recently I feel like I'm reading comments from a weird alternate universe HN where I simultaneously claimed to be Elon Musk and also fabricated everything.

Hello, Earth 2 HNer. Back here on Earth 1 I ran a succession of small software businesses. They're anomalously well-documented; BCC more than any other. If you have access to the Earth 1 Internet you can read the first month'a report where I "bragged" about $24.95 and follow the curve from there. Please give my regards to fellow Earth 2 denizens who told me in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 that publishing numbers would bring a horde of competitors to kill me.

[csa]

The amount of dis/misinformation in your short comment is astounding. Normally I would ignore posts like this, but I have seen a lot of incorrect (or at best creatively interpreted) patio11 information floating around, so I would like to clarify some issues to the best of my understanding.

- BCC was profitable enough for Patrick to quit his job as a salaryman and maintain a similar lifestyle. Most folks would be shocked at how little money he had to make to do that. The revenues and profits went up quite consistently for the first few years -- that is, until he had bigger fish to fry.

- BCC was profitable enough for Patrick to do lucrative consulting as well as build a second business (I can't recall the order of those at the moment).

- Patrick acknowledges that he spent very little time on BCC after he got the processes down. While he was "making money while he slept", he did quite a bit of stuff in that free time that he needed/wanted to do (e.g., iirc, health, dating/marriage, etc.).

- BCC had declining revenues due to neglect that Patrick acknowledges himself (e.g., not updating marketing). As with many folks who scale businesses, it was not a valuable use of his time (e.g., working on AR had higher expected value).

- AR scaled to a higher level than BCC, and it supported an even better lifestyle while still giving him free time for family and building other things like Starfighter. Sadly, Patrick found AR to be not a terribly interesting problem space and did not build it out aggressively. This is not a problem unique to Patrick (i.e., more interested in working on interesting problems than optimizing income with boring/repetitive work).

- Starfigher turned out to be a bust. Patrick incurred some debt while taking a bigger shot. This is remarkably common, and the number is not a terribly big one for a bust. My understanding is that the debt was paid off (or could have been paid off) when he sold AR.

- I don't want to speak for Patrick, but I imagine that there are a number of reasons he went to work for Stripe -- interesting problem space was probably one of them. Debt issue may have been another, but that was effectively solved with the sale of AR.

I'm not sure why so many HNers denigrate Patrick's achievements. He certainly hasn't optimized for maximum income, but I think that the amount of lifestyle freedom that his businesses gave him is somehow grossly underrated and underappreciated. I can only think that there are a fair number of HNers who are envious.

Don't get me wrong, there are many things that I think that I or others would do differently if we were in Patrick's shoes, but we aren't, and we don't know everything that is going on in his life.

That said, if folks are going to criticize him, at least get the facts right. Patrick is fairly open about his business experiences, and the annual reviews on his blog at kalmuzeus.com are a good start.

Edit: oops, Patrick replied while I was typing.

[cunac]

you are twisting the truth, 120000K is debt from bootstrapping a different startup

[tonyedgecombe]

There were some, I know of one personally but there were others as well. Not sure what the impact of that was as Patio11 seemed to be squeezing all the blood out of that stone.

[johnward]

For years I thought "bingo card" meant something else that I just wasn't familiar with. Until I actually read about it and it was as simple as cards to play bingo. I believe he sold that business now.