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by evanrmurphy 5474 days ago
"He hasn't even repeated the success of BCC himself yet."

This is the doubt that inevitably sneaks up on the hope you get when you read small business advice. If what you say is true, why are you spilling the beans? Why don't you protect your secret and reap all the reward for yourself?
3 comments
jasonkester 5474 days ago
Most of the things that go into building a little software empire like this don't need to be kept secret. And by its very nature, it's not something that you want to repeat too many times.

Imagine you had a business that took 20 hours of your time each month and brought in $10k/mo. Your options now are:

A.) go surfing. forever.

B.) build another business that takes up another 20 hours of your month and brings in another $10k/month.

If you iterate this out enough times, you'll notice that option A goes away after a few cycles, and suddenly you have a full time job. Sure, you're bringing in more money, but your quality of life is back to that of every other schmuck with a full time job.

Since the stated goal of the enterprise is "pay for me to have fun with the least possible effort", it just doesn't make sense to find ways to add effort and subtract fun from that equation.

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patio11 5473 days ago
On one level, money is much less motivational to me than praise. On another level, there is a direct path between "Be generous with what I know" and "Sell more stuff." See the iceberg part of the speech. Every time I am cited I get a bit better SEO juice for bingo.

Similarly, some smart people trust me regarding knowledge, execution ability, and character. This is largely a function of being generous with what I know. If you were hypothetically in Ogaki and bought me coffee, I would happily talk about your problems until I ran out of breath. There exist people who are happy to buy that, and they generally pay substantially more than coffee, for example to guarantee availability or reschedule the chat from ogaki to 18 hours east.

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davidw 5474 days ago
By being such a good communicator, patio11 has managed to land himself what would appear to be some very high paying consulting gigs that will pay for lots of development time on his projects.

I don't think that, working alone, he could "reap all the rewards" because he just couldn't cover N small niche businesses like BCC.

Also, he's not selling advice beyond consulting, so it seems quite authentic.

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