[idlewords]

Patio11 is a professional advice giver, while cperciva makes a living running a niche service. The ability to give eloquent and persuasive advice is professionally valuable to the giver, but should not be mistaken for domain expertise. It's important when running a business to lash yourself to the mast sometimes and not listen to people without direct experience or skin in the game.

[tptacek]

That was a good description of Patrick at the time he wrote this post, but stopped being accurate shortly afterwards. The majority of his career, in fact, has not been consulting or advice-giving; he made his living on a micro-SAAS, like you, for a bunch of years, and left consulting after an ill-fated startup he did with some schmuck on HN and spent the longest stretch of his career to date working in the payment industry mines at Stripe.

Your point is well taken! I appreciate also that you're not making an absolute declaration that advice is untrustworthy. I spent a long time as a professional advice-giver too, but if you lashed yourself to the mast and ignored my advice that there was a CBC padding oracle in your session cookie implementation, you were plotting a course to the ocean floor. Running a business means being careful which advice you let in and which you don't.

My only nit here is: between this and your other comment on the thread, I don't think Patrick's advice here was unwelcome. I have a vague recollection of Colin being asked first. Also: if anyone was going to ask before publishing unsolicited advice about someone else's business, it would be Patrick. So the Bingo Card thing is a bit of a low blow. Also, easy to make fun of when you exclude the context that he lived off that Bingo thingy for years.

[idlewords]

I respect Patrick for living off his Bingo card thingy! If I fault him for anything it's giving up that life; may we all find a Bingo card thingy to sustain us.

Unlike you I don't know either person in this discussion personally and you should construe my comment strictly as beating my favorite dead horse, "be wary of smart-sounding advice from people whose livelihood is built on sounding convincing to people like yourself."

[tptacek]

Absolutely. I get that you're coming from a good and useful place here! It's special pleading for me to say "HN is awash in dubious business advice but you should take Patrick's advice more seriously than most, while remembering that it's just outsider-looking-in advice". But that's my take!

Mostly I was just moved to comment because I got the vibe that Patrick was coming across to you as condescending, and I know he was working hard not to come across that way.