The bottom line is you can only optimize so much via a/b testing and whatnot from marginal ideas at best.
Happiness is different things for different people. Don't be condescending if you do not understand another person's way of life.
(He could do more, but he doesn't have to, which is a great place to be).
'cperciva likes how the business is.
He's making a lot more than $60,000 currently. Also he is running his own business/monetary life and that is something very few great entrepreneurs can still say these days. Hard to put a price on that, especially since he acknowledges he values the freedom of not being tied to investors in this very post.
> 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.
How do people normally handle this?
1) Take it or leave it price hike
2) Give a X month grace period before new price
3) Grandfathered in and price only changes if they need to upgrade
4) ??
Later when they need to make many hires to support customers it is much better value to chase those bigger customers.
That is assuming there is significant support cost.
From my perspective your business model seems to be:
1. Pick a niche and figure out keywords for that niche.
2. Perform the Magic SEO Incantation to rank high in Google.
3. Sell well to the visitors that gets you.
Have you thought of launching an affiliate program for the BCC ?
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%.
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.
Another option is Clickbank where affiliates may find you. There are alternatives like JVZoo, DigiResults etc.
You could hire someone part time to do the customer support and bugfixes.
In short you could keep BCC going nicely with very little effort on your part.
And then after a few months, you have a low maintenance business that you can sell, rather than something that will slowly die.
I know it may not seem worth your time, as you have bigger fish to fry.
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.
The info products sold on sites like WF and such are what I'd lump into the "guru" category, and are oftentimes just lots of fluff or something the writer paid someone off Odesk to write for them. Overall, they don't come off as terribly professional and can quite readily be identified as living within the "Get rich quick" bucket.
Affiliates can be helpful, but I'd be really careful about picking ones that won't damage the brand image and credibility he's built for himself.
It's funny to hear you call the WaFo products "guru" here on HN (I would agree they are), because HN itself is subject to the same kind of guru-bullshit. There are multiple people on HN who make money selling info products purely to the HN crowd. I would classify them as "guru" as well. I enjoy watching it play out, because as HN builds as a community, it seems a lot of trends are evolving in the same way the IM community did. Someone makes money, makes a blogpost, gains a following, writes an ebook, makes more money. I would call that "guru", but people on HN pay for it. I will say, however, that the content the "gurus" on HN produce is far better than 99% of the shit coming out of WaFo.
Relatedly, it's amazing how quickly people on HN will dismiss the SEO and affiliate marketing industry. It's a massive market. The "marketplace" forums on WF, WaFo, and BHW process five figures of transactions per day. That's mostly SEO services, some spammy, some not. Outside of that, there are multiple affiliates on those forums doing six figure daily revenues. The AM industry as a whole is ~6billion annually.
Despite all the money in SEO/AM, commenters on HN are quick to degrade the industry as spammy/blackhat/assholes/whatever, and yet most of those people are making more on their own than anyone here. It's quite funny, honestly.
You could ask the potential affiliate to fill in a form with some information about their site, how they will promote before you accept them in.
You can also build relationships on the forum, so you know who can be trusted with your brand. There are plenty of OK marketers, who may have a popular website on there. But you are right there are plenty of get-rich-quick types you have to filter through.
I think the affiliate idea has merit even if you don't use the Warriorforum. You could for example run your own affiliate program using a script, and then contact sites you like directly.
There was some thread here where patio11 kind of snickered when someone called his business a "huge success"; probably because he knows a bunch of people that earn one or more magnitudes more money. But the above quote probably sums up "fantastic success" for me, and I think, a whole lot of the world.
Tyranny of the majority is in effect at HN.
My approach is more high-touch - I don't rely on people searching for "Terminerinnerung" ("Appointment reminder") and then coming to my website. I think most doctors don't do that. I go out and talk to them.
I also by default offer to develop integrations into the customer'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's existing system to be able to continuously export its data. I did this successfully for one of my customers (it was a Java/MySQL application). The other customer I developed a web calendar for.
I have now completed the development for my first two customers (I hadn'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'll start to acquire more (enterprise) customers.
I'm happy to talk about this via email if anybody's interested. My address is [my first name]@[my last name].io (Michael Herrmann).
It's in it's early stages. I'm waiting to e-mail Patrick when I can say "Thanks to you I now have >500€ MRR" :-)
I sent you an e-mail to talk about it some more and share experiences! Always great to learn of similar endeavours.
A few other people also got in touch. Cool! :-)
[H]aving numbers publicly available would complicate
[taking investment money in the future].
Patrick basically has all his cards on the table, and can't give much more than that
"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."
Wasn't that largely made irrelevant a while back? I'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're not building a link profile focusing on that link text as there have been reports of people getting dinged for that.
In his case, his brand is also highly relevant to the term 'appointment reminder', which pretty much locks up the #1 spot for that term.
What would make his case different from theirs other than his backlink profile?
It wasn’t the world’s most inspired naming choice, but the $8.95 I paid for the domain name is probably the best ROI of anything I’ve ever bought. (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. The fact that it is a .org is irrelevant, except in that the .org was $8.95 and the company which owned the .com wanted $30,000 for it.)
Lesson to learn: it's okay to let some things decay so that attention and focus can be paid to the right things.
Then again, BCC seems to have reached much higher heights than I would have thought its potential was, so maybe it's more of a "Mission Accomplished" there.
Did she consider US cities?
Tokyo is very expensive and an unusual choice to move into for family with a child.
Any US city would put you in a better touch with your business and would be less expensive than Tokyo.
Life is about making choices.
5x price increase, small apartments (instead of houses), higher babysitter costs -- these are all downsides.
What is better in Tokyo than in, say, Austin, TX?
Congratulations patio11!
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.
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.
I just realized that I am a part of this :(
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).
I wanted to ask about this:
> To build out that software and get the team spun up, I had to actually sit down and document our business processes
I'd love to here a bit more about how you went about that. You've got a great approach to documenting your thoughts and I'm sure I could learn a thing or two. I'm scaling our app http://www.staffsquared.com in 2015 and working hard to share knowledge across our growing team.
Keep up the great work!
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/sales_aut...
> 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.)
This sounds like it won't scale well. How do you plan to cope with support when your number of customers grows?
- Make it a selling point for the higher tiers of accounts. "If you choose the Serious Business plan, all your questions will be answered by our lead engineer. (Your Serious Business is too important to trust to a call center.)"
If you want to keep the selling point of competent and personal support for all customers:
All questions are answered directly by our highly-trained customer support reps, Anna and Thomas [Picture of Anna and Thomas smiling winningly and looking nothing like That Anonymous Incompetent Dick I Get Every Time I Call The Phone Company.] In the rare cases where they can't solve your problem, they'll immediately refer you to our lead engineer."
Can you counter churn rate by acquiring new customers?
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.
The reasoning behind all these projects was to make "passive income". And by running multiple websites I would make a nice income from them all combined.
After developing and marketing the last of these projects (file sharing one, post-mortem here: http://www.sparklewise.com/post-mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-wit... ) I realized that the most important thing is not to have a "good idea" 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's why I now focus on serving SaaS businesses, because that's actually something I care about and will likely care about for years to come.
Thanks for all the transparency Patrick and for setting an example for the rest of the HN crowd. And good luck with the fatherhood :-)
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.
Apropos of nothing, it seems that if you're interested in piquing the interest of someone busy, discovering the venn diagram for which they're one of a small population in the intersection might be the way to go. Or, it might just be really creepy.
If you could go back in time how would you change the pricing model here?
Would you remove the professional plan altogether? How could your pricing model differentiate between the small personal services with < 100 appointments/month and the law firms with < 100 appointments/month?
Congratulations on fatherhood!
"The slip date shipped repeatedly."
We share the same viewpoint. Well said.