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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Feel free to ask questions about AR or the Appsumo deal if you want.

No one's ever accused me of being a spendthrift--so take this with a grain of salt--but I was disappointed in the "deal" actually.

First step (after getting past the gateway errors): (1) Encounter request for email address with a "we don't spam" reassurance.

(2) "Sure you don't"--let's use mailinator. Receive the email, "hmmm, this description sure meets my definition for spam"--I don't want to hear about exclusive deals, I want to watch Patrick's advice:

"We ONLY email you a few times a month about our exclusive deals for the best web applications."

(3) See video on the page, start it playing, wait for it to buffer, scroll down--"hmmm, what's this about Twitter/FB"?

(4) Watch video (which for me, at least, had major audio sync issues).

(5) Realise the video isn't the video but just an advertisement for the actual video.

(6) Realise I'm being expected to spam my friends/colleagues in order to save $99.

(7) As I value my social network at more than $99 and get annoyed whenever I get spammed by others, close the open window.

(8) Write this comment.

Now, I readily admit, "you" (for whoever is in the financial win/lose situation here) may be happy to not get my Tweet in exchange for content but...

With the business of software video Patrick was in, I quite happily tweeted about it and the content of my tweet got retweeted again by someone much more socially connected than I. I did this because I thought it was good content, that people would benefit from watching and because I like your work.

I happen to think that assuming the quality of this video was at least at the level of that presentation there would've been many voluntary tweets about the opportunity to watch it for free.

But a "tweet for deal" quid pro quo leaves a poor taste for me.

At the least if I was told up front "Hey, if you Tweet/FB this today, then you'll get it for free. Otherwise, you can get access for $99" then I'd know the deal wasn't for me.

FWIW. :)

You're entitled to your opinion.

People often ask me when I'm going to write an ebook for startups. I tell them never. They ask me why, when HN would make such great customers. When I think of great customers, I think "Pays five figure invoices on time and in full", not "Dude, show me the stuff and then maybe, if I like it, I might tweet about it."

That is not specifically aimed at you: I've been humming variants of the same tune for years.

This is interesting. I was going back and forth with Amy Hoy on twitter the other day about the trend (maybe I'm seeing one where there isn't) of doing a successful product or two and then turning around and "selling how you did it", which she's doing with a course, Rob Walling is doing with his micropreneur academy, and 37signals does it with their books.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that (indeed, I'm very happy with Rob's book and recommend it to people), but I'm also somehow glad to hear that you see more money and prospects in products than turning around and selling to people who want to emulate your success.

I think those are a couple different trajectories there. 37Signals/FogCreek both have modestly successful sidelines attached to massively successful software businesses. DHH is not going home at night thinking "Bwahaha, forget Basecamp, another book and I'll have to rent Lichtenstein to park my fleet of sports cars." Amy & Thomas have gone from consulting to info products to SaaS (concurrent with info products/training) and I will eat my hat if the SaaS doesn't eventually swallow the rest of their business because the economics of it are just so freaking compelling. I don't have a good guesstimate of Rob's numbers.

For my part, the trajectory was different: modestly successful product (and ancillary blogging/community participation) lead to lucrative consulting opportunities and gave me enough runway to do a SaaS which will probably eventually swallow any availability for consulting (like it did for 37Signals, FogCreek, etc).

Yeah, it's not a knock on what they're doing at all, just a bit of correlation that I wondered about.

> I've been humming variants of the same tune for years.

Yeah, I was aware of that when I wrote the comment. :) I agree, I don't think hackers are a great market for a lot of things due to our DIY mentality--I'm happy to benefit from the things you share for no cost and live without the rest.

My concern in this case was that the exercise felt more like a (albeit unintentional on your part) "bait-and-switch" and as such was damaging to the "Patrick McKenzie" brand.

Thanks for what you contribute--it's appreciated.

Swallow your pride and watch those videos. Even if you already know everything there is to know about business, it is sheer joy to watch Patrick geek out over his evil Bingo empire.

I wasn't crazy about not being able to edit the Tweet. It certainly was spammy-sounding and far from my own style.

That said, I trusted Patrick. I figured the content quality in a production with Andrew Warner and Patrick would be high. The relevance to me was high.

Anyone interested in online marketing would likely do well to lend an ear to Patrick's thoughts on SEO. That fits my following well enough. I save $99 and potentially help out followers to get the same content for (nearly?) free.

I'm not sure I'd be interested if the video were completely free. I think they created scarcity that got people to act today and leveraged it into targeted, visible, free marketing. I don't see what there is to complain about. Maybe the deal wasn't meant for you?

You did it for free? I think this is really cool, but... They're charging for it? Seems reasonable for you and Andrew to get a (smallish) chunk of the revenue or a (reasonable) chunk of the profit. Heck, if you wanted to, you could donate it to charity. But you've effectively donated something pretty valuable to Noah (who is an awesome guy, but already rolling in $ with AppSumo). :-)

I think Andrew is making money on it. That was the point of the exercise for me.

You mention integrating 'Scalable Content Generation' with AR towards the end... what kind of content could you generate?

It seems like AR is different than BCC in that one of the selling points of BCC is the content other people have generated. (eg 'bingo cards with US presidents on them') But AR seems much more like a service that doesn't have any built in content.

Or are you just talking about outsourcing the creating of blog posts and link-bait info-graphics that will drive up your page rank?

Patrick, I'm interested in the white label. I doesn't seem like it would take a whole lot of effort on my part to make a fancy flyer, pass it out (or mail it) to local salons, plumbers, etc. Maybe make a landing page to capture leads, and offer them a deal or something.

Let's say I went ahead with the solicitations and gave a go-live date of two months in the future, then were I to get say, ten small businesses to commit, could I come to you with the reasonable expectation that we could do this?

[EDIT] I think making a white-label version of the demo page would be very helpful.

Heck yes. patrick@ any of my domains if you want to talk about this.

I'm curious about your costs. "The worse case scenario for cost to service that customer is about $20 a month paid to Twilio." Which you say is for 100 appointments per month.

Assuming one text and one call per appointment that's $.04/appointment, or $4/month.

So what am I missing? Does your service let you fan out to 5 users per appointment? Or is that you can send multiple reminders to the same person for a single appointment (24 hour notice, 4 hour notice, 15 minute notice)?

one of them resubscribed after seeing how I handled it

Could you explain more about how you handled it?

I apologized for causing the problem, fixed it, told them what I did to make sure it wouldn't happen again. and apologized to the worst affected clients personally (where the customer didn't ask me not to).

I'm curious if you're experience in Japan influenced this? Did you apologise as if you were a Japanese company apologising or as if you were an American company? How did that fare for your (I assume) USA customers?

I am not aware of any way those two apologies would be different in this circumstance, modulo specific word choice.

Really? Even with your comments on the Groupon apology?

I got through the Appsumo process and am about halfway through the (downloaded) video. It's great but there are some weird glitches, blank spots, etc. in the video. I'm not the only one seeing those, am I?

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