Hiya guys. Feel free to ask any questions if you've got them. I'm generally happy to answer, to the best of my capabilities.
edit (to avoid comment spam): Thanks for the info!
In middle school, right when I was first getting involved with online services, my best friend was a Puerto Rican. He hated the hard "k" sound in Patrick and called me "pato" for about a day, but laughed at his oh-so-clever joke, so I asked him to change it. I can't stand "Pat." (There was a movie about a gender-ambiguous character named Pat that year. It was middle school and I was a geek, you can do the math.) He then proposed "Patio." We paled around often enough that it stuck with my family. When I needed a disambiguating number for e.g. AOL email addresses or Warcraft 2 handles, I naturally went with my favorite number, 11.
I'm patio11 on just about every service that I use which I don't mind associated with my real name.
I was really confused for a while when I made my next mistake.
"Do you know what does 'WWF'[name of a panda conservation organization] stands for?" -> "No."
It really surprised and frustrated me when I got zero marks for perfectly logical and correct answers.
I still don't quite understand why the teacher wasn't thrilled when I discovered that there are indeed multiple successful ways to hold a pencil. She looked at me blankly when I announced my success and said "Yes, but those are not the right ways."
(You might reasonably ask "How the heck are Japanese men supposed to get married if they're working to 11 PM?" and the answer is "Your boss will consider it his responsibility to arrange for everything you need to live the standard salaryman life, such as a salary, a wife, and an insurance card." Funny story about that, ask me some time.)
Boss: "So are you seeing anyone?"
Me: "Ahh, erm, I appreciate your desire to look out for me boss. Us Americans are a little quirky with regards to finding young ladies -- we typically look for ourselves rather than getting formally set up by family or coworkers. I'm not seeing anyone at the moment but plan on finding her myself, so..."
Boss: "Oh its not just a cultural thing. If you don't have a wife, you'll go back to America to find one, and then you'll quit the company. We can't have that now can we."
Me: "Erm, I appreciate the concern, but maybe we can meet at the midd..."
Boss: "Yeah yeah, whatever."
3 weeks pass. Scene is a Welcome To The Company party for myself and two other new employees.
Boss: "Patrick, I've got someone to introduce you to. This is K-san, who sits two rows over."
K-san is a young lady, about my age.
Me: "Pleased to meet you, K-san."
K-san: "Please to meet you, Patrick."
The following is word-for-word translated from Japanese and is not exaggerated in the slightest.
Boss: "Patrick graduated from a good school in America, is a bright engineer, and has a solid future with the company. How about an international marriage?"
shocked silence
K-san: "I have absolutely no interest in that."
Now in a just world I'd be able to report that this was a little awkward but we can all laugh about it 5 years later, but a just world would have no Japanese megacorps in it. In the world we actually live in, K-san was given grief by many co-workers. (e.g. "K-san, do you want to come out to lunch, or do you have absolutely no interest in that?") My dimestore psychoanalysis is that a) she shot down the boss in "too brusque of a fashion" compared to socially optimal ways to decline things like "giggles Oh he's far too handsome for me." (or any of the 50,000 ways you could say "Yes" and mean "No") and at least in part because b) some people in my company genuinely believe, to some degree, that K-san should not have said no.
If you're interested in gender relations in Japan, many scholarly books have been written on the subject.
But goddamn man, for the greater good, forget this silly software racket and put out a comic book. Perhaps a live action television show, maybe a movie. Your anecdotes are always my favorite part. :)
If this is the Japanese I think it is, I would have had difficulty not laughing out loud.
That's anecdotal and not necessarily representative, but it certainly indicates that not all people are busy till 11. There's also having to go out with the boss and colleagues.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/12/21/i-wrote-a-book-on-conver...
I'm a programmer who has done consulting before with a keen interest in product and marketing. If I want to become self-employed (preferably in the form of working on a bootstrapped product), should I start by bootstrapping a product or by consulting?
I believe that consulting would mean becoming self-employed sooner, but my concern is that I'd end up on a "get work, seek work" treadmill harming my ability to work on bootstrapping.
Alternately, my concern is that if I focus on bootstrapping a side project while working a full-time job, that will also mean not getting self-employed again for a very long time.
Sorry for the rambly comment, do you have any insights or suggestions to offer?
But what do you recommend for integrating a B2C CRM with email marketing?
We do detailed segmentation of our mailing list and I can't find a good B2C CRM that integrates sufficiently with an email mktg platform.
I'm currently looking into synching many more fields (needed for segmenting) from Zoho CRM to MailChimp via API with CloudWork/ItDuzzit/Zapier. Their defaults are useless (3-5 main fields), as we need complete contact info in order to segment well.
Part 1 has his complete back-story: everything from how he learned to program with graph paper to how he built his first product business with $60. http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/19/patio11-part1/
Part 2 has specific tactics for building your own software business: http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/
Both episodes have full text transcripts, so you can listen or read.