I'm actually thinking more of his bazillions of well-chosen targeted landing pages (e.g. "Dolch sight words bingo"), his ability to rank highly enough in search engines for the right words that interested visitors flow into his site (you can't be profitable with 40 uniques a day) — that sort of thing. In essence, yes, you need to pay attention to what is working, but first you need to find something that works in order to pay attention to it.

> There is a super power at play here, but it doesn't take a radioactive spider to get it. People who can simultaneously speak "customer service" and "technology" are rare. Many of the world's most successful software businesses have noticed that and achieved billions just by arbitraging a trivially corrected ineptitude common to programmers.

I agree, this is one thing that really benefits him. But from the standpoint of someone starting out with nothing, I'd say shoddy customer service is a pretty good problem to have — it means you have customers who need serving! If you can't do customer acquisition, customer retention becomes a moot point. Dutifully serving two people who each pay $20 a month will not make you billions of anything.

Patrick actually mentioned this on his blog some years back: He had a tiny customer base and knew he needed to find a way to grow it. The conclusion of the story was something along the lines of "I did marketing and then it was OK." That's where a lot of people's stories would have gone differently.