Patrick McKenzie AMA on BetaList | Hacker News Reader

Patrick McKenzie AMA on BetaList

ama.betalist.com

81 pointsmarc29 comments

That was fun. I apparently wrote approximately 4,500 words in 90 minutes. Also: my brain is now absolutely mush, so if you have anything you'd want me to add, please, find my inbox so I can get to it when my brain is not mush.

I think that's the most exhausting writing task I've ever done -- it's harder being in a CS email firehose, which is already exhausting. At least when doing CS you have macros to help, and 80% of customer service can be done without engaging more than 2% of your mental faculties.

This is something I like about message board writing; there's a feeling of time pressure to it. You have to think a little bit faster than you would writing a long-form blog post.

You mentioned in one of the comments that you get a lot of business from referrals, but don't track the number of referrals in any way. Would it make sense to have some sort of rewards program, e.g. one month off for every customer someone refers to you? I don't expect that would do much for you in the (presumably most lucrative) enterprise space, so maybe it's not something that would make sense to spend time implementing, but I could imagine it working out quite well with e.g. owners of massage parlors.

Bidirectional referrals were a crashing failure for BCC, the one time I implemented it. I also don't like the interaction that makes my customers have with their friends, particularly not in a B2B context. (I mean, wouldn't it put an undesirable thought in the back of your head reading my stuff if you had to wonder every time you heard me say, e.g. "Twilio is the best thing since sliced bread", whether that was being tracked and compensated?)

P.S. A lesson I learned early in AR's career: don't call massage therapy practices "massage parlors". That is one of a couple of word choices which massage therapists are really really touchy about: http://www.massagetherapy.com/articles/index.php/article_id/...

Seems like Disqus was a pretty poor choice for comments on this. I don't find them easy to read, they take ages to load, and worst of all they apparently dropped several of the guest's comments!

If this is going to become a regular thing, Betalist, I would recommend a proper comments system. Disqus is OK for blogs but if you intend to have a high value conversation then it's a bad choice, IMO.

Disqus is, for better or for worse, the best comment system out there. (somewhat tied with Facebook Comments depending on use case)

There isn't an effective embedded real-time "AMA" type platform that exists to my knowledge. Wouldn't be a terrible idea for a startup (but it could be argued that it's redundant with Facebook/Twitter)

I recall being asked to do an AMA on two YC-funded AMA platforms. (My guess: somebody told the founders "Patrick is in that happy intersection of 'people who have something interest to say' and 'people for whom doing lots of writing for free sounds really attractive.' Why don't you ask him?")

AFAIK, both companies no longer do that as their line of business.

Seems like if you are doing an AMA, reddit is the place to do it. I can't imagine any blog comment system working well for the task, and I can't imagine a way to build a profitable company that makes an AMA solution.

Add 2 cups of Node, a dash of Redis, 3 table spoons of two way data binding a la Angular; garnish liberally with some well thought out UX and you have yourself the recipe for the Storify of AMAs.

Somebody get pg on the horn and find me a cofounder! :)

Are you programmer or other?

Programmer.

I think it would be a fun project from a programming perspective but from a viable business perspective I think reducing it down to a list of requisite technologies is "mostly" an exercise in nerd whimsy. AMA exists as a concept because of Reddit and its community, whereas Storify helped shape the concept of Twitter narratives (or maybe contexts is the word I'm looking for). For an AMA if you get heavy hitters, like Barack Obama or Bill Gates, they are going to go to Reddit because that's where the community is, which is precisely the type of AMAer you would need to make an "AMA startup" a viable business. So while Storify can grow from out of Twitter an "AMA startup" would have to grow at the expense of Reddit, and that's where the real challenge is.

I would more say Storify successfully captured that idea and function in their brand name. It could be possible for AMAs. I am working on something bigger that could easily fit this structure into it. I don't feel very far along yet, still needing to build the permanent team, though perhaps we should chat. I eventually want to foster an environment where people can focus on projects like this within the company.

Agreed about the concept and brand synchronicity of Storify. Looking at it you can immediately get the sense of what it is without having to resort to something like "it's AirBnB for golfclubs!".

I followed you back on Twitter, just have had a busy day of meetings today. Will hopefully get a message to you soon.

Whilst I like Disqus for a commenting system, it makes reading large threads rather difficult. This is exacerbated on mobile devices. Furthermore, many ad blockers (AdBlockPlus, Ghostery...) hide all disqus comments. I think reddit would have been better here or even twitter. James Altucher does a q&a on twitter that works quite well until he hits his limit of tweets/day.

Anyway, I've done some 'transcribing', editing and formatting to make it a little easier to read[1]. If anyone from betalist or Patrick takes issue, feel free to get in touch and I'll remove it right away. However, hopefully this will allow more people to see it. I've linked the source so you can see the original.

[1] http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/startup-advice-patrick-mc...

Thanks for doing this. I agree Disqus isn't ideal for reading this many Q&A's. I think there's almost 50 questions and over 100 comments. Didn't see that coming.

We'll be releasing a PDF soon with a summary of all questions and answers. You kinda beat me to it hehe, but the format will be different anyway, more close to the original (giving question askers credit as well, etc).

Thanks for the suggestions. This is our first AMA so it's a learning process for us as well. I didn't have any problems with Disqus' speed, but I agree it's not the best UX for reading comments (we'll be releasing a PDF with a summary soon), and dropping guest's comments is awful. We were able to retrieve two comments (they were initially flagged as spam). I'm not sure wether any other comments were lost. Looking into that.

Just a heads up: AMA has now ended. Patrick was gracious enough to extend his time from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. There's some real gems in those Q&A's. Definitely recommend checking it out.

(Disclosure: I'm the founder of BetaList)

So how do I view the Q/A? Going to that link just has his bio and an email signup form...

The banner at the top of the page says "See questions and answers below". What am I missing here?

The AMA is in the Disqus comments

Ah - that makes more sense. I have Disqus comments blocked.

Same here and this is probably more common in tech circles than outside of them, making Disqus indeed a poor choice.

Like jbigelow76 mentions the AMA happened in the Disqus comments. I didn't realize some people might disable it, so I'll make sure to show them a message asking them to enable it.

Thank you, most people I know actually disable disqus comments as they do any service offered for free that is embedded on multiple websites. The tracking is just too obvious. Same idea with gravatar.

First, thanks for this. However, I'll have to wait until I get to my desktop because this is broken on mobile (Galaxy Note 2 Chrome). In landscape the text extends beyond the screen and portrait shows a few words per line. Zoom appears to be disabled. If web analytics show low engagement on mobile, that would be why.

Thanks for the note. I did try and optimize the site for phones and tablets, but wasn't able to test it extensively. Will look into fixing landscape mode shortly.

We've created a PDF with a summary of the questions and answers. Great for reading on your tablet.

→ http://btl.st/KiNU0L (PDF, 394 KB)

Awesome. Can't wait to read through all the comments! Thank you so much for doing this!

statupclarity has posted a digest in easy to read format:

Startup Advice from Patrick McKenzie:

http://www.startupclarity.com/blog/startup-advice-patrick-mc...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com