Where do you get the 60k from? The price listed (57k) was the asking price afaik we don't know what it actually sold for.
8,297 karma · joined March 6, 2011
Assuming it mattered, and I don't know if it does or not honestly, he may not have wanted it to be known that bcc did the amount of sales that it did because that could hurt his brand not help it. Not that he ever called it anything more than iirc "wee" but honestly I kind of expected that the sales and/or profit was more than what the sale page said and that assumes that sales have been going up and not down.
As far as the patio11 brand that only matters to people on HN nobody in the rest of the world cares about that at all. All they care about is what the business will make and what the product is and what they see as the potential. Which, quite honestly given the product (and especially since Patrick ran it) seems nominal to me, given the amount of time it was in operation.
Obviously there was a reason he didn't publicize the sale on HN and the brand. You can draw your own conclusions.
Plus, what is the downside risk of being overly cautious since that has to be factored in.
If the gut is based on things that you have observed in the past, or your personal experiences, then it is also possible that you will jump the gun by being overly sensitive and matching a pattern incorrectly. [1] In that case you could be wrong. I guess what I am saying is "it's not that simple" as trite advice typically makes it sound.
"minimize potential loss" also means "avoid potential gain".
[1] This actually happened to me and although this is just a single example which I highlight and where I choose to ignore the gut and plug on, in my particular case I am glad that I had done so. (Was with a relationship..).
The problem with this is that we have no data on people who had a gut feeling that something was not right but were wrong about that gut feeling. People would tend to talk about times when "I should have listened to my gut about this" but rarely would tend to talk about when their gut was wrong and they were worried for nothing. (And I can think of several personal examples of this type of thing.).
"there's no real need to charge people to unsuspend the domain"
By that token there is no need to charge people for many things that businesses charge for that don't cost them any money at all (or a nominal amount) and are pure profit. Or even to charge for bringing a domain out of redemption over and above the actual reimbursed cost for doing so. The fact also that some registrars charge typically or don't charge shouldn't really enter into the picture of "scummy" or "not scummy" by any company that chooses to have a different process.
Not that by what I am saying it should matter but the mere fact that you are putting a name on hold means that your support or customer service costs should in theory increase. If a name is on hold then that means a customer could call or write an email which has to be addressed by a person possibly. And there is a cost to providing that service. It is not zero obviously.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569934
I wondered if it was in fact worth the effort to "get your shit together" vs. the probability of an event as described even happening. Unfortunately not everything that one should ideally, one can do. Time doesn't permit mitigating all evils or "maybes" and after the fact (or when you are freshly impacted by someone else's tragedy) doing things like this always seems more important that it statistically.
Not necessarily.
In some cases the ability to have tenants able to rent out their units will allow the landlord to charge more rent for that unit, because the tenant is able to offset the rent. That is good for the landlord, but not good for the other residents who are bothered by the short term rental activity. As others point out it can also add to an increase in rental costs by creating artificial price pressure since tenants can afford to pay more.
That is the point that is often lost. I think this everytime I see someone who actually went to school and has a degree in something "serious" (with job security) throwing that away to do a startup idea. Shark Tank even had this. Robert Herjavec egging on a "board certified dental surgeon" to leave his career (was on "Beyond the Tank") to be able to sell (what started out as) Christmas sweaters. [1] The Dentist making a point that it was a tough decision because he had spent 10 difficult years going through Dental school and other training.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/tipsy-elves-shark-tank-succes...
"Essentially overnight all of the tools that we utilized didn’t work.
Google even went so far as to remove both Brand.com and Reputation.com from its search engine….
What I learned quickly was that you should never build a business model that is dependent on another platform, especially an SEO play on Google’s platform. e.g. Brand.com’s success was dependent on Google’s algorithm.
Business was great until Google’s engineers decided that they would change their algorithm [to] adversely [affect] many of the tools we used at the time to run ORM campaigns."
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,689438,...
"Two years ago, Dan Stillman and Matt Eaton, then sophomores at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, launched WesMatch.com, a site featuring a humorous, elaborate personality questionnaire. The service allows students to rate themselves and their potential mates in categories ranging from sex drive to "socialisticbutterflyosity." "
If there were a shred of truth to this the press and in particular news magazines like 60 minutes as well as WSJ and NYT would be all over this. There are people in this country who also believe that the government played a role in 9/11. As if a conspiracy such as that could actually be kept quiet given the number of players involved in pulling that off not to mention the absurdity of the idea to begin with.
Perhaps it's entirely possible that the EFF is just like any other organization that needs to find ways to justify their existence. The same with security researchers cloaking many of the things that they do in some quest for the greater good (the "if it wasn't for us" argument).
You know locksmith tools are available for purchase over the internet. But that's not enough! We should teach lock picking in schools so that people develop new and better ways to prevent their own locks from being picked and invest in more security against people that have been trained to pick locks. Because disclosure and transparency makes everything better and nobody thinks there is any value at all in obscurity or making things a bit more difficult by not being so out in the open.
Pretending that finding some security flaw is not about capturing the flag and all about saving humanity really bothers me to no end.
Agree. And in fact the other way around in a sense smacks of someone being used regardless of whether that was the intention or not.
Who can forget the stories of Microsoft offering their browser for free in order to cut off Netscapes air supply:
Do you really find that getting multiple emails from sales reps (per week) to be a big problem?
Maybe not so fast.
To me the 30k is (most likely) editorial hyperbole which is not to say Patrick didn't make $30k on some weeks.
If you can make (repeatedly) 30k per week (or even 15k per week) that's a boatload of money on a yearly basis. So I would imagine that while Patrick had 1 or 5 jobs that might have paid that much, he determined that there would not be a continuing stream of work at that rate. Multiply that by 52 and see what you come up with.
If you could continue to charge that kind of money (and perceived a continuing demand) you could most certainly afford to hire someone to offload some of the work that is done (both admin, sales and actual consulting) to less qualified people that you could then oversee. After all not everything that a consultant like Patrick does needs to be done by Patrick. Similar to what attorneys do and other consulting firms do.
It is no secret to anyone who is in business that there is elasticity in pricing such that you can jack up prices on some occasions and some people will pay those rates. As such it's possible that you (the parent comment) are charging (at the rates you are charging) less than your value. But it's also possible that you would get drastically less work if you charged more than your per diem offsite. Even if a large consulting firm is able to charge 5x as much. (Or Patrick).
As a general rule, what I have found with pricing, is that it often pays to charge on a per project basis as opposed to a time basis. I find this to be true in both how I charge (I do a small amount of consulting on the side (not the main thing I do, but close to 6 figures last year)) and how I buy consulting.
If I need something done and the person says "$5000 for the project" that is easier to spend to "solve a problem" then $750 per hour or "$1000 per hour and it will take me 5 hours". See the difference? On the other hand if you perceive the total cost of the project is many hours and you are willing to sell those hours for $100 per hour it may pay to price like that. It all depends on the circumstance.
It also comes down to preparation and not making the mistake of trying to wing something that is super important.
"I don't think anyone needs an AMA from me"
Actually I would find that fascinating.
So now some follow up questions. What happens to partners if they don't add value after being added? Has that ever happened and what would be the game plan? And is there a road map and timeline that specifies in advance how many partners they may add? Do they all vote on the partners and are all votes likewise equal?
Except that knowledge gained in one area or several areas over the course of many years is quite valuable in itself.