My name is Patrick McKenzie. By day, I work at a Japanese computer consultancy. By night, I am the founder and chief bottle washer of Bingo Card Creator, a product aimed at making elementary school teachers’ lives easier. These are my stories. (Sorry, I’m a die-hard Law & Order fan.)
If for some reason you need to get in touch with me, my email address is my-first-name@bingocardcreator.com (alternatively, my-first-name@kalzumeus.com ) . Obviously, you’ll want to replace my-first-name with my actual first name.
Periodically, news of an innovative, goofy, compelling, or compellingly goofy design decision will sweep across the Internets like wildfire. Most recently, this happened with a madlibs-looking lead generation form.
I think it has much to recommend it in the context of lead generation forms (long, arduous monstrosity that you sign up for in the hopes you are [...]
This post is waaaaaaay outside the usual ambit of my blog, as it is at least arguably political and about cultural norms in Silicon Valley. (I’m a sometimes visitor and spiritual resident, but I’ve never lived there.) I’ll be back to software blogging on the weekend if all goes well.
There was a bit of a dustup [...]
I screwed up in a major way yesterday evening. This post is part of my attempt to fix it.
This morning I woke up to an email from a paying customer saying that they tried to print cards but couldn’t. Specifically, they said that they were able to use the Print Preview feature, but that [...]
Back in August I released A/Bingo, an MIT-licensed OSS Rails A/B testing framework. I have been using it continuously on Bingo Card Creator, and judging from the support requests I’ve been getting it has gotten some traction in the Rails world. The 5,000 or so people seeing A/B tests on my site on Valentine’s Day [...]
Original postLong-time readers of this blog know I’m absolutely goo-goo for CrazyEgg, principally because they keep making me money. They’re seriously my favorite $19 to pay every month, even when I don’t actually use them, because some day I know I’ll get the itch again and then bam actionable insights into what my customers are doing. [...]
Original postI have a confession to make: I’m something of a metrics junkie. I have lost entire days of my life just staring at Google Analytics reports. Metrics have always activated that same part of my brain that WoW did: ooh, a page view, ooh, a sale, ooh, if this had purple bars on it I’d ...
Original postSome weeks ago I mentioned that I was implementing a user survey in Bingo Card Creator, using Wufoo. About forty of my customers have now taken the time to give me detailed advice. I thought I’d share some things I learned. A few takeaways may be applicable to your business...
Original post
Dear Publishers:
Hiya. You don’t know me, but I’m a pretty good customer of yours. I buy several thousand dollars of books a year, in almost every genre you sell: fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, classics, mysteries, you name it. I have bought everything from Gladwell to the most obscure author in your backlists and back again. I [...]
Peter Christensen had a few questions for me regarding my last blog post about SEO for startups. I thought the questions were interesting enough to require a bit more than a comment on his post, so I’m going to answer them in detail here. The details are very, very specific to my particular business — if you [...]
Original post
One way I’ve found to cut down on support requests is to make sure I write publicly about any issue that keeps coming up for my customers.
Other small companies contact me for advice fairly frequently, and that also tends to retread the same issues, so I’m going to blog it in depth once rather than giving fifteen people 30% of my thoughts on the same issue. One common issue is "How do I improve our SEO?"
The prototypical customer of Bingo Card Creator is a woman between the ages of 30 to 50 who plays bingo with her classroom. I like to think of her as Martha. However, unlike most statements I make here about my business, this is far more a guess than it is a fact substantiated by data.
I can [...]
As mentioned previously, I really hate getting woken up at 3 AM in the morning. This happens fairly frequently for me, though, because I live in Japan and about half of the people who call me do not. I have not been effective at getting them to check what time it is here before [...]
Original postI saw the title Will Single Founders Please Stand Up and got a bit inspired. Substantive comment continues below the song. With apologies to Eminem, Weird Al, and fans of quality [...]
Original postI was curious today about whether I tend to work consistently or in bits and spurts, so I decided to check by asking my SVN repository. First I dumped all my commit messages since I started using SVN (back in October 2007, which was over a year after starting my business — I know, I know, I [...]
Original post
I visited Thomas Ptacek and the gang at Matasano (who are developing a firewall management product) over Christmas break and had a very productive discussion about marketing. One of the things Thomas mentioned was that I should probably blog out how you can use engineering resources to improve your marketing.
In Which I Have A Revelation
Have you ever [...]
I live in Japan but my family lives in Chicago. I wanted to make it simple for them to call me, so I looked for a service which would provide a US number and forward it to an international number. This way they can call me without having to pay for the call to Japan or figure out how to do it, which nobody managed in nearly five years.
Original postMy name is Patrick McKenzie and for the last three years and change I’ve run a small software business selling Bingo Card Creator, which creates… OK, so I’m not the world’s most creative namer. I traditionally publish stats and other observations from the business that I think are interesting. You can see my automatically compiled statistics and reports for 2006, 2007, and 2008 elsewhere on my blog. 2009 technically isn’t over yet but business typically comes to a standstill after this point in the year, so the overall financial picture is likely accurate in broad strokes, with perhaps a few hundred in sales yet to happen and some expenses which may or may not happen in this calendar year depending on the vagaries of when vendors charge my credit card.
Original postAfter writing an A/B testing library and blogging about the subject for a couple of years, I somehow unwittingly sleepwalked into being that most loathsome of creatures, a technology evangelist. This means that periodically I get emails from folks with the Next Big Thing who want my opinion on it. I rather enjoy this, as [...]
Original post
The other day on Hacker News, commenting on a recent Yehuda Katz explanation of the nuts and bolts of metaprogramming, I mentioned that I though discussions of programming theory are improved by practical examples of how the techniques solve problems for customers. After all, toy problems are great, but foos and bars don't get me home from the day job quicker or convince my customers to pay me money.
My claim: Metaprogramming allows you to cut down on boilerplate code, making your programs shorter, easier to write, easier to read, and easier to test. Also, it reduces the impact of changes.
I have a confession to make: I often trust code that I thinks works. For example, after I’ve got analytics code up and running, and verify to my satisfaction that it in fact increments the count of registrations by one when I sign up, I generally assume “OK, that is the last time I have to worry about that.”
Original post
I run a small business selling software (downloadable and online) which lets parents and teachers make bingo cards. It is October, which is the busiest season on the educational bingo calendar, largely because Halloween is coming up. Kids in school + candy-fueled frenzy + secular(ish) holiday + desire for fun activity = bingo bonanza!
However, due to an IE CSS bug, my Halloween experience is best described as “bobbing for poisoned apples”.
