Long-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. Today is an itchy day.

One thing I have never gotten around to is tracking how users click on pages in my web application, behind the login screen.  CrazyEgg can do this but you need a bit of magic to let their screenshot bot grab samples of the page being interacted with — otherwise, they won’t be able to match up the events their Javascript recorded with the form fields on, um, your login screen.

CrazyEgg’s current user-agent string is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 (CrazyEgg 2 screenshot agent) Firefox/3.5.4

Then just shortcircuit your login procedure for people with that user agent.  (This may be undesirable if you are very, very security conscious.  I sell bingo cards to 60 year old women.  If you are security conscious, email them and they’ll provide a listing of IPs to whitelist.)

In Rails, doing something on the basis of the user agent is easy but, and I know this might come as a surprise, not covered in the documentation.

def authenticate_user
  if (request.env["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] =~ /CrazyEgg/)
    #Whatever you need to do to let them in as CrazyEgg
  else
    #Actual logic goes here
  end
end

For a quick 30 second solution, I signed up as a trial user for my own service with the email address crazyegg@bingocardcreator.com, and have the analogue to the above method on my site just pretend that anybody with the appropriate User Agent is authenticated as that user.

Some 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, and at the very least “detailed, actionable advice can be yours if you just ask for it” should convince you to start a survey this week.

Incentivize Any Surveys You Do

I ran two A/B tests in taking the survey.  The first selected whether a user was asked to take it at all.  The second tested what prompt was more effective at inducing people to take it.  Half of participants were invited to to take it for altruistic reasons (“Would you like to take a survey about Bingo Card Creator?  We’d like your feedback so that we can improve the website and software for all of our customers.”)  The other half were incentivized (“Would you like to take a survey about Bingo Card Creator?  If you do, we’ll let you print 5 extra free bingo cards.”)

I gave all users who completed the survey the free cards, regardless of whether they had been promised it or not.

I have never had a more lopsided A/B test.  The response rate of incentivized users so resoundingly crushed the response rate of non-incentivized users right out of the gate that I was scared of a bug.  It ended up being more than a 2X difference in conversion: 2.51% vs 1.17%, which is significant at 95% confidence.

Thus the conclusion: if you want responses, give away free stuff.  (Incidentally, you might think that you’d get lower quality feedback from incentivized users.  I did not get that impression from reading the results, but I can’t reduce that to a simple statistical measure.)

Surveys Don’t Cost You Sales

A major worry I had was that putting the survey prominently on the trial version of my application would cost conversions.  Nope — there was no significant difference in sales given to folks asked to take the survey versus folks not asked to take the survey.  (I actually got very, very marginally more sales from the folks asked — but not statistically significant.)

Opinions Confirmed About My Customers

Prior to instituting the survey I had guessed that my customers were mostly female, older (I was guessing normally distributed around 40), and that they were probably teachers.

1. I was dead on the money on gender.  85% of participants were ladies — this roughly comports with my experience looking at customer names and doing customer support.
2. My customers are, indeed, mostly older: fully half of them are over 40.  Another 30% are in their 30s.  About 10% are in their 20s and a little less than 10% are below that.
3. I now have data to substantiate that most of my users are teachers: 30% of respondents use BCC in elementary schools and another 20% use it in high schools (that number is much higher than I would have expected).  I was mildly surprised with the number of people playing with adult family members (~15%).  All other uses are fairly marginal.  Confirming that most of my users are teachers is going to be very helpful in crafting my marketing messages.  (Though I suppose I have to worry about stumbling into the local optimum: I might be seeing this because I market to teachers well and market to, e.g., parents poorly.)
4. Two survey takers, as predicted, used the survey free response box to ask customer support questions.  One of them I was able to de-anonimize and fix the issue she had (she had created a new trial account rather than using the old registered account and wondered why it was asking her to purchase).  The other one, sadly, was using an anonymous guest account from an IP I’ve never seen before, so I couldn’t track them to an email address to resolve their issue with the purchase.

Things I Didn’t Know Prior to Asking

1. A lot of my users are very, very appreciative of Bingo Card Creator.  I mean, I knew it saved them some time and that lots liked it, but I got stories of it saving a lesson plan, brightening the day of a room full of seniors, and teaching a son to read.  A few of the results warrant follow up emails to ask if I can quote them publicly.  (Like, right next to the Buy Now button.)
2. I am terrible at Quality Assurance.  Well, I knew that.  But, specifically, a particular combination of A/B tests would result in a user getting textual instructions on one screen which conflicted with what was written on the buttons on the next screen.  Thank you for the report, ma’am — bug squashed.
3. A few customers reported generalized anxiety about using “new programs” and said they wanted more handholding in the instructions.  I beefed up instructions throughout the application.
4. Surprisingly few of my customers reported problems with ease of use — over 90% rated BCC either “Very easy to use” or “Mostly easy to use”.  I also got a lot of free-form comments praising the daylights out of that — many of my customers compared it favorably to other unpleasantness they had had doing routine computer tasks.
5. Surprisingly many of my customers self-evaluate as comfortable with computers.  50% were “very comfortable”, and 30% were “mostly comfortable”.  These numbers are, candidly speaking, not what I would have assigned on the basis of reading support requests for three years.  It is possible both the survey and I are right, just looking at different segments of reality: 80% of the customers are good with computers and fairly rarely email me, and 80% of my inbox is caused by the remaining 20%.
6. Customers respond very strongly to features I consider so core to the program I scarcely mention them — in particular, I  learned twelve different ways to express the thought “Every card is different!” and another eight for “I love that I can customize the word list for the lessons I am teaching that week”  I will be incorporating additional variations of those into my copy.  Repetition never hurt any teacher.

The Number One Complaint My Users Have

Bingo Card Creator isn’t free.  Some variations on the theme:

Make it totally free by having advertisers. Many, many sites that elementary teachers use are kept free by the magic of Google AdWords.  I should know — I’m the guy paying for the ads.  While you can keep the free bubble going by passing around VC dollars to Internet firms to Google to Internet firms to Google to Internet firms to Google to … for a while, eventually, if you’re not getting money from customers, everyone dies.  This was, essentially, the last Internet bubble.  I will continue charging because charging keeps the rest of the ecosystem alive.

Relatedly, the fact that Bingo Card Creator is so easy to use is directly related to the fact that I charge money for it.  I obsess over getting customers (or trial users) through the pages to their beautiful bingo cards, because people who see beautiful bingo cards are very inclined to pay me money.  The sites that I advertise on do not optimize for their user experience because if their website is better than my textual ad, they don’t get paid.  That is why the experience of using them sucks.  (I won’t out anybody who I essentially have a business relationship with, but take a look at the free options in my market some time, or look at pages which compete with mine in the search results.)

Charging also subsidizes the experience of the 97.3% of trial users who don’t actually pay me money.

“15 card limit does not allow for a class set in which everyone can have a different card 25 would be more appropriate for teachers.”  I regularly get asked what my business model is — i.e. how I convince people to pay money for my software when I give so much away for free.  This lady nailed it in one sentence.

Incidentally, I don’t feel any ranchor at folks who believe that everything should be free on the Internet.  I just will not accomodate your preferences.  You’re welcome to use my free competitors if they better fit your needs.  (I actually provide folks  with lists, on request.)

Takeaway Lesson

What are you waiting for, go sign up for Wufoo (or whatever — they have a few competitors) and do a survey.  You’ll learn stuff that you can use to make helpful decisions for your business.

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 may well be the only heterosexual male in the entire world who spent more on urban fantasy alone than he does on video games, movies, and newspapers combined.  I really love books.

For the last decade or so, I’ve bought many of my books through Amazon.  Amazon knows me.  They know what I like, they send me recommendations via email, and on those rare instances when I have a problem with a book they fix it for me within 24 hours.  I really like Amazon.

That is a new experience for me in a book vendor.  Typically, bookstores are anonymous entities who happen to be in the same airport, mall, or street as I am when the craving strikes.  I have absolutely no loyalty to them.  (I hear that before my time there were neighborhood book stores where you’d go in to get a recommendation from someone who knew your tastes intimately.  I’ve never been in a neighborhood book store.)

Some months ago, I bought a Kindle.  Publishers, if you thought I was a good customer before, you should see me now.  I don’t even have to find an anonymous dealer to get my fix — I just punch a button and bam, new book.  And punch that button I do — about four times as frequently as I did previously.  Amazon now sells me over 90% of the books I buy.

Recently, it has come to my attention that some of you are having a bit of a spat with Amazon, centering over release schedules, pricing issues, and, above all, control.  This sent me walking over to my book shelf to check whether those of you who are having the spat with Amazon actually publish authors I read.  The fact that I didn’t know this off the top of my head, and that this is the first time I’ve thought about individual publishing companies in my entire life, should be a preview of coming attractions for you as regards to which company I am backing in this fight.

Let me be perfectly clear: I have no price sensitivity with regards to books.  I read the books I want to read when I want to read them.  I have never bought or avoided buying a book based on whether it was hardcover or trade paperback. (Incidentally, since we’re all businessmen here, let’s be honest: you want to extract as much money out of me as possible because I am price insensitive, and staggering hardcover and paperback release dates is just a way to accomplish that.  Neither of us really care about the physical format in the slightest.)

It does not matter to me what you charge for the books on my Kindle.  However, I’m hearing things about you windowing Kindle releases — i.e. delaying them so that you can protect your hardcover sales.  You think my likely behavior is to go to the bookstore where no one knows my name and pay extra so that I can have the hardcover on release day.  Words cannot express how mistaken you are.

I will read books on my Kindle.  Whether they are your books or the books of your competitors matters to me not one whit.

Dear Authors:

We’re quite the odd ducks, aren’t we.  You don’t know my name either, despite the fact that we’re on surprisingly intimate terms.  I spend most of my leisure time rattling around in worlds of your creation.

I understand you feel a bit of connection to the people who liberated you from the slush pile, sign your royalty checks, and respond to your emails.  You know their names, after all.

I want to read your books as fast as you can write them, on my Kindle.  If you support me in this, I will stick with you like the plucky heroine to the aloof and semi-abusive vampire lord who turned her.  (P.S. urban fantasy authors: stake his worthless carcass.  Signed, beta males everywhere.)

If, on the other hand, you should support your publishers’ interests over my desire to pay you money, mark me on this: I will buy books from authors willing to sell them to me.  I might get a little depressed over not being able to read my favorites, but if you haven’t noticed, I read a lot faster than you can possibly write and that makes me promiscuous by nature.  Any regret I feel over losing you will be quickly assuaged by epic heroism, vile betrayal, true love, and other themes of investing advice books.

Dear Book Stores:

Good luck with that coffee thing.

Dear Amazon:

Keep being awesome.

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie

(A man of no particular importance, who bought more books in 2009 than 20 average American households.)

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 want a high-level strategic overview, I suggest reading that post instead.

In the past you’ve talked about outsourcing your content creation to your “army of freelancers”.  What did that consist of on your end?  My guess is you looked at terms and topics people were searching for (you mentioned “baby shower bingo” once) and then sent a job to your freelancers to come up with 80 or so baby shower words that you feed into your card generator and sample bingo card landing pages.

Periodically, when I have an idea for a new project, I put out a call for freelancers on my blog similar to this (for blog writing on my “sprawling bingo empire”) or this (for creating bingo cards).  (Incidentally, “army” is an overstatement: I think in my business career I’ve used a bit less than a dozen, but don’t have my expenses report in front of me.  One woman  in particular is easily 80%+ of that.  Why mess with something that works?)

The work-flow for those two projects is a bit different, but in general I write up the general outline of what I expect (you can see the most important bits in those posts) and then let my freelancers run with them.  For bingo cards I typically give them discretion to choose their own topics (although I let them see my stats for what previous cards were popular — for example, sorted by genre or popular this week).  For the blog creation project I came up with a list of 14 mini-sites via a one-off SQL query.

The deliverable for bingo cards has changed over the years as I’ve upgraded my CMS.  Currently, there is a back-end one page web form on my site which asks for a title for the card, a subtitle, a brief sentence of description, and then a word list.  Anything submitted there goes into my database and awaits my review, which given that my freelancer is very good at what she does is typically “Oh, good, here’s 30 lists for this month.  Approve All.  Goes off to bank site to mail check.”  Within a few seconds of me hitting approve, the CMS backing my site turns the word list into a PDF file, grabs a screenshot of it, and does a bit of content page generation.

The deliverable for the mini-sites is just pages made in WordPress, extolling the virtues of Valentine’s Day bingo or what have you.

How do you analyze and rank your SEO strategies?  I see your sample card landing pages have an id that they pass to the registration page so you know how the different landing pages are converting.  What other methods do you use to determine which SEO methods are most valuable to you?

The flippant answer is that if I make more money than I expect to then I guess everything is working.  Seriously speaking, though, I do very little backwards facing analysis (“Did that work?”) and concentrate mostly on forward facing analysis (“What opportunities can I exploit now?”), with the exception of when I’m writing a blog post to comment on how something worked.

One of the reasons I’ve cooled on Google Analytics over the years is it doesn’t really lend itself to providing data which lets you make actionable decisions in a reasonable amount of time.  For example, if I look at my stats, I can tell you with arbitrary precision how much more popular baby shower bingo cards are than football bingo cards.  Whee.  That doesn’t tell me anything I can do to improve my business today.  Most of the things which can tell me stuff that will improve my business are the domain-specific analytics functions I’ve created (like the above) or fun little one-off explorations of my database that I do from the Rails console.

For example, I might play around one day and see what the most common 25 words are for customers making bingo cards.  (That was what clued me into baby shower bingo.)  That usually identifies a weak spot in my pre-made card lineup, which I can either tell a freelancer about or just fill myself.

Incidentally, you mention that you think the ID I pass to the registration page is for tracking conversions.  Actually, not so much.  I track conversions with Mixpanel.  The reason that ID gets passed is to provide continuity of experience for new trial users.  I’m actually really proud of this hack: if you show up on my landing page for, I don’t know, tea bingo, and you click “Create Your Own Bingo Cards” and sign up for the free trial, your free trial account gets pre-initialized with my set of tea bingo cards already in it and “personalized” instructions on the dashboard about how you can print bingo cards like the tea bingo cards you were just interested in.

This greatly increases funnel success in A/B tests.  (You are roughly 20% more likely to successfully download a set of customized bingo cards if I give you the “personalized” treatment than you are if I drop you at a blank dashboard and expect you to fight your way through.)

I also do this for my PPC (AdWords) campaigns: if you respond to an ad for Halloween Bingo Cards, then by jove I’m going to everything short of dropping a pumpkin on your desktop.

Best idea here: I don’t think enough software companies unify the marketing and product sides, incidentally.  We tend to treat everybody coming in to the top of the funnel as absolutely the same.  Then we treat everybody who makes it through funnel step N exactly the same.  But we’ve got data that says they are different — why not use the data to enhance their experience and, not incidentally, improve their propensity to buy the product?

For example, if I were in charge of World of Epic Dragonslaying, and I had a PPC

Your Bingo Card landing pages allow you to programatically generate tons of pages from content in your product.  What other tips do you have for getting lots of good SEO content for a low investment of time/money?

I suggest reading the parts of the article about scalable content generation.  I don’t have another magic secret that I use for my own business.  OK, maybe half a secret: data begets data.  For example, I’ve got my 800 or whatever the number is bingo card activities that my freelancers and I cooked up.  I use that in several places: each bingo activity becomes

• a content page
• a PPC landing page
• an activity in the downloadable version of the software
• an activity in the online version of the software

This gives me usage/popularity data about the same subjects.  I use that for:

• automated interlinking of content pages  (see left hand sidebar, “Related Activities”)
• automated decisions of promoted content on the front page
• my popular activities list
• widgets across my “sprawling bingo empire” which list popular activities
• semi-automated decisions on which content to promote to mini-sites

Anyhow, if I should come up with a good second idea to generate content for the website, you’ll likely hear about it here roughly contemporaneously with me implementing it.  Many of my friends have suggested I might be at the point of diminishing returns for BCC.  I think that is likely accurate, and so my very best ideas this year are probably going to be in service of my next software project.  However, given that BCC has always been nights and weekends for me, that doesn’t necessarily mean “maintenance mode” for it will be totally bereft of new ideas.

I hope that answers your questions, Peter.  Thanks for asking.

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 they call, but I certainly want them to call, and even call me in the middle of the night if it is an emergency.

So I made myself a phone secretary with Twilio, their Ruby gem, and Sinatra (a lightweight Ruby web framework).  I gave my friends and family a US number assigned to me by Twilio. Dialing it causes Twilio’s computer to talk to my server and figure out what I want to do with the call. The server runs a Sinatra app which checks the time in Japan and either forwards the call to the most appropriate phone or gently informs the user that it is 4:30 AM in the morning.

The code for this took 10 minutes. Reasoning my way through a deployment took, hmm, 3 hours or so. I am a programmer not a sysadmin, what can I say. I thought I’d write down what I did so that other folks can save themselves some pain.

Code (You’re probably not too interested in the exact logic, but feel free to use it as a springboard if you want to make a secretary/call forwarding app):

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'
require 'twiliolib'
require 'time'

@@HOME = "81xxxxxxxxxx"  #This is not actually my phone number.
@@CELL = "81xxxxxxxxxxxx"  #Neither is this.

def pretty_time(time)
time.strftime("%H:%M %p")
end

def time_in_japan()
time = Time.now.utc
time_in_japan = time + 9 * 3600
end

def is_weekend?(time)
(time.wday == 0) || (time.wday == 6)
end

def in_range?(t, str)
time = Time.parse("#{Date.today.to_s} #{pretty_time(t)}")
range_bounds = str.split(/, */)
start_time = Time.parse("#{Date.today.to_s} #{range_bounds[0]}")
end_time = Time.parse("#{Date.today.to_s} #{range_bounds[range_bounds.size - 1]}")
(time >= start_time)  && (time  "45")
@r.append(say)
@r.append(call)
@r.respond
end

def redirect_twilio(url)
@r = Twilio::Response.new
rd = Twilio::Redirect.new("/#{url.sub(/^\/*/, "")}")
@r.append(rd)
@r.respond
end

post '/phone' do
t = time = time_in_japan
if (is_weekend?(time))
if in_range?(time, "2:00 AM, 10:00 AM")
redirect_twilio("wakeup")
else
forward_call(@@CELL)
end
else #Not a weekend.
if in_range?(time, "2:00 AM, 8:30 AM")
redirect_twilio("wakeup")
elsif in_range?(time, "8:30 AM, 6:30 PM")
redirect_twilio("working")
elsif in_range?(time, "6:30 PM, 9:00 PM")
forward_call(@@CELL)
else
forward_call(@@HOME)
end
end
end

post '/wakeup' do
if (params[:Digits].nil? || params[:Digits] == "")
@r = Twilio::Response.new
say = Twilio::Say.new("This is Patrick's computer secretary.  He is asleep right now because it is #{pretty_time(time_in_japan)}.  If this is an emergency, hit any number to wake him up.")
g = Twilio::Gather.new(:numDigits => 10)
g.append(say)
@r.append(g)
@r.respond
else
forward_call(@@HOME, true)
end
end

post '/working' do
if (params[:Digits].nil? || params[:Digits] == "")
days_left = (Date.parse("2010-04-01") - Date.today).to_i
@r = Twilio::Response.new
say = Twilio::Say.new("This is Patrick's computer secretary.  He is at work as it is #{pretty_time(time_in_japan)}.  Only #{days_left} days left!  If this is an emergency, hit any number call him at work.")
g = Twilio::Gather.new(:numDigits => 10)
g.append(say)
@r.append(g)
@r.respond
else
forward_call(@@CELL, true)
end
end

get '/' do
'Hello from Sinatra!  What are you doing accessing this server anyway?'
end

This script is a bit ugly but, hey, what do you want in ten minutes. (Memo to self: correct it after leaving my job.)

Sinatra Deployment On Ubuntu

A quick look around the Internet didn’t show any cookbook recipes for deploying Sinatra. I thought I’d write up what I’m using, which uses Apache reverse proxying to Sinatra. (Instructions included for Nginx as well.) It assumes you already have your webserver running and are familiar with basic Ruby usage and the Linux command line.

1) Install the daemons gem. We’re going to daemonize Sinatra so that it runs out of our console and starts and stops without our intervention, much like Apache does.

2) Create an /opt/pids/sinatra directory. (It seemed as good a place as any.) Let a non-privileged user write to that directory, for example by executing “sudo chown www-data /opt/pids/sinatra; sudo chmod 755 /opts/pids/sinatra”. Make a note of what non-privileged user you use. I am just reusing www-data because Apache has conveniently provided him for me and he is guaranteed to not to be able to screw up anything important if he is compromised.

2) Write a quick control script and put it in the same directory as your Sinatra app (called phone_sinatra.rb for the purposes of this demonstration). I threw these in /www/var/phone.example.com/ but you can put them anywhere. Make sure the scripts are readable, but not writable, by www-data. (sudo chmod 755 /www/var/phone.example.com/ will accomplish this: it makes only the owner able to write to it, but any user on the system — including www-data — can read from it.)

require 'rubygems'
require 'daemons'

pwd = Dir.pwd
Daemons.run_proc('phone_sinatra.rb', {:dir_mode => :normal, :dir => "/opt/pids/sinatra}) do
Dir.chdir(pwd)
exec "ruby phone_sinatra.rb"
end

3) (Optional) Add in a reverse proxy rule to Apache or Nginx to send requests to the subdomain of your choice to Sinatra instead. I ended up deploying this through Apache, so the rule is pretty quick:

ServerName phone.example.com

ProxyPass / http://phone.example.com:4567/

You could also do this on Nginx and it is similarly trivial.

server {
listen       80;
server_name phone.example.com;
proxy_pass http://phone.example.com:4567/;
}

The main reason I do this is to not have to remember non-standard ports in my URLs. It also simplifies firewall management if you’re into that sort of thing.

4) Add a control script to /etc/init.d/sinatra so that we can start and stop Sinatra just like we do other services, like Apache.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Written by Patrick McKenzie, 2010.
# I release this work unto the public domain.
#
# sinatra      Startup script for Sinatra server.
# description: Starts Sinatra as an unprivileged user.
#

sudo -u www-data ruby /var/www/phone.example.com/control.rb $1
RETVAL=$?

exit $RETVAL

5) Tell Ubuntu to start your daemon when the computer starts up and shut it off when the computer starts down: sudo update-rc.d sinatra defaults

6) Start the service manually for your first and only time: sudo /etc/init.d/sinatra start

There you have it: Sinatra is running the application you wrote, and it will start and stop with your Ubuntu server. If you were doing this for Twilio now you’d check your Twilio account settings to make sure it has the right URL set up for your phone number, and then try calling yourself. Preferably NOT from the phone you try to forward to.

All code in this blog post was written by Patrick McKenzie in early 2010. I release it unto the public domain. Feel free to use it as the basis for your own apps.

Twilio development makes me feel like a kid in a candy store — you can affect the real world through an API, how cool is that? I think next time I have a few hours to kill I’m going to make a similar secretary for my business. I don’t give folks my phone number because a) I live in Japan and b) they don’t pay me enough to do telephone support. However, quoting a telephone number on your website instantly says “There is a real business behind this!”

I think I’ll whip up a computer secretary for the business which handles the most common two support requests (“I didn’t get my Registration Key” and “I lost my password.”), and for anything else takes their message and emails it to me. That sort of thing costs megacorporations bazillions and can be whipped up these days by a single programmer on Saturday morning for under $5 a month in operating costs. Like I said, candy store.

I 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 music everywhere:

Download (or hit icon to play inline): MP3 / Ogg

Won’t The Solo Founders Please Stand Up?

May I have your attention please?
May I have your attention please?
Will all you solo founders please stand up.

I say again, will all you solo founders please stand up.
We're gonna have a problem here.
Y'all act like you've never heard a solo founder before
Jaws all on the floor, slower than the App Store
Can't approve a new idea in a year or four
Like it takes a team of a million monkeys
To make a web 2.0 app.  Oh, sorry -- did
I just imply your Twitter client was easy?
But Paul Graham said...
(spoken)  Well, yeah, but he said "Use Lisp", too.
So that's two things he's wrong on.  Sorry Paul.  Back in character.

Customers love solos.  Ca-ching!
Matz, heard of him?
His left pec once wrote an interpreter while sleeping.
What do you mean you can't market an app
In your spare time.

Yeah, we've probably got a couple cycles in our threads loose
Banging out code in darkened bedrooms
Sometimes want to log on WoW and let loose
But its the business that brings the phat loots.

"You've got to quit your job.
You've got to quit your job."
And if you're lucky get some funding you SOB.
And that's the message we send to part-time slobs.
And expect them to keep banging on MS Bob.

Of course they're gonna blog six days a week for fun.
But that ain't real marketing.  Engineers can't market, can they?
"We're just code monkeys."  Well some of us apes
Can write Java and copy.  Why you gape?
And if we can grok code, AdWords, and email
Then there's no reason we can't do software retail.
EWW!  Oh wait, seventy percent margins ain't fail.

So you solos out there,
Put your hands in the air!

Chorus:

I'm a solo founder, yes, I'm a solo founder,
All you VCs can go eat clam chowder.
So won't the solo founders please stand up, please stand up, please stand up.

Repeats.

DHH got to cuss in his keynotes to get attention,
Well I don't, but I guess it works for him
(By the way thanks for Rails.)
Half of you Redditors don't buy software,
"But if I don't, who does?"
About half the population.  300 million in the nation.
Try selling to women -- you'll be swimmin' in it.
Sometimes a profit beats an exit.

Shoot, I help your kid's teacher play bingo
If that don't prove there's a niche for everyone
I don't know when you gonna believe.

"Yeah, that's real cutting edge, hehe."
Yeah some of us ain't downloading MP3s.
My customers can't even spell PHP.
So what?  Their money's green as your ping stats
Better your wallet than your disk FAT.

And there's a million of us just like me
Who code like me, who sell stuff just like me,
Who write like me, blog, talk, and act like me,
It ain't the next best thing, the real deal's me!

Chorus.

I'm like a lecture to listen to, cause I'm only giving you,
Things to joke about on IRC in your chatroom.
The only difference is I've got a mailing list.
With 2,000 people paying to be on it.
It's called "Customers" -- what a concept.
I'm not the only one on the forum yakking
About making apps, the overflow's stacking,
And I'm building stuff but it ain't rocket science,
Every single one of y'all could try it.
You could be working at Burger King,
Laying out the router rings,
Or in the cubicle banging, Screaming "That ain't null!"

With your collar down and your temper up,
So won't you single founders please stand up
And put three fingers on your hand up?
And be proud to be out of your mind and in control.
And one more time,
Loud as you can,
How does it go?

Chorus x2

Haha,
Guess there's a single founder in all of us.
Let's all stand up.

Actual discussion:

OK, now that my burning urge to karaoke is out of the way: there are a lot of business models out there, and many of them can work.  You can probably even make money with a Twitter client written in Lisp.  I wouldn’t want to have to do it but, then again, I don’t have to, just like you don’t have to wake up in the morning and help little old ladies get their bingo cards in large print.  And that’s perfectly fine.

If it wasn’t totally obvious, tongue was planted firmly in cheek while writing the above, and when given the choice between saying what I really think and making lame attempts at humor, the humor may have won out.  For example, you might on listening be under the impression I have not quit my day job, which is not accurate as of last Monday. (I’m still kind of in shock — and still have work to go to in the morning. See you on a more permanent basis in a few months.)

I don’t claim to be anything particularly special as a businessman and, as you can see, I have few musical skills to speak of.  But if you can’t laugh at yourself then who can you laugh at?

The above song and lyrics are copyright Patrick McKenzie 2010 and released under the Creative Commons By Attribution license.  Go nuts.  It was recorded with assistance from Audacity.

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