How Patrick McKenzie built a small software business from nothing to the point where he could quit his full-time job, plus tactical advice for other small businesses on how to save time by outsourcing, automating, and eliminating low-value tasks.

1. A Software Business On 5 Hours A Week Patrick McKenzie

2. The Problem: Making This Sucks

3. The Big Idea $60 budget 1 week schedule Big Hairy Audacious Goal: $200 a month

4. Bingo Card Creator – July 2006

6. Why Did It Sell That Much?

7. Version 1.02 – Now With Less Crashes!

9. AdWords, Halloween, Google… Oh My!

11. Exact match domains (“halloween bingo cards”.{com|net|org})

12. Declining part of my strategy, but still print money three times a year.

15. Make It A Web App

17. Holy Cow. This Is My Day Job.

19. Adventures Since Quitting

20. Five Quick Bits Of Advice

21. Charge More Programmers consistently underprice. Double it, then go higher. Avoid pathological customersby charging more. Revenue is dominated by customers on most expensive plan spending other people’s money. Recurring revenue is the best kind.

22. Make Web Applications Faster iteration. Easier support. Dramatically higher conversion rates. Recurring revenue is the best kind. Better tracking of actual use than MiniPeace.

23. Figure Out SEO Free traffic from interested people = free money. Single best thing you can do for SEO: create a reason why people who do not buy your software should cite your website anyhow. Second single best thing: create a system which makes content at scale.

24. The Inverted Iceberg Rule Photo: Natalielucier on Flickr

25. Optimize. Everything. All factors in success of a software business are multiplicative. A/B testing: 5% increase in conversion rate, once per month, is ~70% increase in revenue per year. A/B testing is cheap & easy to get started with. More advanced: funnel optimization, first-run experience, etc.

26. In Five Hours Per Week!?

27. Three Keys To Avoid Wasting Time Outsource Automate Eliminate

28. Stuff To Outsource Web design Web content Self-contained programming projects Customer support

29. Stuff To Automate Routine customer support tasks Drudgery – license generation, keyword analysis, etc Server maintenance/monitoring

30. Dashboard O’ Goodness

31. The Big Idea: Scalable Content Generation Automate production of high-quality pages responsive to specific user needs, around a template and/or data source. Outsource the production of text for those pages. ???? Profit!

32. Make One Page

33. Do It 941 More Times

34. … Without Going Spare Live Demo Time

36. Total investment: $3,000

37. 251 activities / 942 have generated sales

38. Top selling activity: I didn’t even know people did that.And 226 More!

39. Stuff To Eliminate Checking Google Analytics 37 times per day Worrying about competition Development which does not meet demonstrable customer needs – see Lean Startup

40. Thanks for Listening Blog at http://www.kalzumeus.com Slides will be posted. See @patio11 Send me email. I love chatting about this. patrick@kalzumeus.com