Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe

@csallen The difference between a shipped product and a shipped product that makes money is a price tag, not any magic thing they teach MBAs or tactic you'll find in the last ~3 million words I've written. Start selling your thing. You can learn the business stuff as you go along. It is far, far easier than you model it as; it is far easier than things you can already do.

10 share tweet・a month ago

Ben Lang

@benln · @askspoke

Hey Patrick. Big Stripe Atlas fan here. What kind of things are you most focused in building the Atlas community?

2 share tweet・2 months ago

@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe

@benln "Whatever our companies need" feels like a cheap and unsatisfying answer to this question, but it is a true answer. The most recent thing we did was a straight-up target of opportunity: many companies wanted support in applying for YC. We bubblegummed the heck out of it: one Google spreadsheet, an inbox, and an email to all Atlas companies asking them to send us their application if we wanted feedback. One (very long) week later, we have hopefully helped some very, very interesting companies get into YC, learned that Atlas companies broadly perceive fundraising as something extremely relevant to their interests, and learned about some opportunities for making systemic improvements in the entreprenurial community. (An example: many entrepreneurs have difficulty being precise about what they are building. That is a useful thing to be able to do; it is indispensable for getting investment, successfully inducing people to join you on your wild adventure, and selling your product to customers. We can feed the fact that we know that that is a problem into our guides and other assorted education about running companies.)

6 share tweet・a month ago

Emily Hodgins

@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt

Where does the name patio11 come from?

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

@nikkielizdemere · Moderator at Product Hunt

@ems_hodge Have been wondering this, too! 😊

@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe

@ems_hodge I've been using the same nickname for 25 years. A Puerto Rican friend of mine in middle school couldn't really handle the hard K in Patrick and started to call me Pato, to his amusement. I was less amused. He switched to Patio; it stuck hard enough that even my family calls me it to this day. Somebody on CompuServe had already beaten me to Patio so I appended my favorite number.

8 share tweet・a month ago

Helder S Ribeiro

@hsribei · Entrepreneur and programmer

@patio11 @ems_hodge is your favorite number an eleven or a three?

upvote share tweet・a month ago

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

@nikkielizdemere · Moderator at Product Hunt

Hi Patrick! Have been following your work for quite a few years. Love your Twitter feed! 💜 How do you define TTV for software/products? How would you go about improving this metric?

@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe

@nikkielizdemere Thanks! I remember that we've swapped a few emails over the years. Are you familiar with the character Walsh on Firefly and how he uses the word "Shiny?" When I'm thinking about this in my own head, I think Time-To-Shiny. You're looking for a combination of both a) delight and b) either demonstrably improving someone's life or credibly demonstrating that you have the capability of doing so. Twilio, for example, has among the best Time-To-Shiny of any complicated, development-heavy software product you'll ever use. You can credibly promise a massive improvement in folks lives as soon as their phone rings in response to code they have written; Twilio can have that happening in ~30 seconds or so for a new user if they're being guided; perhaps ~5 minutes or so if they're a motivated self-starter. How to improve it? One, figure out a way to track it obsessively. Two, cheat like a mofo; ruthlessly defer as much as possible about the full experience until AFTER you have achieved that one moment of concentrated joy. Exact tactics for doing this depend a lot on the product at issue; often they involve (e.g.) having fake data pre-loaded in accounts so that someone doesn't have to do weeks of data entry prior to seeing any improvement in their lives, scripted onboarding experiences, etc.

3 share tweet・a month ago

Haldun Anıl

@haldun_anil · Product Analyst @ SmartAsset

Hi Patrick, Love the idea for Atlas. I was wondering what kind of help the Atlas network will provide beyond the initial startup launch (e.g. equity grants to non-officers, expanding business in multiple states, etc.).

@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe

@haldun_anil We're still very early on in the life of the product, and figuring out both what a) our network partners want to do, b) what they have comparative advantage at doing, and c) what our startups need. At the moment, Atlas companies which are engaged with network partners (accelerators, etc) pretty much get what the partner chooses to provide them. We're going to refine on that model as time goes on. We're experimenting rapidly. For example, many of our companies want funding and other services from YC, so we helped all that wanted to get helped with their YC applications for the S17 class. There exist a lot of potential things that different partners can offer, and if a particular experiment bears good results, expect to see us double down on it.

Bob

@2xconversions · Self-employed

Hiya Patrick! I'm good at explaining technical stuff and I really like the vue.js programming language. So I'm considering doing the "blog > email list > ebook" journey that you often talk about on HN. But I have a few questions about this project: - How can I know in advance that people might be interested in new vue JS tutorials? The official documentation is already great... - Is a blog about "Learn Vue.js" enough, or should I try to find a more specific niche? - Where would you market such a blog, besides HN and Reddit? Thanks!

@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe

@2xconversions No official documentation anywhere is as good as people need it to be. Where are the gaps in it relative to things people actually care about, such as shipping meaningful projects at work? Fill those gaps. Knowing nothing about vue.js (if you just conjured it on the spot, good on you), I assert that there is probably almost nothing in the official documentation about bridging the gap between your first Getting Started project and then actually using it to do Meaningful Work In Production. I'd start there, again knowing nothing else about the project. Since I know nothing about Vue.js, and I consider myself at least fairly tech-literate, I think that scoping yourself down to that community is probably already specific enough for a niche. ("Learn Javascript" is probably not.) In some future after you have success, you might successfully create new Vue.js users. In the short-term, you will not; the project attracts the users to itself and you educate them. Accordingly, you'll want to try hitching a ride to the ecosystem which already exists where people consume Vue.js-related things; that might be official community spaces, well-known tech watering holes like HN/Reddit, or even "The Google SERPs for [vue.js react]" (or what have you -- I'm very not conversant about the cutting edge of JS development in 2017).

4 share tweet・a month ago

Emily Hodgins

@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt

Hi Patrick, thanks for joining us today. What top tips can you share with us for growing a successful community?

@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe

@ems_hodge People can be members of many communities at once, and this is true of nearly everyone you know. Unless your time horizon is long enough that you can achieve growth in your community by literally raising children, your target members are presently involved in other communities. Accordingly, user acquisition for your new community is largely going to be a matter of going to the communities where your prospective users already exist and creating value there, then bringing folks back to your own community. That's the very early stage. The real "and here is where the magic happens!" part of growing communities is a) creating outstanding value inside of the community and b) creating the perpetual motion machine, where community members themselves create the value inside the community, and then bring in outsiders to share in it and potentially become community members. If this were easy, it wouldn't be valuable. Functional communities are really, really valuable because they are really, really hard to do right. (Seen in a certain light the entire history of humanity is basically "How do we build a successful community?" writ large, right?)

3 share tweet・a month ago

Emily Hodgins

@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt

What's your 'go-to' karaoke song of choice?

@patio11 · I work on Atlas at Stripe

@ems_hodge I usually go karaoke-ing with Japanese people, and often get asked for their English favorites (for novelty). I'm not the biggest fan of him, but the definitive white guy artist my age in Japan is Eminem. When asked I usually pick Lose Yourself, which is IMHO the best startup song there is. (Though I don't agree you only get one chance.) If I have my own free pick, I usually warm up with Mongol 800's Anata Ni or Chiisana Koi No Uta. For English songs, One Week, Disney songs (I'm particularly partial to Friend Like Me and Under the Sea), and anything by Weird Al. It sadly is never on machines in Japan, but I once found a place in Philadelphia that had White and Nerdy available, which might as well be my personal theme song. I will also sing All The Single Ladies, since my wife told me it was her favorite song on the day we met and I was so smitten that I immediately acapellaed it (in full diva mode) at a BBQ.

3 share tweet・a month ago

🌟

Ayrton De Craene

@ayrton · Code @ Product Hunt

What is the number one piece of advice you ever received?