He lives from selling his own software... isn't that quite an achievement in itself? Unfortunately, his software isn't open source so I don't think we'll get a chance to take a peek.
Patio11 makes some of his software, A/Bingo, available as open source. A/Bingo is a Ruby on Rails A/B testing framework, available at his Bingo card site.
Naming it "A/Bingo" and hosting it on his own site?
Nah.
Naming it "A/Bingo" and hosting it on his own site for the intent of garnering linkjuice while at the same time presenting the name choice as simply a guileless, clever pun (as he does in his announcement of the project [1]) and within the context of his normal policy of broad disclosure?
A little bit. Perhaps "grey hat" is too strong a word. Swap in "a little discomfiting".
(To clarify, my discomfort is due to the tying together of two orthogonal axes, ie, the quality of Bingo Card Creator as a result for the keyword "Bingo" and the quality of Bingo Card Creator as a source for an A/B testing framework.)
Um, "(The name sort of popped into my head and wouldn’t leave. It is a pun, it relates to my business and personal brand, and it gives the impression of Hitting the Target that successful testing should give you. "
Please name a salesperson more open and honest than Patrick. Tell us who he should emulate. If people don't emulate Patrick's style, maybe they should follow Marc Pincus or Coffeefool instead?
I think perhaps Patrick didn't intentionally name it A/Bingo for the SEO, but he did understand the value OSS and link juice. If I thought of it, he certainly did -- but the name A/Bingo totally stands on its own as a really good name for this software in many ways.
Another example, and the one that inspired me, was one of the bloggers mentioned earlier. Patrick McKenzie runs a small, online business selling bingo cards to teachers (he sold over $45,000 worth of bingo cards in 2011). One thing Patrick does really well is search engine optimization (SEO). One of his techniques for getting people to link to his site (a big part of a high Google ranking), involves open source software. “What!?” That might be your reaction right now. What does open source software have to do with bingo cards for 1st graders?
The answer is nothing. However, Patrick is a software developer that wrote the code for his bingo card website. He recognized that some of the code he wrote was valuable all on its own. So he turned part of it into an open source Ruby on Rails project, put the code up on his site along with instructions on using it, and then told the world about it. What happened? All sorts of software developers, with no interest in bingo cards but a huge interest in his software, started linking to the portion of Patrick’s website that hosted this open source project. More links to his website meant a better ranking on Google which meant more sales of his bingo card creator. So while he didn’t directly sell his offering the way Amazon sold their’s, he did use it in a way that created more business for him.
