But what practical purpose does breaking down your income serve to readers? Will it help them increase conversions, save time, or increase efficiency? Even if it did yield some practical value, expenses and income are so idiosyncratic as to not be applicable to almost everyone.
Also, I wasn't just referring to you. For instance, in Nathan Barry's "year in review," he intricately discusses his travels, personal relationships, etc. This stuff is clearly superfluous to a business-minded audience, and I can only read it as pretention.
But what practical purpose does breaking down your income serve to readers? Will it help them increase conversions, save time, or increase efficiency?
It's true that there is sometimes an irritating level of "hero worship" around these parts, but as another HNer running multiple small businesses, I appreciate Patrick's contributions. Some of his ideas and experiments are relevant to other fields as well. For example, his results from switching to Stripe are very interesting to those of us outside the US, where accepting card payments directly is a much bigger deal (typically a multi-week application process and a lot more tedious integration work). Having some idea of the potential gains over the easy option of using Paypal/Google/etc. is interesting when deciding if and when it's worth spending that time.
It's nice to have numbers to compare against. I'm in the same boat (also selling my own software) and comparing Patrick's numbers to mine gives me confidence that I don't suck terribly at the business stuff.
Also knowing the numbers you can classify his blog posts better. There are many software marketing gurus who tell you how to run your business while they only make $5k year with their flag ship product. At least I know that when Patrick says that something 'was a big increase in sales' he's not talking about making $20 more.
You've made so many negative comments that I've started to recognize your name.
A few pieces of advice from someone who was once a smart and shockingly arrogant teenager:
Dial down the negative replies and stop commenting on everything as if you were an expert. You lack experience and it shows in your writing. In 10 years you will probably decide the majority of the opinions you now hold are wrong. Try to remember that before you criticize.
Don't use "elucidation" when "explanation" will suffice. The purpose of writing is to clearly convey an idea--using needlessly uncommon or archaic words can break the flow of communication. (I had the same problem when I was younger, and my teenage brother still does.) You'll find that your writing is much more effective if it doesn't read like you spent half of your time flipping through a thesaurus (even if you didn't).
Check out this: Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading from the guidelines http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your comments in this thread are not adding value.
Also, I wasn't just referring to you. For instance, in Nathan Barry's "year in review," he intricately discusses his travels, personal relationships, etc. This stuff is clearly superfluous to a business-minded audience, and I can only read it as pretention.