Try. But before you do: are you sure you know what Patrick's business actually is? It looks like "Hello world" hooked up to a random number generator... but it isn't.

Here's a tip: when you've figured out what it is Patrick is actually doing, you'll see why it's kind of silly to consider competing directly with him.

Thomas is presumably artfully phrasing "If you can do organic SEO and AdWords well, you can make a lot of money, so why the heck would you enter bingo cards" to avoid hurting my feelings. He isn't wrong about the money, though my feelings are pretty much impervious. I mean, I sell bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers: it is highly unlikely you're going to say something I haven't heard in the last four years.

(Though if you want to compete, can you do picture bingo cards? I'll send you customers. They don't know what files are and they'll need to crop the images they want to use. If you want to teach them how to do that, they're yours.)

I think you're stripping what you do down too far.

Organic SEO and Adwords are tactics, but your business is a strategy that addresses the needs of a very narrow group of people who will pay to make study exercises (and occasionally family entertainment) easier and more effective. There are lots of other tactical moves you make, like figuring out how to demo your product, moving customers to the web version of the app, keeping metrics on task completion inside the app, etc.

But, yeah, the underlying theme here is that if you can execute these tactics and knit them into a coherent strategy, there are thousands of other niches you can address besides "people who will pay money so they can easily spend class periods playing bingo". Why waste time fighting over the bingo pie?

I'm not even a little bit worried about hurting your feelings. ;)

It would be harder than you think. Patrick is patio11 on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11). He's smarter than the average bear.

do it.

bcc was one of the steps on the way to me realizing that building the site is almost none of the business.

as a friendly and encouraging wager, i submit that you can't or won't get a bcc clone business with >$500 revenues/mo.

If you can do a better job in three days than he has over the entire history of his business, then you definitely should.

Go for it then. Patrick is making about $4,000 per month. If you think you can do better in 3 days then, you stand to make a fortune. So why haven't you done it?