patio11 is smart, but I never understood the attention he got as an entrepreneur. He had a bingo card creator, which barely netted enough to survive in almost any US city (He would frequently post his stats during the JOS/BOS days), a failed job gamification startup (I'm not sure how long this lasted, but it was so short, I barely remember it), and ended up getting a regular job like the rest of us.
My impression was that he was also a consultant, and that BCC was more of a demopiece than a product. His A/B testing framework abingo, for example, used BCC as a concrete application of the tool. It's something you can show to potential clients that they can easily understand, successful enough that it actually got traffic and believable results, and low key enough to let sit on the back burner.
This is typical of consultancies: the "typical" equation is 30 percent of a year is spent working for clients, 30 percent finding new business, and 30 percent skill building. Product building, done cleverly, does both skill building and advertise your consultancy. 37signals did the same thing and we got basecamp as a result.
Anyways, the attention he gets is from writing a lot, responding to comments on HN and having useful quantified insights from an unusual engineering-marketing combo. People pay attention because he is persuasive, not because he is the next Steve Jobs.
Honestly it's refreshing to see someone with an audience like patio11 pushing back on the "Intuit lobbying is the reason US taxes are complicated" narrative that's so popular.
"Bootleggers and Baptists"[1] suggests it can be both -- Intuit is definitely not lobbying to make it easier. One wonders if Intuit makes donations to Americans for Tax Reform, but probably Nordquist is the more influential of the pair.
