I respect patio11, but his bingo card earnings are far from impressive. What's impressive is the process he developed to optimize his earnings in a relatively small B2C market. That knowledge and expertise, along with the fame he earned by sharing them, is his most valuable asset. It just makes sense to capitalize on it with consulting gigs.
If you can earn 25k a year from a simple bingo app, put together a few more similar apps, then you have a decent salary. And so what if you think if his bingo earnings are far from impressive. That first sentence was unnecessary.
I understand where you are coming from, but I can assure you that my first sentence is not meant to be ill-spirited. Rather, it servers the purpose of setting up the second part of my comment which reinforces how much "patio11 is not just the bingo card guy".
I think that Patrick did an awesome job with Bingo Card Creator, but Joel didn't hire the guy because he manages to make $30K in software sales a year. That's not an impressive number for software sales in itself. Plain and simple. Patrick is however an impressive guy when it comes to the specific set of skills he has, so it just makes sense for him to capitalize (possibly far more than Bingo Card ever could) on that.
