Balsamiq Blog

Balsamiq Roadmap for 2009

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 3rd, 2009 under Company / Business — 6 Comments

This is part two of a two-part post about what happened in 2008 and my plans for 2009.

So 2008 was great, no, it was beyond great. I quit my job, moved to Italy and started Balsamiq Studios LLC, my first company. It went very well.

Perhaps I should be more cautious, but I have a feeling 2009 will be even better. Here’s why.

Lots and Lots To Do

I am looking at my TODO list and I have 12, yes twelve projects listed which should keep me busy for the year, and then some!

The name of the game is “Integration”

Most of my big projects for 2009 have to do with integrating Mockups in your preferred way to work.

• I have 4 more server-side integrations of Mockups planned (with more possible), just like the Confluence, JIRA and XWiki plugin versions I shipped in 2008. Each of these has the potential to increase my revenue another 20-30%.
• I am working on a hosted version of Mockups - yes, I am no longer afraid of going SaaS, and lots of people have been asking for this. You’ll be able to work on your mockups online, share them with others and get feedback on them, all from your browser (or from Mockups for Desktop), all for a monthly or yearly fee.
• I want to build the hosted version in a way that can be sold as an enterprise, behind-the-firewall application. And sell it.
• I am working on 3 or more “web connectors”, i.e. ways to load and save your data on the web from Mockups for Desktop.

I wish I could tell you what products I am integrating Mockups with but I’ll keep them as surprises, I don’t want to jynx myself!

I am thrilled about each of these projects, as making great pieces of software talk to each other is something I love doing (there’s something magical about it, that’s why I make Web Office Plugins after all). I will likely contract out part of the development work for some of these, and some platform providers have even offered to help me with development in order to make the project happen. Very exciting.

Client Side Enhancements

Everyone knows that linking mockups together is the last big missing feature of Mockups. I have started a GetSatisfaction thread about it just the other day, but I am itching to start implementing it (I think I’ll do a phased approach, a little bit at the time), so stay tuned here or on Twitter for updates. It’s coming, soon.

Other big client-side enhancements I have planned for 2009 are, in no particular order:

• double-clicking on groups to “dive into them” and edit their contents
• adding support for “UI packs” such as iPhone, mobile and social media UI control packs.
• adding a light-weight Rich Text Editor for the Paragraph and Label controls (for bold, italic, bullets, etc within the same control)

On top of that, there will always be bug fixes and little enhancements here and there…I am releasing every Sunday morning these days so keep updating!

More “Community Features”

I just love the little (ok, not so little) community that has formed around the Balsamiq GetSatisfaction forums in the last 6 months. Your feedback keeps me going every day and makes the product as good as it can be. I haven’t worked on a feature that didn’t come from a customer request since the day before I launched in June. It’s wonderful to know that people will put what I’m working on to use immediately, and that it will make them more productive and ultimately happier.

The collaboration with InspireUX (look in the Help menu for the “I need inspiration” link) is also one of my favorite features. I always read one of Catriona’s quotes at the beginning of a long Mockups session, it gets me fired up and pushes me to do my best.

In 2009, I want to help nurture the Mockups users community with the following:

• a Balsamiq Mockups Community Server (BMCS) - this will be a wiki with Mockups installed on it for people to share common UI components and design patterns that they created with Mockups. Think “Login Page” or “Registration Page” or a simple error message dialog. I am working with some customers on this and plan to launch it at the end of January. In the future I want the Desktop version and the hosted version (and all other versions actually) to integrate with BMCS so that you’ll be able to import pre-made mockups directly from them.
• I plan on retweeting any good UX-related tweets I come across. If you know of someone I should follow to help me with this service, let me know!
• I plan on blogging about any user experience that blows me away, like Dropbox, Posterous, PivotalTracker, StackOverflow, PrintWhatYouLike.com and others.
• I plan on publishing interviews to customers whose jobs have been changed by Mockups, so that you’ll be able to learn their workflows and experiences.
• I just talked to Mariah, and we decided that starting today, in addition to giving free licenses away to do-gooders, non-profits etc, we will also donate licenses to any high-school class that asks for it.  We just ask the teacher to email us the name of their school and class and the number of students in the class, and Mariah will send them all a license.

You may think that I want to do all of the above as a marketing scheme, but you’d be wrong. Community “features” are just as important as features built with code. Knowing that there’s a community of support behind a product is a wonderful feeling, and I want my customers to feel that from day one. Plus it’s pretty lonely over here, so really I want to do it just for my own benefit.

My Goals for 2009

My goals for the company are simple: keep existing customers happy. Make new customers, make them happy. Make all customers more productive. Provide top-notch experiences, both in the product and in any interaction with Balsamiq Studios. Stay transparent, stay human, stay green and socially conscious.

Financially, my goal for Balsamiq is to reach $400,000 in revenue, with a stretch goal of $500,000. It will be tough, but I think I can pull it off.

Personally, this will be another year of intense learning. I will have to go from “mr. Do-it-all” to be Balsamiq’s CEO, which will mean having employees, delegating, setting up relationships with resellers and partners, perhaps incorporate in Italy as well (yay for micro-multinationals!), and hopefully make some non-critical-but-very-formative mistakes. With all that I have planned for 2009, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for it.

Onward!

— 6 Comments

 

 

 

A look back at 2008

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 3rd, 2009 under Company / Business — 6 Comments

This is part one of a two-part post about what happened in 2008 and my plans for 2009.

First, a few numbers about 2008:

• days in business: 196 - that’s 6 months and 13 days, or 28 weeks. See my June 19th launch post here
• products: 1 - Balsamiq Mockups
• product variations: 5 - Balsamiq Mockups is on the web (free demo), for your Desktop, for Confluence, for JIRA and for XWiki
• total individual SKUs: 89 (I fear that’s too many, but “give the people what they want” right?)
• product releases: 5 major ones (1.0 on June 19th,  1.1 on July 20th, Mockups for JIRA on September 9th, Mockups for XWiki on October 5th and 1.5 on December 19th) and countless, almost daily, small ones.
• total revenue: $162,302 ($39,000 of which in December alone, and growing steadily)
• total expenses: $29,574 (I have started paying myself one tenth of the previous month’s revenue)
• total paying customers: 1,322 (Mockups for Desktop: 1,259, Mockups for Confluence: 43, Mockups for JIRA: 18, Mockups for XWiki: 2)
• refunds given: 2 (one customer had problems with an early build and I offered him a refund, and another customer turned out to be a do-gooder after purchase so I gave him his money back)
• licenses donated: over $100,000 worth (this is hard to calculate precisely because we gave many organizations unlimited licenses for all of their employees)
• website stats: ~214,000 unique visitors and ~565,000 page views
• average daily users of the free online demo: ~450
• blog posts published here: 106
  
• products reviews: ~470, overwhelmingly positive (highlights: The New York Times, twice on ReadWriteWeb, 3 or 4 times on Hacker News)
• Twitter mentions: ~1,000, also overwhelmingly positive
• GetSatisfaction forums topics: 381, with hundreds of people contributing (I am so thankful!)
• SEO: I have the top spot on Google for searches for balsamiq, mockups and web office plugins - yay!
• interviews: 6 (of which 2 podcasts: net@night with Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur, and Startup Success with Bob Walsh)
• money raised from investors: $o (the most I was ‘in the hole’ for was $2,078, back in April)
• number of employees: 1 - it’s still mostly just myself, with my wife Mariah donating some of her time lately to give away licenses
• hours of work saved to customers: countless

Overall, I couldn’t be happier with Balsamiq’s first 6 months of operations (and that’s a huge understatement).

This little startup has been successful beyond my wildest dreams, an incredible learning experience and the ultimate thrill-ride. For one guy with an idea and a laptop, I think I made quite a splash!

Next, let’s talk about 2009, for I am SUPER EXCITED about it!

— 6 Comments

 

 

 

1.5 Weekly Release: what’s new this week

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 28th, 2008 under Mockups — 1 Comment

I am starting to batch updates and releasing once a week (Sunday morning, Italian time). I used to “fix it an release it” but now that the product is more mature I feel that “slowing down” to a weekly release cycle is the right thing to do.

This week, the new build brings us:

• curvature property for arrows (GetSatisfaction thread):
• “Empty Text” support: empty text is now accepted in lots and lots of control types. No more “use a space” workaround needed! (GetSatisfaction thread 1 and thread 2)
• Checkbox and RadioButton controls now support text styles like size, underline, etc. (GetSatisfaction thread)
• I fixed a bug with positioning of controls when cloning via the ALT+drag method
• I fixed a bug in the right-click unlock menu, now it properly says “Unlock Group” instead of just “Unlock “

I also fixed a few bugs during the week and pushed them right away (the most important had to do with PNG images failing to export in some cases) .

You can download the new version in the usual places:

• Mockups for Desktop
• Mockups for Confluence
• Mockups for JIRA
• Mockups for XWiki

Two Reminders:

• Help me design the Linking Mockups Feature
• I am looking for good Flex Developers

I also updated the website a bit with some FAQs and more up-to-date company info.

Onward!

— 1 Comment

 

 

 

New Release: Balsamiq Mockups 1.5

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 19th, 2008 under Company / Business, Mockups — 4 Comments

I am extremely pleased to announce the immediate availability of Balsamiq Mockups version 1.5.

This is a FREE upgrade for all Mockups versions.

Download links: Mockups for Desktop, for Confluence, for JIRA and for XWiki. You can also try the web demo version here.

This release introduces the #1 most requested feature and a host of other productivity enhancements which should make Mockups more flexible, powerful and hopefully even more fun to use.

Revamped intro video:

Themes of this Release

• The new Image Import feature, for logos, photos, custom controls and even templates!
• I added some new control types and customization enhancements, including a really powerful new Data Grid.
• Mockups fits better in your flow with native Printing, export PNG to clipboard, export all PNGs, partial XML export, full screen view and other enhancements
• Mockups is even faster and more powerful, thanks to more keyboard shortcuts, configuration options and some “magic” features!
• Lots and lots of bug fixes and little usability enhancements here and there

The Image Import feature

This has been the #1 most requested feature from day one, and it’s the first one that was designed with the help of the wonderful Mockups community using Mockups coupled with the GetSatisfaction forums: you can read everyone’s excellent feedback here:  “Help me design the import image feature“.

Here’s a quick overview video of how to use the feature and what it enables:

I like this feature because it’s simple to use and yet very powerful, enabling a number of use-cases which were previously impossible with Mockups. For instance:

• improving an existing interface: take a screenshot of the current UI and import it into Mockups to tweak or use as reference, like this:
• you can import images of custom icons or custom control types, like this:
• advanced feature: since images are linked in and not embedded, you can use the image import feature to create “master slides” and component templates, as shown in the video below:
  Please upgrade your Flash Player

  
  I realize it’s a bit tricky, but I think this is an advanced use-case so I think it’s OK, at least for now.

Aside from the Image control, you can also embed images in the Cover Flow component (as seen in the video at the top).

I can’t wait to see how you use this feature!

New Control Types and Customization Enhancements

Version 1.5 includes new control types like Arrows, Multiline Button, and Fieldset / Group.

A few existing controls were ehanced with multi-line support, like checkboxes, radio buttons, callouts and tooltips.

Also, the ComboBox has a multiline feature: if you only type one line of text in a ComboBox, you’ll just see the regular, closed combo. If instead you type more than one line of text, the ComboBox’s pulldown will appear with your content in it. Magic!

Other enhancements are the ability to not have anything selected in the Button Bar control and to type and resize the Date Chooser control.

Data Grid Power!

The Data Grid / Table became even more powerful in this release:

You can now toggle the header row, specify two colors for the rows, the row height, whether the grid should have horizontal and/or vertical lines, and use text shortcuts such as [] and [x] to display checkboxes and () and (o) to display radio buttons in the grid.

I think these enhancements alone will allow you to use Mockups for a lot more types of interfaces than before.

Mockups Fits Better in your Workflow

Mockups 1.5 introduces a number of features designed to make Mockups integrate better in your daily work without disrupting your flow.

For instance:

• you can now export an image snapshot directly to your clipboard instead of just to a file: this lets you paste your mockups into Word or Powerpoint documents and other applications directly
• you can export snapshots of all the mockups you are working on with one click with the new “Export All Snapshots to PNG” feature
• if you want to overwrite the same PNG file over and over, you have an option to do so:
  
• Partial XML export: you can already import a mockup into another with the Import feature, but now you can also select which controls to export. This will make it much easier to create a library of common mockup elements for reuse:
  
• Native Printing from Mockups for Desktop, making it the ultimate paper-prototyping tool!
• Full Screen View: ideal for presenting UI Mockups to your clients or team - it removes all distractions, centers your mockup on the screen and gives you a big blue arrow pointer to discuss various UI elements.

Even Faster and More Powerful

The following features have two things in common: they are nearly invisible (barely any new UI was added for them) while at the same time giving you more power and speed when creating your mockups.

They include:

• Paste In Place (CTRL+SHIFT+V)
• Nudge-resize: CTRL+ALT+arrow keys to resize the selection 2 pixels at the time, add SHIFT to resize 20 pixels at the time
• CTRL+Enter will commit multiline text, no need to click outside of the control any more (and remember, ENTER starts the editing as well as F2 and double-clicking already)
• Right-Click over a locked control to unlock it (no need to “unlock all”!)
• Right-Click over a file tab in Mockups for Desktop to Save / Close / Clone the selected mockup, or create a new one:
• you can select multiple files in the “Open Mockup” dialog
• for those rare times where you need something “pixel-perfect”, you can now specify the position and size of the selection in the property inspector:
  
  clicking on the position and size numbers makes them editable:
  the format is “X,Y WxH” or, spelled out “x position COMMA y position SPACE width LETTER X height, all in pixels”
• Auto-magic lorem-ipsum generator: just type “lorem” (all lowercase) in any Paragraph or Text Area control and you’ll get a chunk of lorem-ipsum text pre-filled for you: magic!
• A configuration file: BalsamiqMockups.cfg is a simple XML file that lets you specify, among other things, which font face to use for your mockups. Ehm, are you Comic Sans MS haters happy now? See instructions here on how to set it up on your system.
• A log file: BalsamiqMockups.log is a simple text file containing the output of command-line runs of Mockups for Desktop. See details here.

As always, you can see the full list of supported keyboard shortcuts here.

Lots of bug fixes!

• This is the most important one and I cannot take any credit for it: drag and drop from the UI Library now works on Linux! The fix comes for free when you install Adobe AIR 1.5. This should bring the linux version up to par with the Mac and Windows version, which is a nice feeling. Go Ubuntu!
• You might notice that the color that denotes selection is not as bright and attention-grabbing as before.
• In the Desktop version, the tabs at the bottom shrink so that they all fit even if you have lots of Mockups open.
• Tree controls take less room.
• Lots of other little things I cannot even remember…I hope you’ll notice them a little bit at the time.

Thank You So Much!

I may say that I am a one-person development team, but it sure doesn’t feel that way. This release was truly a collaborative effort. Most of the new features and bug fixes came directly from you, and were designed and discussed together on GetSatisfaction coupled with Mockups. I’ll write another post just on how well those two work together, but for now you should at least take a look at the Help me Design the Import Image Feature thread if you haven’t.

There are a few people whom I’d like to thank in particular:

• Michael Bourque - Mr.GetSatisfaction! Michael is behind many of the ideas that ended up in 1.5 and you probably all have had your questions answered by him on the forums before I could even get to them.
• Adam Wride - I can safely say that the JIRA plugin wouldn’t have existed without him, and you should all be thankful for his willingness to always test the latest version and find bugs before they get to you.
• Noel Gomez - the “generous marketing genius”. The many emails he sent me are filled with practical tips to make my website, screencasts and product better for everyone. I am so thankful.
• Michael Matti - I know I thanked him for his help in 1.1 back in July, but Michael has stuck with me and continues to be an invaluable resource of ideas and bug reports, what a friend!
• Riel Roussopoulos - Riel posted a ton of feature ideas and bug reports on GetSatisfaction, and is the reason behind the new configuration file. His video card software doesn’t play well with Adobe AIR, and it took us 3 days to figure that one out. Thanks for your patience Riel!
• David Miranda - I’ll blog about this separately, but you should know that David redesigned my website in his spare time and donated his new design to me, just out of the goodness of his heart. I have started incorporating some elements of his design already, and lots more is coming.
• Vince Samios - Vince is part of “The Manchester Mob”, a group of marketing and SEO experts in the UK. I have a couple of emails from him sitting in my inbox with feedback on how to improve my site and product, and I can’t wait until I have some time to go through them and implement them. It’s such good stuff!
• M.B. - M. is the brilliant Italian software engineer behind the “Sketch it!” feature of 1.5. I contracted him thinking it would take a couple of weeks and it was done in 8 hours. I hope to be able to reveal his name to you in 2009.

I am truly blessed to be surrounded by such wonderful, brilliant and generous people. This is truly something I did not expect when I started Balsamiq, and something that really warms my heart. For instance, look at the 115 Mockups Fans on Facebook, this is such an awesome global community!

You are the people I write software for, thanks for pushing me and helping me make it as good as it can be.

What’s next

Oh, where to start. I have cleared the next few days to deal with whatever unexpected fire might flare up, then it’s Christmas, also known as “the best time for coding”, so I might start attacking the tough features of 2.0 like “double-click to edit groups”, “add control packs support” (for iPhone, Facebook and other UI control types) and of course “linking mockups together”, the main feature of 2.0. I am also working with Michael Bourque on a “Mockups Community Server” wiki where people can share and critique each other’s mockups.

Additionally, I have 6 (yes, SIX) more integrations in the pipeline for Mockups (other enterprise wikis, bug tracking and content management systems), which should keep me busy through the spring.

Today is the six-month anniversary of launching Balsamiq…so far it’s been an incredible journey. I can’t wait to see what the future will bring, I hope you’ll want to stick around for it!

Happy holidays!

Peldi

— 4 Comments

 

 

 

Mockups 1.5 is on the Way, it’s Screencasting Time!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. December 17th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing — 9 Comments

Hi there, just a quick update. I have been heads down coding and bug-fixing in order to get Mockups 1.5 out the door. I feel extremely close, hopefully I’ll be able to launch by the end of the week.

What I am doing now is recording some new screencasts for the web site, updating the documentation and preparing a few blog posts for the launch (one won’t be enough, there’s just too much stuff in 1.5!)

I thought it would be useful to share my screencasting techniques. I know there are lots of good tutorials out there, but I figured the more the better right?

Here’s my setup:

Things to notice:

• the big ugly but wonderfully functional Rode Podcaster microphone. I thought the built-in Macbook mic wasn’t so bad, but once I bought the Podcaster I realized what a fool I was. Honestly, it’s worth the money.
• 3 books so that I don’t have to crouch down while I speak.
• Screenflow

Here’s how I assemble a screencast:

• I set the monitor’s resolution to 1280×800
• I resize the app so that it’s all showing inside a 1280×720 area (the target size of the HD video)
• I record the demo, without the audio portion. I talk over it to help with the timing but I don’t record the audio at this stage so I can focus on the mouse movements instead. This might take a few takes.
• I play back the demo in Screenflow and add zooming and other effects.
• Now I start recording the audio, then simply play back the video demo and narrate over it. This might take a few takes, and is painful work (who likes the sound of their own voice?)
• If the audio is 90% good, I sometimes record little bits and pieces to replace the 10% that’s bad. You want to do this pretty quickly, your voice will sound different in a few hours.
• I play it back a couple of times, and if it’s at all acceptable, I call it done. I am not a professional screencaster and I’m not pretending to be one. I actually don’t think that something super-polished, with background music and a fake-sounding voice is appropriate for my product/audience. In fact, I always intentionally leave one “user mistake” that I make in the video, to show that it’s easy to recover from it.
• Export settings are a dark art, everyone has different “best Youtube HD settings” and I think you could spend many hours tweaking and learning what works best by trial and error. A good friend of mine once told me “never learn a new thing unless you’d be happy being asked to do it again” (thanks Brad!), so in this case I just follow whatever tutorial I find quickly on Google. Today for instance I used this one. It looks pretty good so that’s good enough for me.
• I upload it to Vimeo and/or Youtube. I like Vimeo’s playback UI much better, but YouTube is more reliable and can be played back on an iPhone.

It looks like my fist Mockups 1.5 video has just finished transcoding over at Vimeo (feedback welcome!!), so I’d better get back to it and make some more!

— 9 Comments

 

 

 

Why I love Atlassian, an inspirational video

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 26th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing — 3 Comments

Hi there. Atlassian once again manages to impress me and make me proud to be affiliated with them. This is one of the best recruiting tools I have ever seen.

This totally fired me up, I truly hope to make a similar video for Balsamiq Studios one day.

Mike and Scott, cheers to you mates, FANTASTIC job!

— 3 Comments

 

 

 

Looking for Good Flex Developers To Recommend

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 25th, 2008 under Uncategorized — No Comment

I constantly get asked if I know any good Flex developers, and I am tired of answering “I wish!”

So if you do Flex development, please fill in the form below so that I can send some work your way in the future.

Lone freelance developers only please, no agencies.

Form powered by Wufoo

— No Comment

 

 

 

Hit $100,000 in revenue, time to start looking up

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 14th, 2008 under Company / Business — 52 Comments

I feel a bit sheepish posting this since I don’t want to come across as bragging, but a promise is a promise, so here it goes…

I just recently surpassed $100,000 of revenue. Balsamiq has been in business for less than 5 months, so as you can imagine this level of success goes beyond my wildest dreams.

The Raw Numbers

My interpretation: not a lot of data here, but Mockups for Desktop sales are clearly growing (I guess it really does save people time and $$!), Mockups for Confluence had a bad October (not a big surprise given the financial markets meltdown), Mockups for JIRA is just getting started and Mockups for XWiki proves that it’s really hard to charge for a plugin built on top of a free platform - not a huge surprise there, but I’m still bullish!

This is the same data, but stacked. October was lower than September, but still really good given the financial crisis. November is looking on track to be the best month yet. Also, these numbers are INSANE. It hasn’t really hit me yet.

This chart tells me that it’s all still very spikey and that I shouldn’t try to make revenue predictions. It also tells me that I need to try to make it more predictable (more on this later).

Same data as above, but stacked. Notice how much less spikey this is (8 straight weeks of >$5,500 in sales). This tells me that having a portfolio of products is a very good thing. I’ll be working on expanding that portfolio in the future.

the chart above is more interesting when you compare it to the one below:

Now # of sales doesn’t necessarily map to “# of users”, since a Confluence sale can be for 25/50/500 people and a JIRA sale can mean a whole company. Still, there’s clearly a lot of demand for desktop apps out there (in this SaaS age, who’da’thunk’it!), but the margins there are way smaller than enterprise sales (duh!).

I am still confident that the plugin versions will grow over time relative to the desktop version, as more and more people “see the light” and start working in the cloud. In the meantime, thanks desktop lovers for keeping me in business!

The next two charts are kind-of useless because the costs don’t include my salary nor my rent, and some other small November expenses I haven’t gotten around to recording yet. Still, I think they are useful enough to show how little out-of-pocket costs I really have:

I just like the slope of that one.

Web Site Traffic

Some people have asked me for this in the past, so here’s the chart with the # of visits since launch day:

I don’t look at these too often to be honest. All the big spikes were blog posts that got picked up by Hacker News: they rarely correspond to big spikes in sales…still, knowing that thousands of people read this blog is pretty darn exciting.

That’s great…now what?

When I started Balsamiq I thought that if everything went well, it would take about two years to get here. I was excited about the struggles ahead, the successes and the failures that were going to help me grow in those two years. So this kind of instant success, 18 months ahead of schedule, is a bit of a shock. I feel totally unprepared for it, so I want to be extremely careful about my next moves. I plan on doing a full round of one-on-one Skype sessions with my advisers soon, plus I have to finish 1.5 (I have a few bugs to fix and I’m waiting for a commercial Flickr API key…grrr) so I’ll still be head-down coding for a little while longer.

Still, with over 800 customers to support, it’s time to start looking up from the daily developer-work and ask myself some bigger questions:

• where is my time spent every day?
• where should my time be spent every day?
• where do I need the most help, and what would it take to delegate it?
• is it time to start thinking about adding a second full-time person to the company? (right now Balsamiq is a sole-member LLC, so I’d have to change that…it’s a pain but I guess it’s a good problem to have).
• there’s all this money in the bank now: how should it be best put to use?
• what do I want to achieve in 2009, and how?
• what about 2010 and 2011?
• Is “adding flavor to Web Office Apps” still the right long term strategy?
• how can I make my revenue more predictable?
• to SaaS or not to SaaS?

Is Balsamiq no longer a startup, migrating towards “profitable and somewhat boring small business” status? I’d very much like that! Unfortunately, someone yesterday made me realize how far I am from it.

The “oh crap” question

Just yesterday, as I was preparing this post, someone emailed me the following (I paraphrase):

“We’d like to buy a big license. I was wondering how long you plan to stay a one-man company for. If you are in an accident, who will support us?“

And my world came crushing down. Though perhaps not the most tactful, the question is totally legitimate! I had a moment of panic imagining myself disappearing from the picture…what would happen to Balsamiq and its customers? Ouch, I don’t know what sound implosions make but I’m pretty sure I heard it. Maybe it was my stomach.

Here I am, trying to be the “champion of one-man businesses”, blogging about it all, trying to convince people to join me in “the future of software companies”, and there I was: stumped by a simple, OBVIOUS question that hadn’t even crossed my mind until then (and in retrospect, I’m glad it hadn’t).

So…I think the days of Balsamiq Studios as a one-man-company are numbered. I don’t really feel like I have reached my limits in terms of how much I can do by myself (I’m still not working crazy hours), but I’d be doing my customers a disservice if I didn’t seriously start thinking about growing the company. And the numbers above tell me that I can afford to at least start considering it.

Like I said, I want to be extra careful in the next steps, so I’ll take some time to do what’s right for the company, my customers, and my sanity.

As a first step, I have asked Mariah to help me with the philantropic efforts. It’s a baby step, but it lets me change the web site text from “I” to “We” everywhere, which is a GREAT feeling (check out the updated company page for instance).

I have also had a very good experience with my first contractor, and I have hired a second contractor for a surprise little project starting on Saturday (stay tuned). I’ll take it as practice in having people work for me.

Now, if you’re reading this and are thinking “this guy is ripe for the picking”, please abstain from making acquisition or “partnership” offers. This kind of challenge is EXACTLY what I was looking for when I started the company, and I am still LOVING EVERY MINUTE of this Balsamiq adventure. I want to stay independent, at least for a while longer, and grow the company organically, as needed. I am lucky to have great advisers and I’ll be looking to add a few more to my board (more about that in another post). That said, if you have some “immediately useful” advice for me, feel free to email me or leave it in the comments (I’m thinking books or blogs to read, people to talk to, that sort of thing).

So that’s the status update. I don’t think I’ll share more revenue numbers for a while, if everything goes well things should get “boring” on this front (i.e. predictable with a steady and manageable growth).

As for everything else, I will keep sharing at every step of the way, there clearly isn’t enough info about the organic growth of bootstrapped companies out there.

Onward!

Peldi

[Update: you can follow some comments on the Hacker News thread about this post]

[Update #2: OMG my favorite blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick covered this on ReadWriteWeb, and Jason Fried posted a comment! My head is seriously spinning right now]

[Update #3: I forgot that RWW was getting syndicated by the NYTimes. THIS is wild]

— 52 Comments

 

 

 

Introducing Mariah, Balsamiq’s Better Half

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 13th, 2008 under Company / Business — 4 Comments

Hi there. I am very pleased to introduce to you my wife and best friend Mariah.

She has been the hand behind all of the UI controls in Balsamiq Mockups, not to mention an incredible “support group of one” for me in this startup adventure.

some of Mariah’s handiwork

Starting today Mariah is going to take a more active role in Balsamiq Studios: the first task she’s taking on is to hand out free license keys to do-gooders, bloggers etc., so be nice to her!

We were brainstorming what her job title should be…Community Manager…VP or Philanthropy…then we settled on what she already is: my “Better Half”.

So please join me in welcoming Mariah to her new role; if you’d like to email her she is mariah@balsamiq.com.

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AtlasCamp, Podcast, Linked Mockups, yay!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. November 7th, 2008 under Company / Business, Links — 3 Comments

Hi there. It was a long day yesterday, with Lufthansa reminding me about how bad airplane food can be.

It’s good to be back in the Bay Area, even for just a few days. It’s a strange feeling, I’ve only been gone 6 months so it still feels like home a bit.

Anyways, AtlasCamp kicked off last night with a big dinner and introductions…the who’s who of Atlassian plugin development is here, I have so much to learn!

I wanted to point out two links:

• I got interviewed by one of my heros Bob Walsh (author of “Micro-ISV, from vision to reality“) for his Startup Success podcast, which I had been listening to since they started, I recommend it! (my interview starts at around minute 19 of episode 4). Thanks so much Bob!
• Michael Hackney just posted a tutorial on how to assemble multiple mockups into an HTML+image map+CSS “runnable” demo. I know many of you are waiting for this feature to be part of Mockups, but in the meantime you can use Michael’s files as a template. Check out his sample demo, it’s really cool! Thanks Michael!

Ok, time to get ready for a big day of learning!

Onward!

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