Balsamiq Blog

Donating Your Software: A Whole Lot of WIN!

by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 13th, 2009 under Company / Business, Customer Stories — 28 Comments

Background

I was shown the value of volunteering from my friend and former boss Robert Tatsumi back at Macromedia: he and his wife Sharon often organized volunteering outings: sorting items at the San Francisco food bank, packing sandwiches for the homeless at the Glide Memorial Church, etc.

I had never done anything like that before, and I remember being amazed at how much a group of motivated people could achieve in just a few hours, and how easy it was to make a difference in someone else’s life.

I decided then that volunteering and donating were going to be part of my life going forward and that I wanted to make it part of my nascent family’s values and traditions.

In preparation for staring Balsamiq, I read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start (required reading for any tech startup), which he starts off with the “Make Meaning” chapter. Here’s a short video in which he talks about it:

This really resonated with me. Problem was: how much meaning was Mockups going to make? Was “write software to help rid the World of bad software” a powerful enough goal? Could it really make a tangible difference? I wasn’t entirely sold. I felt the need to do more.

I remember asking one of my advisers about what else I could do: should I pick a charity to donate a percentage of profits to? Should I make one-time donations to a different charity every quarter? And if so, which? His answer was “worry about getting any revenue first, you’ll figure out how to give back as you go along”. He was right, it didn’t take long…

When working on the Mockups for Confluence pricing, I had copied and pasted Atlassian’s pricing page for Confluence and used it as a starting point for my own. At the end of it was a section about Community Licenses.

I remember reading it thinking: that’s a very nice way to do it and I’ll certainly match their policy, but is this it? Who will want my software?

The answer came to me a few days later, in the form of an email:

Hey,

Just found your software.

My wife and her friend have started a small nonprofit to alert local groups about climate change impact.

I’m a software person but do Java server software, not UI. As any nonprofit, they’re starting on the cheap. My wife put that site together using Google Sites.

They want to get a friend to do a ‘real’ site for them and are having trouble deciding on a design.

I’ve tried to give them help but they’re visual, I’m verbal and I can’t draw.

[...]

I remember thinking: whoa, interesting! Here’s someone who’s clearly doing some good for the World, and all I have to do to help them is generate a license key – a 45-seconds operation: copy+switch+paste+click+switch+paste+send.

Something that took me less than a minute to do could have a material impact on someone’s efforts in helping others and making the World a better place. The reward/effort ratio was extremely high.

I liked that feeling, a lot.

That’s when I decided to institute our do-gooder policy for the Desktop version as well:

If you are a do-gooder of any sort (non-profit, charity, open-source contributor, you get the idea), email us with a short blurb and we’ll send you a license, FREE of charge.

That was 14 months ago.

Ramping Up

As Mockups gained popularity, the number of do-gooder requests I received each day rose proportionally. After about five months it got to a point where I couldn’t keep up with it by myself, so I asked my wife Mariah to help me with it.

She did a wonderful job for a few months, but it become too much for her to do with a little help from me as well. That was one of the reasons we decided to hire Valerie, and she’s been doing a wonderful job at it since.

Right now I’d say we dedicate about 20-man-hour a week to sending licenses. I estimate it’s about 15% of our collective working time. Given that salaries are by far our biggest cost, this is not a small investment.

Current Stats

In preparation for this post I ran some GMail queries to calculate how much we’ve donated so far. Here’s what I found out:

Product	# of keys donated	Equivalent Unit Price	Total Value
Mockups for Confluence	97	$4,000	$388,000
Mockups for Desktop (site-wide)	152	$709*	$107,768
Mockups for Desktop (single license)	1,561	$79	$123,319
Mockups for JIRA	53	$799	$42,347
Mockups for XWiki	3	$6,000	$18,000
Total	2,366		$679,434

*A site-wide license of Mockups for Desktop would cost a lot more than $709 (in fact, we don’t even sell those), but I calculated that the average non-profit in the US has 10 employees (12.5 million US non-profit workers in roughly 1.2 million organizations – it’s 2001 data but it’s the best I could find, LMK if you have better info), so I used the same price of our 10-User pack.

I admit I was really surprised at the number: $680K is a lot of licenses!

I love it, I’m very proud of us right now.

Too Much? I disagree

If you think we’re donating too much, I’d like to try to convince you of the opposite. In fact, if you’re a software business owner, I’d like to persuade you to do more than what you’re currently doing.

Here’s the way I see it.

It’s a moral duty

The fact of the matter is that we (people in tech, knowledge workers) live extremely privileged lives. Just think about how much time you’ve spent on Twitter or Facebook lately, and compare it to how much time you spent worrying about providing for your family.

As software entrepreneurs, we enjoy insanely high profit margins (ours are in the 80% range for instance). In my view, that’s so high it’s kind-of unfair, and there’s definitely enough to share for a better cause.

Most of all, I believe non-profits should spend their limited money on doing good, not on software needed to help them achieve their goals.

It’s extremely rewarding

Because of our do-gooder program, we get THE BEST emails!

Each of them reminds us every day that humans are generally good, generous people.

The wide breath of causes we hear about is inspiring. It really spans the gamut, from large groups like Amnesty International to a single guy working on a new website for an orphanage in Honduras. From tech-y organizations like Mozilla.org to the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada, we hear from literally hundreds of people every week (here’s a very partial list).

Here’s a sample story from a do-gooder license recipient:

[...] thanks to your fast response, I was able to use Balsamiq mockups 8 minutes later, in a 3pm UI meeting yesterday with our donor database software vendor. We jumped into using the tool “cold”, using it full-force in the meeting.

Using the tool really helped keep folks focused and on-task, identifying additional requirements and solving detailed UI design issues right then and there. Everyone was very very impressed with power and ease of use. My coworker and I continued tweaking the mockups on the train ride home, and sent PNG copies back to the developer. Now he is off and running with these!

Bottom line, it went extremely well, and your tool was critical in that success. What a huge improvement over whiteboarding and/or paper mockups (especially since I have awful handwriting). Thanks again!

Shawn Cox, ACLU

here’s another:

One of the most difficult parts for any project is the startup phase. Bridging the gap beween what is envisaged and what is in the mind of IT professionals is a big initial step. The use of Balsamiq Mockups drastically shortens this step and makes working on the project fun from the very start. Clients and IT professionals can use the intuitive interface of Balsamiq Mockups to shape their ideas and quickly reach an agreement on how things should look and what the basic functionality should be. Apart from being a good way to start collaboration within the project, it simply saves a lot of time lateron in the project by being clear on what needs to be done from the word go.

Ed Vanvelzen, Amnesty International Netherland

here’s another:

I have used Balsamiq Mockups occasionally after installation. Mockups has provided efficient collaboration with the church’s administration. I change the Home page of our website every liturgical season or for a major holy day, and the turnaround time sometimes is very fast. Mockups helped me communicate page layouts to decision makers very easily.

Thanks again for a great product and your generosity,
Best regards, Rene R.

and here’s one more:

My name is Fitzgerald Steele, I’ve recently joined ACT, Inc as a User Experience Designer. ACT is a not-for-profit US corporation. Our mission is “helping people achieve education and workplace success.”

Mockups has been an invaluable tool for our UX team. We use it to visualize and communicate design options to stakeholders. We use Mockups to rapidly prototype application information architecture and perform quick UX evaluations. For me, Mockups is great because it allows us to quickly build visual, interactive prototypes, put them in front of project stakeholders and users, and generate conversation and consesus about project features and priorities. Since we’ve started using it, others within our organization have asked about it and have started using it as well.

Thanks for a great product!

There are lots and lots more – we’d love it if you shared your own story in the comments!

It’s really heart warming. Who wouldn’t want to receive emails like these every day?

It’s good for business

Like Tim O’Reilly, I’m a strong believer in the social value of business done right. It’s all about “creating more value than you capture“.

In other words, this is really a case of the more you give, the more you get.

I am going to try and put it in terms that even Scrooge would appreciate, so apologies if the bullets below sound cynical.

By donating your software:

• you get FREE testing and feedback: license recipients find bugs for you, give you great ideas on how to improve the software and do it in the nicest of ways, both because they’re usually nice people and because “they owe you a favor”.
• you get the best kind of word-of-mouth publicity. Non-profits regularely meet with corporations and other people who won’t qualify for a free license. If your software is good, they’ll likely recommend it to them.
• you improve the Triple-Bottom-Line: I heard this term for the first time in this Startup Success podcast episode. Basically as products and services become commoditized, customers start caring more about how what they buy impacts the World, both from an environmental and social aspect. Showing your commitment to making the World a better place sets your company apart from your competitors who are just in it for the money.
• you get great street cred with the open-source community: if I wasn’t trying to make a living as a software vendor, I’d very likely release Mockups as open-source. I also benefit from open-source software every day, so IMHO donating to OSS projects is the least I can do to give back. People on the OSS community respect that, and that’s a very powerful endorsement.
• you have a convincing arguments against hackers. Every few months we notice someone cracking our software and posting license keys or even key generators to the dark corners of the Web. It’s ok, it’s normal and it’s a sign of success. So far, we have always convinced these smart, usually young people to take those keys down with this simple argument: look, we’re good people, why are you trying to hurt us?
• you might be able to treat part of your donations as a tax deduction (ask your accountant).

In general, I think everyone will agree that having a good reputation results in more sales.

Now, the beauty of this is that even if you don’t believe any of the moral-duty, feel-good arguments I wrote about above and decide to start donating your software purely as a marketing move, the end-result is a big WIN for the recipients of your software anyways, so go right ahead! What do you know, even Scrooges can do good in the World!

For full disclosure and for reference, we also donate licenses for marketing reasons, both to bloggers willing to give us feedback and publicity with a review and to people who want to demo Mockups in front of a crowd. These kinds of donations are not included in the $680,000 figure above, and their value amounts to just about 13% of all the licenses we gave away thus far.

Going Forward

I have been wanting to write this post for a while but decided to save it for a special day. Today is that day, and to celebrate it we decided to donate some more, but this time in cash donations.

I asked everyone at Balsamiq to come up with a recipient for roughly $4,000 in donations, and this is what we came up with:

• Mariah, after 35 years, has found the Vietnamese orphanage she came from. We are still trying to figure out if it’s still around, but our plan is to deliver them our donation in person early next year.
• I am sponsoring my uncle Luigi’s trip to Africa in January 2010. He is a surgeon and joined a group called “doctors without vacations”, for which he and his colleagues use up vacation time to go to places in need of doctors and practice there.
• Marco is planning on sponsoring one or more projects similar to what you could find at Kiva.org (also a do-gooder license recipient) but organized by an organization based in Bologna. It will basically sponsoring part of a long-term project somewhere in Africa (he’ll share more details here or on Twitter as we figure out the details).
• Valerie donated to a campership fund that helps kids get to a magical (but expensive) sleep-away camp in Northern California. She says: “Charities have seen a dramatic dip in donations, so we remind our customers to keep giving to your favorite recipients, just give less. Keep flexing your donor muscle, even if you are able to spare less now than during boom years. It’s important to keep the generosity habit alive.”

We can think of no better way to celebrate our little company’s success, and are committed and looking forward to donating lots more in the future.

Speaking of which, I still have to run this through our accountants to see if it’s logistically feasible, but for the upcoming web version of Mockups we plan on giving you an option during sign up to specify a charity of your choice (or pick from a list), and we’ll donate 5% of the money you send us for your subscription to them.

That’s cash donations, not licenses. This idea was inspired by Working Assets (now called Credo), a long-distance telephone carrier I used for years back in San Francisco: their idea is that they round up your phone bill and use the extra change for progressive causes. We won’t round up your bill, but instead use part of it to do good in your name if you so wish. We’ll keep you posted on this program as we figure out the details.

We hope this post will inspire you do start donating your software as well, it’s really a whole lot of WIN.

Peldi for The Balsamiq team

— 28 Comments

28 Responses to “Donating Your Software: A Whole Lot of WIN!”

1. Duke3D Says:
   August 13th, 2009 at 7:29 am

   Hats off to you! I am quite impressed by your philanthropic spirit plus practical business sense – a marketing win for an ISV, a huge gift to the struggling non-profit community, and better UI’s for all. Looking forward to singing your praises in both the non-profit and Joomla developer communities.

2. Adam Wride Says:
   August 13th, 2009 at 9:10 am

   The donation part of myBalsamiq is a great idea. That feature and this post may just motivate me to finish off a website I’ve been working on for a couple months now: http://twomeals.org/ We’re oh so close, just don’t quite have the email stuff working yet. (Side note: You’d be surprised how many charities won’t accept money through PayPal)

3. Just 8 days and already profitable! - Napkee - make your mockups come alive Says:
   August 13th, 2009 at 12:20 pm

   [...] ask yourself why we gave out more free licenses than the ones we sold. I suggest you to read this amazing and inspiring blog post to fully understand why we decided to give away so [...]

4. ramon Says:
   August 13th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

   for a future project of mine I always planned to have a licensing model like:
   - 5$/month or
   - 50$/year or
   - 60$/year including a 20$ donation (so you actually pay only 40$/year for the service) to a charity

   i think this is a great way to encourage people to donate. what do you think?

5. Ian Young Says:
   August 13th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

   By giving to open source projects, not only do you get good word of mouth, you get to demo your product to tons of prospective customers. Just about every OSS dev has a day job, most of which don’t qualify for free licenses. So if we use your product for our OSS project and love it, we’re going to start asking our bosses if we can get some commercial licenses for the office. I think your strategy is great, and I hope it continues to work out for you.

6. shawn Says:
   August 13th, 2009 at 2:19 pm

   Peldi,

   Very inspirational. By reading this blog entry, it makes me want to get out there and do more for the less fortunate.

   Thanks for sharing this with all of us.

   Shawn

7. Nick Turrietta Says:
   August 13th, 2009 at 11:35 pm

   I fully agree with Peldi’s statements. I’m the webmaster at the Rock Church in San Diego. We received one of the 2,366 keys donated. We are using it to improve our church website. We are very impressed with the product and are thankful for the unexpected generosity. We work with other design firms, and of course Balsamiq Mockups has already come up as a topic of conversation. So, even if purely from a business perspective, the what Balsamiq is doing with the donations easily pays for itself long-term… in sales, branding, company perception, and customer relations. You can’t help but like them, because you know that they don’t have an ulterior motive. Think Google – “Don’t be evil!”

8. Lawrence Oluyede Says:
   August 14th, 2009 at 12:48 am

   Your blog posts inspire me very much, keep up the wonderful work you’re doing

9. Jake Boxer Says:
   August 14th, 2009 at 7:41 am

   The do-gooder license I got from Val was a total surprise; I had emailed you guys to thank you for providing such a useful demo. I said that it had helped me resist the temptation to bootleg, and I promised to pay for a full license as soon as my new job started. Val responded by thanking me for my enthusiasm and for avoiding “the pirate path” (as she put it), and gave me the license! I was shocked, and immediately convinced that the Balsamiq attitude was pervasive throughout the company (rather than just in the blog posts and website copy).

   Since then, Balsamiq has been super helpful. When I got the license, I was in the process of turning a web app that was being used internally in our household (to keep track of our chores, a sort of “super chore chart”) into one fit for public consumption. In addition to beefing up security and improving the architecture, this meant making the app much more usable (since users wouldn’t be able to walk into the room next to them and ask me how to use it).

   I (programming and usability), along with my mom (graphic design) and my best friend (copy writing), all work on the web app ( http://powrhouse.net/ ) together. Balsamiq allows me to quickly turn my ideas into things I can share with them and get feedback on. I’d been using Photoshop for this in the past, but it was a slow process, and it was often hard to explain to my teammates that they were rough mockups (they’d say things like “I don’t really like this, the font looks wrong”). With Mockups, it’s a fast process, and everyone understands which parts of the mockups deserve attention.

   Though my web app still needs some work, it’s leaps and bounds ahead of other things I’ve done in terms of usability, and Mockups deserves a huge amount of credit for this. It’s a joy to use, and produces incredible results quickly. Thank you so much for the license, and for the continued inspiration I’ve gotten from your blog.

10. James Standen Says:
    August 14th, 2009 at 11:08 am

    Very inspiring. Datamartist is just starting out- we’re making a “data sandbox” that lets people really play with data from multiple sources, without many of the constraints of databases and SQL.

    I bet there are lots of great folks and charities that could use our tool to understand their data- and avoid having to hire consultant database developers.

    I’m going to put nModals license donation program in place ASAP.

    You, and Balsamiq are a huge inspiration to startups like us. Keep up the great work.

11. Wendy White Says:
    August 17th, 2009 at 5:06 pm

    We greatly appreciate the license our not for profit organisation received from Balsamiq, it is great to see such goodwill from commercial software entrepreneurs.

    We are an interactive science museum which also runs three different websites in-house; Scitech – our main website, Astronomy WA – a website focusing on local astronomy news, and ScienceNetwork WA – a website focusing on contributions to science from local researchers.

    Currently we are re-developing the information architecture and navigation for our main website, and using Balsamiq for rapid prototyping of ideas has been very valuable, not to mention saving us reams of paper! We have limited resources to work with in-house and using Balsamiq has saved me time I can now spend on implementing some of the good ideas we’ve been able to generate so far.

12. Derek Says:
    August 18th, 2009 at 1:39 am

    The essence of donating is not to show off about it.

    [Peldi: I feared that this post might come across as too preachy, so touche'. My intention is not to show off but instead to hopefully inspire other startups to donate more. So far, I have heard of 3 that are starting to implement donation programs after reading this post, so I have no regrets about the 'show off' post above.]

13. Robert Tatsumi Says:
    August 24th, 2009 at 1:30 pm

    Peldi – excellent post! I think letting people know how a small companies can make a difference is a very good thing to share. Here is another story about how giving does not have to be a big thing to make a difference. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1158171/index.htm

14. Mark Says:
    August 31st, 2009 at 2:07 pm

    The software development world (or any business) should read this in it’s entirety and take it to heart – not because you are boasting but you are reminding us all that giving is good. It has inspired me to be better at giving and realise I may not give huge amounts but it will make a difference to someone and, I am lucky I do have something to give. Imagine non profits giving to non profits in a happy cycle of altruism. Awesome post. Thank you.

15. ConnectSolutions Podium (free) for Do-Gooders « ConnectSolutions Says:
    September 21st, 2009 at 10:43 pm

    [...] by our good friend Peldi over at Balsamiq, we are introducing a program to provide “do-gooder” non-profits with the opportunity [...]

16. Nigel McNie Says:
    September 29th, 2009 at 12:05 pm

    The Mahara project has been a beneficiary of one of the free licenses, and already we’re getting such great value from it! While us humble developers cannot hope to truly produce great design from a mockup tool alone, Balsamiq allows us to share our visions with minimal effort, where before it was a truly momentous task.

    We’ve used it several times already, and I’m sure it’ll see a lot more use in future. Thanks, Balsamiq team!

17. Chris Boerger Says:
    October 1st, 2009 at 5:10 am

    Yes! Yes! Yes!

    I love it! This is what we were made for. Thank you for setting an example and being an inspiration to those that read this blog.

    Anyone that has left the professional world to become a do-gooder has likely taken a big cut in income. It’s a leap of faith not only for you but for those that depend on you. The $680K “pay cut” you’ve taken is almost certainly a fraction of the value generated from the projects borne out of these free licenses.

    I sincerely thank you for committing to a counter-cultural lifestyle that puts others before themselves.

18. Donating your software - papadi Development Blog Says:
    October 11th, 2009 at 8:15 am

    [...] But the reason I'm writing this post is not about how useful and engenious it is but its about the latest blog post Peldi Guilizzoni (creator of the software) wrote. The title is "Donating Your Software: A Whole Lot of WIN!". Interesting way to look at software. Sure, being a member of WWF or Greenpeace or sending some money to Médecins Sans Frontières are noble gestures. But this is not the only way to "save this world"! Read the blog post! [...]

19. Rajaraman P Says:
    October 14th, 2009 at 6:43 pm

    My wife was working on few jobs and now due to this tough economy she went back to the community college ,learning some flash/flex , i with hope contacted for a license and Val was so prompt to give it to us and we can learn the mockup tool well …

    Hats off to you

    I don’t think you ever stop giving. I really don’t. I think it’s an on-going process. And it’s not just about being able to write a check. It’s being able to touch somebody’s life
    Oprah Winfrey – Life – Philanthropy

20. Patrice Williams Says:
    October 19th, 2009 at 1:23 pm

    Thank you so much for donating your wonderful s-ware. These days charities are operating on shoe-string budgets. Your donation has made it possible for us to proceed with a free service we hope to offer our members.

    The program is also so user-friendly. I was able to jump right in without any learning curve. We hope to create an app for our film festival, which is a fundrasier for our charity (www.goinggreenfilmfestival.com).

    Your customer support is also outstanding. I emailed you questions on a weekend and received a response same day. That is unheard of.

    So glad we came across your company and s-ware!

21. Ryan Schneider Says:
    November 13th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

    Just wanted to thank you for donating licenses to SnapImpact (a free app available on the iPhone App Store for finding local volunteer opprotunities). We’re now using Mockups in our new relationship with AllForGood.org, where we hope to donate more time improving the site.

    It really is a great product, I’m by no means a UI guy but could convey my intentions clearly with only a couple minutes of work.

    I also won a license at a local CocoaHeads meetup where the app was demoed, and have been using that for my new startup called GoodCasts which hopes to marry the meta-gaming aspects of casual games (things like Leaderboards, Challenges, and Achievements) with social activism by providing rewards for doing good in your community. Mockups and MockupsToGo.net literally saved me days in getting my iPhone to Facebook and back userflow mapped out. Thanks!

22. Massimo Sgrelli Says:
    November 16th, 2009 at 2:13 pm

    I’m really impressed. I’d like to meet you just for a small talk one day – I’m from Brescia. Keep doing business your way
    – Massimo

23. Tim Says:
    December 11th, 2009 at 7:16 am

    Thanks for giving us another role model. I added the same non-profit policy for our software – a Windows-based syringe pump controller. Most of our customers are researchers of some kind – the majority are at universities, some large pharmaceuticals and perhaps there may be a few non-profits out there who can benefit.

    Again, thanks for encouraging others to be responsible citizens and for leading by example.

24. Aaron Ortiz Says:
    January 5th, 2010 at 8:35 am

    Your vision is astounding and generous. You are extending your influence throughout the world by helping those who are helping others!

    Your product is excellent, and you can count on me to spread the word about it to all my friends who code for a living or volunteer.

    May Balsamiq prosper!

25. Scott Says:
    January 5th, 2010 at 10:04 am

    Thanks SO much for the free license! Loving it!

    I’ve been using Skitch, which doesn’t even come close to comparing with Balsamiq. You guys rock and so does this app.

26. Michael Rosenstein Says:
    January 12th, 2010 at 6:43 am

    What an awesome policy and outlook! The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database at the Mount Desert Island Biological Lab has benefited deeply from your great software. We use it to design better information visualizations that help scientists around the world develop hypotheses to understand the effects of environmental chemicals on human disease. Thank you for your donation!

27. Chris Castle Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 7:20 pm

    I downloaded the application one morning, and I had a working design for a new project just after lunch. This tool has already saved me so much time, and we haven’t even started tweaking the design or revisiting features. It gives us such a great way to show users what we are building and greatly increases their comfort level. It is not often that you find such a great tool that reduces the UI design time as well as reduces the development time. Thank you Balsamiq for all the time saved.

28. Mat Says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 5:30 pm

    Thanks a lot for this free licence !

    I used to draw user interfaces on paper… it was a waste of time. Balsamiq Mockups is a big time saver for me, I’ve really boosted my productivity ! It’s so simple to use…

    You have great product and a nice philosophy : congratulations for that !

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