Balsamiq Blog

Bootstrapping a Micro-ISV, Exposed

Luis Arias Joins Balsamiq

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 25th, 2010 under Company / Business — 11 Comments

It is my great pleasure to introduce to you the newest member of the Balsamiq team, monsieur Luis Arias, Web Programmer Extraordinaire.

If you’ve been following us for a while you’ll know that Luis and I have been working together since pretty early in the Balsamiq adventure: he coded the Mockups for XWiki plugin back in 2008 as an external contractor.

I enjoyed working with Luis so much that when it came time to start building the Mockups web application back in January 2009, he was my go-to guy.

Luis has been working on myBalsamiq for most of 2009, but only as a part-time project, often being stuck waiting for my input on things. Not budgeting enough time for the web app was one of my main mistakes for 2009, so I see convincing Luis to join as a full-time employee as one big step to correct it.

Luis brings a number of things to the table which our team was missing until now. Four examples:

he is a seasoned engineering manager,
he has a deep passion and understanding of Test-Driven-Development,
he is an avid open-source contributor,
he is very aware of (and quick-to-evaluate) new technologies to make our work better.

Luis’s job, at least at first, is to take the lead in “all things myBalsamiq”. Not only he’s the main developer of the back-end of the application, he’s also going to coordinate our work and set our priorities for it, as well publishing new releases, responding to support email, and of course making sure the servers are running smoothly.

He has already made a number of contributions to our internal processes, and I’m looking forward to learning more from him in the years to come.

Luis will also run the new “Balsamiq Tech Blog“, a place for us to share any open-source library we create (we have a few planned already), tips and tricks for programmers and things we learn the hard way as we develop Mockups on all of these platforms. Head over there to see his introductory post and if you’re a programmer, subscibe to our new blog’s RSS feed!

I am very excited about this new blog starting up, you’ll see more of that coming from Marco and Valerie in the near future.

Luis is a genuinely nice person, a family man who loves salsa dancing, plays saxophone and cuban percussions, is a member of the global IT Team for Democrats Abroad France and holds a position there of Member at Large in the Diversity Caucus.

He’ll be working out of his home near Paris, France.

Please join me in extending Luis a warm welcome to the Balsamiq family, we are thrilled to have him and are very excited about what we’ll be able to achieve together in the future.

Luis’ new Twitter account is @balsamiqLuis, which needs followers! You can also follow his personal account if you wish. I have also added @balsamiqLuis to the balsamiq/team Twitter list.

I will be updating our company page to reflect our new 6-team-members status (six!!!!) in the next few days. We’re not “a couple of people in a studio” any more, yes!

Onward!

— 11 Comments

First release of 2010: Draggable Tabs and bug fixes

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 19th, 2010 under Mockups, Release Announcements — 4 Comments

Hello friends!

Welcome to our first release of 2010.

Let’s get right to it!

New, Draggable Tabs!

The ability to drag the mockup tabs at the bottom of Mockups for Desktop is something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Michael first asked for this over a year ago! I had tried to code it before but gave up after a frustrating 3 days of digging inside the innards of the Flex framework. The best part about doing so well in 2009 is that we now have money to hire some of the best Flex developers out there who can get features like these done in a short week-long contract. It took a little while to integrate the new tab bar in our code, but lucky for us Marco was on it.

The feature is simple: the tabs now look like tabs instead of a row of buttons, disconnected from the content.

Before:

After:

Tabs shrink “a-la Google Chrome” when there are too many of them to fit:

When you hover over a tab, you’ll see a little (x) icon to close it, for all tabs (not just the selected one). The “reveal on hover” is taken from Safari, and the “(x) on all tabs” is taken from Firefox. This takes care of this old request from Paul Cormier.

The most important part of the feature, of course, is the ability to reorder tabs by dragging them around. You’ll see a little indicator letting you know where the tab will end up as you drag, “a la Firefox”.

You can also drag tabs that are not selected, of course:

Another change we made is to have the “New Mockup” tabs show up at the end, like every other tool does. This takes care of Jaanus’ old request.

Also note how hovering on the tab bar reveals a [+] button at the end for creating a new tab.

But wait, there’s more! You can drag a tab to the [+] button to clone it. Fancy!

A nice side-effect of this feature is that when you export your mockups to PDF, we will now follow the order you have them in when exporting the PDF pages. Thanks to Michael Bourque for working with us on this.

There’s still work to do on tabs, like adding a “Close Other Mockups” menu item in the right-click menu and having cloned mockups show up next to the original one, but we believe this is a huge step in the right direction. We’re eager to hear what you think of this feature. We’ve done our best to test it, but if you see something wrong or unexpected, please let us know and we’ll fix it right away.

Other Changes and fixes

All versions: we now show multiple snap lines, all the ones that match. Try it out, we think it’s an improvement.
All versions: fixed a bug when using the “space out” alignment commands when you had a lot of controls selected. Thanks @grandovskis for bringing this up!
All versions: the Formatting Toobar control is now called “Formatting Toolbar / Rich Text Editor”, for easier Quick Add searching. Thanks to Kip Hughes for the request (via IM).
All versions: fixed a small cosmetic issue with the List control, thanks Jeff Stewart for submitting the bug!
All versions: you can now type *** again to make a row of stars. Thanks John Virgolino for bringing this up!
All versions: fixed a bug with importing images from web when you hit the ENTER key instead of clicking on the button with the mouse.
Mockups for Desktop: Pasting controls into a new mockup acts as a “paste in place”. Thanks to all the people who asked for this, it was a simple one-line fix!
Mockups for Desktop: exporting to PDF or going full-screen marked mockups as dirty. That’s fixed now. Thanks Vitorio Miliano for bringing this up (via email)
Mockups for Desktop: doing a “Save All” used to save mockups that had been opened but not touched as well. Over-zealous! It’s now fixed, thanks to TheHollster for noticing!
Mockups for Desktop: when exporting to PDF, we now properly remember the last folder you used. Thanks to Ben Catherall and others for bringing it up!
Mockups for Confluence: fixed an issue with mockups that have spaces in their names. Thanks readparse for bringing this up!
Mockups for JIRA: importing images from the web works again!
Mockups for JIRA: now supports scandinavian characters in mockup IDs!
Mockups for FogBugz: you can now add mockups to wiki pages that have never been saved yet. Thanks to Jan Fabry for reporting it and helping us fix this!
Mockups for FogBugz: fixed a bunch of little possible security issues. Thanks so much to Jude Allred at FogCreek for spotting those!
Mockups for FogBugz: fixed a small issue with IE8.

How do I update?

Mockups for Desktop: here (you might hit this one-time error if you haven’t updated in a while)
Mockups for Confluence: here
Mockups for JIRA: here
Mockups for XWiki: here
Mockups for FogBugz: here (onDemand customers: this will go live for you automatically in a few days)
Web Demo: here

What we’re working on

Even though you cannot tell because we haven’t shared all of the good news yet, we start 2010 as a very different company than what we closed 2009 with. More people means more fun stuff we can do but also more internal work to do: setting up health-care benefits and 401k, setting up new blogs for everyone, automating more tasks, improving the website, all that good stuff…. We’ll share it all with you in the weeks to come, so stay tuned!

We are also pushing hard on the web app, with a new and much improved build going out to our beta participants this week. If the new build is well received, we’ll invite more people to the beta (thanks to all of those who have expressed interest so far!).

Onward!

Peldi for the Balsamiq Team

— 4 Comments

Balsamiq Roadmap for 2010

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 3rd, 2010 under Company / Business, Mockups — 10 Comments

This is part two of a two-part post about what happened in 2009 and our plans for 2010. We did this last year as well, it’s becoming somewhat of a tradition!

By the way, thanks so much for all the support and nice words you sent us after yesterday’s post. All this attention is a little overwhelming but it’s a great motivator to continue to give it all we’ve got, so thank you!

I am beyond excited about 2010, I think it will definitely be a key year for us.

First of all, let’s talk about the features we KNOW we MUST deliver in 2010.

Re-using Controls

The ability to re-use pieces of mockups across your wireframes is our current #1 shortcoming, and our top requested feature on GetSatisfaction.

I have put it off in 2009 (here’s our FAQ about it) because I considered it an advanced feature and needed to get some basic features done first, but the more I use Mockups, the more I feel the need to support it.

Some people call it templates, others call it “master pages”. We are calling them “external controls” for now, which is a much more flexible way to do it.

Basically the idea is that you’ll be able to take a group and convert it into an external control, saved on its own file (in your “project assets” or “account assets” folder). When you make a change to that file, each mockup that uses it will (optionally) get the updates.

You’ll be able to drag and drop these kind of controls straight from the UI library, resize them and set some of their properties, just like any of the built-in controls.

You’ll be able to create libraries of these controls to share with your team and others.

The wireframes on MockupsToGo will also be converted into this kind of reusable, external control.

Very exciting stuff. We’ll start work on it in early February.

The Web App

We’re putting the finishing touches on version 1.0 of the web app, which is called myBalsamiq. It will have projects, commenting, super-easy sharing, real-time-collaboration, RSS feeds, the goods!

Here’s a couple of screenshots to whet your appetite:

The beta is still closed at the moment, so please don’t ask us for access quite yet. We’ll post here when we have anything to share.

Switching to Player 10, Air 1.5

Flash Player 10 is now on more than 90% of computers worldwide, so we can finally switch to requiring it.

Aside from being a lot faster than player 9, it will enable us to add the following cool features:

* properly embedding a font! Bye bye Comic Sans!
* upping the maximum mockup size from 2800×2800 to 4095×4095 pixels
* vertical text! (for labels and tabs)
* Right-To-Left language support
* better printing
* spell check!

We’re going to spend the next couple of weeks thoroughly testing Mockups on Flash Player 10 and Air 1.5, to make sure there are no surprises. Once the switch is made, we’ll start going through the list above. Yay!

Also, Air 2.0 is coming, and it’s FAST! Mockups will feel A LOT snappier…you can try out the beta of it already if you like.

A new skin

Mariah’s hand-drawings have served us really well this far, and I still love them. They do have a strong character though, they’re instantly recognizable and are a bit too playful for some people.

We’ve heard from many of you that you’d like to have a cleaner, more professional skin to show your wireframes to your more “old-school” clients.

In 2010 we’ll add such a skin…it will still be “sketch-like”, but much much cleaner. We’re very excited about it and hope you’ll like it too!

The plan is to let you choose your favorite skin from a menu item.

I have the feeling that this seemingly little feature will really take Mockups to a new level.

Other features

Other important features are the abilty to rearrange tabs via drag+drop (this is pretty much ready, try it now in the pre-release version!), the “Toggle Markup” feature, the ability to only export the selected controls to PNG, the in-product “check for updates” feature, and others.

Longer term, we want to publish a set of APIs so that others can integrate myBalsamiq with their own back-end system. Aside from the technical challenge, there are some licensing issues to think about…this will be challenging but also very cool, I can’t wait. I suspect we’ll start to really think about this in the 2nd half of the year (gotta give the web app some time to mature first!)

We might also add another wiki integration ourselves this year…Jive Clearspace and Mindtouch are the front-runners in my mind, the ones that seem to have a community of commercial plugin vendors starting to form around them. We shall see. Let us know what you think!

Other than that, we have tons and tons of little- and medium-sized improvements to do, our TODO list in Pivotal is ENORMOUS! Fun stuff, we’ll be busy this year!

I hesitate to even write this, but towards the end of the year we might start thinking about our next product…we have lots of ideas and one clear front-runner…but I don’t really want to think about it quite yet, Mockups needs our full attention right now!

Company Changes

The best part of doing so well in 2009 is that we can now afford to expand our team a bit, filling out the roster, so to speak.

We have TWO AWESOME hires lined up, we’ll announce each very soon. I’m SO thrilled at the thought of working with them every day and all that we’ll be able to accomplish together! I don’t want to say more yet even if I’m dying to!

As we grow in staff, we’ll also grow as a company. We just set up our 401k contribution plan and are looking into providing health insurance for our US employees. We’ll also start having some internal company policies (sounds more formal than it will be), which we’ll definitely share with you on this blog to get your feedback on.

I would also love for everyone at Balsamiq to blog more…we are learning so much, it would be a shame not to share it all with you.

Financially, my goal is to reach $2M in revenue, with a stretch goal of $2.5M. That seems like an enormous number right now, we’ll see.

Challenges

I feel that Mockups (the product) and Balsamiq (the company) are both going through their teens right now. No longer little kids, but not yet mature adults.

In other words, these are turbulent, transformative months, when we decide what kind of adults we want to become.

I hope to be up to the task of steering this ship in the right direction…luckily I am surrounded by great advisers, staff and blogs to help along the way. If you see us make a bad move, tell us! OK? Thanks.

My job will have to change once again, delegating more and spending more time communicating internally (making sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing) and externally (talking to partners etc)…more of a managerial role than I’ve been doing so far. I will continue to make an effort to keep my hands in the code, as that’s really my passion and what I’m best at.

As a company we’ll have to start acting a bit more grown-up, meaning a better website (more updated, easier to navigate, cleaner-looking), as well as standardizing how we deal with partners, resellers and also optimizing our internal processes more.

As the product matures a bit, I suspect we’ll have time to look at metrics a bit more…I’ve been heads down in features right now, totally ignoring anything other than what I KNEW had to be done. Do it first, optimize it later, know what I mean?

Community

The community that formed around Mockups fills us with pride and joy, so we want to help it grow and help its members be successful even more.

For instance, that means giving them ways to make money off of us, by selling external control packs, or simply by us starting an affiliate program.

We’ll also continue to share everything we learn through this blog and by speaking at conferences. As I mentioned in the previous post, we’ll also want to support some more blogs, events, groups and podcasts this year, via sponsorships or discounts.

Last but not least, we will continue to support the efforts of non-profits and do-gooders around the world. Our goal is to give away as much as we take in, we’ll see how we do on that front.

Parting thoughts

I think the recipe for 2010 is the same we’ve had from the start: work hard, stay true to our values, be proud of what we do every day, provide as much value as we can, and have fun!

Onward!
Peldi

— 10 Comments

A look back at 2009

by Peldi Guilizzoni. January 3rd, 2010 under Company / Business — 38 Comments

Wow. Just wow.

It’s hard for me to believe how much has happened in Balsamiq-land in 2009.

I feel like a completely different person than when I wrote the “A Look back at 2008” post, just 12 months ago. In a way, I am a different person, and Balsamiq is a completely different company as well.

In this two-part post I’ll first look at what happened in 2009, then share some of our plans for 2010, which we are beyond excited about.

Product Enhancements

Mockups has definitely come a long way in 2009, but we like to believe that it’s still the simple and focused tool we set out to build from the beginning.

Number of official releases: 48

As planned, we released almost every week, sometimes even twice in the same week…we also had a few “secret” releases to fix bugs before anyone noticed.

We are happy we kept the weekly schedule, as it allowed us to fix bugs quickly and showed our customers our commitment to the application.

The drawback of releasing this often is that it makes it harder for us to work on bigger, tougher features. Since we have a few of those planned for the near future – see next post – we might slow down the pace for a little while…maybe to releasing every other week, we’ll see what feels right.

I also have recently realized that updating every single week might be more than most people have an appetite for. We don’t want you to feel like keeping up with our releases is a job, know what I mean? What do you think?

Here are some of the major features we released this year:

Links! The no.1 new feature of the year was the ability to link mockups together. It’s a good feature – no, it’s an essential feature – but it’s one that I didn’t really want to do for a long time for fear it would change Mockups entirely, and one that took me a while to fully digest. That’s why the initial release of it was a bit rocky, it took a few iteration to get it to a point where it was really usable. And guess what, we’re still tweaking it, and we’re not done either (we need to improve how we position mockups while in full-screen, for instance). In retrospect, we needed to include our awesome community earlier in the process for this important feature…I wanted to make it come out with a bang, which was a big mistake. That’s when I learned that long-term value trumps any short-term marketing scheme.

Zoom! Probably the other biggest feature we released this year was zoom and pan. This was a direct result of having someone other than me in the code-base: the coordinate translation calculations required for zooming is one of those things that scare me (not sure why, it’s irrational), so I was planning on postponing this feature for a while. Luckily Marco had no such fear: he jumped in and had it done in no time. Unfortunately, my excitement about getting this awesome new feature in the hands of our customers made me jump the gun and release it in a bad state, but we fixed it all up in a couple of hours in the end (see below).

Mockups for FogBugz! The other major release of the year was Mockups for FogBugz, Marco’s first back-end integration project. We are really pleased with how it turned out and it’s selling very well, both the on-premise and the hosted version.

In Mockups for JIRA, we got rid of the annoying watermarks and replaced them with a 30-day trial. We added the Personal (3-editors) license level first, then switched to full user-based pricing, which is more fair and flexible.

In Mockups for Confluence, we added the 3-editor and 10-editor license levels and added support for linking mockups together, which is super-cool.

Other big features, specific to Mockups for Desktop, include the ability to export all of your mockups as a multi-page, interactive PDF, more native menus, the semi-secret but awesome “DropBox integration“, the Open Recent menu, the switch from Comic Sans to Chalkboard on OSX, a new application icon and a cleaner application skin in general. We also added support for pasting images into a mockup and a way to reuse common images via the project and asset folders.

Some other editor enhancements worth noting are:

early in the year, we added the ability to import images from Flickr
we added iPhone controls and icons
we added the markup syntax for *bold*, _italic_, [links] and -disabled- text, as well as supporting \r for multi-line support
we added the ability to move the UI Library to where you like it best, optionally docking the property inspector as well, for a more “standard graphics program” feel
for those who really want to use Mockups for more than wireframing, we introduced some Geometric Shapes, with lots of options
we also added “snap on center” and “space out” buttons, which are very handy

We made hundreds of other changes and bug fixes, if you have a few hours to spare you can read our Release Announcements blog posts for the year for all the details.

There’s still a lot to do before we can even say that Mockups is “implemented to vision“, a milestone we think we’ll hit late this year. I’ll blog more about our “Grand Vision” for Mockups soon, I promise.

Financial results

As stated on this blog post from 12 months ago, my goal for the year was to hit $400k in revenue, with a stretch goal of $500k. Well, once again I was reminded about how bad I am at forecasting financial results.

2009 Gross Revenue: $1,626,528.93

That’s over 4 times my 400k goal and over 3 times my stretch goal.

To say that we are blown away by this success is a huge understatement, I never thought a little app like Mockups could bring in these kinds of numbers…and in a recession!

It’s simply awesome…we are literally in awe, every day.

2009 Profits: $1,139,919.59

We were able to maintain a 70% profit margin even as we went from 1 full-time employee to 3, which I’m really happy about – gotta stay scrappy!

This also means that we are very well positioned for the years to come, with money to invest in the company and a solid little cushion in the bank to keep us going even if – God forbid – we hit a rough patch in the future. I love it.

Here are a few charts for your enjoyment. These all show data since we launched, 18 months ago:

Those are some sweet charts, I can’t believe they’re OUR charts! What a ride!

The feeling is the one of being strapped to a rocket, trying to hang on and somehow attempting to steer it a bit by shifting my body weight to one side or the other.

Sales seem to have stabilized a bit in the last 4 months, which is a nice break while we prepare to scale up more – though it could also be due to Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, we’ll see what surprises January brings…

Company Changes: From “I” to “We”

The biggest change of the year, of course, was Marco joining in March and Valerie in May.

Looking back, it’s funny for me to read the end of year post for 2008, with all those “I”s in there. First of all, I should have already been using “we” since Mariah has been helping out with design and support since 2008, but I guess 12 months ago Balsamiq still felt like “my little baby“. That feeling is now totally gone, replaced by “wow I created this MONSTER-baby that now requires 3 people to tend to it full-time, with some part-time help as well! Argh!”

It seems so obvious now, but I have no doubt in my mind that Valerie and Marco were essential to our success in 2009. When I started Balsamiq I thought I would go at it alone for years…I was really scared at the thought of hiring anyone, and I didn’t expect this kind of success, by far.

Both in Marco and Valerie’s case, I waited until it became clear as day that if I didn’t hire someone quickly, I was going to hurt the company. In both cases I just woke up one day and KNEW that the time was right.

I also knew right away that Marco and Valerie were exactly the right people, and consider convincing them to join Balsamiq my biggest personal achievement of 2009.

I feel really blessed to work with such awesome individuals, sharing this adventure, learning together and from each other, every day. That’s really what it’s all about. I am so thankful.

Community

Speaking of awesome people…the community that formed around Mockups feels like a huge group-hug, every day. We are so lucky to be surrounded by such smart, kind and supportive people. Michael, Adam, Mark, Jenny, Leon, Enrico, Vitorio, Theresa, and countless others. We are so lucky to know you!

To support the community we started off the year by launching MockupsToGo, which has been a big success (84 posts, 222 subscribers, 290,000 page views). It’s so awesome to see the widgets you come up with! In 2010 we plan on making the MockupsToGo stencils more easily embeddable in the app, stay tuned for more.

Together we designed some of the most important features of Mockups, like linking, zoom, the UI library position and others. In 2009 I have learned that we simply MUST involve you in the feature design right from the beginning, or it won’t come out right. Thank you so much for helping us with your use-cases and insight!

Later in the year we released a version of Mockups designed exclusively for UX trainers to use in workshops, which is starting to get some traction. We’ll try to push it some more in the new year: whatever we can do help UX professionals in our shared quest to rid the world of bad software is a good investment in our book.

Last year also saw the beginning of a community of 3rd party tools that integrate with Mockups, starting with the WebOrb exporter by MidnightCoders, the excellent BMML to Image Maps converter by Vitorio Miliano, the BMML import feature of FlairBuilder, and of course Napkee, “Balsamiq’s perfect companion.”

We are thrilled with these efforts, are doing whatever we can to support them (we built the “custom properties” feature just for them, for instance) and would love to see more. Next year we plan on providing more APIs to allow easier integration with other back-end systems…see the next post for more info.

Last but not least, I estimate that we donated around $1M worth of our software to do-gooders, non-profits and other worthy individuals. It’s our small way of making meaning, and we’re proud to do it.

Conferences and Sponsorships

In 2009 we attended a few great conferences. We had our first little conference booth (at Atlassian Summit, which was a blast), and we also sponsored LessConference and the iPhone Camp Bahm.

I was fortunate enough to speak at the Atlassian Summit (video: one and two), at WebExpo in Prague and at Red Gate in Cambridge, UK for the Springboard startups. Valerie attended and spoke at AtlasCamp, and Marco attended The Business of Software in San Francisco, where we also threw a massive meet-up / after-conference party (with the generous last-minute help of Atlassian).

I am looking forward to speaking at a few more conferences this year – I am confirmed to speak at the Business of Software 2010 conference in Boston (can you believe it? me neither!) and I’m hoping to get confirmed for FOWA London.

We have also been sponsoring the excellent Wireframes Magazine, as well as supporting groups like the Product Group in NYC, the Find Invest Grow and TechStars incubators, the Founders Institute and a few others.

I am looking forward to sponsoring more events, blogs and podcasts next year. But before you email me with a pitch, know this: our policy is to only sponsor things we love, things we want to make sure we can keep reading / listening to / attending in the future. In other words, we will find you, not the other way around. You just focus on being “so good we can’t ignore you” and we’ll come knocking.

The Balsamiq Blog

A new thing for the year is that you can now subscribe to this blog via email, or even listen to our best posts as a podcast, provided by the cool new Hear a blog service.

Here are the posts from 2009 that got the most attention:

Twitter

Twitter continues to be an integral part of our daily lives, and our usage of it is constantly evolving as we all learn more about it. The introduction of Twitter lists now tells us who we are in the eyes of the Twittersphere and allows us to show you a view of our whole competitive landscape, as well as what we consider to be essential startup tools. Even our Twitter background (below, click to enlarge) has received some nice praises, so thank you!

Facebook

If you live in Facebook, you have to thank Valerie for taking over our little page there: http://www.facebook.com/mockups

We now have over 1,100 fans, and use the page to share and discuss topics that are more informal than what we’d share on this blog, as well as release announcements, etc.

We’re still figuring out to best provide value to you via Facebook, so thanks for helping us along the way!

Sales: starting to “Work the Channel”

In 2009 we started to dip our toes in different sales channels for Mockups.

For instance, we decided to sell Mockups for FogBugz both as an on-premise plugin, purchased once with an optional yearly maintenance fee (just like we already did for Confluence and JIRA), as well as a monthly subscription, using Spreedly as a payment processor.

On the Atlassian side, you can now purchase Mockups for Confluence or for JIRA directly from us and install it on your servers, or you can purchase it via a few selected Atlassian resellers, or you can purchase it from us and then install it on your Confluence or JIRA server that Atlassian hosts, or now even just purchase it as a monthly subscription on top of your Confluence or JIRA hosted package. In other words, you have lots and lots of options!

Each of these different ways to charge for our product has its pros and its challenges. One of the first things we’re working on for 2010 is a nice “Which Mockups version is best for me?” wizard, to help you buy exactly what you need.

We are learning a lot from these different sales channels, and are happy to support them all for now. I am looking forward to learning a lot more in this area in 2010, as we expand to support more platforms, more resellers and start looking into affiliate programs.

Oh, 2009 should also be remembered as the year we stopped writing invoices and quotes manually in Word – we are happy Freshbooks customers now.

We also had to cave in and get a fax number – we use MyFax and are happy with it so far.

Competitive landscape: From “new tool” to “the one to beat”

My, it seemed that 2009 was the year of new wireframing tools. Someone even complained that we’re drowning in them!

In just a few months Mockups went from being this quirky little new tool with a scrappy, never-seen-before hand-drawn interface to being “the gold standard“, the one to beat.

Mockups is even required knowledge for certain jobs, which is hilarious given that it takes about 3 minutes to learn!

I really didn’t expect this transition, and while it’s a nice feeling, it’s going to take me a little while to get used to this new role. Like Val says, it’s easier to get to the top than to stay at the top.

We don’t pay too much attention to our competitors – we’d rather spend our time on listening to our customers and giving them what they need – but from what we’ve seen a number of our features have been included in other tools, which is very flattering.

It doesn’t look like any other tool in our same price-range is gaining much traction, but even if they do, if we continue to focus on usability and customer service, I think we’ll be fine.

We’re always on our toes though…remember Friendster? Yeah, we don’t either.

In general I am very pleased that so many people are trying to help others build more usable software…the more the better!

The Internet is a big place, there’s plenty of room for multiple players. We know Mockups is not for everyone, and that’s totally fine.

If you’d like to get a sense of the competitive landscape we’re in, follow the tweets from all the wireframing tool makers we know of via this list: balsamiq/wireframing-tools.

Mistakes

Before we go I’d like to reflect on some of the mistakes I’ve made this year, or at least the ones I have identified as such – I might be making more that I’m not even aware of right now!

A really broken build: this was the most “visible” mistake of the year, when I published a bad build and left the house right after it. We were able to fix it in a couple of hours but now that we have so many customers, even a couple of hours can cost us. Here’s my apology – look at the comments to get a sense of how great our customers are.

Accountants: this year I learned (through stressful mistakes) that finding accountants and lawyers who have the exact experience you need (in my case both international taxation experience AND being bilingual Italian/English) is both extremely hard and extremely important. Also, if you’re a founder of a startup that has all of its employees in the same country, don’t come to me wining about bureaucracy…you got it easy my friend!

Setting wrong expectations for the Web App: right, the web app. That’s been “the other thing” that we’ve been working on all year, our “next big thing” that’s been in private beta for a few months now. The mistake I made about the web app is to not realize that with all that we have going on, we’d really only be able to dedicate tiny amounts of time to it. We’ve been working with an external contractor on it for a while – and it’s really very close to where we want v1.0 to be – but without having at least one person dedicated to it in-house, and zero revenue, it’s been hard to justify investing the time on it. I guess I thought we’d have more time. We are fixing this staffing issue very soon, and are very eager to get the web app in your hands early in 2010. It won’t be perfect, but it will be a start, and I consider it a key part of our strategy in the future. Thank you for your patience on this one, and sorry for promising earlier releases. We live and learn.

OK, this has been an epic post, I’d better publish it so that I can get started on part 2, where I start thinking ahead at 2010. Lots to share there!

Onward!
Peldi

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Hi this is Peldi from Balsamiq. This blog is a mixture of product updates, company updates and posts about my experiences as a programmer-turned-entrepreneur. If you're into 37Signals and A Smart Bear, this blog is for you.