

Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009 - nsoonhui
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2010/01/03/a-look-back-at-2009/

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maxklein
Balsamiq has twice as many twitter followers as Facebook 'Fans'. I'm strongly
of the opinion that the word 'Fan' and the way it shows up in your Facebook
profile makes Facebook pages a lot less useful for businesses. I want to get
info about balasamiq, but I am not ready to describe myself as a fan to
everyone on my facebook friendslist, considering that I've not used it.

Facebook should allow you to 'friend' a business without having to be a 'fan'
of it. I think if they allowed this, facebook interaction between business and
normal users would be much higher, considering the much larger facebook
userbase.

~~~
vaksel
Twitter is useless compared to Facebook. You get a lot more engagement from
Facebook.

With twitter your window of opportunity is the 5 seconds that you show up in
their feed. With Facebook that time is a lot longer.

You can have 10,000 followers on twitter, but only 20 people will see your
announcement, since you'll show up in their feed for 5 seconds.

Anyone who follows a business account on Twitter, is most likely following
more than 100 people(and most likely >1000), which means you are one of
hundreds of people trying to talk to them

~~~
maxklein
I just don't get the utility of twitter for business. I see one great use for
twitter, which is what I am using it for right now: Get major influencers to
follow you. When you do that, you have a good chance to be republished by one
of them, which is great PR.

(That's why I bothered writing two articles recently, trying to raise my
twitter 'important people' follower count. It actually works somewhat.)

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vaksel
I'll give you an example, I needed to buy some wine as a gift. So I tweeted
out to Gary Vaynerchuk what to buy. He tweeted back with a few suggestions.
And I got into my car and drove down to Wine Library and bought one of his
suggestions.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
youre from jersey? respect++

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icey
Pretty impressive for any company, let alone a bootstrapped one. I'm really
glad Peldi still makes these sorts of posts, a lot of times the openness
disappears when the money starts coming in.

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3dFlatLander
I agree with the idea of openness. But, if that much money started coming in
for something I made, I'd feel awkward reporting on the numbers.

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cwan
Not sure if he'd thought it through that far, but it seems like a pretty good
and calculated risk that's paying off. The fact that he is as open as he is
(though hopefully he knows better than to report numbers that appear worse to
the IRS), I think makes his customers want him to succeed that much more.

Broadly, it's a tool that enables others to build their own sites but also
their own businesses (and I think entrepreneurs like supporting each other as
it helps prove that the rewards do indeed exist). It lets users share, in a
sense, in the success to be associated with a product they've used while also
being inspired.

Of course, there can be a thin line between sharing and bragging/offending his
user base, but I think he treads it quite well.

~~~
kevinherron
I think they moved HQ to Italy. Would they still have to report to the IRS?

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balsamiq
We have HQ in Italy but most of our business comes through our US presence, so
yes we report to the IRS...AND to the Italian taxman. We're a micro-
multinational! :)

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cperciva
This is making me feel really inadequate -- Tarsnap launched publicly only 5
months after Balsamiq, but it's nowhere near Balsamiq in revenues. (Possibly
Tarsnap pricing starts at 300 picodollars/month rather than at $79.)

Oh well, humility is good for the soul, right? :-)

~~~
davidw
The Cynic: ask for picodollars and you shall receive picodollars.

Joking aside though, I think that I see something of myself in your marketing.
Your web page, for instance, is very plain, which to someone like me is great.
But people seem to not like that, for whatever reason. Maybe you should do
some A/B testing with a "flashier" (but no flash, please!) version? I would be
curious to hear about the results. This is one of those things that irritates
me about the world at times: people ought to be looking at your product and
its price, rather than fades, drop shadows and the like... but they don't.

Also: he's targeting people used to paying for stuff, whereas lots of Linux
and BSD people are, well, kind of stingy. Maybe a bigger push towards Mac
would be another idea?

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cperciva
I think you're right on both counts. I have a friend who is trying to find a
way to make the Tarsnap website look nicer without losing its essential
geeky/minimalist character; if/when he comes up with something I'll definitely
be doing some testing to see how it compares. That said, I don't think
Tarsnap's conversion rate is particularly bad -- I'd say that most important
issue is simply getting people to the Tarsnap website in the first place.

Promoting Tarsnap as a solution for OS X runs into the GUI problem: Most OS X
users don't have a clue what to do with a command-line interface. Tarsnap will
gain a GUI at some point in the future, but of course this is a rather non-
trivial amount of code to write...

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neilk
_I have a friend who is trying to find a way to make the Tarsnap website look
nicer without losing its essential geeky/minimalist character;_

Maybe you misspoke here, but based on this quote I think your approach could
be improved.

1) You went to a friend. Unless this person is an experienced designer of
commercial websites, that doesn't sound like the right approach.

2) Your primary concern is preserving the site's "geeky/minimalist character",
although that seems to be your Achilles heel. The last time Tarsnap was on
news.yc, I made the same incorrect assumption, that this was not really a
business, but just a side project of an academic. You and I even talked about
that in the comments.

3) You're framing the problem as aesthetics, but it's really about poor
communication. Engineers often make the mistake of thinking that visual design
= making something look nice. This is like saying a database designer makes
data nice.

Just like a database designer sees important patterns to capture, a great
producer or designer understands how to drive website visitors to the right
understandings and behaviours.

It sounds to me that if you go down the route you descirbe, you'll have all
the pain of redoing the site, without solving the more fundamental problems.

~~~
cperciva
_You went to a friend. Unless this person is an experienced designer of
commercial websites, that doesn't sound like the right approach._

I went to a talented web designer who understands my vision. I think
understanding my vision is important -- otherwise I'm likely to pay $$$ only
to be presented with a website which I hate and don't want to use.

~~~
Poiesis
I think what people are trying to tell you is that--with all due respect--your
opinion on your website is not worth a damn.

I mean, if you're interested in pageviews, and revenue--and your comments wrt
Balsamiq seem to indicate you are--you need to realize that the aesthetic
you're looking for is likely costing you customers and hence money.

Nobody's going to fault you if you prefer to make less money and keep your
website any way you want, but if you're going to complain about sluggish
growth you've gotta realize that your customers' habits and tastes are much
more important than your own.

In related news, the demographic you seem to be targeting is quite possibly
either unwilling or unable to pay for it; the former because they'd rather
hack something up on their own and the latter because they may not be the
decision maker for their organization.

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snitko
Don't know how about you, but I find <http://gomockingbird.com> way better and
attractive. It doesn't use flash, it has pretty controls and generally a
better UI with tiny little details like, say, aligning the elements relatively
to each other. But still, since they are profitable (good for them) and make
that much money, there's probably a need for such services on the market.

~~~
dpcan
Mockups is more than just an app that does mockups. It's integrated with other
very important systems.

Smart partnerships and good networking are far more important than a pretty
product. (When it comes to revenue)

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boucher
Although I would expect that to be true, It doesn't appear to be. This post
doesn't break out profit by specific product, but that last post that did so
indicated that the desktop version of the app accounted for 80% of the
revenue. That version doesn't really have any of the integration feature of
the other versions of Balsamiq.

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bgurupra
Always been totally refreshing to read Peldi's blog , amazing amazing what he
has achieved and how humble he is about it!

EDIT: I do have one question though, how is your typical work day? With a
release every week, thousands of customers to support and a full fledged
family - how do you manage to even stay sane ? :-)

~~~
balsamiq
Hi there. Typical workday is wake up at 7, get my kid ready and take him to
school, than back to the office (home) at around 9:30. Work until 6:00pm, then
family time again, then put the kid to bed at around 9:30, then work again
until 12:00-12:30. It's a lot, but I can take a morning or a night off pretty
often. Mariah only works on Balsamiq maybe an hour or two a day, Marco's
workday is about 9:30 to 5:30, and Valerie's workday is...actually, I don't
really know! It seems like she's always working! :)

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balsamiq
Hi there. Just FYI, I'm reading this if you have any questions. Peldi

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crocowhile
Being Italian myself, I'd like to commend you guys for your job: this kind of
entrepreneurship is really rare in Italy and it's great you are contributing
with such a fantastic example.

I have just read on your blog <
[http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/10/14/personal-whats-
your-...](http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/10/14/personal-whats-your-story-
why-start-balsamiq/) > how it all started and I found it so inspirational
(maybe just because I am in a similar situation right now?!)

Can I ask you if you ever regretted moving back to Italy? It seems to me you
managed to separate the good aspects of life in Italy (Bologna and the family)
with the bad ones (taxes and servers, i suppose, are in the US).

~~~
balsamiq
Ciao crocowhile, we have not regretted moving back to Italy at all so far. Our
servers are in the US, taxes are split in both places. HTH!

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davidw
Ok, we just found a sponsor for the Italy Hacker News Meetup ;-)

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ramanujan
Wow, just fooled around with the mockups tool. VERY impressive and responsive
-- like an internet version of Omnigraffle. Well deserved success.

Check it out:

<http://www.balsamiq.com/#>

My only feature request would be for more keyboard shortcuts. My fingers know
Omnigraffle like they know Emacs.

(Also: from a technical perspective, looks like this is a Flex app. Very
different approach than the 280north guys with their ObjectiveJ approach.)

~~~
balsamiq
Hi ramanujan, thanks for the kind words.

Try the Desktop version for more keyboard shortcut support:
<http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download>

Browsers "eat" so many key combinations :(

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protez
Awesome! The profitability of your business made my jaw drop to the floor. I
guess businesses in other sectors may have to generate more than ten million
dollars of revenue just to be par with your bottom line.

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richardburton
I think this kind of openness is great. It attracts curious entrepreneurs to
the site who might be thinking of hacking together an app and are interested
in how other people have succeeded. Those same people might just use Mockups
to help them. Great marketing.

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k7d
The most important thing I take away from this: Peldi's success is very
inspiring for anybody intending to do their own thing

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oomkiller
Love the tool, but the price is a bit high for my limited startup wallet :) I
especially like the Confluence integration.

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superchink
The #1 result on Google for "mockups"—that is impressive!

They've truly found a great niche and carved it out themselves.

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arpit
Wow. I am completely impressed! As a Flash developer who is getting majorly
into Adobe AIR (which Mockups is written in), this is very encouraging. Its
kind of sad that Flash and AIR get such a bad rap, but they are great at a set
of things like this.

Good luck with 2010.

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spiffage
Go you guys! My company uses Balsamiq for mockups, and I was impressed enough
that I started using it for personal projects too. I'm happy to see you do
well.

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niczar
Why couldn't you be fucked to spare a couple words to tell us what "Balsamiq"
was? I have no idea what it is and, I suspect, neither do 99.99% of those who
read this headline.

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markbao
That's like someone linking a 37signals blog post and complaining that they
don't tell you what 37signals does in every blog post. It's called going to
the homepage. And I'd be surprised if the majority of Hacker News didn't know
what 37signals is, and likewise with Balsamiq. Peldi's like one of the most
active and well-known entrepreneurs here.

