I'm not a fan of policies. In fact, the tiny little essay on how policies are bad from Rework is my favorite of the whole book. It's called "Don’t scar on the first cut" - worth buying the book just for that four-paragraph chapter.
I live in Italy and I am confronted daily with its infuriating bureaucracy. I'm sure this happened because of Italy's long history. One little rule at the time, Italy's laws have become bloated, and just like in software, adding is much easier than removing.
I always resist making company policies. As soon as anyone at Balsamiq - myself included - suggests making something a policy, a big red flag goes up: it's a quick, automatic big NO unless it's really, really necessary. Very similar to when someone says "let's make it an option" or "let's add a permanent button on the screen" in Mockups. :)
That said, some policies are obviously needed, it's how societies and companies are able to function and not self-destruct too quickly. They help define what we consider fair as a company.
We have created some policies and processes here at Balsamiq over the last 3 years. Each time, we have tried to keep them as short as possible and as specific as possible (you'll see).
I'll be sharing our policies with you in the next few posts, in order to get your feedback on them and in the hope they'll be useful to other little companies like ours.
Here's a list of all the policies we have that I can remember:
I explain our industry's recent infatuation with analytics-driven-development in part as a reflection of our nerdy shy personalities: it's a way to try to learn what your users do without having to go through the enormous effort to actually talk to another human being! Epic win! ;)
Personally, I would MUCH rather spend my time talking to our customers. The amount of actionable information I always receive from watching someone use their tool for an hour is, IMHO, orders of magnitude higher than what I'd get spending the same hour trying to devine action items out of analytics data.
I do believe metrics have their place though: they are great for optimizing, spotting and removing bottlenecks.
Now that Mockups is three years old, our roadmap for the next year or two is pretty much set - our users have been telling us what we need to do loud and clear.
As we have gone mainstream and grow as a company, my job as the CEO is very much focused on making sure we are able to keep up with demand while maintaining the level of quality and support we like to compete on.
Now that the product is past its teen-age years, it's time to optimize.
In other words, do first, optimize later.
Joel Spolsky once told me that my job as the CEO is to come in the office in the morning and ask my employees: What do you need? I have found a tool that helps me answer that question. It's a metrics tool for people who don't have time to look at metrics.
It's called DigMyData, and I want to tell you about it.
But first, I want to tell you a bit about friendship in the age of the Internet.
Adam and Mark
Back in 2008, when Balsamiq was still a one-man operation, I received a feature request from a certain Adam Wride to integrate Mockups with Atlassian JIRA. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember the request as being very enthusiastic at the prospect, but not pushy.
As this was something I had already considered, I spent a few days coming up with an integration and I published it online.
Adam saw it, tested it, loved it and used it for a few days. Then, a few days later, he very gracefully told me it had missed the mark. You see, Adam practically lived in JIRA, while I had only used it once or twice, and never for a real project. He and his long-time co-worker and friend Mark Smith came up with a number of suggestions of how to integrate it better, which they proposed using Mockups and GetSatisfaction.
In the end, they practically designed the Mockups for JIRA product for the rest of us. :)
In the months that followed, Adam and Mark became two of the most prolific members of the growing Mockups community, and still contribute to this day - Adam's the most vocal proponent of the crop image feature for instance.
Needless to say, slowly but surely Adam and Mark have earned my trust and respect, one small interaction at the time.
In early 2009 I decided to start building a web app version of Mockups. Still being the only employee, I turned to Mark and Adam for advice on what technology to use to build it. We had a nice chat, which in the end resulted in Luis joining the team to build myBalsamiq full-time.
During that chat it became apparent to me that Mark and Adam were ready to quit consulting to start a business of their own. They had the hunger, and certainly the technical chops. Their first idea was to build a platform for recurrent billing, like Spreedly or Chargify (both of which were just getting started at the time).
In the spring of 2009 I mentioned to Mark and Adam that I was going to be in South Carolina for a few days to visit my in-laws. Mark said "I live in Georgia, I'll come and hang out!". So Mark drove East, rented a hotel room and a conference room in the hotel, and came to work next to me for a few days. Just like that!
During that time we talked about how their startup could power the billing for myBalsamiq, but in retrospect it was too early in the life of both products to be having those conversations. In the end, they decided to focus on the analytics side of their idea, and we ended up using Spreedly for our recurrent billing, as Mark suggested. Still, Mark and I bonded.
I finally met Adam in person at LessConf 2010, where we sat next to each other and had an awesome time - it felt like I was hanging out with an old friend.
Enter DigMyData
As I mentioned, DigMyData spawned from Mark and Adam's original recurrent-billing idea: they realized they were more interested in building the perfect CEO's dashboard rather than having it be a feature of a billing platform, something that is quickly becoming a commodity.
Just like Adam and Mark have been using Mockups since the very early builds, I have been using DMD since the very beginning, the rough-edges days.
Giving them UX and feature feedback has been my way to repay them. This was my turn to design their product, just like they designed Mockups for JIRA for us. ;)
Over time, as I noticed how much I relied on DigMyData every day, I asked Mark and Adam if they'd let me be involved more formally, if they'd let me become an advisor. Basically this product was SO GOOD that I wanted the world to know that I was involved in it. They graciously accepted.
The reason I told you this long story is to show that even on the Internets, real friendships can happen, and take time.
I get about an email a week from people I've never heard from before asking me to become an advisor to their startup, and I'm always reminded of a Ben & Jerry quote. I'm not sure if it was Ben or Jerry, but they were approached by someone who was really pushy about partnering with them. His answer was "I've been dating my girlfriend for 17 years and we're still not married. I've only just met you..." (if you know the full quote I'd love a link, I can't find it!)
Mentorship is like a long-term relationship, you can't just rush into it. Just like in everything else, what you can do is be so good they can't ignore you, earn people's trust and respect, and see what grows!
About the product
In a nutshell, DigMyData is a BIG, colorful line chart. What makes it special is that the lines on the chart can come from so many different sources. You can plot your Google Analytics data (of course), as well as Paypal and Google Checkout revenue, you can import any RSS feed, plus Twitter followers, Facebook fans, MailChip data, AWeber, you name it. A killer feature, IMHO, is the GMail integration: you can set it up to pull any GMail label and count the emails in that folder. New source types get added all the time, just ask. You can also import an Excel spreadsheet with your own data, of course.
Once you have all your sources set up and gathering data, the fun really begins. You can create different sets of lines to show and save them. For instance I have a "Revenue and ASP" set showing our total revenue line and our average sales price line.
I also have a "Email Load" set which charts the emails we receive at sales@balsamiq.com, support@balsamiq.com and free@balsamiq.com, as well as GetSatisfaction interactions.
You can have all sorts of sets, I create new ones as needed.
Another very powerful feature is the calculation line feature. With it, you can take two lines and combine them in different ways. For instance, the Total Revenue line is the sum of the Paypal revenue line, the Google Checkout line and the "Checks and Wires" data I import from a spreadsheet.
With these few but very well-designed features (heh), you feel in total control. In fact, most people have a "WHOA" reaction as soon as they see their data show up. It's like stepping back and all of a sudden seeing your business from a higher ground.
You can see how everything is interconnected: a blog post might result in lots of new twitter followers, facebook fans, web mentions, more visitors and ultimately more revenue. Another post might go totally unnoticed.
As I said before, I think metrics are really good for spotting bottlenecks and optimizing. A clear example is what happened with our sales@balsamiq.com emails.
As the number of customer keeps growing, so do the emails we get from them. DigMyData helps me figure out how to cut those down. Clicking on the high point in the chart above shows me a list of all the emails, which I can easily sort and even group by subject line, in a super-simple pivot-table.
I can spot patterns and dig further, for instance searching for the "lost" keyword
Clearly, lots and lots of people contact us because they can't find their license key - we needed to automate it. So I spent two hours building this, and the next month we saved a couple hundred emails, just like that.
Another example is the chart below that plots how much of our sales come from the website vs those that come via check or wire transfer.
Look at the red line: the way we were able to optimize and lower that "% of Manual Transactions" line in May and then again in July was to enhance our buy page to be able to process upgrade and maintenance purchases automatically.
Another thing I really like to do is to divide different lines per my "number of employees" line.
Using the chart above I was able to learn that we are maintaining the $500k/year in revenue per employee level which I want to operate at ($48,328.28 per employee in August means 48x12 = $576k/year). I am also able to see that our recent product and website updates have been working in lowering our per-employee support load, which was at only 269 emails per employee in August. Since we're able to operate nicely when that number is as high as 450-500, this tells me that we're in no rush to hire another tech/sales support person right now. If you look at the September and October forecasts that DMD magically provides, hiring another person would bring the "emails per employee" level to 197, which is way low. We might still want to hire someone soon to go faster, but this chart confirms to me that we're happily handling the load right now.
Cool stuff huh?
I could go on and on, I find out new things about my business almost daily.
If you own an internet-powered business, or work for a web agency and want a way to show the effectiveness of your work to your clients, I suggest you sign up and try it out. Pull in every kind of data you can think of, let it sit for a couple of weeks so that it has time to gather enough data, then start digging! :)
It's free to try out, and will likely cost $99/month starting in 2012. For me, it's a no brainer.
In 2004 I started PatataMonkey, a pregnancy/daddy blog, which also ran for about 3 years.
In september 2007, long before telling anyone about my startup idea, I started this blog.
Each blog is different, but the motivation to start each of them was the same: I was entering a new phase of my life, jumping into the unknown, "having a new baby" if you will.
It was a stressful time, a time when I felt the need to process my thoughts by writing them down. I needed a diary.
Looking for advice on each new phase of my life, I googled and googled for a blog just like the one I wanted to read, one of someone who had gone through my same path before me or who was going through it at the same time as I was.
Each time I was looking for an established community, a support group: one about FCS development, one about "parenting in San Francisco in 2005" or one about a "programmer-turned-entrepreneur launching a bootstrapped micro-ISV in 2007".
After many years of using the World Wide Internet Webs I know now that no matter how small, the community you're looking for is already out there, hanging out in some corner of the Internet somewhere. You just have to find it.
Problem is, the Internet is a vast place, small communities are really hard to find. Each time I tried, my googling fell short.
Getting found
So I decided to try and "get found" instead. Each time I decided to pinch my nose, jump in and publish my rants, in the hope that someone would google for my same kind of content one day and find me.
For PatataMonkey, I was desperate to find a new group of friends quickly: none of our "offline friends" at the time were even married, let alone expecting a child at that time. So as soon as I started the blog, I immediately put Google Adsense ads on it. The hope was that Google's all-powerful algorithms would be able to index and understand my content, returning me advertisements that would lead me to the people I was looking for. Oh mighty Google Spiders, what stores should I be going to? Which sites should I be reading? Is there a blog or forum I should look at?
Well, my nerdy scheme didn't really work out, but the blogging was a very effective therapy for me, so I kept at it.
Then, with time, as if by magic, a community started to emerge, organically, on its own. Someone would post a comment pointing me to a blog I should read, someone else would suggest a book.
All of a sudden blogging wasn't a lonely endeavor any more, I wasn't just speaking to the wind like a crazy person...I had...friends! People just like me, going through the same issues as I was! :) Slowly but surely, a little community gathered around my blog, and I started hanging out at other blogs as well, starting to recognize the names of frequent commenters like me.
I realized then that the Internet is a galaxy of warm little communities held together by blogs, mailing lists and now Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Ning networks, Twitter cliques and StackExchange-powered sites.
I guess people call it social media...I call it life in 2010 and beyond.
I read maybe a dozen different blog posts every day, and most of them teach me something new. My favorite posts to read are those written from the heart, those where you can clearly see that the authors needed to get something off their chest.
That's how I want to write as well: it's therapy that helps me and helps others in the process. Talk about a win-win!
At this point I cannot imagine my life without blogging.
As Paul Hawken says in his awesome "Growing a Business" - one of my all-time favorite business books - in order to be successful you need to get permission of the market first.
I define "the market" as the community of people who are passionate about the problem your company or product is trying to solve. It includes customers, competitors, complementary products, free-loaders. Asking for permission means earning their respect...ideally you need to become a thought-leader in your community.
As you start your blog, ask yourself: which community do I want to try and become a leader of?
Choosing your target should be easy because it should be "people just like me", or rather "people just like the one I hope to become". If you succeed in your quest, great things will happen. If you don't, the high goal you set for yourself will have pushed you to do your best work, teaching you a ton and making you a better person in the process.
It doesn't have to be related to your product, you're not doing this to generate more sales. You're doing this for yourself: to vent, to grow as a person and to be a good citizen.
Sure, if you do a good job your company will benefit from the higher exposure and stuff...but that's a side-effect, not the end-goal!
Becoming a leader in an online community is done by providing value to its members, continuously, over time. It means listening carefully and genuinely caring for the success of your fellow community members, without ever talking down to them - you're no better than them, you're just trying to help. It's hard work, but very fulfilling work. Share what's relevant, but don't spam. Try to keep it short, everyone's busy. Retweet! Make a Twitter list! Make two! Help others find your community, help it grow! Support it by sponsoring the best blogs and events!
Just the simple act of being yourself, but "in public", can make a big difference in someone else's life. You'll be surprised.
At Balsamiq, Everyone Blogs
One of my goals for the year is to encourage everyone at Balsamiq to blog, to try to become a leader of their chosen niche.
My dream is for each Balsamiq employee to be better known within their community for their blog rather than the company they work for.
I want Balsamiq to benefit from the "halo effect" of these blogs, not the other way around.
All of us are first-time members of a tech startup. We are all going through a new phase of our lives, learning a ton every day. What better time than this to share what we learn and find our communities in the process?
we updated each of our blog's sidebar to point to it and
we will regularly post a "blog roundup" summary (just like Atlassian does), both here and via our currently-dormant monthly newsletter
we will each be tweeting about our blog posts, so you can follow our Team's Twitter list if you'd like
This will be challenging at first, this is a new experience for both Val and Marco. I am thrilled at how enthusiastically they both accepted the challenge, and wish them luck. You can read Val's first post here and Marco's first post here (in Italian).
This will also be a significant time-commitment for our little team. Blogging takes time. For instance, it's incredibly 2:15am already as I write this.
I believe the benefits of us all blogging are more than worth it: if you're hesitant, just consider each blog post to be like a product release, only one that doesn't involve coding. It's that important.
Onward!
Peldi for the Balsamiq team
P.S. Two questions!
I bet there are great resources out there by now to help people find communities online. I've sent people to this old Marshall Kirkpatrick post before, but I'd love to collect a few more links like it. Which do you recommend?
Another question: I am tempted to splinter off my posts into a new blog (/blogs/peldi perhaps), so that this blog could focus only on product-related news. What do you think? I like the idea of giving people more focused RSS feeds, but I fear that it would effectively mean "starting over" a bit. I don't know. What are your thoughts?
Today I'd like to share a little Del.icio.us trick that might be useful for your company. It's something I saw used at Atlassian and that I've been using extensively ever since starting Balsamiq.
An intro to del.icio.us
Most everyone knows what delicious (or del.icio.us) is by now (Wikipedia entry). The bookmark-in-the-cloud service was revolutionary in many ways, it was one of the first social web applications, before "social media" was even a term.
Here's a screenshot of a user's page (click to enlarge):
In essence, delicious lets you save your bookmarks on an account on the delicious (now Yahoo) servers, and "tag them" with keywords for easier searching later on.
This alone is very useful, as it lets you access your same bookmarks from any computer, or even just different browsers on the same computer. The tag system helps you find old links quickly, which is extremely useful as we collect more and more bookmarks over the years.
I suspect the vast majority of delicious users only use the service this way, blissfully ignorant of how their own personal use contributes to the larger, social aspect of the tool.
The thing is, by default everyone's bookmark lists and associated tags are publicly accessible by anyone. Ha! :)
Seeing other people's bookmarks
So for instance you can go to delicious.com/garyvee to see all of the bookmarks Gary Vaynerchuck has ever saved there, or delicious.com/joshua to see what the creator of del.icio.us is bookmarking these days.
You can even "refine your search" by going to delicious.com/joshua/food to see every bookmark related to food bookmarked by Joshua Schachter.
This automatic-sharing and easy-filtering is pretty powerful, especially if you consider that those pages have RSS feeds associated with them. Want to be notified whenever Joshua finds another food-related link? Just subscribe to the RSS feed for the page above - an easy way to follow what your heroes deem worthy of bookmarking.
Another page you can go on is delicious.com/popular, to see what people are bookmarking today. A great way to find what the world thinks "the best of the Internet" is today...I suspect many journalists watch this page. But I digress...
Searching by Tag
Just like you can search a user's bookmarks, you can also search bookmarks by tag. So for instance if you go to delicious.com/tag/scuba, you'll see a list of links that people find interesting about it, sortable by "most recent" and "most popular", each sorted view with an RSS feed for it.
The Problem: Organizing Your Company Press Mentions
Say your team created a product, or a web app, or what-have-you. Obviously you'll want to keep tabs on when your product is mentioned on the web. Using RSS coupled with search results is a great way to do it, which I describe in this old blog post.
Now the problem is: as you collect new mentions of your product on your feed reader, how do you categorize them, save them for posterity and share the categorized list with your colleagues and the world? Also, if there are a few of you in charge of keeping track of these mentions, how do you make sure the categorized list doesn't have duplicates? Doing it manually, even on a wiki page, is enormously time-consuming. Believe me, I tried it.
This is where del.icio.us can step in to help.
The Trick
The trick to make it all work is simple: as you start collecting links about whatever you're tracking, add them all to delicious, using a tagging system you have internally agreed upon.
I saw a browser open to that page with the corner of my eye on my first visit to Atlassian, and it immediately made me realize how awesome they are as a company. :)
See, all they had to do was to tell every employee: "if you see a mention of Atlassian anywhere on the web, add it to delicious with the atlassian_press tag".
Brilliantly simple to explain, to remember and to do.
The cool thing is that as people do that, delicious adds all the links to the page above, automatically collating it into a single list without duplicates - instead, it shows how many people bookmarked that same link, giving you an indication of how popular that particular link was (useful if you want to advertise on that particular blog for instance, or even just thank the blogger/journalist who wrote the piece).
Additionally, you can see the number of bookmarks on the list at any time (including when you add a new tag), which can be useful sometimes (you could even track this over time!).
But wait, there's more! The page above is completely public! Not only non-employees can see it, but can contribute to it as well! For instance, I have been adding links to the delicious.com/tag/napkee_press page as I come across mention of Mockups' perfect companion on the web.
Using a public service to maintain that list also speaks volumes about what kind of company you are: you're telling the world: "here's what the Internet thinks about us, feel free to make your own opinion of our company by reading it."
Open, confident, honest. Brilliant.
Wait, how can you be sure that the list is complete and not censored? A company might decide to only tag good reviews, ignoring the bad press. The short answer is "you can't", but remember that anyone can contribute to the list, and the effort required to police it would far outweigh the benefits of using delicious this way. Plus, a Google, Google Blog, Google News or Twitter search for the same company is just a few clicks away!
In other words, since you can't hide anything on the Internet these days, why even try? I love it love it love it.
Needless to say, I have embraced this practice entirely, and now use a number of tags for each mention of Balsamiq I find on the web.
Our Delicious Tag Lists
Here are the tags we use for bookmarking Balsamiq press, and how we use them.
balsamiq_press (3,263 links at time of writing): this is the "catch-all" tag, the comprehensive list. Every time see something about Balsamiq, I bookmark it with this tag, usually along with one of the tags below. I try to tag everything, the good and the bad. The only thing I do not tag is warez sites offering cracked copy of the software. Sorry, but I'm not going to help you find those... :)
balsamiq_reviews (1,554 links): any time I see a review of Mockups, I use this tag. I also use it if the link is not a full-blown review but it contains a sentence or more about the product...as long as the author expresses an opinion on the product.
balsamiq_comments (219 links): if I see a mention of Balsamiq as a comment to a blog, or on Friendfeed, digg, Hacker News or any other "forum-like" website, I use this tag instead of the balsamiq_reviews tag.
balsamiq_love (135 links): I reserve this tag for those mentions that shower us with love. ;) The goal here is to keep a list from which to cull customer quotes to use on this website. These quotes are better than ones received via email, as you don't need to ask permission to use them - it's already public knowledge!
balsamiq_tweets (1,039 links): when we first started, I bookmarked every Tweet about Mockups with this tag. It soon became too time-consuming, so I now only use this tag for those tweets that say very nice things about us, something to add to our Twitter background in the future. Instead of sending people to that list, I now just send people to this Twitter search result page directly. Somewhat related, we also maintain a Twitter list of all the wireframing-tools on the market, so that people can get an unfiltered sense for the whole space we're in.
balsamiq_puzzle (24 links): I'll write about this "puzzle" thing in another post. It's basically articles that are about stuff we do that's not related to our core competency. Just know that we're trying to earn as many as these kind of links as possible. :)
balsamiq_sightings (28 links): I use this one whenever I come across something that was made with Mockups, even if they don't mention it. I love to spot these! If you come across any and have the time, add it to delicious with balsamiq_sightings, ok? Thanks!
balsamiq_videos (9 links): I use this tag for those reviews that include screencasts, or for our own videos.
balsamiq_jobs (10 links): apparently knowing how to use Mockups has become an requirement for some jobs, which I find amusing because Mockups takes about 5 minutes to learn, or so we hear ;) This is a cool list for you to keep tabs on in case you're a Mockups expert and are looking for a job!
In Conclusion
The beauty of having the lists above is that they can be used on many different occasions. For instance, we link to the balsamiq_love and balsamiq_press lists straight from our testimonials page. We also show the RSS from the balsamiq_reviews page on the side-bar of our blog.
I also recently added the RSS feed for balsamiq_press to our OPML file, so if you're interested in keeping track with our own output as well as what the Internet says about us (hi mom!), you can now get it all in one convenient package.
To wrap it up: we've been very happy with this little delicious trick and continue to find new uses and benefits from it all the time. We recommend it!
What do you think? Do you do something similar? How do you track your product's mentions?
Big shout-out to Laura Khalil at Atlassian for inadvertently showing this to me. ;)
Hi there. I've been wanting to write this post for a long time, but things were still evolving too much for me to come up with a definite list.
Now that we've been in business for a whole 15 months, the dust has settled a bit on the tools we use in our day-to-day operations.
We're pretty happy with our tool set so I thought we'd share it in hope it will be useful to some, and hopefully to get your feedback on it!
We are NOT affiliated with any of the companies that make the tools below, just happy customers.
I do know some of the companies below are Mockups users, which makes me SO proud. Come out in the comments if you are, it will be a big lovefest! :)
Also, apologies for the OS X-heavy list...perhaps someone has a Windows-heavy list of equivalent tools to share?
Internal tools
Apple laptops - our hardware of choice. Mariah and Valerie work off of their MacBook Air laptops and Marco and I each use a 17-inch Macbook Pro (with external 24-inch LED Cinema Displays). We also have a mac mini (our "cash register"), and we'll probably get Valerie a new 27-inch iMac soon (the Air is awesome for traveling, but not the most powerful machine for work.)
The iPhone - the first thing you get when you join Balsamiq as an employee. Aside from being a great perk, it's so useful in so many ways that I can't imagine life without one. Also most of the tools mentioned below have an iPhone client, so it's great for us to "carry the whole office" with us at all times with no extra effort. Last but not least, I find it a great source for UX inspiration.
Typinator - I cannot count how many hours this has saved Mariah, Valerie and me. If you use email for work, you need this. It's a tiny little tool that listens to your keystrokes and expands what you type if it matches a certain shortcut you previously specified. Just like typing "lorem" in Mockups expands it to a full "lorem ipsum" paragraph. We have A TON of shortcuts (email replies, URLs...) saved up and we share our shortcuts via DropBox. I found this tool via a Guy Kawasaki tweet, and we now each have a license. Awesome.
DropBox - If you don't use DropBox, I will shake my head at you in disapproval. ;) It's "shared network drives" taken into this millennium. Nothing to set up, works across firewalls, brilliantly easy to use, insanely cheap. If they go public one day, I'll be buying stock. We use it for ALL of our internal files, from graphic assets to contracts, invoices, UI mockups, screenshots, and accounting data (we're totally transparent internally, even more than externally). We even built a feature of Mockups that enables near-real-time collaboration by using DropBox!
Confluence Hosted - the other place where we keep our documents is an instance of Atlassian Confluence (hosted by Atlassian). It comes with Mockups for Confluence pre-installed, which is killer. :) It's basically our Intranet (and our browsers' home page). It has a list of links that we share, an RSS feeds for all the mentions of Balsamiq on the Internet, and most importantly meeting notes, documents we want to collaborate on (like drafts of new pages for the site or blog posts). Confluence is the best wiki software I know of, and every time I use it I wish I needed to use it more...I used to live in it when I was back at Adobe and I miss it! I'm serious. Good software has that effect on people. :)
Yammer - Yammer is like a "Twitter intranet". We use it to share links and to help each other with internal issues. We also use it to tell everyone else what we're working on, and to share an occasional viral Youtube video. Since our team is distributed, this is our water-cooler. Very effective and took no time to get adopted (even faster than Twitter itself). To give you an idea, if we didn't have it we'd be looking for a replacement or try to build our own. We use the Gabble client (it's native OSX, uses a ton less ram than their AIR client) and their own client on our iPhones.
Microsoft Excel - we use this for our "beans", i.e. our big spreadsheet where we record all sales and expenses. We keep the file on Dropbox and update it daily (Val updates it with the help of a script Marco wrote and I double-check it). Excel has its quirks (1904 date format anyone?) but overall there's no better tool to manage thousands of rows of data and make pretty charts out of it.
PivotalTracker - you probably heard me rave about it before. PivotalTracker is as simple as a TODO list you might write on paper, but online, shared and collaborative (try the real-time collaboration and be amazed). Every bug or feature request we get ends up on our pivotal list. Once in a while we go through and prioritize the next few weeks, but we're not religious about following it (customer issues always take precedence for instance). We have 3 projects in Pivotal right now: one for Mockups as a whole, one for the web app and one for Valerie and mine's shared TODO list, so that we always know what we're working on. The only problem with PivotalTracker is that it's free. I'd feel MUCH better if I was paying for it, I need them to stay in business forever!
Apple Preview (for PDFs) - I find that I use the Mac's native PDF-handling abilities quite a bit. We print stuff ot PDF for our records, sometimes remove pages, sometimes merge two PDF files together (a simple drag and drop!)...it's nice. If we were on Windows we'd probably be buying Acrobat Professional to do most of the same things.
Parallels - we use Parallels mostly for testing Mockups on different flavors of Windows and Linux (I have an Ubuntu Hardy image as well as an XP, Win 2000 Server and a Vista one, while Marco can run Vista , 2 flavors of XP, Ubuntu and soon Windows 7). The other reason is to run QuickBooks, but hopefully that will soon be a thing of the past (see below).
Writeroom - Writeroom is what I'm writing this post in and what I use any time I have anything to write (I usually end up copying and pasting the text into Confluence or WordPress). It's a wonderful piece of ZenWare and it inspired me to keep Mockups as clutter-free as possible. If you need to focus on your writing (and you should!), I highly recommend it.
Adobe Fireworks, Illustrator, Photoshop - Fireworks is my "go-to" graphics editor, I use it almost daily. It's just fast and easy to use. Illustrator is what I use when I need to design something, though thankfully I am now able to outsource as much design work as possible (it's better for everyone). Photoshop I can barely use any more, I learned it maybe 10 years ago and haven't touched it much since, but that's what designers use so I'm using it to interact with them, plus there are a few things that Fireworks just can't do.
Skitch - if you need to put an annotated screenshot online, Skitch is the fastest, easiest and most fun way to do it. I just love tools like this: it doesn't try to boil the ocean, it does one thing, does it well and makes it fun. Killer. Marco says he likes LittleSnapper as well.
Screenflow and Screenr - I use Screenflow to record all the screencast for the website. It's very well done, very mac-like. Great UX. I usually record the video first, then record the audio and add it to the video track. Screenflow lets me do that easily without having to launch GarageBand or other audio-editing software (which is a software category that generally makes me queasy ;) .) I also use Screenr if I need something quick to show a customer for instance. Also great UX, and cross-platform (it's a Java applet). Awesome. Some people also use Jing for this stuff but somehow it never stuck with me (it used to crash quite a bit plus that little non-standard "yellow ball UI" never really sat well with me).
QuickSilver - I use this over the built-in Spotlight because I find it faster. It also has a ton of plugins and cool features. Thanks to Elliot Winard for showing this to me back in the day!
Last.fm - I used to be a Pandora enthusiast when I lived in the US, but alas, that's not available here in Italy. Last.fm has proven itself to be even better, with the "social discovery" features helping me not get totally bored with my music all the time. It's worth paying for an account just for the "only play my loved tracks" feature.
Tweetie and TweetDeck are the Twitter clients we use. I like how little memory Tweetie uses but it's been a bit flaky lately (the search column doesn't update any more?), so I'm back to Tweetdeck for now.
Google Reader - is what we use to read (and share internally) RSS feeds. I follow quite a bit of blogs (here's an OPML file with a subset of them about startups), and Reader has the best UI. I used to use it as part of iGoogle but I have now come to love the full-screen UI of it.
Coding Tools: Adobe Flash Builder, Flash Authoring, Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio Express. Mockups is a Flex app, so Flash Builder (I still call it Flex Builder, sorry) is our IDE. The UI controls in Mockups are hand-drawn by my wife Mariah, and taken into Adobe Flash authoring (via Fireworks) to turn them into something that Flex can use.
For our server-side coding, we use eclipse for java development (Mockups for Confluence, JIRA and XWiki), NetBeans for the web app (the back-end is in grails) and Visual Studio Express for C# development (Mockups for FogBugz). We also use Firebug to help us with jQuery development.
Charles - Charles is essential if you do anything client-server. It inspects requests/responses like nobody's business. The problem with Charles is that I've been able to use the free demo for years, their limitations are too loose! I know tons of people that use it, but don't know anyone who's paid for it. I think I'll go pay for it right now, it's a really good piece of software.
Deployment tools: for source-code-repository, I used to use Perforce when I was alone but it's too expensive for a small business like ours, so we switched to Subversion, mostly because it's mature and has lots of 3rd party tools that support it (before you have a fit, we'll be using git for sharing some open-source scripts soon). One such tool is Versions, an OS X native client for it with great usability. I still use the command-line interface for merging and other complex stuff, but for day-to-day coding Versions is quite nice.
For building our products we use a combination of Ant and Maven scripts, all continuously built (and deployed!) via CruiseControl. I know that CC is like living in the dark ages when it comes to CI servers, but I'm pretty happy with it, it's very reliable. Plus it's free. We might invest in something that lets us run parallel builds sometimes soon, as we have 8 different builds going off after every check-in right now, which takes about 10 minutes. We'll be sharing some of our build scripts soon (see below).
We also just installed Atlassian FishEye. I was REALLY excited about it for about two days, but haven't really looked at it since. I suspect that for a team of 2.5 developers like ours it might be overkill, but maybe I'm not using it right. I thought I'd mention it because it really seems like a very well-made and powerful product.
Slicehost - we chose to host our web app on Slicehost for 3 reasons: reasonable price, outstanding customer support and the best technical documentation I've ever seen (I might write a blog post about it one day..it's concise, to the point, funny and makes you feel like a super-human). I hope Slicehost realizes how important PickledOnion's articles are to their overall success and compensate him (her?) accordingly. A word of caution, Slicehost can get pretty pricey if you install memory-hogging apps like Tomcat on it. Still reasonable, but their cheapest option won't make it.
Apple Keynote - I only just recently started using, for my WebExpo talk in Prague last week. All I gotta say is WOW. Keynote's usability kicks the pants off of Powerpoint...it's really a wonderfully designed piece of software. I was especially impressed with their progressively disclosed snap lines, which are SO MUCH BETTER than the ones we have in Mockups. It must be nice to be Apple and have tons of brilliant engineers and designers to help you, I'm jealous! :)
QuickBooks - oh, man. We use QuickBooks Assisted Payroll for Valerie's payroll. It's nice and automated, but still requires Val to launch Parallels in order to launch their Windows-only application, which is NOT the pinnacle of usability...we just asked our accountants if we could pay them a monthly fee to take this painful part of Valerie's job away from us. There's plenty of great software to replace QuickBooks (our friends at LessAccounting know a thing or two about it), but IMHO the best software to use for certain things is one that you don't even use yourself! Much better to have professionals use whatever they like best.
Our own scripts - we wrote a bunch of little scripts to automate some of the most tedious tasks. We plan on sharing those as open-source soon, and we're going to be hosting them on GitHub because that's where all the cool kids are these days ;) , and actually looks REALLY nice for open-source projects.
Customer Facing Tools
GMail - we use Google Apps for your Domain so all of our mail is handled by GMail. I actually end up forwarding all of my email (personal and for business) to balsamiq@gmail.com because the "consumer" version of GMail gets Google Labs features earlier than the other one. GMail's search, threaded view and filters are absolute must-have for us, we couldn't run our business without them. Also, the "Default to Reply All" feature in Labs is effectively replacing our need for a CRM tool (even though we looked into ZenDesk and it looked nice, especially since it integrates with GetSatisfaction).
Marco wanted me to mention that he's a mac purist and uses Mail.app instead. Oh well. ;) We also use Mail.app on our mac-mini to run the cash register...but that's a subject for another post. :)
Skype - where to begin. Our phone number +1 (415) 367-3531 is a SykpeIn number, meaning that if you call it both Valerie's computer in Foster City and mine in Italy will ring. When one of us answers, the other laptop will stop ringing. How cool is that? Valerie and I use Skype internally for our daily catch-up meetings...we use it as an instant messenger, we use Skype chats as "war room" for development, we use the new screen sharing feature all the time (which is a bit flaky but nicely integrated). I have been interviewed for a number of podcasts via Skype as well. If there was one piece of installed software in the last 7 years that changed the World we live in forever, Skype might be it. Can you believe Skype is only 7 years old? Can you remember life before it? I can't.
Adium - for instant messaging. This stuff is boring by now, but Adium connects to everything and just works.
Freshbooks - when I first started Balsamiq I dealt with invoices and estimates by hand, I used one of the default templates that came with Microsoft Word. I am SO glad that we make enough money to be able to afford the (very affordable) Freshbooks. It has great usability, it's very fast to use, it's a web app so Val and I can access the account at any time, and most importantly it has APIs! I just spent a couple of days last week cooking up some PHP scripts that allow our customers to generate estimates (quotes) and invoices by themselves when they need them. This freed up an hour of Valerie's time EVERY DAY, just like that. Better living through scripting! :) Freshbooks also has GREAT customer service, plus they seem to be really nice people overall. We're happy to support them.
GetSatisfaction - you've probably heard me rave about GS before. I was lucky enough to be one of their first paying customers so I've seen it get better and better. I REALLY love what they stand for and how they put the customer and the company on the same level. They win on UX as well, with the smiley faces and the "gardening tools" being right there where you expect them to be. I hope they do well, I really do.
Payment Processors: Paypal, Google Checkout, E-Junkie and Spreedly - We use E-Junkie as a shopping cart. Their name is terrible, but their admin UI is pretty good and flexible enough for all the different things we need to do (generate keys based on the names, etc). It integrates nicely with both Paypal and Google Checkout, and I recommend using both since Paypal won't accept as many credit cards in as many countries as Google Checkout does. We also decided to pay $30/month for Paypal's Virtual Terminal (I think that's what it's called), which lets us take credit-card orders over the phone. Best $30/mo ever spent, I wish we had done it earlier. Pays for itself immediately.
We just recently started using Spreedly as a payment processor for our hosted offerings, and we're very happy with them. The APIs are super-easy to pick up, they have good docs, accessible support and overall seem like good, trustworthy people. I like their administration's UI as well. Thanks to Ryan Carson for recommending them in this talk.
Delicious - I think I'll write a separate blog post about this, but I use delicious extensively. Want a few examples? Look at the balsamiq_press tag, or the balsamiq_reviews tag, or the balsamiq_love one. It's SUPER useful, I'll write more about it I promise.
Facebook - I admit that I never "got" Facebook much before Mariah and Valerie showed me the way. If Yammer is our internal water cooler, our Facebook page is our "community water cooler". Valerie, who has effectively taken over our page there, says that it's like this blog, but less formal (I know, can you be less formal than this? I didn't think so either). ;) I love it! The best part about it is that we can see actual FACES of our fans and customers, it's so magical. We are not a company selling software to customers: we are people helping other people ridding the World of bad software, one wireframe at the time. Social media really brings this point home, I love it. I wouldn't want to live in any other time in history actually.
For this website, we use Drupal for every page except for the blog section, for which we use WordPress instead. I think I use about 10% of what Drupal can do, but it works well enough for me. WordPress is WordPress, there's a reason it's the standard.
Posterous - ah, another one of my favorite tools. SO simple. No, you don't understand, it's SO simple. We use it for MockupsToGo, our community site. Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal are awesome and always put my own customer support response-times to shame. I swear they respond INSTANTLY! They also implemented a feature "just for me", which makes me feel all nice and special. I heart them!
Then, are you using these tools? Do you think we should swap out any of them for a better one? Note that what we care the most about are usability, customer service and the people behind the tool. Features come a distant 4th.
Note: I plan on deleting comments that are too "sales-y" or "pitch-y". If you want to pimp your product, get someone else to do it. If it doesn't strike me as a truthful endorsement, I'll delete the comment for everyone's sake. You have been warned. :)
Peldi
P.S.There are some interesting comments over at Hacker News about this post.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
Hi there. If you've been following this blog for a while you already know that lately I haven't been sharing as much as I used to. It's true and it pains me, so I want to try and figure out the reasons for this change by writing about them below.
The main reason is purely mechanical: with over 4500 customers and over 200 new customers every week, I have little time left for blogging, or anything other than customer support for that matter. I spend my days in GMail and have been feeling like I'm "chasing" my business for the last few weeks...by the time I have answered the most urgent messages and dealt with the bank/accounting/beurocracy issue of the day it's usually already 2pm, which leaves little time to do everything else. It's very frustrating and I am working on it (more news on this VERY soon), but let's just say that I now fully understand why Joel Spolsky suggests keeping your marketing, resources, quality and revenues in lock-step in this great Inc article from last year (make sure you check out the infographic). I have been actively holding back on some exciting changes because we cannot manage any more customers than what we're currently attracting at the moment...something I never thought I would have to do and certainly a good problem to have...still, it's stressful, trust me. Thank goodness for Marco and Luis who keep development going and for Mariah who keeps sending tons of free licenses out every day.
All the other reasons are related to the fact that Balsamiq Studios is growing and maturing as a company.
Let's talk about blogging about our financial results for instance. I received huge amount of attention each ofthefourtimes I shared our numbers in the past...I wasn't doing it as a marketing ploy but it sure worked as one! :) Everyone likes to hear of other people doing well, myself included. Problem is, we are now doing SO well that we are embarrassed to talk about it. Although we're always happy to share our figures if someone asks, publicly talking about them on this blog would just be boastful and distasteful, it's simply not our style. The reason I talked about the numbers in the past was to reassure potential buyers that Balsamiq will be in business for the duration of their support period, and hopefully the years ahead. Now that we make enough to cover our yearly salaries every month, that's no longer needed.
Another reason for not blogging as much is that my own personal need to blog is not as strong as it used to be. Just like most parenting blog (ours included) don't last more than a couple of years, once things start humming along and you start getting into a rhythm, the insecurities that resulted in the need for venting dissipate. We are now "out of the tunnel", if you will...plus with Marco here every day I get to vent to him instead of here on the blog...poor Marco. :)
I am also personally in transition...I no longer feel like a total newbie at this entrepreneurship thing but I am definitely far from being an expert, confident enough to give advice to anyone. On one hand I can’t really ask dumb questions publicly any more (I am embarrassed to show our big enterprise customers how clueless I am in some areas), and on the other I'm no Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, Marc Anderssen, Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuck or Seth Godin...maybe in 20 years, if ever. ;)
Speaking of which, I would love to speak at some conferences in 2010 - mostly because it's a great way to travel, I like to speak in public and I don't like paying to attend conferences ;) - but I'm not really sure I'm in the position to teach anyone anything yet...let me know if you disagree (hi mom!) and if so feel free to suggest some topics I could talk about! ;)
So there you have it, I think that's why this blog is getting a little more centered on product announcements and yes, more boring than it used to be. I'm ok with that, at least for now. I am trying to build what DHH calls "a little italian restaurant on the web"...so while it's good to know the owners and know that they are doing well, that shouldn't be the reason you go eat there: it's the quality of the food (ehm, product) that matters most.
Interestingly enough, while this blog is becoming a little more corporate, I am becoming a little more personal in what I share on Twitter...so let's chat over there (@balsamiq) if you'd like! ;)
Onward!
Peldi
P.S.If you can think of something we should blog about, don't hesitate to ask! For instance, Marco is thinking of doing a set of more technical programming series of posts, and we're thinking of doing a "customer success stories" series as well. Would those be interesting to you?
[Update: this post was picked up by Hacker News, you can follow/contribute to the discussion there]
Be humble, work HARD, hussle, be patient and passionate about what you do. Be so good they can't ignore you, actually genuinely CARE about your customers, be transparent, take the long view...A-men!
Hi there, I thought I'd celebrate my 999th Twitter follower with a little blog post I've wanted to write for a while.
Back when I first started using Twitter, I treated it mostly as an extension of my blog, a marketing channel for announcements and customer service in case someone wanted to contact me that way.
Then I discovered Summize (now search.twitter.com) and the fact that you could get RSS feeds of the search results, and was amazed by its great marketing potential.
I started scanning Twitter for mentions of keywords related to my product and sent @-messages to people who I thought would benefit from using it. To make it clear I was trying to sell them something, I would start my Tweets with $$, a convention I came up with (and that I've seen a few others pick up, but it never really spread). Here's the full blog post about it: "$$ tag for Twitter ads? I want to pay for Twitter!", in which I declare that I'd be willing to pay Twitter $1 for each of these $$-tweets, thus solving Twitter's elusive business plan in the bargain. ;)
The best idea to came out of that whole post came in a comment by guruz from p300.eu, who suggested that 50 cents of that dollar could go to Twitter but that the remaining 50 cents should go to the receiver of the unsolicited Twitter message. Now that would be nice: getting paid to be advertised to? I want to live in such a World! :)
I have to say I felt like I was threading a fine line with the $$-tweets, so I was as cautious as I could be with them - I think I sent maybe a dozen total, and from a separate @balsamiqads account, as you can see for yourself. Nonetheless, my idea made some waves and I was even interviewed by Bob Walsh about it for his "Twitter Survival Guide" e-book.
As a way to be able to get to read the book for free ;) I also did an editorial review of it for Bob, and that's where my Twittering really turned a corner.
The best part of Bob's book, IMHO, are the interviews (minus mine, I guess, sorry about that). Specifically the one to Ben Metcalfe (@dotben) made me realize that I really wasn't getting Twitter at all. Buy the book just for that interview, it's worth it.
My use completely missed the social and collaborative nature of Twitter. In other words, why should anyone follow me when everything I do is pimp my product or spam people with unsolicited tweets?
At the same time, I started following @timoreilly, and noticing how much I was getting out of it. Most of his messages are Re-Tweets (RTs) of news that are interesting to me, he is acting as a human filter for his followers. What was I doing for my followers? Not much.
So I started slowly retweeting UX-related Tweets and others that I thought my be helpful. At some point someone pointed out the excellent TwitterSheep, which generates a tag cloud based on the Twitter bios of the people that follow you. Here's mine:
Now that I know that most of my followers are web developers and software entrepreneurs I can cater my retweets to them and provide a better service.
Another aspect of Twitter that I was completely neglecting is the fact that Twitter can be so much better than Google sometimes. For instance, I once vented on Twitter about having spent hours setting up a mail server on my server. Within minutes I received a bunch of tips and links which would have saved me an afternoon of pain had I asked beforehand.
Asking for the Twittersphere's help is still not second-nature to me, but I'll try to remember to do it more in the future. I believe people generally like to help others, and I know I've answered a few questions in the past.
I have also started to have very interesting conversations about my product via Twitter, but I suspect FriendFeed might be a better venue for those (I have to admit I still don't "get" Friendfeed yet, no matter how much I listen to @scobleizer rave about it).
Last but not least, just today I searched Twitter for Freshbooks before deciding whether to subscribe to their service or not, to see what people thought about them. I was pleasantly surprised to find @freshbooks had an active account, and impressed that they responded to one my tweets, and with a sense of humor, too! I am now a happy Freshbooks customer.
In case you're wondering about the $$-tweets, I have completely stopped with those, for three reasons:
I have seen others use Twitter this way (I was even on the receiving end of a marketing tweet), and I gotta say, it's pretty yucky. Even if you have the best intentions, you're intruding into someone else's semi-private lifestream without asking first. Now, if recipients got 50 cents or more out of it, I'd be OK with it (you're paying for your intrusion)...but as it stands, I'm not going to do that any more.
I don't have time to scan Twitter for much of anything any more, my time is much better spent elsewhere. In fact, if you have time to do $$-tweets, you're either a community manager at a large company or you're desperate for attention (which I was when I just started). Sadly, it shows.
In a way this is very conforting, it means I can go back to focusing on making the best product possible (a product worth suggesting to your friends and followers), leaving the marketing to take care of itself.
I'll leave you with a screenshot of my second monitor...Snackr at the top, TweetDeck is the left half, then Twhirl (for my @peldi account), then Skype and Adium.
...all applications I can't seem to live without but that I love to QUIT, as it means I'm getting ready to get productive for a while.
All in all, Twitter rocks. Thanks for changing the World for the better @jack! :)
Onward!
Update: the fine folks at TwitterCounter.com were kind enough to send me a csv with my Twitter followers history over time, here it is with annotations:
The article resonated with me, I highly recommend it. If I were to state my "big hairy audacious goal" for Mockups it would be
"to make the World a better place by helping people build better software"
Clearly it's not on the same league as what a Google.org or The Gates Foundation might do, but for a tiny startup like mine I'd say it's a pretty big goal, and audacious enough. I certainly feel passionately about it.
Tim's first point is to "Work on Something That Matters to You More than Money". The quality/usability of a GUI has a tremendous impact on people's mood: words like "frustrating", "horrible" and "annoying" are fairly common when describing software, and if you were ever forced to use an enterprise HR or Payroll system you know how maddening bad software can be. On the other hand, excellent software elicits powerful feelings as well. I simply LOVE the ease of use of DropBox, Posterous, GMail and yes, Mockups too. Using them makes me feel creative, confident and powerful. I believe that if all software was well made, people would lead happier lives. Life is too short for bad software. If I had a small role in helping people design better software, which in turn made its users happier and more productive...well that matters to me a lot more than money.
As for Tim's second point "Create More Value Than You Capture", I think we're doing OK there as well. Clearly Mockups saves people time (or they wouldn't be buying it so much), and we give more and more licenses away every day (Mariah woke up to 81 license request emails just yesterday). This sentence also resonated with me: "Look around you: How many people do you employ in fulfilling jobs? How many customers use your products to make their own living? How many competitors have you enabled? How many people have you touched that gave you nothing back?". It sure helps me put things in perspective and feel better about the copy-cats that are popping up...hey if they also help people make better software, I guess we all win in the end! :)
As for point three, "Take the Long View", that's something I have known from the start (a lesson I learned from working on essentially the same product for over 6 years at Adobe). It takes time for software to mature, you just have to stick to it and improve it a little every day. This doesn't mean it has to be improved forever for the sake of it (I HATE bloatware), but there's lots of other aspects which could make the software more useful which also need work, like the community-contributed website for common UI patterns that we're working on. Good software lives for a long time, so you'd better be prepared for it (and be excited about the prospect!) when you start it.
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.
Interesting!
