8 ms·

Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

262 points by nsoonhui 17y ago

icey 17y ago
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.
- 3dFlatLander 17y ago
  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.
  - cwan 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      I think they moved HQ to Italy. Would they still have to report to the IRS?
      - cwan 17y ago
        Hmmm that I didn't know. That could be complicated if they moved in the last year (e.g. deemed disposition of shares and all that). I guess as long as they're reporting to whoever the appropriate reporting authority is though I doubt Italy's tax department is as sophisticated as the IRS (they're known to have checked out facebook profiles).
      - balsamiq 17y ago
        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! :)
cperciva 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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?
  - cperciva 17y ago
    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...
    - mixmax 17y ago
      I think there's a rather strong correlation between people that are used to the command line and people who don't pay for stuff online because they use opensource products. It doesn't make things better that tarsnap works only on linux of course. (If I remember correctly?) That might be part of the problem as Davidw is hinting at.
davidw 17y ago
Ok, we just found a sponsor for the Italy Hacker News Meetup ;-)
ramanujan 17y ago
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/# 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 17y ago
  Hi ramanujan, thanks for the kind words. Try the Desktop version for more keyboard shortcut support: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download Browsers "eat" so many key combinations :(
balsamiq 17y ago
Hi there. Just FYI, I'm reading this if you have any questions. Peldi
- agentbleu 17y ago
  Peldi, I blogged about you sometime at the beginning of last year. At that time you was already at about 10K in sales if I recall. I'd be interested (and I am sure others would too) if you could do a post about the successful marketing techniques which have worked for you. I.e. what proportion of new clientele comes from your sponsorships of events Vs any advertising you do etc. etc... The main problem most people I assume find is they run into a plateau of sales where it levels off, whereas you have gone like a rocket - so more on where your traffic is coming from would be great. How about opening up your stats? (I know your all for openness's) would this be a step too far?
- samh 17y ago
  Hey Peldi, Congrats. I've read your marketing advice in your blog. Do you have any other tips for small software companies getting their product reviewed or mentioned in the press / blogs ? Cheers
  - balsamiq 17y ago
    Hi samh, I revisited my old blog post as part of this interview: http://blog.asmartbear.com/balsamiq-studios-uncommon-interview.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/balsamiq-studios-uncommon-intervi... - I hope it will be helpful! :)
    - samh 17y ago
      Thanks
- vaksel 17y ago
  How come you didn't include website traffic stats like you did last year?
  - 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
niczar 17y ago
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.
- markbao 17y ago
  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.
- macmac 17y ago
  Judging from the votes I would say 99.99% is probably a bit high.
- ct 17y ago
  If you don't know what Balsamiq is you probably haven't been paying attention for the past year or so, or just don't read startup news all that often. Although they're not as well known as 37 signals, anyone that wants to start an internet business should know about them and their model.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- staunch 17y ago
  As lame as the tone of this comment is, he's probably right that one should have a little intro about the product on blog posts like this. At the top and bottom probably, a small screen shot and a blurb/link would probably drive some sales and be informative for new readers.
bgurupra 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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! :)
maxklein 17y ago
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.
- timf 17y ago
  Great observation. > Facebook should allow you to 'friend' a business That has the same connotations to me, how about "follow"
  - maxklein 17y ago
    Follow works even better. Now all we need is someone from Facebook to take part in this conversation...
    - jfarmer 17y ago
      Facebook does allow per-page-type changes in follow-verbs. For example, you don't "fan" a politician, you "support" them. Page admins have no control over this, though, it's hard-coded per page type. So I can't imagine there's even that much work involved in changing the copy from "fan" to "follow" for certain page types (or even letting the page admin select among a few, pre-configure options when setting up the page).
      - maxklein 17y ago
        What about I want to see what Linode vs Slicehost are up to, even though I am at Dreamhost? I would just like to follow them for a while while, get a feel of who they are before deciding. Not 'support' or 'fan' them. Facebook should change their verbs.
- 17y ago
protez 17y ago
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.
snitko 17y ago
Don't know how about you, but I find http://gomockingbird.com 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 17y ago
  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)
  - boucher 17y ago
    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.
- bvi 17y ago
  I am a big fan of gomockingbird. Fantastic app that does a great job in quickly cooking up a mockup. Plus...it's free!
oomkiller 17y ago
Love the tool, but the price is a bit high for my limited startup wallet :) I especially like the Confluence integration.
spiffage 17y ago
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.
superchink 17y ago
The #1 result on Google for "mockups"—that is impressive! They've truly found a great niche and carved it out themselves.
k7d 17y ago
The most important thing I take away from this: Peldi's success is very inspiring for anybody intending to do their own thing
richardburton 17y ago
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.
arpit 17y ago
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.

262 points by nsoonhui 17y ago

icey 17y ago

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.

3dFlatLander 17y ago
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.
- cwan 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    I think they moved HQ to Italy. Would they still have to report to the IRS?
    - cwan 17y ago
      Hmmm that I didn't know. That could be complicated if they moved in the last year (e.g. deemed disposition of shares and all that). I guess as long as they're reporting to whoever the appropriate reporting authority is though I doubt Italy's tax department is as sophisticated as the IRS (they're known to have checked out facebook profiles).
    - balsamiq 17y ago
      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! :)

cperciva 17y ago

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 17y ago
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?
- cperciva 17y ago
  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...
  - mixmax 17y ago
    I think there's a rather strong correlation between people that are used to the command line and people who don't pay for stuff online because they use opensource products. It doesn't make things better that tarsnap works only on linux of course. (If I remember correctly?) That might be part of the problem as Davidw is hinting at.

davidw 17y ago

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

ramanujan 17y ago

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/# 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 17y ago
Hi ramanujan, thanks for the kind words. Try the Desktop version for more keyboard shortcut support: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download Browsers "eat" so many key combinations :(

balsamiq 17y ago

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

agentbleu 17y ago
Peldi, I blogged about you sometime at the beginning of last year. At that time you was already at about 10K in sales if I recall. I'd be interested (and I am sure others would too) if you could do a post about the successful marketing techniques which have worked for you. I.e. what proportion of new clientele comes from your sponsorships of events Vs any advertising you do etc. etc... The main problem most people I assume find is they run into a plateau of sales where it levels off, whereas you have gone like a rocket - so more on where your traffic is coming from would be great. How about opening up your stats? (I know your all for openness's) would this be a step too far?
samh 17y ago
Hey Peldi, Congrats. I've read your marketing advice in your blog. Do you have any other tips for small software companies getting their product reviewed or mentioned in the press / blogs ? Cheers
- balsamiq 17y ago
  Hi samh, I revisited my old blog post as part of this interview: http://blog.asmartbear.com/balsamiq-studios-uncommon-interview.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/balsamiq-studios-uncommon-intervi... - I hope it will be helpful! :)
  - samh 17y ago
    Thanks
vaksel 17y ago
How come you didn't include website traffic stats like you did last year?
- 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

niczar 17y ago

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.

markbao 17y ago
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.
macmac 17y ago
Judging from the votes I would say 99.99% is probably a bit high.
ct 17y ago
If you don't know what Balsamiq is you probably haven't been paying attention for the past year or so, or just don't read startup news all that often. Although they're not as well known as 37 signals, anyone that wants to start an internet business should know about them and their model.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
staunch 17y ago
As lame as the tone of this comment is, he's probably right that one should have a little intro about the product on blog posts like this. At the top and bottom probably, a small screen shot and a blurb/link would probably drive some sales and be informative for new readers.

bgurupra 17y ago

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 17y ago
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! :)

maxklein 17y ago

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.

timf 17y ago
Great observation. > Facebook should allow you to 'friend' a business That has the same connotations to me, how about "follow"
- maxklein 17y ago
  Follow works even better. Now all we need is someone from Facebook to take part in this conversation...
  - jfarmer 17y ago
    Facebook does allow per-page-type changes in follow-verbs. For example, you don't "fan" a politician, you "support" them. Page admins have no control over this, though, it's hard-coded per page type. So I can't imagine there's even that much work involved in changing the copy from "fan" to "follow" for certain page types (or even letting the page admin select among a few, pre-configure options when setting up the page).
    - maxklein 17y ago
      What about I want to see what Linode vs Slicehost are up to, even though I am at Dreamhost? I would just like to follow them for a while while, get a feel of who they are before deciding. Not 'support' or 'fan' them. Facebook should change their verbs.
17y ago

protez 17y ago

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.

snitko 17y ago

Don't know how about you, but I find http://gomockingbird.com 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 17y ago
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)
- boucher 17y ago
  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.
bvi 17y ago
I am a big fan of gomockingbird. Fantastic app that does a great job in quickly cooking up a mockup. Plus...it's free!

oomkiller 17y ago

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

spiffage 17y ago

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.

superchink 17y ago

The #1 result on Google for "mockups"—that is impressive! They've truly found a great niche and carved it out themselves.

k7d 17y ago

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

richardburton 17y ago

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.

arpit 17y ago

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.