Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
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Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#2Pretty 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.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#3This 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? :-)
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#4Ok, we just found a sponsor for the Italy Hacker News Meetup ;-)
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#5Wow, just fooled around with the mockups tool. VERY impressive and responsive -- like an internet version of Omnigraffle. Well deserved success.
Check it out:
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.)
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#6This 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? :-)
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?
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#7Hi there. Just FYI, I'm reading this if you have any questions. Peldi
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#8Wow, just fooled around with the mockups tool. VERY impressive and responsive -- like an internet version of Omnigraffle. Well deserved success. Check it out: http://www.balsamiq.com/# My only feature request would be for more keyboard shortcuts. My fingers know Omnigraffle like they know Emacs. (Also: from a technical perspective, looks like this is a Flex app. Very different approach than the 280north guys with the…
Hi ramanujan, thanks for the kind words.
Try the Desktop version for more keyboard shortcut support: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download
Browsers "eat" so many key combinations :(
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#9This 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? :-)
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…
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...
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#10[deleted]