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.
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
#12Why 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.
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.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#13Always 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 ? :-)
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#14Balsamiq 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.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#15Pretty 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.
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.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#16Why 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.
Judging from the votes I would say 99.99% is probably a bit high.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Tarsna…
Have you tried Reddit advertising?
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#18This 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…
IMHO, the point is not that the site isn't flashy, but that it doesn't explain why would you want off-site and crypted backups in the first time. The site I would expect for a backup tool is one which scares the visitors to the hell, full of well known horror stories, and showing how tarsnap would have avoided them.
For example, Jeff Attwood, a well known and "smart" guy isn't he? Well, he also thought his hosting provider was doing adequate backups...
Astalavista? They had backups, but the cracker logged into the backup servers using the credentials stored in backup scripts and deleted them. Did you know that tarsnap may use a key for writing, another for reading and another for deleting?
It's true that being an UNIX oriented tool makes it a "niche" product since most companies use a combination of UNIX and Windows servers. But there is still a big chance of success among web owners running small to medium webs for a living on cheap VPS or shared hosting accounts on foreign countries. They should get very nervous every time they hear an horror story detailing how some site dissapeared because of a bad backup strategy...
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#19Awesome! 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.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Tarsna…
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.