41–50 of 128 posts
Hi there. Just FYI, I'm reading this if you have any questions. Peldi
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How come you didn't include website traffic stats like you did last year?
Totally forgot, but it's also an indication of how little time I spend looking at them. What stats are you interested in? I can look them up for you.
also a little bit more specific, so only post these if you want to...but can you post the top 3 traffic sources to your site for the last year.(if you have the user defined hack on Analytics, I'd love to know the specific urls which sent the traffic. But if not, just top level domain would do.) and maybe the top 3 keywords Google search queries that brought you the most traffic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Hi samh, I revisited my old blog post as part of this interview: http://blog.asmartbear.com/balsamiq-studios-uncommon-intervi... - I hope it will be helpful! :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally forgot, but it's also an indication of how little time I spend looking at them. What stats are you interested in? I can look them up for you.
can you post # of uniques and # of page views? also a little bit more specific, so only post these if you want to...but can you post the top 3 traffic sources to your site for the last year.(if you have the user defined hack on Analytics, I'd love to know the specific urls which sent the traffic. But if not, just top level domain would do.) and maybe the top 3 keywords Google search queries that brought you the most…
Traffic sources are here: http://skitch.com/balsamiq/np3w5/balsamiq.com-2009-traffic-s...
FYI, I practically NEVER look at any of this stuff. But maybe I should? :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
can you post # of uniques and # of page views? also a little bit more specific, so only post these if you want to...but can you post the top 3 traffic sources to your site for the last year.(if you have the user defined hack on Analytics, I'd love to know the specific urls which sent the traffic. But if not, just top level domain would do.) and maybe the top 3 keywords Google search queries that brought you the most…
Ok here's the graph of visitors and page views: http://skitch.com/balsamiq/np3ws/balsamiq.com-2009-stats Traffic sources are here: http://skitch.com/balsamiq/np3w5/balsamiq.com-2009-traffic-s... FYI, I practically NEVER look at any of this stuff. But maybe I should? :)
i.e. if you see that a particular site(that you never heard of), sent you 200 people, where each person went through 6 pages, compared to your average of 2...you know it's probably a good idea to go buy some ads there, since you know that site's audience will convert
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 busin…
Facebook, despite their recent posturing, is for me still a personal sphere. Twitter, despite its flippant image, is for me about business. At the very least it's my web persona, rather than, say, my people-I've-known-since-I-was-11 persona. I follow a bunch of businesses (and moreso, business contacts) on Twitter. The only businesses I follow on Facebook are from friends who have nagged me about doing such. ;-)
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? :-)
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…
The tagline is "Backups for the truly paranoid". Yet the site looks like it was built by one person as a hobby. Why would the truly paranoid trust this web site to store his files?
Tarsnap requires the user to be a unix-geek that can compile the program himself and use the command line. But if I'm a truly paranoid hacker, wouldn't I just write a quick python script myself to encrypt and backup my files to S3? Why would I trust you? One thing that may help is that you should let the user upload the files to their own S3 account, not to your S3 account. That would certainly make me more likely to use it.
Also, nowhere on the home page does it tell me what makes Tarsnap so special. To me, it's just another backup program. What's special about it that makes it good for the truly paranoid? Tell me that up front.
Earlier 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…
Tarsnap has one of the technically best back-end implementations available, but the barrier to entry for an interested customer is incredibly high -- not just on OS X, but on UNIX as well.
Even on UNIX, producing a working backup setup requires writing custom scripts to do so, and implementing anything like snapshot-based backups is complicated enough that even I spent a couple hours getting everything working/tested, and I'm very familiar with this area.
I'll be bold: You solved the backup problem, now the number one hinderance to your growth is solving the user experience problem.
The UNIX utility should have an exceptionally easy way to configure backup schedules. Possibly even an optional web UI.
A Mac release must have a native OS X GUI (no qt!), be easy to use/configure, and be well-integrated into system services.
After the first iteration on the above you should consider implementing support for network-based backup administration, so that we can control backups/restores across all of our desktop/server installations from a centralized administration console.
If the above is not your forte -- if you're only interested in the crypto and backup issues -- then you need to find a parter or contractor who can step in and solve them for you.
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 busin…
With Twitter, your tweets easily get lost in the sea of tweets, whereas Facebook stories persist in the fans' News Feeds for a while, and then show up even more if their friends interacted with it.