Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

balsamiq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 128 posts

Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

#51

Post by coliveira »

bokonist wrote: post #47
davidw wrote: post #6

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 agree. 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…

From what I can grasp from their page, the paranoid part comes from the encryption used.

Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

#52

Post by ct »

niczar wrote: post #11

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.

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.

Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

#53

Post by crocowhile »

mml wrote: post #34
samuel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

crypted off-site backups? wait, people pay for that? wtf, crashplan is free (forever). all you need is a buddy with some disk. a tb is about a hundred bucks these days. good luck with that tarsnap thingy.

I think you are being downvoted for being so rude and straight but I think you make the point here. Tarsnap is shooting at the wrong target: everything about it seems to be designed to appeal geeks: the webpage style, the humor (the picodollars thing), the code to be compiled (!). Basically tarsnap is targeting the people that will never pay for this service. I am a geeky enough to recognize myself as possible target and therefore geeky enough to setup the same thing using 10 minutes of bash, truecrypt and S3 for half the prize.

Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

#56

Post by crocowhile »

balsamiq wrote: post #7

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

Being Italian myself, I'd like to commend you guys for your job: this kind of entrepreneurship is really rare in Italy and it's great you are contributing with such a fantastic example.

I have just read on your blog http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/10/14/personal-whats-your-... > how it all started and I found it so inspirational (maybe just because I am in a similar situation right now?!)

Can I ask you if you ever regretted moving back to Italy? It seems to me you managed to separate the good aspects of life in Italy (Bologna and the family) with the bad ones (taxes and servers, i suppose, are in the US).

Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

#57

Post by tentonova »

crocowhile wrote: post #53
mml wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crypted off-site backups? wait, people pay for that? wtf, crashplan is free (forever). all you need is a buddy with some disk. a tb is about a hundred bucks these days. good luck with that tarsnap thingy.

I think you are being downvoted for being so rude and straight but I think you make the point here. Tarsnap is shooting at the wrong target: everything about it seems to be designed to appeal geeks: the webpage style, the humor (the picodollars thing), the code to be compiled (!). Basically tarsnap is targeting the people that will never pay for this service. I am a geeky enough to recognize myself as possible target…

Tarsnap does block-based differentials, in addition to its fancy crypto footwork. You can't set that up with bash, truecrypt, and S3.

Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

#58

Post by balsamiq »

crocowhile wrote: post #56
balsamiq wrote: post #7

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

Being Italian myself, I'd like to commend you guys for your job: this kind of entrepreneurship is really rare in Italy and it's great you are contributing with such a fantastic example. I have just read on your blog http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/10/14/personal-whats-your-... > how it all started and I found it so inspirational (maybe just because I am in a similar situation right now?!) Can I ask you if you ever…

Ciao crocowhile, we have not regretted moving back to Italy at all so far. Our servers are in the US, taxes are split in both places. HTH!

Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

#59

Post by dpcan »

snitko wrote: post #29

Don't know how about you, but I find 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.

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)

Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009

#60

Post by mechanical_fish »

coliveira wrote: post #51
bokonist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. 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…

From what I can grasp from their page, the paranoid part comes from the encryption used.

And, ironically, I'm not sure which I'm more paranoid about: Having other people read my backups, or accidentally screwing up my encryption protocol and being unable to recover my backups.

My worst nightmare is securely encrypting everything with a single key and than somehow losing that key to a fire, a thief, a tragic laundry incident, or a filing error (oops, I changed keys and accidentally shredded the new one instead of the old one! Oops, I put the paper with the key in this bag but then I forgot about it for a week, and cleaned out the bag, and the piece of paper got picked up by the office cleaning staff!)

I wish I could afford to use nothing but the Linus Torvalds approach to backups: Upload everything to the cloud in plain text and try to convince people to mirror it.

Post reply on HN