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.
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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
#62This 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? :-)
You posted the Tarsnap redesign 111 days ago, here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820705
As far as I can tell you didn't incorporate a single piece of advice you received in that thread. I'd print out patio11's comment and staple it above my desk.
The homepage still looks like the website for any random, academic OSS project. It doesn't say "hardcore," it says amateur, and there's no way I'm trusting you with my money, let alone my sensitive data.
I just don't understand what that homepage is designed to sell, and why you're so insistent on keeping the "minimalist aesthetic," the crazy pricing, and the walls of text. Is it for your sake, or for your customers?
If the former, I think I know why Balsamiq has higher sales.
For example, imagine I'm a potential enterprise client who, for compliance reasons, needs exactly what you're offering. How much do you think I'd be willing to spend? Does your site even let me spend that much?
You have a beautiful piece of technology. My background is in mathematics so I really appreciate the brilliance that went into building something as comprehensive and innovative as tarsnap.
But that is the first step of 10. The other 9 steps are about marketing and sales, and Balsamiq is better at that than you are.
EDIT: An illustration of your distribution strategy vs. Balsamiq's.
http://www.google.com/search?q=secure+online+backups http://www.google.com/search?q=mockups
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#63Pretty 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.
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.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#64This 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? :-)
I guess their revenue would be in pico dollars as well if you had to download, compile, configura and install the balsamiq software as well.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Please don't get me wrong, it was not my intention to compare the features of tarsnap to a 10 minutes hack. I am sure there is a lot of good work behind and it looks like great code and a great project. I am also sure that a lot of businesses would be happy to pay for your service if they were directly targeted for it.
But I have no doubt the reason while your revenue doesn't make you happy yet it is because hackers are not the right target for it. I do differential backup using encFS and dropbox; it's not even remotely as cool as tarsnap but it's free for now. You see my point?
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#66Earlier 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 have a friend who is trying to find a way to make the Tarsnap website look nicer without losing its essential geeky/minimalist character;
Maybe you misspoke here, but based on this quote I think your approach could be improved.
1) You went to a friend. Unless this person is an experienced designer of commercial websites, that doesn't sound like the right approach.
2) Your primary concern is preserving the site's "geeky/minimalist character", although that seems to be your Achilles heel. The last time Tarsnap was on news.yc, I made the same incorrect assumption, that this was not really a business, but just a side project of an academic. You and I even talked about that in the comments.
3) You're framing the problem as aesthetics, but it's really about poor communication. Engineers often make the mistake of thinking that visual design = making something look nice. This is like saying a database designer makes data nice.
Just like a database designer sees important patterns to capture, a great producer or designer understands how to drive website visitors to the right understandings and behaviours.
It sounds to me that if you go down the route you descirbe, you'll have all the pain of redoing the site, without solving the more fundamental problems.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#67This 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? :-)
An anecdote that may help you...
One of my former employers had a product that came about sort of by accident, providing a Perl hook into a Sendmail milter interface. It wasn't vastly better than a few open source CPAN modules, daemonized. Management found that it was taking time away from all the really cool geeky stuff we wanted to do. We, the programmers, complained loudly over and over again that at $700, this product was ludicrously overpriced.
Meanwhile, out in the real world, our customers were dealing with a rising tide of spam. They were bowled over that there could be such a powerful and flexible solution that fit right into their existing mail infrastructure. It was a perfect match for big institutions like universities.
The problem was that they wouldn't even consider a $700 product.
This is more than just institutional prejudice. At $700 a pop, they knew that we weren't putting any effort into this product. We wouldn't be there to expand for their needs, or respond quickly.
Everything changed when we started charging thousands of dollars. This product soon outstripped all others in revenue. It saved the company, gained us reliable customers, and led to an acquisition. Nowadays it's a very user-friendly system, with all sorts of GUI wizards, but at base it's just an elaboration of the Milter API.
So, the point here is, it is very possible to charge too little. You might be sending the wrong signal to your customers, that you aren't serious enough for the long haul. If your main product is totally secure backups that last forever, that kind of pricing signal might be important.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#68Balsamiq 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…
We have 5x as many Twitter followers as Facebook fans (363 vs. 74), but I'm not convinced it's as simple as semantics: 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 contac…
> We have
Who the hell is we? Do you really think you're important enough to use the royal "we"? I have no idea who you're talking about. Your post sure as hell doesn't make it clear, and I guarantee you you're not important enough to use "we" unambiguously.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#69I 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.
Re: Balsamiq Makes 1.6 Million with 70% Profit in 2009
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have 5x as many Twitter followers as Facebook fans (363 vs. 74), but I'm not convinced it's as simple as semantics: 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 contac…
> We have Who the hell is we? Do you really think you're important enough to use the royal "we"? I have no idea who you're talking about. Your post sure as hell doesn't make it clear, and I guarantee you you're not important enough to use "we" unambiguously.
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