Man Writes Software, Blogs About it, Makes $100k in 5 Months
We love this story. Back in July we wrote about the inspiring experience of Peldi Guilizzoni, a lone software developer who'd built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and who was opening up his financial records on his blog to show everyone how things were going. We'd been following his progress since before he launched, but just 6 weeks after Balsamiq hit the market at roughly $79 per license, we wrote that Peldi had already made $10k in revenue.
That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that he's just cleared $100,000 in sales of the four variations of his product. Talk about a simple tool coming along at just the right time! It's cool software, too.
In addition to selling Mockups for Desktop, Peldi also sells Mockups for Confluence, Jira and XWiki. Desktop sales have dominated, as any designer can use that software, but wildly popular enterprise wiki service Confluence has a big ecosystem of developers interested in mockups as well.
Peldi says that while October was slower than September, and sales seemed to slow a bit when news of financial crisis was breaking out, so far November looks to be his biggest month yet.
He's got an active community of supporters cheering him on at his blog, too. He tracked the lead up to his launch, its aftermath and the product's early momentum right out in the open on his blog. He displays financial numbers throughout the blog. It's been a model of the paradigm of radical transparency and it's a whole lot of fun to watch.
What's next for Balsamiq? The tiny company has put together a remarkable board of advisors, Peldi has hired his wife Mariah to move from graphic design for the Balsamiq to a full time position, he's hired a few contractors and more projects are on the way soon.
We love stuff like this.
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I actually was very much impressed with Balsamiq when i saw the demo. I spoke with Peldi and worked out a deal to giveaway a free license.
I ran a giveaway on my blog for SharePoint Consultants to win this software and had a huge response.
I use it everyday as well in my line of work when designing SharePoint intranets / layouts.
Of course, his blog had to be promoted successfully to attain potential buyers of his software.
Successful Internet marketing and online advertising is as much of a necessity as the product or service itself.
Without mastering this - the blog will remain basically anonymous.
Of course, viral marketing, social bookmarking, PPCs, SEOs are essential. Once you bring potential prospects to your site, then it is up to the product of service to prove itself. But marketing is need for it to get that chance in this highly competitive industry
This is a great motivational story for those of us who make great software but haven't got there yet!
Balsamiq is great fun to use, Peldi deserves all the success he gets.
Wow, what a great tool. Thanks for calling this out RWW!
We've been working on wireframes for version 4 of our wiki-inspired intranet software (ThoughtFarmer). We've used scanned pencil sketches, PowerPoint drawing tools, Axure prototyping software, and some PhotoShop. My favourite is pencil, but it's slow and doesn't work well for collaborating across geographically dispersed offices. Balsamiq seems like a perfect balance. They just cleared $100,079 in sales. :-)
It's an awsome and cute little piece of software, saved me tons of tedious hours doing the same thing using Keynote or Powerpoint. The man totaly deserves such a success.
Balsamiq is great!! I was working on it when I read this story. It is worth it's price.
Only things that I find missing are component libraries being shared and created by users as well as some more customization options for the built-in components. I think these suggestions have been made by several users.
Wow - dont we all wish we could do that?!?!
- much love from the weekly world news
Wow that is amazing i can't believe that much money
I agree that this is a great story, but why has this tool not been duplicated yet by a free service? Is there no model to offer a free version with advertising embedded?
He was a little guy to start, now he should think about helping the other little guys.
Posted by: harleycw.pip.verisignlabs.com
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November 14, 2008 10:29 AM
I'm sold!
We use Balsamiq to build our lo-fi mockups and I can't imagine going back to Visio. Great example of a simple product that's focused on solving a single problem really well. It's unbelievably easy to mock something up in Balsamiq, but what impresses me more is how well Peldi has thought out the sociological aspects of how mockups get used, and he's designed the software accordingly. It's little things like making all the UI controls look like they were pencil drawn (lines aren't perfectly straight, can't color boxes in, etc.). Just this little thing prevents me from over-thinking the lo-fi mockups and it communicates to the designers that they have creative license to change things to improve usability, look and feel, etc.
Great story and inspirational for bloggers like me. I wrote a post recently in reagards to the personal finance space and it was intersesting to see the great revenue potential form blogging. I make about $700 per month as discussed, and can only hope to get to Peldi's level. Keep up these great stories!
great !!