Balsamiq - ReadWriteWeb

InVision Looks Like a Web Designer's Dream Come True

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:00:07 -0800

Creation of an attractive and compelling web app prototype is no small task, but a new startup called InVision offers a framework to do so that looks easy, fast and like a real pleasure to use.

The service lets designers drop image files into its web interface, then create clickable hot-spots on each page. The next page each spot links-to is chosen from a drop down menu of images uploaded and the end result is a stitched-together series of pages that can be shared publicly with a single URL and commented on. It looks really nice and is priced from free for a single small project through $75 per month for up to 25 simultaneous projects with unlimited collaborators. I saw one error in the account creation flow (which the company has now fixed), but otherwise the service appears to work well as promised.

]]> It looks like a lot of hot designers are already excited about the service and the company says it's got thousands of signups already, despite getting very little press coverage in the week since it's launched.

Trying to create a free account resulted in an error message each time I tried to do so, but my account was in fact being created and I got verification emails each time I tried. (Update: This has been fixed and account creation is remarkably fast now.) Otherwise it appeared to work really well and was very fast and easy to get started with. Check out the demo video below.

Building to Learn

As Tom Hulme, Design Director at IDEO (designers of Apple's first mouse, Microsoft's second, the Palm PDA and much more), told BoingBoing in an interview today, "Building to learn is a really important part of our approach - it's the idea that we should prototype as quickly as possible to test ideas. Building stuff forces decisions, centers everyone on the idea at hand, enables valuable feedback from users."

A service like InVision seems likely to be useful in that kind of strategy.

InVision was created by Epicenter Consulting, an 8 year old firm in New York. There are already many app wireframing apps available on the market (see Balsamiq, MockFlow and iPlotz, for example) but InVision appears to be winning hearts early with its ease of use. Smashing Magazine's Editor in Chief Vitaly Friedman called it "very promising."

UX designer Rachel Anna Lehman said this morning that she's excited to do some wireframes with InVision and then user testing of them using Silverback. That does sound like fun.

"You can do a similar thing in Fireworks, but this makes it a lot easier," mobile UX designer Brianne Baker told me after looking at the service. "The service's resources section is cool too, they offer links to various wireframe kits and UI kits all in one place. Of course it depends on your workflow, not everybody prototypes like this. But it looks pretty awesome."

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Man Writes Software, Blogs About it, Makes $100k in 5 Months

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 08:16:33 -0800

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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Balsamiq, a Mockup Creator in AIR, is on Fire

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:55:06 -0800

Balsamiq, an application mockup creation tool built on Adobe AIR, has generated more than $10,000 in revenue less than 6 weeks after the $79 tool launched. The one-man company was profitable within 3 weeks after launch and the application itself is quite remarkable.

It's a great story of a creative entrepreneur using new technology to address a key market need and finding a healthy number of customers willing to pay for software. Balsamiq lets users drag and drop a library of common design elements around a work space, then export their final product in PNG or into a Confluence wiki. It seems like something that could cut design work headaches down substantially. Demo video below.

]]> How many developers would love to see this kind of success for their projects? From the company blog leading up to launch to the remarkable transparency about company finances right out of the gate - Balsamiq is shaping up to be a very fun company to watch. All this success so far has come without a single write up on any of the top tech blogs, with the exception of an interesting interview with Balsamiq's founder on WebWorkerDaily.

Check out the demo video below and drop by the website for a fast free trial of the software, too. You'll probably be ready to drop $79 on it as well.

Balsamiq aims to offer a variety of "web office plug-ins" and we look forward to seeing what the company comes up with next.

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