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techZING! 4 – Balsamiq Studios

Peldi from Balsamiq.com moved from San Francisco to Italy, started a one man software company, and went from $0 to $500,000 revenue in 10 months. We asked him, WTF, how did you do THAT?!

12 Comments
  1. Peldi says:

    Hey guys, thanks for the chat, I loved it! 🙂

    Here’s some links that I mentioned in the podcast:

    Preparing for Launch: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/04/18/preparing-for-launch/

    Marketing Advice: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios/

    Atlassian Values: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/11/26/why-i-love-atlassian-an-inspirational-video/

  2. Peldi says:
  3. What I’m missing: A short text description kinda like Mixergy does it (e.g. http://mixergy.com/listen-to-users/), with a few headlines describing the major points you talked about.

    All in all a good interview, thanks & looking forward to more 🙂

  4. Ashley says:

    Wow, for some reason I imagined Peldi sounded like a soft speaking Italian!

    Been following Balsamiq and Mockups since day one (or very, very near to day one), and it’s been very inspiring watching it go from a small product which I’d recommend to people once in a while (although I still haven’t brought a license…I’m a student, I don’t have much money to buy software…feel free to send me a free license Peldi! :P), to it exploding into something 37signals interviews on their blog!

    Well done Peldi (and co.), and good luck with the future (…not that you’ll need it!)

  5. Hi, I really enjoyed this podcast, but I closed it without finishing and threw it in the trash the moment one of you guys started talking about not using source control. That’s crazy! It’s completely unprofessional. Working on your own is irrelevant to the question. I can’t tell you how appalled I was that you actually asked somebody about this, without being ashamed about it or anything, like it was a reasonable question. It’s like asking a doctor whether they buy into that whole washing their hands before surgery thing, or do they just play it by ear?

    Sorry, I don’t mean to sound quite so angry, it’s just I’m kinda stunned. The rest of the podcast was very interesting to listen to and I enjoyed it.

  6. @Giles Bowkett
    Actually, I asked the question about source control in jest knowing that it would make me look like a complete ass and it was really just referencing a topic we discussed in-depth (and with some humor) in the previous show.

    The truth is that I do use source control, just implemented in a kind of stupid and inefficient way. About once every day or so I copy of the source directory to a backup directory on my hard drive and give it a date. That way I can roll back to a previous date if I need to. Is it the best way to do things? No, of course not and I fully acknowledge that. Setting up an SVN, GIT or Mecurial repository has been on my to-do list for quite a while now, it’s just that I’ve been procrastinating about it for so long that I’ve kind of gotten used to it. Would I ever suggest that someone else follow this approach? No, absolutely not. I just got very lazy about it. I mean at the end of the day I have a copy of the code on the dev server, the staging server and the production server (all off-site) and I have a backup of every day of code on my hard drive and on a thumb drive, so I’m fairly secure. It’s just that it’s sort of a low-tech, inefficient method. Now if I didn’t know what source control was, or had never used it, or didn’t understand it or if I ever recommended that someone else not use it, then I would be an idiot. But that’s not the case here.

    But just so you know I’ve already installed TortoiseSVN and I’m in the process of getting a hosted repository set up (Beanstalk), so I’m on the road to salvation! 😉 After Justin’s rant on this topic in the previous show I figured that if I didn’t get something going then I’d have to listen to him rant about it all over again which would be really boring.

    Anyway, I hope my confession on the show hasn’t completely put you off to podcast because we have some really cool stuff coming up that I think you’d enjoy. Plus, I’ll be fully version controlled by then. 😉

  7. Richard says:

    @Jason Roberts

    Giles is completely right, this is insane.

    Your approach is totally inefficient and dangerous, but now that you’ve seen the light just go for it and use a source control system. After that everything in your life will be better, you’ll sleep like a baby, your teeth will be whitening, etc etc 😉

  8. Ashley says:

    @Jason Roberts:

    I’d recommend trying Git, it’s awesome, and Github.com makes the experience even better! 🙂

    From splitting up your development into chunks (with the ability to instantly revert to any commit), to branching, to just getting your code into a public repo within 5 seconds, it’s an invaluable tool!

  9. Eeppo says:

    This kind of podcast is what i’ve been waiting for. Awesome job guys and keep up the good work!

    Eelis from Finland

  10. Val says:

    Peldi mentioned the great company values listed by Atlassian here: http://www.atlassian.com/about/

  11. Efraim says:

    I love Balsamiq mockups! Use it almost weekly!
    However, software UI tools don’t seem to solve the ‘first ideas’ or ‘napkin drawings’. For some reason, I can’t bring in software until the idea is a little more clear, since all UI software (incl. Balsamiq) only allow pre-set controls.

    To solve the early stages, I use:
    http://www.MockupMagnets.com
    Very fun magnetic UI widgets for prototyping on a whiteboard. You should try them!

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