I admit that I'm relieved that this open letter was not another public bashing. I love stories like this and, most importantly, I really love balsamiq. I didn't know anything about its creator/founder, but I'm glad he's as upstanding as the product he produces.
What's admirable here is not that he provided a free $79 license (that's relatively easy). What's admirable is that he responded personally, and irrationally selflessly.
Knowing Peldi, I know exactly why he does such things. In every software entrepreneur, he sees a peer and the potential for someone to build something great.
I met Peldi a couple of years ago at SXSW and was impressed by his humility. He's personally answered all of the emails I've sent him. Usually really quickly. When I first me him, I was an Omnigraffle user and had paid for Michael Angeles (Konigi)'s UX templates for Omnigraffle.
Peldi hired Mike as the UX Director for Balsamiq. At that point, I knew I should make the switch.
When I heard they were building myBalsamiq, a collaborative tool for wireframes, they solved the problem of versioning wireframes and centralizing the repository. This is a team truly committed to building an opinionated wireframing product. Yes you have to make trade-offs. But you'll build better products. It's worth it.
It's one of very few products I bring up in conversation. Balsamiq is a company of which I'm proud to be a customer. Balsamiq, for everything your team has done, and everything you will do for the UX community and software development, I thank you.
Well said. The whole team has been pure class every time I've digitally interacted with them. That's not an easy feat considering that everyone has bad days.
About a year ago my wife and I were working on a project together and we had a complete miscommunication about some feature that I was supposed to build. At the time I was doing all of our UI design, so I was the only one who had a copy of Balsamiq. The entire miscommunication could have been avoided if my wife had been able to mockup a couple of wireframes really quickly. She emailed Balsamiq, told them what happened, and asked if they would give us a discount on a second license. They gave us a free one instead. What an amazing team. Peldi's interview on Mixergy was one of my all-time favorite - http://mixergy.com/balsamiq-peldi-guilizzoni-interview/
BTW, I've seen several other sites that do social polling like this. I've never had any interest in using any of them, but I just went through every one of your polls. Fantastic design, it sucked me right in. Congrats on your launch!
Thank you for the kind words about Quipol and the great story. I think we're seeing a trend here: if you give, people don't forget (and they pay it forward). Thank you, August!
I'm also a huge fan of Peldi - I love that he personally responds to emails and tweets and seems to actually give a shit about his customers. (Very refreshing after my stint at Google, which is severely lacking in that department :).
I also love Balsamiq - I use it both to prototype web/mobile apps and also for diagrams in presentations (http://client-side-apis.appspot.com/). The sketchy feel makes the prototypes feel more flexible, perfect for encouraging iteration.
I've been using myBalsamiq (the online version) for a while, and though it is Flash-based, and Flash is the devil, it works pretty well and I recommend it.
One small UI suggestion: put thumbs-up on the right and thumbs-down on the left. About 90% of the population is right handed and the word "sinister" originates from the Latin word for "left" [1]. Generally speaking, people associate the right side with good and the left side with bad. :)
I've never heard the sinister meaning! Truth be told, we originally had the buttons reversed, but our customer development group consistently said it should be on the left. I have two theories for why:
My far out theory: Microsoft's dialog boxes always had the OK button on the left and Cancel on the right.
My sane theory: People read left to right, and they think "Yes or No." You rarely hear people say, "No or Yes."
Hey all: I'm shocked by (and so appreciative of) the responses to this. Thanks for directing the much-deserved love toward Peldi, too! He's seriously my entrepreneurial hero.
I had a very similar experience with the Balsamiq crew. Early on I didn't have much to offer other than this budding Web testing service I was working on. As it turns out, they have a Web site and saw value in it and accepted my barter offer. I was completely shocked. The outcome was two fortified notions: it never hurts to ask and the Balsamiq guys are great.
Yeah, the Do-Gooder notion was the thing that gave the the guts to even consider asking for something free. I think every company should have a Do-Gooder policy!
Uh. He didn't say that. He said that getting Balsamiq gratis meant something important to him, and that and Balsamiq itself (which is so much more awesome when you actually use it than you'd think a mockup tool could be) kept him from getting discouraged while building something.
This post put such a smile on my face, but then I read the comments and it's like, here's the guy who doesn't believe the letter, and here's the guy who sees this as an opportunity to harp on Adobe AIR, and I'm afraid to see what the next nasty comment is going to be.
@tptacek nailed it on the head. It wasn't a rational thing. It was emotional. All I'm trying to say is that Peldi's generosity affected me in a huge way. It was a tonic—a positive starting point that I've cherished ever since.
>It wasn't a rational thing. It was emotional. All I'm trying to say is that Peldi's generosity affected me in a huge way.
What is it that you don't understand about that? As several posters have already pointed out, the letter isn't about what the software did for him, it's about what the act of generosity did for him.
Peldi's gracious gesture made myoder feel great and gave him drive that helped him finish his product. You're focussing on the wrong thing.
I clearly didn't do a great job writing my post—my apologies. I was simply saying that Peldi and Balsamiq helped me get the ball rolling on a positive note. Who knows what would have happened had I waited to act on Quipol—there's a real possibility that I wouldn't have ever done so. Sometimes, inspiration and ideas pass, and, for better or worse, they never come back.
Mockups with PowerPoint are just not effective. Also, with apps that are more than just a couple pages, it quickly becomes cumbersome, even inside Photoshop or Illustrator.
With Balsamiq, you're able to think out loud and get more decisions made faster. Also, when you're working in a team and not 100% clear on what the solution you're building will end up becoming, it helps a lot with the communication.
Lastly, when you know what you're building, it takes a lot less time building it (at least for me it does.)
For example, we're about to build and launch a new product in the next couple weeks. By spending some time creating a wireframe prototype that the whole team can click around in (https://volcanic.mybalsamiq.com/projects/customerloyalty/gri...) we've been able to tweak what we want version 1 to be and narrow our scope quiet a bit to just the essentials.
I'd say wireframing, particularly with myBalsamiq, is very beneficial for web app development.
I've played with many different mockup applications (I've got a blog post about them I'm working on currently). I got started playing with them due to a free license I got from Peldi in return for blogging about it.
The short answer is that the tools are efficient. A good mockup tool bridges the gap between providing enough information that you can communicate ideas and being able to do so very quickly. PowerPoint doesn't communicate the ideas as well as other tools; and it is definitely slower than other tools.
Today, Balsamiq is still my tool of choice on my laptop. iMockups is my tool of choice on my iPad. One of the primary reasons is that I can export BMML files back to Balsamiq.
I think this "open letter" is a little disingenuous. A nice heartwarming letter of thanks by a poster that signed up to HN 4 days ago. Maybe I'm cynical, but this seems like astro-turfing.
I don't see it as nasty, just an observation of various facts that lead me to believe (perhaps incorrectly) that the post has ulterior motives. But since you ask, this is what lead me to comment how I did.
- HN is about sharing and opinions, so I decide to share mine.
- The poster opened an HN account 4 days ago and the startup was launched 5 days ago.
- "Open Letter" titled posts almost always leads to someone bashing a product or individual. Imagine how relieved HN will be when they see that it is indeed a "heart warming" thank you letter...did you feel good reading this?
- Without the product the startup wouldn't be here. All credit goes to Balsamiq while conveniently encouraging you to view the startup.
- And, as a software developer (who has one more than once been NOT paid for services rendered) this one really raises my suspicion. The poster received the software 8 monts ago and will get the $79 to Balsamic ASAP.
Anyway, right or wrong, that is how I came to my original comment. I'll take my down votes if necessary.
If he wanted to pump his startup, he'd have pumped his startup. As it stands, the only thing he had to say about it was his name. The post was about Peldi.
HN needs a lot of policing, but much, much less of this bogus fake kind.
You shouldn't get down votes. I totally get where you're coming from, BigCanOfTuna. I'm not perfect, and maybe I shouldn't have linked to Quipol at all. When I said I'll get you the $79 ASAP, I thought it would make people laugh. I meant it, but I also thought it would be funny. Also, I didn't know that open letters were notoriously rude. I just thought they were open to everyone instead of on a one-to-one basis (the openness was my way of giving back to Peldi by giving him a glowing, deserved review). Anyhow, you're good. I appreciate you explaining your rationale, and I'll try to do better in the future. If I violated any written or unwritten codes of conduct on HN, please accept my apologies. Thanks, BigCanofTuna.
I feel really bad for you having to deal with stuff like huge voting rings and people making sockpuppet accounts but sometimes I wish you'd just keep stuff like this behind the scenes.
He's astroturfing... a thank-you note?
There's real manipulation on HN. This wasn't it. Look at the comment thread you jumped into more carefully.
This place just gets more and more frustrating. It must be 10x worse to own it, but still.
Definitely wasn't a scheme or evil plan, just my roommate who happens to be my loving girlfriend. Even so, I understand your frustration, and I'm sorry about that, Paul. Lesson learned.
It might be because I asked my 3 roommates to vote up on the link for me. That was clearly a very stupid and selfish idea, and I'm sorry for doing so. Like I said to BigCanofTuna, I'll learn (fast) to be a better community member. I apologize.
Oh man, that's hard to hear. I'm sorry that it comes off that way. While building Quipol, I was more of an onlooker. Maybe I should have been more active earlier.
Balsamiq is a good piece of software but I wouldn't put an effort to ask for a free copy of especially when I'm broke. Instead, I would rather use pen and paper.
If you feel you really really need the software to aid you in building your product then be a good customer and pay the license.
Peldi started Balsamiq on nights and weekends, and now it's supporting half a dozen families. If that is not a real, tangible definition of a successful business is, I don't know what is.
Also, one of my favorite product names (shows the founder's background/personality).
Yeah, I think that's the coolest thing about starting a tech business: you get the opportunity to support other people through both software and jobs. Peldi gets to go home at night and know that people are eating well because of a little idea that he turned into a great product.
This is the kind of comment you write when you've never actually used Balsamiq. I use and adore OmniGraffle (though I'm back to doing more technical illustration in Illustrator), and it is nothing like Balsamiq. It's not a difference of stencils or downloading or anything like that; they are simply very different applications altogether.
I'm inclined not to believe you, if you need someone to argue with you that OmniGraffle has a similar approach to UI mockups.
Perhaps you downloaded it, dragged some things onto a canvas, and then never picked it up again. You missed a lot of great stuff. It's a thoughtfully designed (and very nerdy) app.
