A few words about growth and my Balsamiq addiction

Many can probably tell the following story – You had a favorite restaurant, many others thought it’s great too. People used to wait in line for 2 hours to get a table and felt like the time spent at the door was well spent. A couple of months later, the owner/chef became greedy and introduced 27 new locations. All of the menus are now synched to perfection between all locations and the great food you got addicted to, becomes mediocre at best - even at the original location. This happens when success is being mixed with growth.

It can easily happen to startups once money starts flying around. It didn’t happen to 37signals and one of the reasons I like them so much is that they always keep in mind what their lighthouse is (building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary), grew only as needed and kept blessing us with great products albeit their huge success.

Balsamiq Studios is one of these small companies that I secretly wish they’d stay small. They become more and more successful by the day. They hit $100,000 in revenue in less than 5 months…What’s really impressive about it is the fact that Balsamiq Studios is a Micro-ISV – just one guy (Peldi) in his studio. I’m addicted to Balsamiq’s flagship product – Mockups and can’t see how I could do my job without it.

Spec’ing shouldn’t be the longest part of a development cycle. When you write long technical Word Documents and create Photoshop mockups just to communicate an idea – this is exactly what’s going to happen. Another side-effect is that you are not going to get an honest feedback from your team. People know how much time you’ve put into these mockups and compromise just so you don’t have to change your beautiful artwork. This is where Balsamiq Mockups comes to the rescue – it’s a super intuitive tool for creating *functional* mockups/sketches. For me, it’s much faster to create a Balsamiq mockup rather than whiteboarding it. It comes in a few flavors - desktop, Jira, Confluence or XWiki so everyone in the company can iterate over software mockups using the same tool. Other than producing great software, Peldi is also providing great customer service on his GetSatisfaction forum and created a unique blog where he is being transparent about everything, including the company’s financials. In short – he is doing things just right and therefore his success is well deserved.

It’s fun to see this kind of success and I would love to see Balsamiq around for a long long time…I wish and hope Peldi doesn’t decide to grow Balsamiq too much and stand behind his promise – to only bite off what he can chew. In the mean time, I recommend to all product managers out there to give the $79 Balsamic Mockups a try (all software updates included).