Peldi Guilizzoni: Sticking to Your Values When Building your StartUp | SaaS District

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. On today's episode, we'll be talking about why you should always stick to your values when building and growing your startup. Today we have our guest, Peldi. I'm going to mispronounce this— joining us. After studying computer science in Italy, he moved to San Francisco where he worked for a couple of years as an engineer with Adobe. When he worked at Adobe, that led him to discover an opportunity to develop a tool that could make everyone more productive on the team, something he describes as a no-going-back technology. After a series of events, he ended up quitting his job at Adobe and decided to focus on his new project. So he decided to go back to Italy and found his new successful company, which is now Balsamiq, which he is now the founder and CEO. Balsamiq is a fully bootstrapped company focused on prototyping UI/UX, and the Wireframes is a collaborative user interface wireframing tool that gives the experience of sketching on a whiteboard but using a computer. They focus on content and structure rather than the details and other design elements, which is important to somebody like myself. They started in 2008 as an independent little software company and one-man shop and have been growing organically ever since. I know Balsamiq, from what I've heard, has turned away a lot of external investors, turned down many multi-million dollar acquisition offers because they truly believe it's the right thing to do for them and their community. So hopefully that was a good introduction. Peldi, welcome to the show and glad to have you here.

Great introduction. Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. Was that everything, or did you want to add anything else to that?

That's it. You described my whole life.

Awesome. So you talk about how the product you initially built was adapted to the workflow of the entire team at Adobe. I want to speak to that a little bit. How did that disruption happen, and can you tell us how the story— how that influenced the development of Balsamiq to where it is today?

Right, so the year was 2005, '06, '07, and the term was Web 2.0. And basically what happened was that browsers and JavaScript were getting to be good enough to be able to build what we now called web apps.

Mm-hmm.

And so one of the first web apps that we started using in my engineering team was Atlassian Confluence, which is an enterprise wiki knowledge base, you know. And that's the thing that really spread like wildfire in the team. We realized all the things that we now take for granted, which is web apps are a single source of truth. They have history of changes and everything is always saved automatically. There's no— you just share a URL, you don't have to export to PDF and send that over email, you know. It's just that the collaboration with web apps is so much more seamless that it really changed how we worked and increased our productivity tremendously. And so When I saw that happening, I thought, I want to be part of this somehow. And building a whole platform, collaborative platform, seemed way too big. But Atlassian Confluence is an extensible wiki, so you could build what they used to call plugins.

Mm-hmm.

Now they call them apps. And so that just enhanced the functionality of the wiki itself. And so I thought, hey, that's a smaller scope problem to solve. Maybe I can solve that with a smaller company and just by myself. So I started looking for what could I build to improve this platform. And so the wireframing solution was— Well, it was supposed to be the first of many products that I built, but But, it's been 12 years and I'm not done with the first one.

Still working on the same one?

Yeah.

So, what did you take from, you know, working at Adobe? And then, was there anything that you saw that you were, you know, directly applied from when you first started there?

Oh my gosh, that's where I learned everything. I worked there for 7 years, almost 7 years, so, I was a programmer there, and then an engineering lead, but I was really, trying to learn as much as possible about all the different aspects of how to design and make and support and the legal aspect and the pricing and the marketing and the sales.

Nice.

So one of my main motivations for going on my own was to learn all the steps required to make software. At Adobe, I was part of a very large team, and so I was only exposed to A little part of it, but I was very curious to learn all the rest of it.

And now, you know, 12 years later, so you started in 2008, your response was that, you know, we're not interested in investment. You said you got, you know, many, several multi-million offers to get acquired, but you're not interested. So when many founders start their company, their goal and maybe their dream is to get acquired as some, you know, another corporation, a big corporate like Google. When did you make that decision to stay bootstrapped throughout, and was that the value you knew from the beginning that you wanted to keep growing organically? And if so, you know, why was that decision made?

Yes, it was very much from the beginning. I was— my motivation was never to make money. The motivation was I wanted to stay a one-person company forever. I wanted to— I try to pick the smallest possible problem because my motivation is the love of the craft itself. So my goal was, let's pick a tiny, tiny problem that will, yes, me and my family for a while, and that's it. I didn't want to have a company with employees. That sounded stressful, people problems. I just wanted to program and build a product and interact with my customers, and that was it. And so that was the, the original vision, to be a solopreneur, uh, indie hacker, whatever you want to call it, um, and stay that way. Unfortunately, well, maybe fortunately, I picked a problem that was too big for one person to solve on their own, and the market was growing and growing and growing, and so pretty quickly I had to let go of my dream and start hiring people, but I fought it for a long time.

Okay.

And so ever since, I've had to sort of reinvent my dream based on what the market is dictating, But, the goal again, the values are the same, which is we want to just have a good time building the best product possible with our customers. The money is a consequence, it's not a motivator.

And how many team members do you have now? I'm sure you're more than the one you were.

We are now 33, which is a lot, but I've been able to not hire anyone for the last year and a half, so that's a success. And we'll see, maybe we have finally reached our equilibrium size.

Does the team push back like, hey, we need somebody to do this job, and you're like, no, no, no, I'm okay here?

That's been the history since the beginning, but, you know, once in a while I understand, and I also don't want the team to suffer, so we've been growing organically ever since. Sometimes we will make a big jump and, you know, hire 5, 6 people in a year, But usually, we hire maybe 1 or 2 people a year, but yes.

So, if anyone's looking for a job, don't look at Balsamiq, it's going to be years before you get in.

It's pretty hard, yes, I know.

How do you guys compete with the— you know, so you guys are a bootstrap company, I know there's other— you have competitors who are, you know, VC-funded, they have a lot more funding behind them, how do you guys stay ahead of the competition there?

Well, the stroke of luck, not genius, but luck, is that the market that we chose is pretty small. So it's too small for big players to go after and fairly big for tiny players that are coming now to be able to compete with us. So, you know, we do have big competitors, but they do much more. They do prototyping, so where you can build a fully functioning fake application or fake website, right?

Yeah.

And those are complex tools, pro tools, and they cost 10 times what we charge. We don't go there. We are a wireframing tool, so only We compete with pencil and paper, so we only let you do these sketches, and then after that, if you want to use a prototyping tool, you can. If you want to go straight to code, that's what most of our customers do. But, so by focusing on this smaller market, the big players leave us alone. They think that we're a feature of their software. But that's not actually true because we are perfect for non-technical users that have an idea, but they have to express it somehow, and the fact that we're so focused means that we can stay simple even for non-technical users.

Makes sense, and so your original vision, you know, stay lean, keep growing, you know, not focus on the money, focus on the craft, where are you guys today in terms of the size, and now, You know, 12 years later, what would you say is your end goal or vision with the product or the company?

Right, so like I said, we're 33 employees. Last year, our revenue was $6.7 million.

Nice.

This year, we should easily pass $7 million, which is plenty for us. It's a lot. Around $1 million in profit every year since the beginning, sometimes more.

Nice.

So, you know, it's going very well. Now the vision is to more of the same, continue to serve our customers, make them more awesome at what they do by listening to them, talking to them, giving them what they're asking or what they need, you know. And my— I like to grow maybe 2% a year for revenue.

Okay.

Seems like a nice sustainable growth. And my main goal is to build a company that will outlive me. So the focus has always been on longevity rather than growth. And so That's why I like small growth, because if you grow too fast, it's like burning a candle at both ends. You don't last as long.

Right, it escapes underneath you. So, yeah, that's kind of interesting that, you know, you stuck to your values where a lot of people may push, or you get an external pressure if you did have to take investment, or, you know, whatever the case, you have partners, you know, the mentality is always grow, grow, grow, push. sell, make more money. So I mean, the fact that you're very like, I'm OK with 2%. Most people are like, what's wrong with you? Why not go for doubling every year over year, right? And you probably could if you really wanted to. But you're like, no, I'm good. I'm sticking to what I got.

That sounds really stressful. I'm very happy with the profits we have right now.

OK. So is this something that you see—

And we're lucky that the market is allowing us to take our time and be the size that we want.

Right, yeah, you have nobody coming in taking over, you know, all markets.

We have very little competitive pressure. So yeah, you asked about VC, uh, this— how to compete with VC companies. Well, uh, our market is not VC-friendly because, uh, the wireframing— the total addressable market for wireframing tools is maybe, I don't know, $10 million worldwide. We take $7 million of it, that's plenty. But it's not going to grow 10 times in 5 years by itself. You would have to either bundle us with a bunch of other tools and make us a complicated suite, or make us move into the prototyping world, and then you're competing with Microsoft, Adobe, you know, giants. And in that world, of course, you need VC because that's, you know—

Yeah.

But in our small niche, So, we have had direct competitors that were VC-funded, and they last a couple of years, and then the VC pulls the plug because they realize that by itself, it's not going to grow at the speed that the VC needs.

Right. Yeah, so I know what comes to mind to me is something like a Figma, and that becomes overwhelming because I'm not a designer, I'm an engineer, but very technical, analytical, so I like that. something, a tool like this, it's, yeah, you say it's, you know, a pool of this kind of people, but you could also reach other people who are maybe like curious and they want to learn and, but they don't have that kind of, you know, design mindset. So that's kind of curious.

Right, we decided to not focus on designers, even though a lot of our customers are designers and they use us as, together with Feedback, together with InVision, together with XD, together with Axure, And that's fine because we are still the fastest way to do wireframes because we're so focused.

Yeah.

But a lot of our customers are people who can't afford to hire a designer yet. They're founders, entrepreneurs, product managers, right? They, um, they have ideas, uh, they want them— they want somebody to build them. Or developers, they buy, they buy our tool in order to talk to their clients, right?

Right. So you don't have a number in mind for use? Like, I'm going to hand this off to my kids or family, grandkids, and I want this to keep lasting forever. I don't know if you have kids or not, but yeah.

Yeah, I do. But I don't know if my son is interested at all at this point. He's 14 yet, so he doesn't really know. But no, the dream is to be able to build a company that is so well-run and so solid that it can fully function without me.

Mm-hmm.

So that should one day something happen to me or whatever, or should I get bored and want to do something else, I could leave and continue to own it and continue to get dividends every year, and the company would do even better without me than with me. And even if I fail, I think it's a good goal to have because it just makes the company just stronger and smoother, and so this is my 5-year project right now, to try and see if I can get to a point where I'm not actually needed for anything, and it's also, it sounds fun, because then once I reach that point, then I can work on whatever I want, I can help out whatever, whoever I want inside the company.

Exactly, you get to decide and choose what you want to focus on. Cool, love it. Can you attribute to really what drove the growth to Balsamiq in the very early stages, and then what's continuing to work right now, you know, 12 years later?

It's hard to tell because I don't track anything, so I don't really know how it happened, but I attribute it to, you know, from the beginning we say we compete on usability and customer service, and it's not easy to do those things well, especially for a small company or, you know, in our small market, because We had competitors before I started and they were clearly made by programmers for other programmers. They were, you know, they did not— they were like '80s and '90s kind of software, right?

Mm-hmm.

So Balsamiq Wireframes was the first tool that was easy enough to use for non-technical users. And so that was, I think, a big competitive advantage. We also use a sketchy UI, the designs that you make with Balsamiq look like they're hand-drawn, which was pretty unique at the time. It's been copied a million times over, but— And so that gave it character immediately, that there was a virality built in into the product, because as soon as people saw a wireframe made with Balsamiq, they immediately asked, how did you do that? That's very unique, right?

Cool.

So, um, so the, the product was well-built, easy to use, uh, it was somewhat viral, and then the customer service, uh, we've always invested a lot in, uh, so very close, uh, feedback loop with our customers. Releasing all the time, fixing bugs all the time, cultivating the forums. I live in Italy, but the second employee was in California, so we could cover more time zones.

Mm-hmm.

Answering the phone, you know. So, I think that that's really been our formula for success, which is just continuous iterating in close contact with customers.

Love it. So it's more very product-led growth where you just focus on—

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Our, uh, our— we've barely done any marketing ever. Our marketing is our product itself and our customer service.

Love it. Can you share— so I know sometimes it's important to share what works, but then there's also, I think, equally important what people don't share is what, what didn't work. Um, can you share any failed growth experience that you tried over the last few years that didn't work as, as much as you hoped?

That's the thing, we've never tried any growth experiments.

Never tried anything.

Growth is a consequence, it's not a goal.

Okay.

So, there's stuff that we do that fails, of course, but features that were not well designed originally, and we've had to do them again, or a couple of them we've actually managed to remove. You know, we make mistakes all the time, that's part of the fun. But yeah, I can't tell you about a growth experiment because that's not—

You don't have a marketing team? So you don't have, you don't have anybody doing SEO, anybody doing, you know, paid ads, anything like that?

Well, so we do paid ads because there's a consulting company called Software Promotions in England that manages the whole thing for us for free, because we're friends and, you know, we did so, We did a case study for their website, and so they take care of it. They tell us how much we should spend, and they, you know, I have no idea how that works.

Okay.

I think it's helping. They tell me our numbers are good, but I don't like that stuff, so I talk to them once a year.

So you don't even pay attention to that?

You're like, okay. No, zero. And then SEO we do, but we don't do it for the search engine. We do it for humans. I mean, having clear titles, having clear descriptions, having clear web pages, that's good for our readers. The search engine is supposed to emulate what a human does. So we focus on making it as good as we can for humans and then whatever happens with the search engines.

That's very interesting. I mean, it works, right?

Yeah. It's been working for us. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah. But like you said, you're happy with the growth. And if it works, keep doing it. So I know you've been very transparent and open with information about your company. But it also leads to many other people copying your software. I know we talked a little bit about that. Even your business structure, you openly lay out your software and your training. And you have a lot of material there, like your academy. Can you tell us more about this? You call it the golden puzzle concept that you mentioned, how to stay different from the competition?

Yeah, sure. So, at the beginning, I blogged a lot because it was just me mostly, and so in order to think through something, I needed to talk to someone, and so writing on the blog was a good way to clear my head and get feedback from anyone who would listen. And, um, and so that was useful for me, and it became this marketing thing where, oh my gosh, you're so transparent. Uh, and so people started— that became sort of a trend at some point. Um, the way I saw it was I have nothing to hide. Uh, I don't— I, I'm just being me. I understand if you don't want to buy from me because it's just a one-person company, so it's risky, but I'll tell you as much as I can so you can trust that I'll be honest. And that, um, you know, so I started sharing my revenue numbers right away because they were pretty good, just to show that, uh, potential customers that, uh, I was not that risky of a bet to buy my software. I was gonna stick around to answer their phone call if they had a support question. 6 months down the line, right? So that's, that's what started the whole transparency thing. And I've stopped blogging years later because I had a team and the team could be my sounding board for different things, right? So, so it started that way. And then— sorry, your question was about the golden puzzle?

Golden puzzle, yeah.

Yeah, so, so yeah, the consequence of all the sharing is that some people thought, hey, if this dude can do it, I could do it too. And so some people started cloning every— and copying everything we did. I mean, there was this one company that we used to release every Monday, and then one day we decided to change it to every Thursday. And 2 days later, their blog post was, we're changing, we're releasing every Thursday.

Wow.

They're copying every step, even without questioning completely. So that was interesting for a couple of years, but they all went away. But anyways, when that was starting to happen, I was telling my dad about it. And he was like, should, should you be worried about it? And I said, well, I don't know. And he said, what is it that, that someone can copy and if they do, you go out of business? So he kept asking me like, do you have any patents on what you're doing? I said, no. Is your software super complicated to build? I said, no. So he asked me, what is it that If somebody copies it, you're out of luck. And I had to really think about it, and the answer was none of it, or all of it, right? You can't— it's not just one thing. It's not just the code. It's not just the website. It's not just how you do marketing. It's not how you do your pricing. It's not your terms of service, license agreement. It's all of it. You have to be good at every single thing. And if you are, you're not going to be perfect at everything, but you have to be very good at every single interaction with the customers.

Mm-hmm.

And that's hard to do, because some of it is technical, some of it is people skills, some of it is marketing and user experience, right? So it takes a— a really broad view to be able to do it all. And so the golden puzzle is how I teach my team to always try to achieve that level in whatever output they have.

Okay.

So our definition of the golden puzzle is, a piece of the golden puzzle is when somebody tweets or blogs or talks about something that we've done that is not our software. It's not our core competency, right? So if somebody sometimes says, oh, the license agreement of Balsamiq is one of the clearest ones I've seen, boom, that's a piece of the cold deposit. Or somebody says, the customer service of Balsamiq is the best in the world. That's Golden Puzzle.

Got it.

You know, even I had Evan, the inventor of Twitter, he tweeted complimenting us for our Twitter background.

Okay.

Because it was unique at the time and he noticed it. And so that's a piece of the Golden Puzzle that we had printed and we have it on the wall at the office. So it's, the aim is to make everything that you Put out into the world so good, so remarkable that somebody will talk about it. And if we do it for everything we do, then we're gonna be just fine. And if we fail, well, at least we tried. So it's probably gonna be pretty good.

Makes sense. Yeah, I mean, how do you copy user experience? How do you copy customer service? That conversation they have, right? So you can try to copy a technical, but yeah, you're right. There's some things. That's just your golden parachute, right? Whatever you want to call it.

Yeah. And, you know, mostly what it comes down to is the people. That's the most, uh, the thing that's the hardest to copy. And so, we invest so much in our team. We're constantly training everybody, giving people time to train themselves and get better and better at what they do, um, all the time.

And what's the reasoning today that you still openly share so much information and process? So, I saw You know, this is how much we pay you, we're gonna pay you this, this, and this for your hiring, this is the number of users we have, this is the number of transactions, this is how the product works, like, you guys are still super transparent on—

Well, it's the same, right? The more we share, the more people can trust us, I think. They can see that we're a healthy company, and we're gonna stay in business, and it's really about being a good citizen. I don't— I can't think of doing it any other way, you know?

I'd be curious to see if like you removed all that tomorrow, if like, you know, you'd lose— start losing customers. But yeah.

Well, it's— well, now it's kind of our brand. It's just our, our value system. We are always, you know, honest, saying this is how we are now. We're not perfect, but we're constantly trying to improve. And, uh, and this is what you get. Yeah, take it or leave it. You know, again, we're lucky that we don't sell this enterprise thing where the pricing changes by every customer. And for some things it makes sense to be that way. Yeah. Um, but for us, where we're making a tool that is standardized and inexpensive, um, then, uh, our, our style sort of seems to work well for that.

Makes sense. Uh, now kind of going back to the product, I know we're, we're humans of emotion, right? We make a lot of decisions based on emotion, sometimes not too logical. You try to focus your software focusing on eliciting those feelings. How do you build that into a product and try to get those feelings?

Well, it's not really a goal, but it's more about trying to understand our customers as best as we can. And so, um, and if we can, uh, infuse a little personality, a little, you know, special touches into our software, uh, we like to do that because it just— again, I think it makes for a better user experience overall. So one example that we have that gets a— that is appreciated a lot is that in our help menu in the In the app, when you, you know, you go to help, there's get support, report a bug, documentation. What should I make for dinner?

What?

So we have this feature, and so you click on that and it takes us to our website where one of our employees has made 150 YouTube videos of very quick recipes that you can do Very quickly, right? And the idea is we know that our customers, when they use our tool, they lose track of time because it's so— they get in the flow, it's so creative, right?

Yeah.

And inevitably it gets 5 PM, 6 PM, they have to run home, and now the stressful question is always the same: what should I make for dinner? So we try to help you even at the end of your day. That's just one idea that we have. Another thing that we did, for instance, is in our loading screen, right, there's a little loading and sometimes you're loading a large project so it takes a few seconds. So instead of just showing a little progress bar, under the progress bar we put an inspirational quote.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So you're waiting to start your day and that way you get inspired a little bit. While you're waiting, right? So it's funny because people now complain that our software is too fast and they can't read the quote fast enough. You know, people ask us to make our software slower instead of faster.

I actually read that another— by the way, I love both of those examples. That's fantastic. I would never have thought of that. I read another company where they did the same thing where they had a loading image and it actually dropped their conversions and their sales. Because when they removed it, because people felt like, no, this is too fast, it's not working as good as it should be, it needs to take time to process and work. But right, it's a weird cycle.

Another example is we put— we added background music. Um, you can go edit, play background music, and it's this very soothing music that helps you focus. And we made it 25 minutes long, which is the length of a Pomodoro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know the Pomodoro technique?

Yeah, yeah.

And then we have 5 minutes of bird sounds that we recorded, which means get up and stretch and take a break, go get some water, and then it restarts again with another Pomodoro. So it's these little things that some people might not consider software, but for us, they're an integral part of the experience of using our tool. If they help you be more successful, why shouldn't we put them in?

That's awesome.

So, we're constantly looking for these little things, and we don't want to go overboard. We're not, you know, we don't want to be cheesy or anything, only what's useful.

You guys should look at integrating with a, or, you know, build your own, something like Brain.fm. I don't know if you heard of that, but to get users into flow state, and they're like, whoa, and then you just see them create like all these beautiful pieces.

Right, right. Yeah, that's— our music is similar to one of those.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Cool. So I'm an engineer. I'm very data-driven marketer. So I'm the one that you don't like. I'm the opposite of you with an analytical—

No, no, no. Wait a minute. It's not that I don't like you.

No, you're not like me.

I don't need to be that way.

Sure, sure. And exactly. I don't like creating either. I mean, I just don't know how to. So when I think of wireframing, I think of creative design, which is You know, it gets intimidating. Who can start wireframing, I guess, and how can someone like myself get good at it?

Right, so it's— of course it's intimidating, like anything that you've never done before is intimidating, but often, uh, once you start, then you look back and you, you laugh at yourself for being intimidated, right? It turns out much easier than, than you expected. Yeah, it's just scary because it's new. So, one thing that helps if you want to learn wireframing or user experience design in general, product design, is instead of starting with a blank sheet of paper, maybe start with a tool like Balsamiq because on paper you can just draw anything and that's scary. With Balsamiq, we give you all sorts of pre-made components and you just drag and drop and assemble.

Okay.

So that's a lot less scary because you can confidently assemble a UI knowing that these components already exist. Some programmer will be able to build it someday, right? So we hear from a lot of beginners that we actually help them in this way. And then the other thing is Over the years we've learned that just giving people a pencil is not going to turn them into Leonardo da Vinci.

Sure.

Right? It's just a pencil. And so we've invested quite a bit in the last few years on education team. And so if you go to balsamiq.com/learn, you'll find what we're calling the Balsamiq Wireframing Academy, which is a giant piece of our website now with courses, articles, videos, tutorials, all sorts of things. And the idea is to get you from zero to decent. Uh, you're not going to become the best product designer in the world. That, that takes years and years to master.

Right.

Uh, but you, it should solve that problem that you were saying, which is I've never done it before. Where do I start? Uh, we have very easy to follow, uh, classes and things like that.

And all that is free on your website.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's awesome. So no excuse not to do it.

Well, I mean, it takes time, like everything else. But try a few things and see if you develop the passion for it. And it might be fun.

Sure. I want to talk about hiring here, because I feel like you have a pretty interesting concept and vision around how you build your team. And I see that it's obviously extremely difficult to get hired at Balsamiq, just based on your guys' standard, and then obviously the amount of volume of hires you guys make. You offer industry average plus pay policy, I think I saw, based on your location. Vacation, kind of pretty relaxed there. You really try to build that strong work culture and training. I'd like to hear more about what does your hiring process look like, and how do you find that top talent? Because I know that's a common difficulty for CEOs.

Sure. So yes, absolutely. Like I said before, the people is the one thing that is hard to copy, is the one thing that I want to invest as much as possible in. I think that the more I do that, that has the highest return in the long term.

Mm-hmm.

And so it is difficult to work at Balsamiq Because we hire so rarely, but it's actually not very difficult, I feel, to qualify for a job at Balsamiq because, more than hiring for seniority, we hire for potential.

Okay.

We, you know, like I said before, we are not perfect, we don't have all the answers, but we're gonna work towards finding them and we're gonna work To get better every day. So I actually prefer finding someone with less experience and more potential rather than someone who might be super expert and then 2 years later get bored because they have nothing to learn. It's more about working on something, it's more like, let's get on board on this train and let's make it all, you know, let's travel together and make it as good as we can together. So, I feel like that approach has been working well for us. So, you know, coachability, and self-motivation, and thirst for learning, these are things that are important here, and what will make you successful.

But how do you measure that at the interview stage? Do you have—

It's tough, it's tough, and especially because we are Distributed worldwide, and we often don't meet our employees until 8 months after we've hired them in person. So we've made some mistakes. We've had a few people not work out within a year. Usually we figure it out.

Yeah.

We try as much as we can to make it work, but then we see that it's just the potential is not there. So, this is something that we're working on improving, but again, we don't hire that often, so it's not something that we can work on, practice too often.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's the number one strategy that we use ourselves. So, number one is always, we call it grit or hunger, and that's the thing. And then, yeah, usually it's like, can you deliver results? I think that's usually the second one, which is kind of tied. And then our third hiring criteria is experience, because that stuff changes every 5 years, right? So, who cares? Maybe it's not relevant, you know, you've probably seen things change throughout the last 12 years.

Yeah, yeah, so yeah, we like flexibility, because we're still growing, and people move between jobs. We're actively, this is an area that we're actively working on improving.

Can you share a little bit more about the cultural side? I guess that's one side I'm kind of curious about.

Yeah, sure, I guess, I mean, so we, I don't know if you can see behind my screen, we just spent some time last year trying to recodify our company values.

Okay.

Because the original list was made when it was just me 10 years ago, and I thought that doesn't make sense, you know, now after 10 years and with this group, We should know exactly what our culture is about now, and so we should update it for the next decade. And so we came up with these 6 values, which are: one is we're good people and we care.

Mm-hmm.

And then give and earn trust and respect. Be a great teammate. Be so good they can't ignore you, which is a Steve Martin quote. Aim for longevity, which we spoke about. And then always be kaizen-ing. Kaizen means continuous improvement.

Love it.

And so, like I already said, for us, a lot of our work is just getting better at everything we do. So, with these values, they pretty much capture our internal culture right now. And then, when it comes to benefits, we Our goal is to make sure people don't think about it. They don't think about money, that, you know, they know they're well paid, they don't have to worry about it.

Hmm.

So that they can then focus on their work. And so we have— we compete with the best here. We compare with Apple and Google and Facebook, and we try to Not fully match what they do, but as much as we can, and luckily we're very profitable, so we can afford to spend a lot on benefits, so, you know, we have very good salaries and very good benefits, a few you've mentioned, but you can find more on our website.

Love it. So, thank you so much for being with us today. Where can our audience get in touch with you, learn more about kind of what you're working on, what the vision is, and about your product?

Well, as you said, we're very transparent. Everything is on our website, balsamiq.com, balsamiq with a Q instead of the C at the end, 'cause we don't make vinegar. And my email is there, my Twitter, you know, everybody's information is on there. There's a million ways to contact us. I have an office hours, program where I meet with anyone who wants advice once a week. So you can put in mind for that. A few of my employees do it as well. So you can check out that, or we have a community Slack group that you can join if you want to talk to us directly. We're very approachable. So, okay.

Is that for founders or only for wireframers?

Oh, anyone, anyone. Usually, usually for me, I usually speak with founders.

Founders, okay.

About business stuff, and then we have Leon, who's a UX expert, and he can give you advice on your wireframes. We have Mike, who's a product designer, and usually gives advice about careers in product design. We have several people that you can talk to if you want.

So guys, if you guys are listening to this, and you are a founder, and you need to speak to an expert, please take take up— take this, uh, this opportunity. I mean, that's huge. Not a lot of founders open up their time for, for other people and are willing to help you. So that's huge value.

And my goal is to make new friends.

So yeah, I hope we're friends after today. Um, and I know on top of that, what, uh, for everybody listening, um, you know, very nice of you to offer. So anybody who wants to try out his product, enter in code SaaS District, uh, in one word, and you'll get a 3-month trial of the product. You can use it for free. So just put in SaaS District in the checkout. And thank you so much for offering that to us and our listeners.

Sure. That's for Balsamiq Cloud, our web app.

Okay. Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Anything else you want to add, Peldi?

No, thanks. Thanks a lot. And good luck with the podcast. It looks very good so far.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Cheers. Thank you all for listening in to today's episode. Don't forget to join us for another episode where we interview top leaders and experts in the business and SaaS industry. If you enjoyed this episode, I ask that you please give us a 5-star review on iTunes. That would be really, really appreciated. Otherwise, if you have any feedback, suggestions, or improvements for this podcast, please feel free to send it directly to me on our website at horizoncapital.com.

Thank you.

Or you can just tweet me @akeeljabber. Thanks again, and hope to see you guys on the next episode.

Bye!