Dan Martell - Remaining Untouched By Competitors with Peldi @ Balsamiq.com - Escape Velocity Show #23

00:00:00.000 it's not your job to make employees happy and kind of this kind of blew my mind but happiness

00:00:05.660 is an intrinsic thing people decide if they want to be happy or not right my job as a ceo is to

00:00:12.680 create an environment where people want to be happy can be happy people who want to move forward

00:00:17.280 can move forward people who want to people who just had a baby and want to just chill for a few

00:00:22.160 months, and it's okay, they can do that.

00:00:25.740 Admission sequence start.

00:00:27.740 Three, two, one.

00:00:38.920 Peldi, how's it going?

00:00:40.220 Good.

00:00:40.580 Hey, man, I appreciate you coming on.

00:00:42.800 Balsamic, if anybody's watched my stuff, like I told you yesterday, I referred probably

00:00:46.660 three people just in email, because a lot of non-technical founders come to me for like,

00:00:51.220 OK, I've got this idea.

00:00:52.660 I want to build it.

00:00:53.620 I always say, check out your product.

00:00:55.540 You've been doing this since 2008 or nine?

00:00:58.720 Eight.

00:00:59.540 And for those that don't know what the product does,

00:01:02.220 how do you describe it?

00:01:04.640 Well, if your audience is SaaS founders,

00:01:06.440 it's basically for when you have to be a UX person,

00:01:11.320 but you can't afford to hire a UX person yet.

00:01:15.120 That's where you need my product most.

00:01:16.980 Basically, it's a simple tool similar to PowerPoint.

00:01:21.720 You drag and drop all these controls,

00:01:23.640 and you assemble user interfaces, whether it's

00:01:27.240 for a website, or an app, or a desktop app,

00:01:30.840 or whatever app you need.

00:01:34.920 You can design it.

00:01:35.740 I actually built Clarity, my last company, using Balsamiq.

00:01:40.760 I still remember my wife took a picture because it was like

00:01:42.920 3 in the morning, and I had my Thunderbolt monitor

00:01:45.720 with the flows, and she's like, are you coming to bed?

00:01:48.840 And I was like, I got to finish this.

00:01:50.940 And I'm not a designer, and that's

00:01:52.260 what I've always loved about it is the ability

00:01:54.960 to communicate your ideas.

00:01:59.100 When you think of building this business,

00:02:02.040 I remember in the early days, it wasn't SaaS.

00:02:04.520 That was something that you added later.

00:02:06.780 How has the company's business model

00:02:09.100 evolved over the years?

00:02:11.380 Sure.

00:02:11.880 So when I actually first started, my goal

00:02:14.880 was to be neither SaaS nor licensed,

00:02:18.480 but I wanted to build a plugin for Atlassian Confluence.

00:02:23.620 OK, yeah, I remember.

00:02:24.420 And so sell it that way, because my goal

00:02:26.100 was to have a one-person company.

00:02:27.500 So I thought, if I can get the platform

00:02:30.820 to do my marketing for me, then I don't have to do that.

00:02:35.620 Then I can stay smaller, right?

00:02:36.960 Yeah.

00:02:37.380 So at the beginning, I started just

00:02:41.560 building this product as a plug-in.

00:02:45.820 Then even before I launched during the beta,

00:02:50.000 my beta people said, oh, this is great,

00:02:53.500 but I don't use Confluence.

00:02:54.940 I don't use Jira.

00:02:56.240 Can I have it as a desktop application?

00:02:58.280 I said, ah, it's 2008.

00:02:59.780 Everything is going to the web.

00:03:01.000 Who wants desktop, right?

00:03:02.760 Well, apparently every time wanted desktop.

00:03:04.800 Everybody wanted desktop.

00:03:05.860 So I had to give in.

00:03:08.180 I fought it and fought it because I thought,

00:03:10.200 If I do a desktop app, then I can't really charge as much because it's a very narrowly focused app.

00:03:17.280 And that means that I'll have high volume, but I'm by myself.

00:03:21.460 How do I support high volume?

00:03:24.040 And so the people in the barrier said, just don't support it.

00:03:27.500 Just do forums only support and people support each other.

00:03:31.240 I said, okay.

00:03:32.120 I don't even know how much to charge.

00:03:33.900 And then one person said, well, you know, there's this competitor, which I hadn't even seen yet.

00:03:38.400 You didn't even know.

00:03:38.960 That is $79.

00:03:40.580 You're a little better.

00:03:41.740 I said, all right, $79 it is.

00:03:43.760 That's how you do pricing.

00:03:44.800 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:03:45.620 And so even before launching, my business plan did not survive impact with customers.

00:03:52.680 So I had to give in and I had to become a shareware guy.

00:03:56.380 And for many years, that was our number one product.

00:04:01.400 Still is.

00:04:03.060 Just a few months ago, 11 years later, SaaS has surpassed desktop.

00:04:08.340 really yeah yeah yeah it's still a big maybe 50 percent when did you make the switch so then i

00:04:15.900 also didn't want to do sass because it was just me yeah i wanted to just have like i said a small

00:04:21.740 small company so i wanted to be able to sleep at night i didn't want to have to run servers and

00:04:27.060 keep them up because your your the thought was if i have a subscription they're gonna expect 24 7

00:04:33.320 And connectivity.

00:04:34.440 It can't go down.

00:04:35.320 Yeah, it can't.

00:04:35.780 It can't go down.

00:04:36.440 And the product doesn't work.

00:04:37.180 And it's my first time.

00:04:38.260 I'm not at DevOps.

00:04:41.180 It sounded so stressful.

00:04:44.160 As a solo person, it just seemed like too risky.

00:04:49.320 What inspired you to build a, and now you've got 30 employees.

00:04:54.480 It's a totally different game.

00:04:55.580 Yeah, so a year later, this one guy who was a DevOps person loved everything about us

00:05:02.540 and said, come, hire me, and I'll build you the SaaS version of this.

00:05:08.100 And I said, all right, you're on call, though.

00:05:10.160 Not me.

00:05:10.860 He said, it's fine.

00:05:11.520 Yes, I love this stuff.

00:05:12.520 And so that's when we started with the SaaS a year later, yeah.

00:05:15.200 And how that transition, now people pay.

00:05:20.200 Is there like Teams additions?

00:05:22.120 Yeah, we have different versions.

00:05:23.980 The SaaS version, which is now our number one product,

00:05:26.820 has these plans, three tiers, and they're priced per project.

00:05:34.020 So either two projects or 20 projects or 200 projects and unlimited users.

00:05:38.160 But, of course, if you have a lot of projects, usually a lot of users,

00:05:42.840 usually they want to create projects.

00:05:44.480 So it's kind of a proxy.

00:05:47.920 Yeah.

00:05:48.400 And it's funny because I've been an early customer,

00:05:52.100 and I think I still get the upgrades.

00:05:54.940 It's, you know, I paid one price and I-

00:05:56.760 For the desktop?

00:05:57.520 Yeah.

00:05:58.160 Yeah, and it's, and then I also, like, personally,

00:06:00.800 I had that license, and then when I built the companies,

00:06:03.220 I always bought the team stuff.

00:06:05.920 And what have you learned about, like, the two business models?

00:06:09.080 Is there different customer segments?

00:06:10.760 Like, do you have different types of support needs now?

00:06:13.940 Well, I mean-

00:06:14.560 Do you wish you would have done it earlier?

00:06:16.840 You know, I like to have the mix.

00:06:19.120 I like to have the mix because people, for my specific solution, you know, it's a tool.

00:06:30.380 And people still really like to have it offline, save their data locally.

00:06:35.680 It's just familiar.

00:06:36.440 It's the old Microsoft Office model or the old Photoshop, right?

00:06:44.440 They like to pay once and use it as much as they want.

00:06:47.300 they want to keep their data private on their computers and and um i get it i get it i'm like

00:06:52.720 that with some software as well yeah less and less now but uh it's faster it supports more

00:06:58.040 keyboard shortcuts you know it's just more optimized more native um experience uh but then

00:07:05.320 for people who are uh more uh where collaboration is more important than the online version is

00:07:12.680 clearly more powerful.

00:07:15.300 There's revision history, and you know, all that.

00:07:19.580 But what's interesting is I feel like maybe

00:07:22.040 it's just my hallucination, but you really

00:07:24.140 pioneered this space of collaborative workflows

00:07:27.660 and mock-ups.

00:07:28.220 And then now there's some other companies that have come in.

00:07:30.620 Some of them are venture-backed.

00:07:32.120 How did that impact what you did?

00:07:35.400 Because you were just focused on building a profitable.

00:07:37.860 And that's one thing I love.

00:07:39.060 On your about page, it's like, we're not for sale.

00:07:42.180 Thank you, but no thank you.

00:07:44.220 And that's always been your ethos.

00:07:48.040 When you saw those other companies do things,

00:07:50.080 were you inspired by them?

00:07:51.540 Were you like, hey, that's cool, but that's just not

00:07:53.160 our customer?

00:07:53.780 How did you think about the competition as they showed up?

00:07:56.800 That's been an evolving thing.

00:07:59.320 So when I first started, I had initial success.

00:08:03.940 And I shared everything about my revenue numbers

00:08:06.780 and everything on my blog, just mostly for two reasons.

00:08:10.840 One is I was alone.

00:08:12.560 I had no one to talk to, so I blogged instead.

00:08:15.260 And second is I wanted to show my customers, some of which were big enterprises, that, yes, I was a single person doing something, but I was making money.

00:08:27.680 I was going to be around to support them if they wanted to, right?

00:08:32.320 As a big company, I wouldn't buy from a single-person company, right?

00:08:37.120 That's too risky.

00:08:38.240 They might go belly up next year.

00:08:39.580 So I was sharing all this data, and that spawned, I call it the year of the clones, 2010.

00:08:48.320 That was the year.

00:08:49.440 Five, six different straight-up clones.

00:08:54.080 Or, you know, they copied everything, and then they had a little angle.

00:08:58.480 Or there was one that did a SaaS before us because they saw that I didn't want to do a SaaS by myself.

00:09:05.200 So they came, and for a while, it didn't really impact our sales.

00:09:12.480 In fact, I think it cemented us as the leader.

00:09:14.880 Yeah.

00:09:16.060 It's hard to talk about this space without mentioning you guys.

00:09:18.780 Absolutely, exactly.

00:09:19.860 So whenever they would get a review, we would get a review.

00:09:21.900 It was good for us, although it was kind of annoying.

00:09:25.780 Yeah.

00:09:28.160 But they mostly came and went.

00:09:30.860 Then we had one team of two that built something,

00:09:36.880 and they got into Y Combinator. 0.81

00:09:39.380 And so I was like, oh, crap, this could be bad.

00:09:42.700 Two years later, they went to work for Stripe.

00:09:47.240 The thing is about these little apps is that they're still around.

00:09:50.900 They don't kill them because they just don't work on it,

00:09:55.340 and they bring in a little couple hundred bucks a month.

00:09:58.380 and it's really unethical to their customers i think because they're not they're not they're

00:10:04.700 not supporting it they're not they're not i bet they're not even doing security fixes you know

00:10:09.980 that's just junk that's left over in space right and just the grades um i get calls once in a while

00:10:17.820 from some of these people are like hey do you want to buy my customer base and then i ask them and

00:10:22.460 and they make as much in a year

00:10:25.140 that we make in three hours.

00:10:27.980 It's not worth it, not worth it.

00:10:29.940 But they do pollute.

00:10:31.580 When people do reviews of the space,

00:10:33.560 they list all these things, half of which are dead.

00:10:36.180 Yeah, the links don't even work.

00:10:37.460 And you don't see it.

00:10:38.720 They just remove all dates from their website.

00:10:41.220 They remove the blog, and it's just this time.

00:10:43.320 Do you actually see them do that?

00:10:45.080 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:10:45.680 OK, so it's a way for them to.

00:10:47.140 Yeah, so that happens.

00:10:48.420 So for a while, that's what happened.

00:10:52.460 Now, what happened was that Adobe got in the game with Adobe XD.

00:11:00.480 So when I was at Adobe, there was this rule where you couldn't start a new product unless it was pretty much guaranteed to make $100 million in revenue from the beginning.

00:11:12.900 Because it's just a big company, and you can't just ship in one language.

00:11:17.480 It has to ship in 20 languages, right?

00:11:19.200 Even version one, right?

00:11:20.360 So they have these fixed costs.

00:11:22.460 and so the ux space was not big enough for them right but then things changed at adobe they went

00:11:28.780 through a rough patch etc etc their products are very mature this ux thing is growing and growing

00:11:34.360 and they saw that there were a couple of companies doing pretty well and so i think they lowered that

00:11:40.920 threshold and they started with these other products so adobe xd is a great product i've

00:11:45.920 I've only used it once or twice.

00:11:49.280 And it's really like Fireworks used to be,

00:11:52.400 a simple graphic design tool.

00:11:55.120 And what's interesting is that they put a UX spin on it.

00:11:58.960 It's really a generic tool.

00:12:01.040 But in order to market it better, to focus it better,

00:12:05.360 they say, oh, yeah, it's a positioning,

00:12:07.940 purely a positioning thing, at least at first.

00:12:10.980 Now they've focused, they've built more features

00:12:13.460 that are specifically for prototyping.

00:12:15.480 Or Figma is another one.

00:12:18.140 It's basically Illustrator, right?

00:12:21.580 But that's too much to go after at the beginning.

00:12:24.420 So they said, oh, it's an Illustrator, but only for UX,

00:12:27.540 prototyping, right?

00:12:28.280 Then there's InVision, who is all marketing, right?

00:12:33.660 Tons and tons of money.

00:12:34.720 So I've been getting calls from VCs for 10 years.

00:12:37.920 And I say, go give it to someone else.

00:12:41.020 I'm not interested.

00:12:42.960 And so they have.

00:12:45.060 But they continue to educate the market.

00:12:47.180 Yeah, and also, the only change we've had to do since all these big players showed up

00:12:52.460 is to make it more clear to our customers and our potential customers

00:12:58.280 that we don't really compete with them.

00:13:00.520 They are prototyping tools.

00:13:01.880 They're pro tools for UX designers.

00:13:04.360 Yeah, so they're for the designers that are professionals at UX.

00:13:10.120 And last time we were talking, you said...

00:13:12.360 I'm not.

00:13:12.840 I mean, so we are perfect for people who have to act as a designer.

00:13:18.680 So product managers.

00:13:20.440 Early founders that don't have it.

00:13:22.040 Founders.

00:13:22.700 We have so many founders.

00:13:24.100 You have this idea and you have to get it built, right?

00:13:28.120 So our tool is perfect because you don't have to know anything about anything.

00:13:32.000 You just put it together.

00:13:32.760 You just transform your idea into a design.

00:13:36.280 And then with that, you go and hire a programmer.

00:13:38.400 You hire a graphic designer to make it pretty.

00:13:42.340 And if you can, you hire a UX consultant to help you, or you just do it all yourself and talk to customers and test it, et cetera.

00:13:51.340 So for that market, we have the best solution.

00:13:58.440 They would not – first of all, we cost a tenth of what those other tools cost because those tools are for professionals who – that's their only tool.

00:14:07.940 They live in that tool day after day.

00:14:10.360 So, of course, it's got to cost more.

00:14:11.620 And as soon as you cater to that audience,

00:14:13.920 like all these tools like Envision app and others,

00:14:16.000 it's like the product's complexity.

00:14:18.000 Oh, yeah.

00:14:18.800 Yeah, forget it.

00:14:19.720 It brings it to a level where these non-designer designers,

00:14:22.940 I mean, there's just no way they're

00:14:25.300 going to figure this out.

00:14:26.240 Exactly.

00:14:26.700 So we say we are your first tool.

00:14:31.080 Then if you want to become a UX professional, go ahead.

00:14:34.920 Graduate to something more complicated, right?

00:14:39.500 If you hire UX professional, then they're going to use whatever they want.

00:14:42.560 But we want Balsamiq to be the first tool that people who are getting into UX use because it's just the easiest and most approachable, and we want to keep it that way.

00:14:57.040 So what I did was I hid some of the most power user features from the product because we were going back to our roots.

00:15:05.960 We're saying, no, we don't want, you know, we have a lot of people who actually live in Balsamiq. 1.00

00:15:11.600 Yeah, that's what they're, yeah, even designers.

00:15:13.820 We do, actually, we got a lot of senior designers who know not to chase the latest shiny thing, and they know which tool to use.

00:15:22.740 Yeah, you mentioned that, that it's like for the first non-designer designer, and then for the professionals that know better when prototyping.

00:15:28.980 Yeah, the senior designers, they know.

00:15:30.640 When you prototype, keep it.

00:15:31.760 They have a set of tools, right?

00:15:32.960 Oh, I just need to do wireframes?

00:15:34.500 I'm just going to use Balsamiq. 0.99

00:15:35.500 it takes half the time a third of the time of any other tool yeah also we purposely don't let you

00:15:43.420 must mess with details and colors and precision we're never going to add those features right

00:15:48.620 because if i let you do that then i put the onus on you to know how to do that right all these other

00:15:55.180 tools can also do low fidelity wireframing but you can also it's you know the ability to tweak

00:16:02.220 a corner radius on a rectangle is right there right so people say that they need incredible

00:16:10.300 self-discipline to stop and do it quickly when they use those tools yeah in balsamic you just

00:16:15.660 can't do any of those things so it is quick or there's no way there's no it's really hard to be

00:16:21.740 slow in balsamic yeah and one of the things i've always find fascinating peldi about you and there's

00:16:26.540 There's this whole cohort of, like, early SaaS founders, product founders back in that 2009, like, where, you know, I mean, still to this day, I know you probably don't do all support, but, like, in the early days.

00:16:39.740 Oh, I still, I love support.

00:16:41.280 Yeah, but that was, like, you emailed and you replied.

00:16:44.860 Like, what are the things like that that you did to win the customer's mind or differentiate yourself from other tools out there?

00:16:55.420 Let's see.

00:16:56.060 So from the beginning, it was very clear to me

00:16:59.780 that one should not compete on features.

00:17:03.820 I used to say, competing on features is very 1990s.

00:17:08.080 Right now, the software industry has matured.

00:17:12.140 After a while, all the products that

00:17:14.500 solve a specific problem will kind of look the same

00:17:18.060 and behave the same, because-

00:17:19.720 That's the right way to solve the problem.

00:17:20.880 I mean, they're tools, right?

00:17:22.820 So yes, there's 1,000 brands of screwdrivers or pliers.

00:17:27.880 Yeah, project management software.

00:17:28.920 Or pliers, you know, tools, hammers.

00:17:31.000 Yeah.

00:17:31.600 There's the best hammers and the cheap hammers, but they all kind of look the same, right?

00:17:35.140 That's inevitable with tools.

00:17:37.120 And so don't compete on that.

00:17:38.980 So I always wanted to compete on usability and customer service.

00:17:43.000 So usability means our product is so focused that it is easy to use,

00:17:49.360 And we are better than in competition at saying no to new features, keeping it focused, not going after bigger markets.

00:17:56.980 We're going to keep it focused.

00:17:58.180 This is enough for us because we're a small company.

00:18:01.000 We want to remain a small company, so that's fine.

00:18:03.380 And also usability for us is also every interaction that you have with us has to be top-notch.

00:18:09.500 So customer service is really, I'd say, another facet of that same front line.

00:18:13.960 Yeah, and so I set up a remote global company from the beginning.

00:18:22.920 My second employee was in California while I was in Italy because I thought that that was a competitive advantage.

00:18:29.760 These other small competitors, they only have one location, and so they sleep.

00:18:35.660 And so they don't answer the phone 17 hours out of the 24 hours like we do.

00:18:40.640 Did you have a phone number right from the beginning?

00:18:42.200 Yeah, in the beginning, right.

00:18:42.940 Which is pretty rare.

00:18:43.960 Yeah, but as a customer, don't you want that?

00:18:45.880 That's what you want.

00:18:46.660 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:18:47.360 Of course.

00:18:48.080 Yeah.

00:18:48.260 So I think the relentless customer focus and trying to do right by our customers has been maybe unique.

00:18:59.900 Super unique.

00:19:00.480 Maybe not anymore.

00:19:00.980 Especially for the price point.

00:19:02.160 I mean, it's pretty.

00:19:02.600 Yeah.

00:19:02.980 I know.

00:19:03.700 I know.

00:19:04.160 Yeah, we always support anybody.

00:19:05.680 We never check your license before answering, you know.

00:19:10.740 Yeah, so support has been.

00:19:13.080 A competitive advantage.

00:19:14.500 Yeah, but it's also been, it's not just for our customers, it's also for ourselves.

00:19:19.960 Because if you give people great support, they will give back in feedback and suggestions.

00:19:26.240 We have very active forums from the beginning.

00:19:29.560 And so we know where the roughest edges of the product are immediately.

00:19:35.340 We don't do any analytics ever.

00:19:37.120 We've never done it because people tell us, they scream at us.

00:19:40.540 Yeah.

00:19:41.040 We have a ton of qualitative, so more in-depth data.

00:19:47.680 We talk to people all the time.

00:19:49.800 We interview our customers all the time.

00:19:51.460 And it's so easy.

00:19:52.180 They volunteer.

00:19:52.900 We have a customer advisory board,

00:19:55.680 which we started a couple of months ago.

00:19:57.140 And it's already 200 people.

00:19:58.480 Wow.

00:19:58.900 So we have a question about, hey, should we design this this

00:20:01.320 way or that way?

00:20:02.360 Boom.

00:20:02.940 We got a ton of great feedback, right?

00:20:05.380 How do you use the, I call it a CAB customer advisory board.

00:20:09.220 Do you show them early mock-ups?

00:20:11.500 Yeah, you know, we're just getting started,

00:20:12.820 but we've had incarnations of the same thing forever.

00:20:16.240 And yeah, I used to just design new features in Balsamiq,

00:20:20.660 put them in the forums.

00:20:21.580 It'd be so weird if you didn't.

00:20:22.840 Yeah, right.

00:20:24.400 Put them in the forums and say, OK,

00:20:28.160 you've been asking for this feature.

00:20:29.520 How about we design it this way?

00:20:31.620 And you get such great feedback, because your customers

00:20:36.140 use your product much more than you do.

00:20:37.720 You're too busy building it to use it, right?

00:20:40.060 So by doing that, you get all the different use cases that you would not see right away.

00:20:50.160 And also, this kind of buys you time.

00:20:52.220 That's kind of a trick.

00:20:52.980 If you say, oh, let's discuss this for a couple of months.

00:20:57.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:20:57.640 That way I don't have to build it.

00:20:59.020 I want to get it right.

00:20:59.480 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:20:59.920 You know it's going to take you some time.

00:21:01.140 Yeah, exactly.

00:21:02.220 And they give you that grace spirit.

00:21:03.400 That's so smart.

00:21:04.220 Yeah, that works.

00:21:05.380 Yeah, so we do that. 0.63

00:21:06.520 And or whenever we do surveys to define our personas better,

00:21:15.280 you know, try to understand what these people do

00:21:18.880 or what they like.

00:21:20.380 It helps us with our marketing.

00:21:21.700 It's like, are you guys on LinkedIn?

00:21:24.880 Should we market on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever?

00:21:27.660 So we closed our Facebook page recently.

00:21:30.340 Yeah.

00:21:30.880 Didn't matter.

00:21:31.760 No.

00:21:32.380 No.

00:21:32.880 And do you ask them, like, what events you guys go to

00:21:35.020 or where do you think we should show up?

00:21:36.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:21:37.240 We do all that, yeah.

00:21:38.800 And it's great.

00:21:40.060 But you've got to earn that, right?

00:21:41.860 People don't give you their precious time for nothing, right?

00:21:45.380 They have to sort of feel like they are jumping on the train

00:21:49.540 with you, and we're going together to a better place,

00:21:52.280 right, you know?

00:21:53.260 Co-create.

00:21:53.920 Yeah.

00:21:55.360 So one thing I've always been fascinating, Pelda,

00:21:58.240 you live in Italy, and I see you at a lot of events

00:22:01.960 for somebody that lives in so many time zones apart.

00:22:05.220 and you guys blog, and share, and educate.

00:22:08.580 How has that played into your kind of creating value

00:22:12.980 for the customer?

00:22:13.740 Because I know that's one thing you say.

00:22:15.340 Our mission is not only the tool, but also

00:22:17.580 to educate non-designers.

00:22:20.040 I mean, your series on UX, basic stuff to a UX person,

00:22:24.800 but definitely not known to a non-designer that

00:22:27.840 can transform an app's ability to solve the problem, right?

00:22:31.500 How have you thought of that?

00:22:32.780 So that came a couple years ago.

00:22:38.300 We were 10 years old.

00:22:40.260 The product was getting to be pretty mature because, like I said, after a while, you've done it.

00:22:47.680 It's good.

00:22:48.920 It's the tool.

00:22:49.820 It's the tool that solves the best hammer, right?

00:22:56.640 But so I thought, all right, now what, right?

00:23:01.260 So we go back to our company mission, and the mission is to help get rid of the world of bad software.

00:23:08.460 That's your mission.

00:23:09.200 From day one.

00:23:10.280 Wow.

00:23:10.600 From the very beginning.

00:23:11.460 That's awesome.

00:23:12.000 It's not that big of a mission.

00:23:14.120 It's cool that you crystallized it so early.

00:23:16.420 But, yeah, it's been that since the beginning, right?

00:23:18.340 So, okay, help rid the world of bad software.

00:23:22.420 We've built a tool.

00:23:23.960 We've built a company behind it that is solid and then can support the tool and make it better and support our customers.

00:23:30.180 Great.

00:23:30.460 now what else can we do and we're like well we've heard from our customers loud and clear that

00:23:36.120 um just because you have a tool doesn't mean you do good work a pencil you could do scratches or

00:23:44.020 you could be leonardo da vinci right with the same pencil right so i thought perfect the tool is

00:23:50.500 mature now we we invest less in the tool and more in education and so the first step was to raise our

00:23:59.740 event sponsorship budget.

00:24:02.360 So I thought,

00:24:04.340 okay, we don't even have a team

00:24:06.060 now to teach people about UX,

00:24:08.240 but there's a million people already

00:24:09.980 educating about UX.

00:24:11.780 Let's look at all the UX events that are

00:24:13.900 helping people get better

00:24:16.040 at UX and sponsor the heck out of them.

00:24:18.120 So we set up a

00:24:19.920 $350,000

00:24:20.960 yearly budget for sponsoring

00:24:24.000 events. And we basically

00:24:25.840 don't want anything in return.

00:24:27.500 and we give them the logo sometimes.

00:24:29.080 They don't even put the logo.

00:24:29.940 It doesn't really matter because what matters is that they're helping us

00:24:33.640 in our goal to rid the world of bad software, right?

00:24:38.660 Then we started investing in an education team,

00:24:42.460 and we put it right in front, top navigation.

00:24:46.840 You have product, company, learn UI design, right?

00:24:51.500 and basically the way you can summarize it is

00:24:55.760 I want wireframing to be synonymous with Balsamiq. 0.97

00:25:00.880 Not prototyping.

00:25:02.380 The bigger players can have that for the pros.

00:25:05.160 But wireframing is an unsexy word.

00:25:09.840 You know what happened?

00:25:11.140 At the beginning in the 80s and 90s,

00:25:14.220 there was HCI, human-computer interaction.

00:25:17.760 And inside of it, there were all these disciplines,

00:25:19.940 uh information architecture and wireframing and prototyping and card sorting and uh user research

00:25:26.120 and uh yeah sorry card sorting is a is a technique it's not a job anyways then in the 90s and 2000

00:25:32.840 it all got bundled together into ux yeah ux was the sexy uh uh term yeah and so that that was great

00:25:41.020 for the for the world as a whole i think because it was easy to uh show the world that this is

00:25:48.120 where we're competing now, and this is what matters,

00:25:51.000 which is great for the end users.

00:25:52.920 But it all got muddled together.

00:25:54.600 Now that term is mature enough that I

00:25:57.640 feel like the little disciplines inside UX can be brought up

00:26:02.640 again and stand on its own.

00:26:03.800 And so if that's happening, that's

00:26:05.420 the trend that I'm seeing, wireframing I want to own.

00:26:09.840 All the other disciplines were not big enough,

00:26:13.440 and maybe someday, but that's fine.

00:26:16.260 But wireframing is enough.

00:26:17.700 It's big enough.

00:26:18.440 It's important enough.

00:26:19.580 It's the one step that you really can't skip.

00:26:23.520 And so I said, all right, I want us

00:26:26.880 to be synonymous with wireframing.

00:26:28.360 Let's create a team that teaches people how to wireframe.

00:26:32.560 Our website says, go from zero to decent.

00:26:36.280 You're not going to become a pro.

00:26:38.260 You don't need to become a pro.

00:26:40.540 But if you want to, we'll give you an on-ramp.

00:26:43.520 But for most people, we want them to be decent,

00:26:46.640 because it does change the world.

00:26:48.280 If everybody knows a little bit about user interface design,

00:26:53.800 the world becomes a better place.

00:26:55.300 Every app becomes better.

00:26:57.120 And it's not just software, because people

00:26:58.760 use Balsamiq to explain floor plans and, you know, like.

00:27:03.380 Did you notice in the slides yesterday here

00:27:05.840 at the conference, they had a few charts, like quadrants,

00:27:10.680 and those were clearly .

00:27:12.900 I mean, people just use it to communicate information.

00:27:16.600 But how did you build that?

00:27:18.720 So did you hire?

00:27:19.560 So now, yeah, we changed someone's job

00:27:22.180 to be full-time education.

00:27:24.720 And then we hired another person to be full-time.

00:27:27.580 And now we moved a marketing person full-time to that

00:27:31.160 to help them share.

00:27:32.580 They've been building a big library of articles and courses.

00:27:36.280 And now, in a month, they're going

00:27:39.140 do a mini retreat in chicago to kick off the team and there's going to be another person joining so

00:27:46.740 basically we're we're building out a team and doubling down on this yeah for sure for sure

00:27:51.620 it's the most important thing it's the concept of the total product right yeah the you the bits

00:27:57.540 are just a little part of it you the support is just as important the documentation is just as

00:28:02.020 important that and and the education is just as important so we're going to do events we're going

00:28:06.660 going to do workshop we're going to do uh meetups we're going to you know grow that part for the

00:28:12.920 next decade that's just as important as uh i want us to become as well known for that

00:28:18.780 than the product itself in fact that education team um it's explicit not to write balsamic

00:28:27.840 everywhere you can use it as the uh as the example but what you're teaching is generic

00:28:34.460 they could do it on pen and paper if they wanted.

00:28:36.280 Well, I heard somebody say once, they said, if you do it right,

00:28:38.740 your marketing will serve more people than your product ever will.

00:28:41.980 Yeah, no, of course.

00:28:43.040 I love that idea.

00:28:43.840 Of course, yeah.

00:28:44.500 If you do it right, if you create really great marketing.

00:28:47.580 Always.

00:28:48.180 It's the O'Reilly, create more value than you capture, right?

00:28:51.020 Yeah.

00:28:52.300 Absolutely, we've lived by that since the beginning.

00:28:54.740 And as you've built the business, it's funny because I used to be a developer

00:29:00.900 and I just didn't want to talk to people.

00:29:02.400 And then I realized, well, shit, if I want to build a company, I'm going to have to learn how to, you know, recruit people because then I can do more.

00:29:09.100 What does that journey look like for you at Balsamic as the, you know, what inflection points did you? 0.98

00:29:17.620 Oh, several.

00:29:18.600 Yeah.

00:29:18.820 And that's what I love about when you speak.

00:29:20.480 You always share the, you know, those learning opportunities.

00:29:23.560 It's really, people think that learning is, you know, a straight curve like this, but really it's up and down, up and down, up and down.

00:29:30.640 and you think you know what you're doing

00:29:32.480 and all of a sudden,

00:29:33.540 boy, you're back at the bottom

00:29:35.240 and you're like, 0.94

00:29:35.880 oh, crap, 0.96

00:29:36.520 I did not expect this giant challenge. 0.98

00:29:38.800 But over time,

00:29:40.400 you get better, I guess.

00:29:43.200 So, I mean, at the beginning,

00:29:44.620 like I said,

00:29:45.080 I was dead set on having

00:29:46.680 a micro one-person solopreneur

00:29:51.140 software company forever

00:29:53.180 because I didn't want to have reports.

00:29:56.680 I just wanted to be myself with my craft.

00:30:00.080 Do great work.

00:30:00.640 And do great work.

00:30:03.080 That didn't last.

00:30:05.440 After six months, I went to the first guy.

00:30:08.500 No, no.

00:30:09.420 I went about six months by myself.

00:30:12.360 I got to about 3,000 customers.

00:30:14.960 And then I realized that I was doing customer service all week.

00:30:19.980 And then I would only be able to code in the weekends

00:30:22.780 when they were leaving me alone.

00:30:24.340 I did six weeks of this.

00:30:26.400 And then I woke up one morning thinking I was going to die.

00:30:29.480 Just sweating.

00:30:30.360 I was like, I got to hire someone today.

00:30:32.380 So I hired a programmer right away, and that helped.

00:30:35.400 And then a month later, I hired a support person in California, which helped.

00:30:41.720 But then I got to five people, and I said, that's it.

00:30:45.560 I even wrote it on the blog.

00:30:46.580 I hope for the next two years is for nothing to change.

00:30:49.560 Yeah, let's go with five. 0.83

00:30:50.820 Five is a great team.

00:30:52.460 You can do so much with five.

00:30:54.000 And the customers kept coming and coming and coming,

00:30:56.420 and the support team was struggling, and we were all struggling.

00:30:59.140 And so did you do anything unique?

00:31:02.140 Because as much as you guys are Italy and European,

00:31:05.820 even the name, but it's funny because people say,

00:31:10.180 like, hey, we're a European company.

00:31:11.320 We want to enter the US market.

00:31:12.640 No.

00:31:13.180 Like, how do you like, you guys are just like.

00:31:15.280 We're an internet company.

00:31:16.600 People don't even know we exist.

00:31:17.620 I don't understand why, how that, I guess,

00:31:19.260 understand, like, there's currency issues, et cetera.

00:31:22.120 But like, how did you decide to do that?

00:31:23.680 Well, I was lucky because I started the company

00:31:26.520 when I was in the US.

00:31:29.260 So I was able to, I had a bank account.

00:31:31.920 OK, so that's why, for the most part,

00:31:34.260 you could take US dollar transactions.

00:31:36.120 Right.

00:31:37.020 So the sales has always been through the US.

00:31:39.120 So you can work with all the payment processors,

00:31:42.760 even if they're not in Europe yet.

00:31:44.340 So the way we set it up is that the Italian company

00:31:46.920 is an R&D company, and it only has one customer,

00:31:50.100 the American company.

00:31:51.280 So it sells everything to the American company.

00:31:53.640 The American company is in charge of marketing and sales.

00:31:56.160 Perfect.

00:31:56.660 So, yeah, that took a year and a half of three sets of accountants and lawyers.

00:32:02.480 But that's how it works now, yeah.

00:32:05.980 So five employees.

00:32:07.460 Five employees.

00:32:08.140 And boom, customers kept coming.

00:32:09.160 Yeah, and we were struggling.

00:32:11.060 And we got an acquisition offer.

00:32:13.580 And I seriously considered.

00:32:14.920 Did you really?

00:32:15.640 Oh, yeah, just then.

00:32:16.860 Huge.

00:32:17.980 And seriously, we were disclosed because I thought, hey, I'm going to hire myself a boss so I can code all day,

00:32:25.600 which is what i love and um and then it turns out that they expected me to hire 60 people after the

00:32:32.160 acquisition i was like wait a minute no no no no i don't want to be a manager um so we uh so that

00:32:39.360 was a big uh inflection point where we decided okay we're gonna stick to it alone we're gonna

00:32:44.880 hire five more people we're gonna be 10 people forever that's gonna be great so we we did that

00:32:49.360 we got to 10 for a couple years it was fine and then we're like well you know we got to rewrite

00:32:54.080 the whole application because flash is dying we got to rewrite it all all right how long did you

00:32:58.960 last at 10 a couple of years maybe then we were like all right we're going to 16 in six months

00:33:05.760 and we hired a bunch of developers and that was that changed everything again because all of a

00:33:10.560 sudden now we needed to write down our policies in a handbook yeah before it was just me talking to

00:33:16.480 everybody right yeah so then we were 16 for a while we grew a little bit and then we we got

00:33:22.480 I was stuck at 22, 23.

00:33:25.940 That was okay for a few years.

00:33:28.320 And then this education thing started, and we wanted just to do more.

00:33:35.180 Our customers want us to do more, and we can afford to.

00:33:38.340 And so we hired eight people in a year again.

00:33:40.600 So now we're 33.

00:33:42.200 And that was a bit of a mess for me specifically

00:33:46.480 because during this whole time, I never set up managers.

00:33:53.140 So everybody was always reporting to me.

00:33:55.220 We're flat, which really means that everybody reports to me.

00:33:58.380 And when it's 32 people, that doesn't work.

00:34:02.260 It doesn't work for me and it doesn't work for them.

00:34:06.300 So I had a bit of a breakdown and tried to figure out what am I really needed for?

00:34:12.500 What should I focus on?

00:34:13.680 What should I delegate?

00:34:14.340 So that was a big growing pain last year.

00:34:19.260 How did you learn all this stuff?

00:34:20.980 Was it just talking to other founders, or are you an avid reader?

00:34:24.480 Did you go to?

00:34:26.220 Well, I come to this business software conference once a year and always feel horrible.

00:34:32.640 Opportunity.

00:34:33.300 You're like, okay.

00:34:34.400 Oh, man.

00:34:35.580 Yes.

00:34:36.060 This conference has a very short time to imposter syndrome.

00:34:42.240 Within the first couple of talks, you feel like, oh, I'm doing everything wrong.

00:34:47.280 So I learn a lot from people this way.

00:34:52.220 But mostly it's also on my own skin.

00:34:55.320 We take these experiments and we power through it somehow.

00:35:02.060 Now, you know, within the team, there's a bunch of people that are very supportive and help me work through it.

00:35:08.260 In that journey, did you, I mean, financially, did you ever have any scares, issues?

00:35:13.280 No.

00:35:13.460 Because it was pretty steady.

00:35:14.520 We've been so blessed.

00:35:15.660 I mean, I know that all this, the number one problem, you tell me because you speak to hundreds of SaaS people.

00:35:21.340 But usually the problem is we're not making enough money to continue, right?

00:35:24.900 We need more.

00:35:25.740 We need growth.

00:35:26.380 We need growth.

00:35:27.040 For us, since the beginning, it's been the opposite where we can't keep up with the growth.

00:35:31.840 Yeah.

00:35:32.060 for the first few years that's what it was it was like being strapped to this rocket

00:35:35.420 and trying to steer it somehow um in the last three four years that's been that slowed down

00:35:41.260 some to a healthy little growth uh percentage but that's all we've always had more money than we

00:35:48.380 need yeah so luckily that's been that's never been not a concern has there also the the competition

00:35:55.420 has never been really serious yeah so we can take our time we don't have deadlines you know we we

00:36:01.340 You can create the right product.

00:36:02.920 Yeah, you're not stressed out.

00:36:03.820 A lot of people, they get that way

00:36:05.720 because they're trying to grow and add features

00:36:08.340 and they hire a bunch of engineers and it's expensive

00:36:10.720 and then the product doesn't materialize to the revenue

00:36:13.600 they thought it would.

00:36:15.100 But because you guys have said, look,

00:36:16.620 we're not going to add everything.

00:36:17.880 We're actually going to be deliberate.

00:36:19.580 I mean, it's hard.

00:36:20.880 Oh, man.

00:36:21.620 I don't know how you do.

00:36:22.400 Honestly, it's like.

00:36:23.640 Well, you got to curb your ambition too, right?

00:36:26.900 Yeah.

00:36:29.040 Yesterday, there was this slide that said,

00:36:31.340 you have to have a good product for a good market,

00:36:39.100 and you should also be trendy, right?

00:36:41.240 Oh, that was April's slide, yeah. 1.00

00:36:43.120 Right?

00:36:43.520 Yeah.

00:36:44.080 And I was like, no, I don't want to be trendy.

00:36:46.060 I'm totally happy just with a good product and a good market.

00:36:49.220 We don't want any press.

00:36:50.080 We don't want to just leave us alone.

00:36:51.800 Yeah, you don't need to add any AI, blockchain.

00:36:54.080 Yeah, I don't need, yeah, I don't want any of that.

00:36:56.900 I've seen the-

00:36:58.660 Come and go.

00:36:59.240 Come and go.

00:36:59.920 remember google wave our customers were begging us forget about this begging us to go you have to 1.00

00:37:05.760 go to wave what do you think you idiot that's the future a year later it was killed right 0.98

00:37:10.720 google plus you have to integrate uh no no chill you know relax i love that you remember google 0.98

00:37:18.080 wave yeah because it was like touted as this is going to be the next collaboration platform

00:37:22.960 everything everything we're going to take over everything wow every few years there's something

00:37:27.840 like that our industry is very transient fashion driven and every few years we got to reinvent

00:37:34.240 everything again but it sounds like just like bezos says it's like customers will always want

00:37:38.480 a better customer experience they always want a faster app they want an easier tool to use

00:37:43.440 focus on things that are not going to change in 10 years right yeah um peli i love to ask founders

00:37:49.840 you know as you look back at this journey who have you had to become to be the ceo of this business

00:37:55.760 oh man you have to really reinvent yourself so many times and it's so hard how did that

00:38:01.600 look like for you yeah i remember thinking when we were five people and i was happy as a clam

00:38:09.200 and i wanted to stay that way and it was obvious that the market was telling us no that's not the

00:38:15.440 right size for what you're doing and i was like but it's my company god damn it sorry no you can 0.81

00:38:22.400 swear uh it's my company shouldn't i have a say in how big it is and it's my dream and um

00:38:33.600 and uh you gotta add some you know i could have raised prices and have fewer customers

00:38:38.400 right but that doesn't make any sense for the kind of product that i want to build

00:38:42.400 uh and if you raise prices and then you gotta add more features to justify that and now you're

00:38:46.720 competing with microsoft and adobe good you know good luck with that right as a five person company

00:38:51.440 right and you're you're opening yourselves up for disruption from the bottom right clayton christensen

00:38:57.280 so i didn't want to raise prices it doesn't make sense so really all you get to choose as an

00:39:01.760 entrepreneur is the problem you want to solve and once you've chosen that there is a natural home

00:39:08.240 for someone to solve that problem there is a natural size of company for someone like if you

00:39:14.160 want to feed pizza to the neighborhood you can do that with two three people this makes sense to hire

00:39:19.920 30 people right if you want to eradicate polio right you're gonna need some money you're gonna

00:39:25.680 need a heck of a lot of funding you know there's only bill gates can do that right um so as an

00:39:31.200 entrepreneur that's what you choose you choose the problem choose the problem and then think about it

00:39:35.920 okay in 10 years where does this live is this gonna be a free feature of aws right eventually

00:39:44.640 that's where people are gonna look for that well then you better structure your company so that

00:39:49.680 aw amazon buys you right if instead is do you think there's a future for a freestanding thing

00:39:56.480 like this is it going to be a small uh market for you know the wire framing market is maybe

00:40:04.160 10 million dollars a year that's nothing you know in the grand scheme it's too small for the big

00:40:10.160 competitors to go after and it's too big for the tiny people to chase and we are dominating we're

00:40:15.680 taking the majority of that so um so you know it's gonna grow but gradually it's still a small niche

00:40:25.600 and so that probably can sustain a couple of companies like ours of 20 30 people that's great

00:40:32.800 but if you're picking something that's gonna blow up you better expect you give it act accordingly

00:40:37.600 right yeah so so you have to really uh until you find that balance of company size company

00:40:46.240 structure you have to figure it out follow the market because if you don't someone else will

00:40:51.600 yeah the software itself is not that hard yeah it's essentially building the business and like

00:40:58.000 in regards to when you look back peldi the entrepreneur that started this mindset beliefs

00:41:04.240 habits characteristics like who who what are the things that you had to change

00:41:08.960 well i mean you had to sort of accept it took me years to accept uh that i was the boss

00:41:16.840 the b word was not allowed yeah uh a balsamic manager was that was a bad word but

00:41:24.180 then you realize oh crap people haven't had a raise in years because hey i'm not the boss

00:41:30.520 who else is going to make that decision yeah there's certain decisions that don't get made

00:41:35.300 if nobody's the boss that's fascinating right or uh give yourself or yeah yeah or uh no one cares

00:41:44.120 for uh employees career development right no one's setting up uh professional development

00:41:50.260 programs no one's doing any of this very important stuff not just for the employee but for the whole 0.74

00:41:56.200 company right um and so i was like shit i gotta be the boss so i had to do a bunch of reading and 0.79

00:42:05.960 and do that and then you do that for a few years and i realize i'm not really good at that i'm 0.86

00:42:12.280 better at doing this or that um and so then you delegate you learn what to delegate did you ever

00:42:17.960 hire a coach to support you on that stuff i hired a coach just for a few lessons uh and the only

00:42:23.560 thing we worked on is what is the job of a ceo yeah that was my one question what am i supposed

00:42:29.240 to be doing because i know what i'm doing what i was doing was taking out the garbage to me

00:42:34.840 i'm the i'm the ultimate servant leader i hire good people and if there's something boring or

00:42:40.600 repetitive you'll take it i'll do it don't worry you work on harder stuff right yeah but the

00:42:46.680 The company didn't need a janitor.

00:42:48.100 They needed a leader, right?

00:42:50.280 Someone who spent time to craft a vision and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:42:56.100 Which I'm still not very good at, but I'm getting more comfortable about that.

00:42:57.680 What did you learn?

00:42:58.440 What is that?

00:42:59.020 What did you learn?

00:42:59.560 Some of the big things that the CEO was in?

00:43:01.660 Well, so I'm trying to remember.

00:43:03.120 I have to look up my notes.

00:43:05.640 But there's definitely a, you know, you should be allowed, you shouldn't be busy.

00:43:11.500 You know, all the usual stuff people say.

00:43:12.920 You shouldn't be busy because if you're busy, then you don't really have time to think strategically.

00:43:18.200 And I didn't really understand what that meant until one day I managed to magically free my schedule for the week on Friday at noon, right?

00:43:29.800 So I had the afternoon free.

00:43:31.200 I didn't know what to do.

00:43:32.120 And I thought, you know what?

00:43:32.900 I'm going to watch a Death Trainer talk because I love the guy.

00:43:36.260 And I was feeling really guilty about watching something for an hour.

00:43:42.920 But anyways, while I was watching this, I was taking notes furiously, and it gave me so much clarity, and I came up with obvious things that we must do in the next few years.

00:43:55.160 And then I was able to communicate those to the team, and I realized that we were spinning in place in some places.

00:44:01.560 That one hour that I was able to take resulted in happier employees for years, right?

00:44:11.460 Wow.

00:44:11.720 So it is totally worth it.

00:44:13.740 That was the, you're like, oh, that's how strategic work.

00:44:16.680 That's what it means.

00:44:18.100 It's really, that's it.

00:44:19.540 It's nothing more than that.

00:44:20.900 Just spend some time just learning from others or reading or, you know,

00:44:28.660 and it will give you your self-clarity,

00:44:33.480 but then it will give the whole team a better direction

00:44:36.740 and you'll waste less time.

00:44:39.940 Everybody will be happy.

00:44:40.960 But that's why you need to free up your schedule.

00:44:42.780 That's why you need to free up your schedule.

00:44:43.800 So freeing up your schedule is a hard thing, ongoing activity,

00:44:47.780 because things tend to creep up again.

00:44:50.420 And you mentioned vision, creating the vision.

00:44:53.640 Yeah, so there's that.

00:44:54.940 And then what else do you have to do?

00:44:57.860 Well, first, obviously, you have to sort of be the caretaker of the financials.

00:45:03.620 You have to make sure that everything's fine.

00:45:05.520 That taxes are paid.

00:45:06.780 Yeah, all that.

00:45:07.900 But you delegate most of that to a CFO.

00:45:10.340 Still accountable.

00:45:10.720 You still have to, yeah.

00:45:12.000 You still go to jail if they don't.

00:45:13.720 That's what I always tell my CFO, like, please don't send me to jail.

00:45:16.700 I'm going to sign this.

00:45:17.900 Then a lot of it is the culture, the policies.

00:45:22.400 So one big lesson that this coach gave me was it's not your job to make employees happy.

00:45:30.180 And this kind of blew my mind.

00:45:31.500 But happiness is an intrinsic thing.

00:45:33.640 People decide if they want to be happy or not.

00:45:35.860 right my job as a ceo is to create an environment where people want to be happy can be happy people

00:45:42.680 who want to move forward can move forward people who want to people who just had a baby and want

00:45:47.720 to just chill for a few months and it's okay they can do that and then the year later they want to

00:45:53.900 learn a ton and become more senior they can do that so that's the job your job is to set

00:45:59.040 the boundaries create the environment and then they choose what they want to do and i was this

00:46:04.840 is very freeing for me because i was taking it very personally anytime any employee had any issue

00:46:10.300 any bad and 30 people direct reports you're feeling it i was i wasn't sleeping i wasn't

00:46:16.100 sleeping because for them they would just you know we asked them what are your challenges right now

00:46:21.820 but those were after delegating everything else i was left with only one-on-one meetings and that's

00:46:27.240 all i did all day i heard them bitching and moaning and individually they maybe it was a 0.52

00:46:31.960 little thing for them but i i would only get that and so i got super depressed i thought i was

00:46:37.740 doing a horrible job um so now now i don't do that anymore we figured out a different way to

00:46:44.180 do that but um but what the coach said they're gonna have good days and bad days and

00:46:50.260 the best you can do and really your job the only thing you can do is try to

00:46:55.160 create a good environment and so that shifted my thinking uh quite a bit and

00:46:59.480 and that's been very helpful what needs to happen for you as the founder going forward

00:47:05.680 like what are some of the areas that you want to work on or take to the next level um

00:47:09.920 well we're still working on figuring out how to do these manager tasks these important managers

00:47:18.280 people uh managing tasks jobs uh in a way that is balsamicky so we're not going to introduce

00:47:28.400 managers, traditional managers, quite yet.

00:47:33.360 TPS reports.

00:47:34.420 Yeah, exactly.

00:47:35.160 We definitely have been fighting to be non-corporate forever.

00:47:39.060 But it does creep up on you, and it starts to make sense.

00:47:43.760 Yeah, you understand why those things exist.

00:47:45.780 It's like, oh, that's how 5,000 people companies are managed. 0.98

00:47:48.840 You have to have all that crap. 0.94

00:47:52.380 But maybe there's ways to innovate there, too. 0.98

00:47:54.780 We treat the company very much as a product.

00:47:56.420 We're on version five right now of the company.

00:47:59.200 Yeah, yeah, for sure.

00:48:00.660 And so every few years, you've got to reinvent it

00:48:03.000 and update the whole in-book and work on it together.

00:48:06.800 And so right now, we're experimenting with making the team.

00:48:14.780 We have individual teams for different things.

00:48:17.260 And some people are making the whole team the manager.

00:48:20.600 So if there's a tough conversation about someone non-performing,

00:48:23.500 it happens with the team.

00:48:24.700 and it's team it's four or five people usually per team so it's small enough that it is hard but it

00:48:30.300 also brings the team together same thing we we're adding these checklists to make sure that everybody

00:48:36.540 is doing well everybody is fulfilled or you know their systems career development we meet quarter

00:48:44.540 teams meet quarterly mostly without me at this point and and plan out um not just the work but

00:48:51.340 but also how we work.

00:48:54.060 So that could work.

00:48:56.420 I've also heard from some other people who are like,

00:48:58.680 whew, that seems like a lot of work.

00:48:59.800 Can I just have a manager?

00:49:01.340 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:49:02.120 I don't need.

00:49:02.940 I don't want to learn.

00:49:03.720 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:49:04.300 I don't want to have somebody else.

00:49:06.100 Just give me someone.

00:49:08.120 Hire someone for me to care about that.

00:49:12.060 So we might do that for some teams.

00:49:13.500 We'll see.

00:49:14.000 But it's cool, because you're saying it's an experiment.

00:49:16.180 And version 6, we might throw all that away

00:49:18.580 and go down a different path.

00:49:19.820 We'll see.

00:49:21.860 You have to.

00:49:22.860 You think you're building these rules and they last forever.

00:49:26.300 Forget that.

00:49:27.000 Forget that.

00:49:27.880 You can't.

00:49:28.760 How do people find you online, Peldie?

00:49:31.000 Balsamic.com.

00:49:32.540 Just go to the site, download, use it, become a customer.

00:49:36.480 Learn UI design.

00:49:38.240 Learn about our company.

00:49:39.480 Rid the world of bad software.

00:49:40.820 Yeah.

00:49:41.380 Get it for free.

00:49:42.560 Really appreciate you coming on.

00:49:43.860 Peldie, it's awesome catching up.

00:49:45.080 Thanks, Dan.

00:49:45.640 Talk soon.

00:49:46.180 Bye.

00:49:46.380 Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.

00:49:49.640 Be sure to like and subscribe and leave a comment with your biggest insight from our conversation.

00:49:55.160 Be sure to check out the next episode.

Dan Martell - March 12, 2020

Remaining Untouched By Competitors with Peldi @ Balsamiq.com - Escape Velocity Show #23

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