Remaining Untouched By Competitors with Peldi @ Balsamiq.com - Escape Velocity Show #23
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Summary
In this episode of Origin Stories, I sit down with the CEO of Jira, a productivity tool that does what you need to do to get stuff done in your day-to-day life. It's a tool that allows you to manage your productivity and productivity in a productive, fun and productive way. Origin Stories is a series of interviews with founders from the community where we discuss how they got their start in the tech industry.
Transcript
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it's not your job to make employees happy and kind of this kind of blew my mind but happiness
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is an intrinsic thing people decide if they want to be happy or not right my job as a ceo is to
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create an environment where people want to be happy can be happy people who want to move forward
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can move forward people who want to people who just had a baby and want to just chill for a few
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Balsamic, if anybody's watched my stuff, like I told you yesterday, I referred probably
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three people just in email, because a lot of non-technical founders come to me for like,
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And for those that don't know what the product does,
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it's basically for when you have to be a UX person,
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Basically, it's a simple tool similar to PowerPoint.
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I actually built Clarity, my last company, using Balsamiq.
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I still remember my wife took a picture because it was like
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3 in the morning, and I had my Thunderbolt monitor
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with the flows, and she's like, are you coming to bed?
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but I wanted to build a plugin for Atlassian Confluence.
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to do my marketing for me, then I don't have to do that.
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If I do a desktop app, then I can't really charge as much because it's a very narrowly focused app.
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And that means that I'll have high volume, but I'm by myself.
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And so the people in the barrier said, just don't support it.
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Just do forums only support and people support each other.
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And then one person said, well, you know, there's this competitor, which I hadn't even seen yet.
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And so even before launching, my business plan did not survive impact with customers.
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So I had to give in and I had to become a shareware guy.
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And for many years, that was our number one product.
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Just a few months ago, 11 years later, SaaS has surpassed desktop.
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really yeah yeah yeah it's still a big maybe 50 percent when did you make the switch so then i
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also didn't want to do sass because it was just me yeah i wanted to just have like i said a small
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small company so i wanted to be able to sleep at night i didn't want to have to run servers and
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keep them up because your your the thought was if i have a subscription they're gonna expect 24 7
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As a solo person, it just seemed like too risky.
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What inspired you to build a, and now you've got 30 employees.
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Yeah, so a year later, this one guy who was a DevOps person loved everything about us
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and said, come, hire me, and I'll build you the SaaS version of this.
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And so that's when we started with the SaaS a year later, yeah.
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The SaaS version, which is now our number one product,
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has these plans, three tiers, and they're priced per project.
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So either two projects or 20 projects or 200 projects and unlimited users.
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But, of course, if you have a lot of projects, usually a lot of users,
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And it's funny because I've been an early customer,
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Yeah, and it's, and then I also, like, personally,
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I had that license, and then when I built the companies,
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And what have you learned about, like, the two business models?
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Like, do you have different types of support needs now?
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I like to have the mix because people, for my specific solution, you know, it's a tool.
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And people still really like to have it offline, save their data locally.
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It's the old Microsoft Office model or the old Photoshop, right?
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They like to pay once and use it as much as they want.
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they want to keep their data private on their computers and and um i get it i get it i'm like
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that with some software as well yeah less and less now but uh it's faster it supports more
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keyboard shortcuts you know it's just more optimized more native um experience uh but then
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for people who are uh more uh where collaboration is more important than the online version is
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There's revision history, and you know, all that.
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pioneered this space of collaborative workflows
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And then now there's some other companies that have come in.
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Because you were just focused on building a profitable.
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On your about page, it's like, we're not for sale.
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Were you like, hey, that's cool, but that's just not
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How did you think about the competition as they showed up?
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So when I first started, I had initial success.
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And I shared everything about my revenue numbers
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and everything on my blog, just mostly for two reasons.
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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.
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I was going to be around to support them if they wanted to, right?
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As a big company, I wouldn't buy from a single-person company, right?
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So I was sharing all this data, and that spawned, I call it the year of the clones, 2010.
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Or, you know, they copied everything, and then they had a little angle.
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Or there was one that did a SaaS before us because they saw that I didn't want to do a SaaS by myself.
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So they came, and for a while, it didn't really impact our sales.
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It's hard to talk about this space without mentioning you guys.
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So whenever they would get a review, we would get a review.
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It was good for us, although it was kind of annoying.
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Then we had one team of two that built something,
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And so I was like, oh, crap, this could be bad.
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The thing is about these little apps is that they're still around.
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They don't kill them because they just don't work on it,
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and they bring in a little couple hundred bucks a month.
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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
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that's just junk that's left over in space right and just the grades um i get calls once in a while
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from some of these people are like hey do you want to buy my customer base and then i ask them and
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they list all these things, half of which are dead.
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Now, what happened was that Adobe got in the game with Adobe XD.
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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.
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Because it's just a big company, and you can't just ship in one language.
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and so the ux space was not big enough for them right but then things changed at adobe they went
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through a rough patch etc etc their products are very mature this ux thing is growing and growing
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and they saw that there were a couple of companies doing pretty well and so i think they lowered that
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threshold and they started with these other products so adobe xd is a great product i've
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And what's interesting is that they put a UX spin on it.
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But in order to market it better, to focus it better,
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Now they've focused, they've built more features
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But that's too much to go after at the beginning.
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So they said, oh, it's an Illustrator, but only for UX,
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Then there's InVision, who is all marketing, right?
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So I've been getting calls from VCs for 10 years.
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Yeah, and also, the only change we've had to do since all these big players showed up
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is to make it more clear to our customers and our potential customers
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Yeah, so they're for the designers that are professionals at UX.
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I mean, so we are perfect for people who have to act as a designer.
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You have this idea and you have to get it built, right?
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So our tool is perfect because you don't have to know anything about anything.
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And then with that, you go and hire a programmer.
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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.
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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.
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like all these tools like Envision app and others,
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It brings it to a level where these non-designer designers,
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Then if you want to become a UX professional, go ahead.
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If you hire UX professional, then they're going to use whatever they want.
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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.
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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.
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We're saying, no, we don't want, you know, we have a lot of people who actually live in Balsamiq.
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Yeah, that's what they're, yeah, even designers.
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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.
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Yeah, you mentioned that, that it's like for the first non-designer designer, and then for the professionals that know better when prototyping.
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it takes half the time a third of the time of any other tool yeah also we purposely don't let you
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must mess with details and colors and precision we're never going to add those features right
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because if i let you do that then i put the onus on you to know how to do that right all these other
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tools can also do low fidelity wireframing but you can also it's you know the ability to tweak
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a corner radius on a rectangle is right there right so people say that they need incredible
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self-discipline to stop and do it quickly when they use those tools yeah in balsamic you just
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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
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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.
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Yeah, but that was, like, you emailed and you replied.
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Like, what are the things like that that you did to win the customer's mind or differentiate yourself from other tools out there?
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I used to say, competing on features is very 1990s.
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solve a specific problem will kind of look the same
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So yes, there's 1,000 brands of screwdrivers or pliers.
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There's the best hammers and the cheap hammers, but they all kind of look the same, right?
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So I always wanted to compete on usability and customer service.
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So usability means our product is so focused that it is easy to use,
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And we are better than in competition at saying no to new features, keeping it focused, not going after bigger markets.
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This is enough for us because we're a small company.
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We want to remain a small company, so that's fine.
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And also usability for us is also every interaction that you have with us has to be top-notch.
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So customer service is really, I'd say, another facet of that same front line.
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Yeah, and so I set up a remote global company from the beginning.
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My second employee was in California while I was in Italy because I thought that that was a competitive advantage.
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These other small competitors, they only have one location, and so they sleep.
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And so they don't answer the phone 17 hours out of the 24 hours like we do.
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Did you have a phone number right from the beginning?
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So I think the relentless customer focus and trying to do right by our customers has been maybe unique.
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We never check your license before answering, you know.
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Yeah, but it's also been, it's not just for our customers, it's also for ourselves.
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Because if you give people great support, they will give back in feedback and suggestions.
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And so we know where the roughest edges of the product are immediately.
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We've never done it because people tell us, they scream at us.
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We have a ton of qualitative, so more in-depth data.
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So we have a question about, hey, should we design this this
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How do you use the, I call it a CAB customer advisory board.
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but we've had incarnations of the same thing forever.
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And yeah, I used to just design new features in Balsamiq,
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And you get such great feedback, because your customers
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So by doing that, you get all the different use cases that you would not see right away.
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If you say, oh, let's discuss this for a couple of months.
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And or whenever we do surveys to define our personas better,
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you know, try to understand what these people do
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Should we market on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever?
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And do you ask them, like, what events you guys go to
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People don't give you their precious time for nothing, right?
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They have to sort of feel like they are jumping on the train
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with you, and we're going together to a better place,
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So one thing I've always been fascinating, Pelda,
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you live in Italy, and I see you at a lot of events
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for somebody that lives in so many time zones apart.
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How has that played into your kind of creating value
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I mean, your series on UX, basic stuff to a UX person,
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but definitely not known to a non-designer that
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can transform an app's ability to solve the problem, right?
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The product was getting to be pretty mature because, like I said, after a while, you've done it.
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It's the tool that solves the best hammer, 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.
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But, yeah, it's been that since the beginning, right?
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We've built a company behind it that is solid and then can support the tool and make it better and support our customers.
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now what else can we do and we're like well we've heard from our customers loud and clear that
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um just because you have a tool doesn't mean you do good work a pencil you could do scratches or
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you could be leonardo da vinci right with the same pencil right so i thought perfect the tool is
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mature now we we invest less in the tool and more in education and so the first step was to raise our
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?
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Then we started investing in an education team,
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You have product, company, learn UI design, right?
00:24:55.760
I want wireframing to be synonymous with Balsamiq.
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And inside of it, there were all these disciplines,
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uh information architecture and wireframing and prototyping and card sorting and uh user research
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and uh yeah sorry card sorting is a is a technique it's not a job anyways then in the 90s and 2000
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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
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where we're competing now, and this is what matters,
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feel like the little disciplines inside UX can be brought up
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the trend that I'm seeing, wireframing I want to own.
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Let's create a team that teaches people how to wireframe.
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But for most people, we want them to be decent,
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If everybody knows a little bit about user interface design,
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use Balsamiq to explain floor plans and, you know, like.
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at the conference, they had a few charts, like quadrants,
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I mean, people just use it to communicate information.
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And then we hired another person to be full-time.
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And now we moved a marketing person full-time to that
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They've been building a big library of articles and courses.
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do a mini retreat in chicago to kick off the team and there's going to be another person joining so
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basically we're we're building out a team and doubling down on this yeah for sure for sure
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it's the most important thing it's the concept of the total product right yeah the you the bits
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are just a little part of it you the support is just as important the documentation is just as
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important that and and the education is just as important so we're going to do events we're going
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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
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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
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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,
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your marketing will serve more people than your product ever will.
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If you do it right, if you create really great marketing.
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It's the O'Reilly, create more value than you capture, right?
00:28:52.300
Absolutely, we've lived by that since the beginning.
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And as you've built the business, it's funny because I used to be a developer
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.
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What does that journey look like for you at Balsamic as the, you know, what inflection points did you?
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You always share the, you know, those learning opportunities.
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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.
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And then I realized that I was doing customer service all week.
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And then I would only be able to code in the weekends
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And then I woke up one morning thinking I was going to die.
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So I hired a programmer right away, and that helped.
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And then a month later, I hired a support person in California, which helped.
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But then I got to five people, and I said, that's it.
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I hope for the next two years is for nothing to change.
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And the customers kept coming and coming and coming,
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and the support team was struggling, and we were all struggling.
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,
00:31:19.260
understand, like, there's currency issues, et cetera.
00:31:23.680
Well, I was lucky because I started the company
00:31:39.120
So you can work with all the payment processors,
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,
00:31:51.280
So it sells everything to the American company.
00:31:53.640
The American company is in charge of marketing and sales.
00:31:56.660
So, yeah, that took a year and a half of three sets of accountants and lawyers.
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
00:33:28.320
And then this education thing started, and we wanted just to do more.
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Our customers want us to do more, and we can afford to.
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.
00:33:55.220
We're flat, which really means that everybody reports to me.
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It doesn't work for me and it doesn't work for them.
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So I had a bit of a breakdown and tried to figure out what am I really needed for?
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Was it just talking to other founders, or are you an avid reader?
00:34:26.220
Well, I come to this business software conference once a year and always feel horrible.
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This conference has a very short time to imposter syndrome.
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Within the first couple of talks, you feel like, oh, I'm doing everything wrong.
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We take these experiments and we power through it somehow.
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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?
00:35:15.660
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?
00:35:27.040
For us, since the beginning, it's been the opposite where we can't keep up with the growth.
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
00:36:05.720
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
00:36:23.640
Well, you got to curb your ambition too, right?
00:36:31.340
you have to have a good product for a good market,
00:36:46.060
I'm totally happy just with a good product and a good market.
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.
00:36:59.920
remember google wave our customers were begging us forget about this begging us to go you have to
1.00
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go to wave what do you think you idiot that's the future a year later it was killed right
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google plus you have to integrate uh no no chill you know relax i love that you remember google
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
00:42:50.280
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.
00:43:05.640
But there's definitely a, you know, you should be allowed, you shouldn't be busy.
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?
00:43:32.900
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?
00:44:13.740
That was the, you're like, oh, that's how strategic work.
00:44:20.900
Just spend some time just learning from others or reading or, you know,
00:44:33.480
but then it will give the whole team a better direction
00:44:40.960
But 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,
00:44:57.860
Well, first, obviously, you have to sort of be the caretaker of the financials.
00:45:13.720
That's what I always tell my CFO, like, please don't send me to jail.
00:45:22.400
So one big lesson that this coach gave me was it's not your job to make employees happy.
00:45:35.860
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
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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
00:47:35.160
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.
00:47:45.780
It's like, oh, that's how 5,000 people companies are managed.
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But maybe there's ways to innovate there, too.
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00:47:56.420
We're on version five right now of the company.
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.
00:48:17.260
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,
00:48:24.700
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
00:48:56.420
I've also heard from some other people who are like,
00:49:14.000
But it's cool, because you're saying it's an experiment.
00:49:22.860
You think you're building these rules and they last forever.
00:49:32.540
Just go to the site, download, use it, become a customer.
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.