Switch Stories

Peldi - Beach coding in Mexico (before the switch)

An exciting story of an Italian who worked for Adobe/Macromedia for over 6,5 years and found his way to switch to the passionate life. He built on the side and launched a web app for mockups called Balsamiq Mockups.

Switch in numbers!

• 11 months of coding to push the first version of the app out
• profitable just after 2 months after launch
• $10,000 – revenue after the first 6 months
• $1.6M revenue after 18 months
• 15,000+ customers in 18 months

What a staggering results for the entrepreneur!

The reasons behind the switch

Peldi used to work as a Senior Software Engineering Lead at Adobe. You would imagine it is a great success for a developer to be a part of one of the biggest and greatest software company in the world. But our definition of success changes with years and what Peldi realised was:

I wanted to see how much a single person can achieve with an idea, a laptop and the Internet. I wanted to learn what my limits are. Being the product of just myself, Balsamiq is a tangible representation of “the best that I can do”, which is fascinating to me.

Isn’t what we dream about many times? Put everything what’s best in ourselves into a single business and see how it grows?
When heading to the US from Italy a few years earlier Peldi had already planned the whole thing and there were certain circumstances which showed him that the time had come.

Paul Montwill: Peldi, on your blog you mentioned that there were several reasons that made you think seriously about the switch:
- you learnt almost everything you wanted to in Adobe,
- your landlord wanted to kick you out of your place as he was selling it,
- and you really wanted to go back to Italy.

What was the most important reason behind the switch? Was it more like “it is time to show what I am capable of” or maybe a reaction to the above cirumstances – “I’m tired of living abroad, I need a steady business to go back to Italy?

Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni - Photo (c) Matt Snow

Peldi Guilizzoni: First of all I’d like to thank you for choosing my story as the first one for your new website, which looks really cool. Following your passion is definitely fun and, incredibly, easy to turn into a job these days. People don’t really realize how revolutionary this is yet, it’s awesome.

As for why I switched, it was really a combination of different factors, it seemed as if all the stars were aligning, sending me signals that the time was right, it definitely felt like a „now or never” situation.

Finding enough time – especially with a family to care about

Building a business on the side while keeping a day job it is the best way to maintain financial stability and grow what once will be a full time activity. It is much more difficult if you have a family to take care. But Peldi showed that with a lot of determination it is possible to spend on a project even  4 hours a day (from 8pm till midnight) and a few hours on Sunday morning.

Once he even took his family and friends to Mexico for vacation so they can spend time together and he could focus on coding.

PM: Keeping a day job, taking care of the family and spending 4 hours in the evening is a difficult thing. You didn’t have much sleep during that time, did you? Was 6 hours enough for you to keep going? How did you manage to keep energy during the day?

PG: Six hours of sleep was plenty, considering we had just come out of a tough-on-sleep year with a newborn!

As for energy, I drank a double latte in the morning and an espresso after lunch, which is more caffeine than what I usually drink (I’m back to my standard single cappuccino in the morning routine now).

PM: You must have had great support from your wife who took care of your home and family so you could focus on coding during this long 11 months, right?

PG: Definitely, yes. Without her support, I wouldn’t have started. We also hired some help to clean the house and to baby-sit during that time.

Peldi with his baby in San Francisco (Alamos Square Playground)

PM: How did you stimulate yourself to sit down in the evening while being tired after the whole day? Enthusiasm and motivation works especially in the beginning but you needed  almost 11 months to launch Balsamiq.

PG: The schedule was dictated by my day job, as I wanted to finish the release we were working on before quitting. Eleven months is a long time for what I did on Mockups, I suspect that if I was working on it full-time it would have taken maybe 4 months of development. In other words, it was slow going, but it was good given that my brain was working at half-capacity after a long day of work each day.

The stimulus was clear: with a family to feed, I wanted to have something ready to ship right after my last day at Adobe. Also, when you’re doing what you’re passionate about, it’s not really work, it’s a labour of love!

PM: You started coding in August 2007 and launched a Balsamiq Mockups on June 19th. It is almost a year of hard work without seeing the end result. Many life coaches say that you need at least 12 months to build a steady business on the side. It won’t happen overnight. Did you learn patience and persistency in Adobe or you had never had a problem with them?

PG: I guess I’ve always been persistent, some may say stubborn.  I like to give myself long term goals, I like to have a goal to work towards. Also, once you start working on what you’re passionate about, it doesn’t feel like work at all, the hours fly by and there’s never enough hours in the day.

Balsamiq Mockups - screenshot

Changing mindset and taking first steps (ACTION!)

In the interview for 37signals Peldi said that he changed his plans about going to business school (thanks to great advisers) and started to read a lot of books for a few months that helped him to change his mindset. Making a switch starts much earlier – first of all you’ve got to change the way of thinking and realise that there is a world out there you have never been aware of.

PM: While the right mindset is crucial to make a jump taking actions is even more important and difficult. There are thousads of people that are now reading about switch but will never take actions. Did you struggle to move forward? Reading books and dreaming is fascinating and most people stay there. How about you?

PG: Books are a wonderful way to learn, the ROI is very high – it’s like having the author coach you, practically for free.

At the same time, books can only take you so far. To really learn something you have to „do the time”, put in the 10,000 hours required to become an expert at it. My boss at Adobe Dennis Griffin used to say „time is an unshrinkable property”, which sums it up nicely.

Making the jump was not easy, I didn’t sleep for 4 nights before giving notice!

PM: Did you have any fears that held you back or postponed your switch? How did you cope with obstacles?

PG: Once I made the decision, my mind was pretty much set. I did some financial predictions to convince myself that I was able to afford it with our savings, ran them by some advisers and my WIFE, and never looked back.

PM: Did you have any failures in life that stayed in your mind and affected your self-confidence while building the app?

PG: I’m sure. Nothing huge, but a lot of my lessons come from the little failures I had while at Macromedia/Adobe, in school, in life. It’s called experience, no?

I think it’s really important to spend time working in an environment where you’re free to fail in order to learn, at least for a while. I’m trying to create such an environment at Balsamiq right now.

Inspiration & being small

In the interview for 37signals Peldi said:

“I also read Bob Walsh’s Micro-ISV: from Vision to Reality and Erik Sink’s The Business of Software, which showed me that being small is OK, and of course Getting Real, which provided me with a real example of a new generation of software company: small, ambitious, transparent, fast, daring, fun. It painted a pretty compelling picture: if you guys were doing it, why not me? ”

PM: Corporate life versus runing a small web business – both have advantages, but I can see that in the long term your prefered the second one, right? Is it still OK to be small?

PG: It’s definitely fun to be small. We can react faster, we never have meetings, it feels more like a family. I really love it.

My fear right now is that it might be really hard to stay small and continue to serve thousands of customers properly, we might be forced to grow, at least some. We’ll see…the dream is still the same I started with: 5-6 people doing great work and having fun doing it.

A synergy of Passion and Solution

One of the mantras you can hear from life coaches is something like “find what you are passionate about and start doing it”. 

One of the most common advice for young entrepreneurs is “find a problem and build a solution to it”.

The best things if it is your problem so you have an indepth view on what the solution should look like. Similar was with 37signals products like Basecamp and the same story goes with Balsamiq.

PM: You connected both passion and problem solving – were you passionate about the project from the very beginning?

PG: Definitely! I have a very low tolerance for bad software, and will do whatever I can to help people rid the world of it. Usability and User eXperience make a huge difference in people’s lives, the difference between staying at work late hating your job and going home early with a smile on your face.

I cannot imagine working on something I wasn’t passionate about. I think it would make work feel like work (it doesn’t now), and I think it shows to your customers as well. Yuck.

PM: Have you ever done any other projects on the side before?

PG: Always! While in school I created and maintained www.ultilinks.com, which was at a point the #1 ultimate-frisbee website on the Internet.

Aside from that, I always had something going on. Don’t all coders do?

PM: Peldi, my questions are focues around your situation before the switch as your answers may help many people around the world to take actions and change their lives, to fight with fears and doubts as well as to conquer self limitations.

About your character and abilities – what hold you back the most and what was your biggest advantage in the whole process?

PG: I definitely think you have to FEEL ready before making the jump.

Two examples: all of a sudden, I realized that I had become a pretty good coder. Let me explain: most of the time, when you write some new code, you try it out and, inevitably, it doesn’t work. You go back to it, fix something, try again, and after a few times it starts working. Once in a blue moon, your code works the first time. It’s rare. Well, all of a sudden this started happening to me over and over, way more often than before. I can only explain this by the fact that, after almost 20 years of programming, I had reached the 10,000 hour mark and finally mastered the art. I wouldn’t have started a software company by myself if this hadn’t happened.

Another thing that happened one day is that I realized that whenever our team had some issue or we had to tackle a new problem, I immediately started thinking of a solution that would benefit the team instead of just myself. It went from begin „how can I answer this question?” to „who’s the person on our team that would benefit the most from doing the research to answer this question?”. I guess my body was ready to manage at that point. It took years!

When I finally decided to make the jump I felt «almost ready», «ready enough to try it out».

The numbers behind Balsamiq’s success

What’s so great about Peldi’s story is that he could monetize his passion quite quickly and make a switch without putting his family on financial danger. And he was happy to share the numbers to gain trust of his current and potential customers. What he was not aware of is that it would really motivate a lot of people to consider following his path.

PM: Peldi, we wouldn’t be writing this story if you hadn’t made the numbers that allowed you to keep going. Let’s be honest, you would still be working for a man if you hadn’t sold enough. Did you have many doubts about potential revenues and the profitability of the business?

PG: That is true, I was not aware that my blog would motivate others to do the same, that was never my goal. I blog mostly for myself, it’s a cathartic experience. I also like to share my experience since I have gained so much from reading other people’s experiences. I don’t know if people should follow my path, I consider myself really lucky and sometimes a little bit like a fraud.

If Balsamiq had not taken off, the plan was to do freelance consulting, not go back to work „for a man”. Who is this man anyways? The executives at Adobe were very nice people, with a tough job, flaws and feelings, just like you and me. I don’t like that term „the man”, it adds a layer of abstraction that encourages whining.

As for doubts about profitability, of course. In my financial projections which I mentioned above we didn’t have any customers for the first 3 months and only about 200 customers after 2 years. It’s been 18 months and we’re at over 15,000 customers, so I was clearly wrong. What’s important is that those very conservative figures were enough to convince me to make the jump, which is what mattered at the time.

Definition of success

PM: When was your tipping point when you felt that you made it? Was it with a certain number of clients or maybe when the money started to flow in and you could focus on improving the product and customer service? Or may be a publicty you and your “web child” gained?

PG: Hmm, I don’t know. I’m always thinking about the present and the future, I don’t spend much time at all thinking about the past. I think it’s genetic.

The feeling I get is of amazement, incredulity. I can’t believe this is happening to ME. I think I block out the feelings of pride and accomplishment as much as possible in order to stay hungry and motivated. They do sneak in some anyways…

Peldi on vacation in Vietnam doing a bit of customer support next to the beach!

PM: What factors were the most important in getting so many customers in just 18 months? What would you advice other people when running their online business based on your experience?

PG: It’s a million dollar question! I think it’s a combination of many factors. The product must be good, innovative, easy to use, fill a need, solve a real problem. The company needs to be accessible, trustworthy and remarkable itself. So I’d say blog blog blog, become a leader of a niche, no matter how small. Be both the best product and the thought-leader in your space, treat your customers well…it’s a lot of different things, and most of it sounds obvious, but I do believe that they’re all pieces of the same puzzle.

PM: What are you plans for Balsamiq for another 12 months?

PG: We have A LOT to do. I blogged about my plans for 2010 here:
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2010/01/03/balsamiq-roadmap-for-2010/

“Overnight success takes fifteen years”

There is a great line by Aretha Franklin “Overnight success takes fifteen years”.  Peldi’s switch did not happen overnight. Peldi had 20 years experience in coding, he decided to make a switch when he was 32 and it took him 11 months of hard and persistent work to push his Mockups up out. He was very well organised as he had to take care of his family and work on the side. He also seems to be a really nice & humble guy who was glad to share his story to help others.

Thank you, Peldi, for your great support when writing the story! I am very happy that your story is the first on SwitchStories.com. Trully deserved!

Find out more about Balsamiq and their products.

Want to read more exciting switch stories? Click here to Subscribe to RSS now.