Looking back at 2021
Hello friends of Balsamiq!
This post continues our tradition of looking back at the previous year and sharing our plans for the current one. Previous editions are here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2009, and 2008.
Our revenue numbers
Our revenue in 2021 was USD $7,658,588 - a growth of 4.7% over 2020.
I had predicted a down year, so a $340K+ bump was a nice surprise.
We’re still focused on longevity over growth, but it’s comforting to see continued growth even in this environment.
As I had predicted, Desktop sales went back down (the bump last year was due to upgrade pricing, which petered out), and our SaaS version continued to grow.
What I did not predict was the bump in Integrations revenue: Atlassian announced that they were going to stop selling their server version of Confluence and Jira, so in February 2021 a lot of customers decided to renew one last time to lock in 2 years of guaranteed support.
For 2022, barring any mid-year changes (we’re considering finally updating our pricing), I expect a flat or down year, maybe about $7.5M. Since I don’t want us to get addicted to growth, I don’t mind it. We’re still making more money than we need, so it’s all good. 😊
Product updates
While 2020 was all about surviving launch and scaling, 2021 was finally a year in which Balsamiq Wireframes stabilized, and we moved towards the normal stage of its lifecycle. If the sentence above didn’t make any sense to you, read this article on How We Prioritize Product Work. 😉
All this to say, we got to work on more features, yay! 🙂
Here’s a list of big features we shipped in 2021:
- Nested Symbols, the #1 feature request from our advanced users. This makes complex projects much easier to manage.
- Mobile editing support for Balsamiq Cloud. Yes, you can now wireframe on your tablets! No apps to download, just use your regular Balsamiq Cloud account. We even invented a cool touch-first way to draw your wireframes, which we call the QuickDraw Toolbar.
- We added 2 ways to quickly iterate on screenshots of existing UIs, with the Split Image and Extract Text features, our first foray into artificial intelligence. Fun!
- We added a way for you to search our extensive documentation without leaving the app, and improved your customer service experience by letting you create tickets from within the editor. Handy!
- We simplified the Balsamiq Cloud home page, now properly optimizing its UX for the 99% of users who only have access to one Space.
- We also added SAML support to Balsamiq Cloud for our corporate clients.
- We added an integration with Trello which is pretty handy.
- For our macOS users, we now support Quick Look for BMPR files. Fast!
We also shipped over a dozen smaller features: we improved our right-click menus, made copying and pasting between projects and versions much more powerful, added support for Images and Arrows in QuickDraw, improved our loading screen with UX quotes from our Wireframing Academy, made it easier to go back to editing wireframes from the Assets, Symbols and Trash views, increased the resolution of wireframe thumbnails, standardized our About Boxes, did a revamp of the mac UI for Big Sur, added some code to future-proof our Desktop versions, and even improved the crash report screen! Phew!
Even though it might seem less glamorous, we’re very proud to say that we fixed over 530 bugs in 2021. We really take pride in how solid our apps are, so we always prioritize bugs above other work.
We still found time to work on various chores though: we now share more code between platforms (Web, Mac, and Windows), we started migrating our code to Typescript, we updated our dependencies and updated to React 16, fixed a number of potential security issues, and generally paid back a bunch of technical debt. One thing that made our developers happy this year is that we stopped supporting Internet Explorer, finally!
On the testing side, we automated a bunch of manual tests and streamlined our tests environments. There’s always room for improvement, but we’re pretty happy with our test suites now… this has been a long time coming.
We also improved how we work: we now have a solid user research and design process, a tried-and-true feature development process, and a regular monthly release process that’s mostly stress free. 🙂
We’re particularly proud of how many of you we spoke with! We ran 9 research studies, for a total of 62 interviews!
We continue to work on our documentation, both to keep it up-to-date with all the new features that shipped, but also to improve its accessibility.
We also made time for studying and running experiments. One of our values is to always improve, so it’s important that we all keep getting better at what we do.
Marketing, education and website updates
We continue with our non-traditional marketing strategy of having a good product, supporting it well, and giving back to our communities. 🙂
We sponsored 175 events, with over half our $350K budget dedicated to underserved communities in tech.
We continued to sponsor podcasts, with our formula of giving away the airtime to listeners of the podcast itself who can’t afford to sponsor themselves. We sponsored seasons of The Bootstrapped Founder, SaaS District, and the Empathy Deployed podcasts.
We met with 30 people for our Office Hours program. You should look into it, we added more mentors this year!
We were interviewed 10 times for various podcasts, and I tried my hand at guest-hosting one.
We closed our Instagram account so we’re finally #FacebookFree, and continued sponsoring our local Ultimate Frisbee team. We improved our Brand Assets page, and event organizers love it! We decided to stop selling SWAG, and instead only send it out as a gift. We also shared 12 intimate newsletters with you, our inner circle.
Our Education team was unstoppable this year: we started hosting quarterly webinars, we published 2 new courses about Designing Navigation and Page Layout, we shipped a brand new section on UI Control Guidelines which is simply amazing, as well as several new articles. We gave a few talks and did more interviews for our “The Process Behind” series.
We compiled a list of inspiring UX quotes and continued sharing useful UX/UI links each month.
We also continued to give back to our community through the Live Wireframing Sessions with non-profits program. We love it!
Our website continued to grow: the biggest change was a brand new company section, which I described in the last newsletter. It’s huge, and growing!
Company updates
Running a remote-first, geographically-distributed micro-multinational like ours takes a lot of effort!
Our Company Care team does an outstanding job. They make sure our books and processes are in order, our employees feel supported, and that we operate in line with our company values.
The main project of 2021 was to introduce the concept of people managers, to better support our employees in their careers, and to make Balsamiq more scalable and long-lasting. Because this represented a big shift for us, we took it slowly and carefully.
We used it as an opportunity to look at all types of management work in the company and how we could improve communication, ownership of work, and better recognize and develop leadership of all types.
This project will continue in 2022, and it’s going well.
We also organized 2 virtual retreats, and some company-wide skill development projects, including a fun workshop on giving and receiving feedback.
We didn’t hire anyone in 2020 or 2021, which I see as a great success. It means we might finally be reaching our company’s natural size.
A peek at 2022
We hope 2022 will be a better, easier year for everyone.
In product development, we will continue to work on bugs, features, and chores. The normal phase of an app’s lifecycle is my favorite: you just truck along working on a variety of tasks, none of which too big or scary.
For Balsamiq Wireframes, we’re already working on adding Find & Replace (finally!), and revamping and improving our Export features. After that, we will see. Believe it or not after 13 years we still have a long list of things we want to add to the app. 🙂
On the server side, we’re working on adding OAuth support to Balsamiq Cloud, and on native Slack and MS Teams integrations.
For marketing and education, we plan to continue a lot of the same programs, but we think it might finally be time to do some traditional marketing, for a change. 😉 We want to hire a senior product marketer in the second half of the year!
On the company front, we will continue with the management / professional growth project, as well as with the company-wide skill development initiative. We plan to hire a business / finance person soon, someone who can help us with sales tax compliance, budget management, operations, and other company care projects.
If you know someone who might be interested in these two roles, please send them to our Jobs page to submit their email address!
Peldi for the Balsamiq Team
