Balsamiq

Looking back at Balsamiq’s 2022

Hi friends of Balsamiq,

Like many of you, we spent the past few weeks reflecting, planning, and starting new projects. We’re continuing our tradition of sharing this reflection, complete with a review of 2022 and plans for 2023.

Previous editions are here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2009, and 2008.

Our revenue numbers

Our revenue for 2022 was USD $7,256,185 - down 5.3% from 2021.

We had predicted a down year, so we weren’t too surprised. And in this economic environment, we think we did pretty well overall.

As you can see from the chart below, fewer and fewer customers want to use the desktop version and are gradually migrating to Balsamiq Cloud, which costs them less upfront but pays off for us long-term.

Our Atlassian integration revenue continues to grow nicely.

To reflect this new reality and to help speed up the transition to our SaaS offering, we recently announced that we will raise the price of the desktop version, and slow down its releases.

As always, we’re focused on longevity over growth and remain profitable. So it’s all good, we think in decades, not years. 😉

For 2023, we predict another flat year, plus or minus 5%.

Product updates

We spent much of the last year focused on pruning, an exercise that’s helped us make Balsamiq Wireframes easier to use for both new and existing users. Pruning also included our tech stack and internal collaboration—focusing on security, tech debt, and the Balsamiq design process.

We also built new features, listened to feedback, and addressed your bug requests. Here’s the 2022 Balsamiq Wireframes highlight reel:

We built Find and Replace for text. It was an ambitious feature with many technical and organizational requirements—we’re excited we made it happen for customers in our year of pruning.

• We introduced icons in all user text. Think Controls, Wireframe Notes, and more. Combined with the update of the FontAwesome icon set to version 6, we now have thousands of built-in icons—lots of options no matter the project.
• We pruned features. Delivering on the theme of 2022, we removed the largely unused Chat and Grid View features. Most customers didn’t notice! We also adjusted some UI elements, like the Trash view, to make them less prominent when you don’t need them.
• We pruned our tech stack. Our goal is technical longevity and top-notch security, so we spent 2022 finding alternatives to technologies that don’t have a bright future or could be a liability over the long run. One area we focused on was tech used for platform deployment.
• We simplified our platform integrations. This included adjusting the link unfurl feature and our Slack integration.
• We updated our billing system, Olio. In 2022, this meant integrating new and complex US tax system requirements. We quickly discovered that this would be one phase of many in simplifying our billing and subscription system. More to come on this!
• We restructured our teams. We removed silos between Balsamiq Apps and consolidated the design process. After years of building Balsamiq Wireframes, we learned things can get unnecessarily complicated.
• We decided that someday in the future, Balsamiq Desktop will go away. This was a hard decision and will take us a few years to do right. But customers are more interested in Balsamiq Cloud, and we decided that while we’ll still support Desktop for now, we’ll focus more on Cloud.

Support updates

Like in 2021, we helped hundreds of customers, updated product documentation, continued our free program, and unified our team. This was especially important as the company transitioned to a new structure, and we found new ways to collaborate in Sales and Tech Support.

We also reviewed and stopped using automatic text expanders. We hear this is very unexpected in a world of increased automation. But after a few experiments and lots of feedback, we realized that we provide our best support when we’re mostly custom and human.

Marketing, education, and sponsorship updates

2022 saw a significant reconfiguration in our internal marketing structure. We consolidated 3 teams— Marketing, Education, and Sponsorships—into one broader group (called “Marketing”). This coincided with our company-wide effort to introduce manager roles to support these larger “Group” departments. We’re still working on this transition!

As for the projects we completed, here are some of the highlights:

• We added a new course: How to Redesign a Website From Start to Finish.
• We continued writing our book on wireframing. It’s been more work than we expected, but we’re so grateful to have the folks at A Book Apart as our editors to make it excellent.
• We started to improve the accessibility of our educational material by adding closed captions, and timestamps to our videos. Transcripts for our videos and ALT text for our images are next.
• We gave away $269,000 to sponsor 113 events in over 18 countries dedicated to events or initiatives promoting equity, inclusivity, and accessibility.
• We shared our unique thinking about sponsorships. In February, we published an article with Startup Grind about How to Use Sponsorships to Increase Diversity in the Workplace. And we wrote our June newsletter about Balsamiq’s Unique Way of Thinking about Sponsorships.
• We hosted our first “unconference” of startup founders at our Nest home base in Bologna.
• We created a museum of Balsamiq History at the Nest.
• We hired our first Head of Marketing, Arielle Kimbarovsky (that’s me).

We also wrote this monthly newsletter, did 6 educational webinars, and updated educational materials to keep them fresh.

Company updates

2022 was a transitional year for our company. We implemented the formation of Groups and Areas (think departments and teams) and established a working Manager team—a concept we introduced in 2021.

While many companies have had similar structures from the beginning, we’ve been a historically flat organization. But all things evolve, and we needed a way to provide better support, clarity, opportunity, and decision-making.

With these changes came the need to hire. In the marketing update, you read that we hired a Head of Marketing (still me). We also hired a Business Manager, JR, to help us with our spreadsheets and finances. And our newly formed Groups started doing mini-retreats for the first time.

As much as 2022 was a year of pruning, it was also a year of new.

A peek at 2023

It feels like the start of a fresh chapter at Balsamiq.

In product development, we’ll continue building new features, fixing bugs, and focusing more on Balsamiq Cloud.

On the technical side of things, we’ll continue to reduce tech debt, focus on performance, and raise the bar on security standards. We’re also planning updates to some of our internal tools, like Olio (licensing and billing). This continues our 2022 projects around making work more efficient and enjoyable.

Meanwhile, we’re working on a new strategy in marketing! We’re excited to experiment and test ideas while continuing our existing programs like giving back through sponsorships and design education. We’re also going to take a look at our brand and, combined with other Groups, start giving Balsamiq a fresh coat of paint.

As a company, we’ll continue to lean into professional growth, manager training, and team dynamics. We’re planning our first company retreat in years at the Nest (this May) and are building a salary matrix to make sure our compensation is fair and equitable. We also plan to hire another person to join our Support Group—we’ll share the application as soon as it’s live.

If you have any questions about what’s in store for Balsamiq or want to share your plans, let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

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