these series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the CerdadelHuerto team, formed by Victoria Arias and Alejandro Hoyos.
Last thursday in Barcelona, the mockups we used in our slides for the Tetuan Valley Start-Up School aroused lots of positive reactions. Indeed, we had enjoyed a lot using the tool, created by balsamiq, that provides good and simple sketch-like drawings, for efficient and good looking mockups. As balsamiq happens to be a start up, we decided to interview for you one of their members, Luis Arias, known as the Web Developer Extraordinaire of the company, who shared very interesting information and advice with us. Enjoy !
“Cerca del Huerto Team (CDH): Hi Luis! Can you introduce yourself?
Luis Arias: Sure! I am a senior (some would say old timer 
) software developer at Balsamiq taking on the lead role in the development of myBalsamiq, our webapp for using Mockups online. Balsamiq Mockups is a really cool app that allows people to draw “low fidelity” wireframes, which less technically means they can sketch out ideas about user interface and communicate about them to other people on their team. Before joining Balsamiq I did a number of things such as working at XWiki, an open-source wiki written in Java, where I had a more market facing role. I have always been very interested in the entrepreneurial side of the industry and started my own consulting company fairly young. In the early days of that company we worked a lot on NeXTSTEP which is the ancestor of what powers the fancy iOS you see on iPhones and iPads. I was also at the origin of an entrepreneurial community in 2003 at ESCP Europe with my friend Florence Laterrade. We held jam packed monthly seminars for more than a year with the objective of helping each other on our entrepreneurial projects.
CDH: What an experience! Can you tell us more about balsamiq?
Balsamiq is a life-style company founded by Peldi our great boss whose purpose is to help people make better software. Our product, Balsamiq Mockups, helps people do this by letting them share ideas and design their user interface in a way that focuses on the real issues and avoids the distraction of dealing with a specific set of user interface components. We have had much success as a company reaching out to 30 000 customers and making 1M$ of revenue in a very short time (I think it was 14 months on, and Peldi was almost alone all that time). Now we are 7 employees with people in San Francisco, New York, Bologna, and Paris. We are a very tight nit team despite the distance because we all spent some time together in Italy this summer and we are always chatting with each other on skype.
CDH: We read about “mybalsamiq”, the project you are currently working on. What is it all about? Why is it so awesome? 
Well I hope it will be awesome ! myBalsamiq is an online application that allows people to use Mockups in a project setting. People can sign up, choose a plan, and get started creating projects, and creating and organizing mockups. We are currently in private beta but we are really getting there. We have been holding back on launching because we want the application to feel right for us and for our beta users. We also need to move from our beta infrastructure (from which we learned a lot in optimizing and tuning our app) to a production infrastructure which we are going to be hosting in the cloud on Amazon.
CDH: As a start-up lover, what do you think we young to-be entrepreneurs could learn from the example of balsamiq?
Oh lots and lots and lots !!! For a story like Balsamiq to succeed I think there are a number of things to point out. Some of these are not going to be easy to work out because they are probably not repeatable, but everyone has access to opportunities and its their job as an entrepreneur to work with what they have. One of the most (probably the most) important ingredients in Balsamiq is our wonderful Peldi, his leadership is invaluable and probably goes further than anything else to explain Balsamiq’s success. The product itself has some very important attributes for success, we like to think that people who use it and buy it realize the value from Mockups within the first hour of use. That perception is very important for people to talk to others about Mockups widely in a positive manner. We also like to say we compete on support and user experience. People who have issues with the product love our customer service and it is very important to us to get answers to their questions in a timely manner. So its important to choose your space and focus on what makes a difference in that space. Simple to say, difficult to execute but the opportunities are there.
CDH: Do you have special advice or secrets to share with us about the start-up experience?
Remember that learning is as important if not more important than actual “success”. The reason is that there are a lot of factors that you just can’t control, you also have to be there at the right place and at the right time. So make sure that you are very observant in what you do and the results you obtain so you can learn from them. Having a very clear idea of *why* you are creating your startup is also very important because you can easily get sidetracked, there are all sorts of temptations and promises that might sound good and end up wasting a lot of your time. If you have carefully thought out why it makes sense for you to do what you are doing you can always refer to it and see if your next steps make full sense in that context. Finally your time as founders is precious. Spend it wisely, make sure you are not getting bogged down with minutiae, your job will be to find the resources to achieve your goals, spending time on anything else is time that is wasted. As a final note I would like to say that Tetuan Valley sounds like a great opportunity for budding entrepreneurs in Spain! It’s great to see programs like that and if I wasn’t having so much fun at Balsamiq I would be tempted to apply ! It’s very important also to talk to your fellow entrepreneurs, share ideas and experience. In many cases no one knows how to build the business that you are planning to build, that is part of your competitive advantage that you are working on it, so its important to learn fast and be able to get advice and feedback from both experienced and novice entrepreneurs and advisors.”
Thank you so much to Luis for kindly answering to our questions in the middle of a sunday afternoon…!
If you want to know more about balsamiq, check out their website : http://www.balsamiq.com
