Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq
In August 2008 Balsamiq was starting to gain traction in the marketplace, just 2 months after launch. People asked me how I got noticed, so I wrote a blog post about it. Most of that advice is still valid today, so here's the post, with some edits. Enjoy!
The title of this article is a bit pretentious for my taste, I hardly feel like I am a marketing expert, in fact I consider myself a beginner at most things. Still, I can't deny that Balsamiq has received a very good amount of coverage in the blogosphere: I am timing this post to coincide with the 100th review of Balsamiq Mockups, the website has received over 32,000 unique visitors and sales are exceeding all my expectations. For 6 weeks of operation, I can't complain. 😉
A few people have asked me to share how I did it, so here it is.
Follow the advice of the masters
The first thing I did when I was getting ready to launch was run Google searches on variations of "how to get a major blog to cover you".
The result was this list.
Of all of the tips contained in those articles, Marshall Kirkpatrick's articles were the most helpful (no big surprise there). After reading this article I decided to start giving away my tool to influencers, and to tweak my "direct email template" (see below).
Aside from those articles, I read a bunch of books over the last few months which had something to say on the subject: Bob Walsh's excellent book Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality is especially useful for coders like me.
Send direct emails
In preparation for launch, I sent maybe around 40 direct emails to bloggers I thought might want to cover me. I had a list of such blogs handy: most of the blogs I read every morning apply.
If you don't have a list handy, you can once again follow Marshall's advice to create one.
Once you have a list, forget your inhibitions and just email the blogger to their preferred email address (or submit to their "contact us" form, whatever they suggest).
Note that I also sent emails to "mavens" who didn't have a blog but maybe wrote a book that was relevant or are just huge superstars like Jason Fried or Guy Kawasaki — yes, I emailed them both, and they both replied, being the class acts they are. I am never washing my Inbox again! 😉
Here's the email template I used:
Subject
A tool you might be interested in: Balsamiq Mockups
Body:
Hi there.
[insert a paragraph thanking the blogger for their work]
[insert a paragraph in which you explain why you think this email is relevant to their blog]
I am preparing to launch a wireframing tool that you and your readers might be interested in, so I thought I'd share it and perhaps get some of your expert feedback on it. Here's the info if you're interested: https://balsamiq.com — You can find info on the product and my company from there.
Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about it. I'd be happy to send you a license so that you can evaluate the desktop version better, if you'd like.
[optional] One note: I am still in stealth mode, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't blog about Balsamiq until June 19th.
Thanks!Peldi
Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni
Founder, Balsamiq
ph: +1 (XXX) XXX-XXXX, Skype, Twitter: balsamiq
If you are reading this and were on the receiving end of an email like this, forgive me for sending you a templated email... but I sent 40+ of these puppies and efficiency is a must for a one-man startup like mine! 🙂
What I like about the template above is that it's fairly short, informative enough, respectful (not begging), it includes different ways for the blogger to contact me (look at the signature), and offers the blogger something special (a free license), which is an incentive to reply and start a conversation.
Just remember that bloggers are just people, sure they are insanely busy and hugely influential people, but still people like you and me. And they are always, always looking for interesting content.
I think I roughly had a 20% success rate with those emails (i.e. 2 in 10 resulted in a write-up), which I am very happy with.
I sent most of those right before launch, but I occasionally still send emails like that out once in a while if I run into a site that I like and seems relevant.
Inject yourself in the conversation
Another thing that has worked for me is what I call "injecting myself in the conversation". As I was looking for bloggers to contact, I found some posts/articles that were extremely relevant to what I was doing. In other words, these are posts that people looking for a tool like mine would find and read.
So what I did was add a comment saying something like "I'm working on a tool that might solve this problem for you..." with a link to my site.
The thing to note is that I only ever add a comment if I think it will be useful for the readers of that blog post, the last thing I want to do is spam (man, do I hate blog spam with a passion!). If it's only mildly relevant, I pass.
Another thing I do to track relative conversation is make extensive use of RSS coupled with Twitter. Here's a post on Making RSS work for your micro-ISV I wrote on the subject.
I also have an RSS feed of a Twitter search for prototyping OR "UI AND design" OR wireframe OR mockup OR UX which is a great read in general, and useful for finding people who are looking for a tool like mine. In those cases, I send a Tweet back telling them about my solution. Again, only if I really think my tool will help them, relieve them from the pain that brought them to vent their frustration on Twitter in the first place.
This incredibly direct way to advertise has been very successful, resulting in multiple reviews and sales.
It basically allows you to contact people who are looking for you, moments after they expressed their need for your solution (i.e. when they need you most).
Note that over time I have stopped doing this, as it looks a bit desperate for attention. As soon as you notice your community doing this for you, it's time to stop.
Give stuff away!
This is really a case of "the more you give, the more you get".
Give to influencers
Everyone likes free stuff, but you have to be careful, as giving free stuff to journalists can be considered a form of bribery.
The way I dealt with it for the first few years was to make it a company policy, clearly stated on my website. If you were a blogger/writer/influencer, you got a free license. Period, with no obligations towards me. I had no control on what you wrote: in fact, a critical review was sometimes more useful to me than a glowing one.
Also, by its nature the demo version was limited in functionality, so a full license was required to fully evaluate the product in order to write about it.
After a few years, we stopped doing this because it was no longer needed, and was getting abused by people posing as journalists just to get a free license.
Give to influencers to give away
Influencers love to give away free stuff, as it makes them more popular. In preparation for the 1.1 release, I emailed all the bloggers who had requested a license and offered them an extra license key to give away to their readers, as a promotion.
Give to do-gooders
I am SO happy to be giving away so many licenses to nonprofits and other do-gooders in the world. I don't have much to give, but somehow managed to create a tool that people find valuable. So I am extremely happy and proud of the fact that so many do-gooders use my software to do good in the World. It gives me motivation to keep going.
For the more cynical of you, giving away to do-gooders is also good for business: first of all, most nonprofits are poor and chances are they wouldn't be buying your tool if they had the money (they'd use it for something more important), so it's not like you are "spoiling" a potential customer. On top of that, nonprofits have lots of contacts in the for-profit world, and are good for your company's image. But none of this matters to me, the World needs more do-gooders and I'm happy to help them in any way I can.
Give to everyone!
I used to offer a limited free edition of Balsamiq Mockups on my website. It nagged you every 5 minutes, but it was still useful for the occasional mockup. You could export your work as XML and save it to a text file if you want to continue working on it later or create more than one. So in other words, it was fully functional version, just not super-convenient.
I gave this away because I believe people should have access to my tool if they really need it and can't afford it, and to allow people to try before buying.
The fact that these versions exist got mentioned a lot in the blog reviews, as bloggers like to help others find good free stuff.
We now only offer 30-day trial versions, which is enough for most people to try the tool properly and has become an industry-standard way to do this — unless you want to do freemium, which I don't like.
Make it fast!
I give away about a dozen licenses every day, so I have to make it as fast as possible. I wrote a little application that allows me to send someone a license with only a few clicks. All I do is select the person's name (from their email), copy it, paste it in the application, click "generate key", and what I get is not only the key, but a pre-populated email like this one:
Hi there, here's your license info:
Download URL: https://balsamiq.com/wireframes/desktop/
Serial Key: [redacted]
I have some assets you can use here: https://balsamiq.com/company/brandassets/ if you'd like.
I'll add XYZ to my Customers page in the next few days.
Enjoy Balsamiq Mockups and thanks for the good you're doing in the World!
Enjoy Balsamiq Mockups and thanks for spreading the word, I am looking forward to reading your review!
Peldi
The app automatically puts that email in my clipboard, so all I need to do is go back to Gmail, hit reply, paste, delete the lines that don't apply and hit send.
The whole process takes me about 15 seconds. Efficiency is everything! 🙂
Blog blog blog
The chart above shows the number of visitors to balsamiq.com since launch. The 2 highest peaks happened the day after 2 blog posts, both about Balsamiq's financial results. The second post resulted in the RWW review mentioned earlier. Some of my blog entries get a lot more traffic than other site pages, and I suspect this post will as well.
In other words, blog, blog blog! 🙂
AdWords? What's that?
So far I have spent exactly $0 on marketing (I don't even have an AdWords account). Sure I have put some serious time into the website and the marketing efforts described above, and given lots of free licenses away, but out of pocket, I have spent nothing so far. I might explore it when I need it, but so far it hasn't been necessary.
UPDATE: a couple of years after writing this, we started advertising on Google Ads, and it was effective. SoftwarePromotions manages the whole process for us.
Conclusion
Again, I feel a bit uncomfortable passing the above as advice... take it for what it is, a description of what I have done so far. Implement at your own risk! 😉
I really feel that the Internet has kept its promise: anyone can reach a very wide audience, all it takes is a computer, an Internet connection, some readily available know-how and some old fashioned elbow grease. 🙂
If you are reading this because you are about to launch a new product, good luck to you, and don't forget to have fun with it!
The original post generated some discussion on Hacker News, and received many interesting comments. Let us know what you think below!