Office Hours with Balsamiq Mentors
Get advice on your startup or your career from senior Balsamiq staff. For free.
We have some very senior people at Balsamiq, leaders in their different fields.
We also love to give back to our community in any way we can. Giving advice to our customers is one of these ways.
How it Works
It's very simple: we set aside some time every month to meet with our customers and answer any questions they might have for us.
You get advice on your current problem / career / life plan, and we get to make a new friend in the process. Win-win! :)
Just choose one of our mentors, schedule the session, and meet us for your 1-hour video chat.
The only thing we ask in return from you is to join our Research Program, so we can get your help to improve our offering in the future.
Topics That Are Out of Scope for This Program
This program is about personal and career advice. For other topics, please see below:
- How to use Balsamiq's product: please refer to our extensive Tutorials or Documentation pages instead.
- How to wireframe your idea: please refer to our Balsamiq Wireframing Academy site instead.
- Asking for investment: we don't do that, sorry.
Meet Our Mentors
Alberto Forni
Software Development CareerAlberto is a software engineer. Nowadays, he focuses mostly on the frontend, but he has experience in microservices architectures, testing and continuous integration and delivery. Alberto worked in a few different countries and a variety of companies from startups to consulting agencies. You can chat with him about programming, career path, and how to foster collaboration between designers and developers.
Balsamiq employees listen intently, respond kindly, and are overall exceptionally lovely people to work with. I believe the employees they have are the secret sauce for their success! - Cheryl Meder
Arielle Kimbarovsky
Marketing Strategy Teams CareerArielle is the Head of Marketing at Balsamiq, driving brand and growth through acquisition, lifecycle. communications, content, brand, product marketing, and more. She has years of experience across B2B and B2C in a variety of industries, and is happy to help you with advice on marketing, strategy, team building, or career.
Brendan Saricks
Customer SupportBrendan Saricks is one of our Customer Champions and a lifelong customer advocate. His goal is for everyone to have human interactions with their customers and users. Whether you have a specific issue, or just want to brainstorm ways to make your support as human as possible, Brendan is more than happy to help you however he can.
Brendan was simply amazing. He gave me precious and actionable insights for our DataKnowl platform. One of the most interesting step in our journey to discover the best Customer Experience strategies of the most innovative companies! - Alessio Paolucci
Giacomo “Peldi” Guilizzoni
Bootstrapping Strategy MarketingOur founder and CEO Peldi knows a thing or two about building sustainable, bootstrapped, geographically distributed software businesses. He's always happy to help entrepreneurs who are just getting started. Watch these talks and read these posts before scheduling, you might just find your answers there!
Peldi does NOT invest in startups, so no pitches please.
Had a 1-hour call with Peldi from Balsamiq. Such a humble person and we were literally brainstorming. It was great of him to allocate 1 hour on his busy schedule. They are doing awesome things focussing on a very targetted niche. - Vinodh David
Peldi has that rare ability to reflect back your own reality and then gently allows you to see your own advice. He did not TELL me what to do but instead gave me clarity to see what was in front of me already, pretty much the same as Balsamiq does for requirements. - Mark Breen
Thanks so much to @peldi and @balsamiq for the thought-provoking conversation. I feel less alone in bootstrapping my business in Italy :-) - Andrea Nagar
Peldi has a way of making his success accessible to a beginner and his vast knowledge of product, software, making career decisions, and crafting a quality lifestyle for you and your family is invaluable. - Hidekazu Shidara
Laura Lei
Graphic Design Web Design LetteringOur graphic designer Laura Lei is passionate and enthusiastic about web and graphic design, lettering, and live music photography. She runs the Bologna chapter of Ladies, Wine & Design. She also created Feeling Things Deeply, a visual project to raise mental health awareness.
What a wonderful and inspiring time talking about wellbeing and mental health with Lei from Balsamiq! Congrats for your work on Feeling Things Deeply sharing a positive message on how to handle our personal subjects and make us stronger to help people. - Marcio Franca
Marco Botton
Software Development Team LeadingMarco is the lead developer of Balsamiq Wireframes for Web, Mac, and Windows. He loves everything that lives on client side, especially if itβs a multiplatform app made with a bunch of different technologies, but which behaves like a truly native app. He is also genuinely obsessed with software performance, simple code architecture, and good looking UI. Schedule an hour with him to chat about software development on desktop and web, and how not to go crazy because of it.
Michael Angeles
UI/UX Design Career Path WireframingMichael Angeles is our interface designer. He is known in the UX community as Konigi. He was one of the original founders of the Information Architecture Institute, and has written about interface and interaction design since 2001. He has been known to play career therapist in the past. He can lend an ear or offer perspective and reflection to new and seasoned UX designers.
I had no idea that Balsamiq was doing office hours - spent an hour with Mike (UI design) talking through a couple of tough UX issues I've struggled with. Super helpful and highly recommend checking it out. - Ruben Gamez
I had a wonderful chat with Mike from Balsamiq about UI/UX, and it always pleasant to have a real conversation with the team behind a product that we're proud to use in our daily process. - Lucian Daniliuc
[Mike] provided great insight into design approach for products along with tips on where he draws inspiration from. It was a helpful and cathartic experience. Highly recommend! - Corey Ganser
Stefano Masini
Software Development Team LeadingStefano Masini leads the development of our Balsamiq Cloud product. He's been developing software professionally for 20+ years, occasionally giving talks at technical conferences. He loves tackling new problems with a down-to-earth, hands-on approach, trying to pull simplicity and elegance out of complexity. You can talk to him about a wide range of topics, like React, Javascript, Typescript, Python, GraphQL, AWS, scalable architectures.
I'm now a mega fan of @balsamiq - Thanks to Stefano for giving me AWS/architecture advice and startup advice as part of Balsamiq's Office Hours. It was really good. - Jack Bridger
I participated in Office Hours with Stefano this morning. What an incredible way to spend an hour. I got to meet a celebrity responsible for the continuing improvement of my favorite tool. Anyone who uses Balsamiq should participate in office hours. - Steven