Peldi Guilizzoni set out to build four small products a year. More than a decade later, Balsamiq is still one product - because a product, like a market, is never really finished. He wanted to build not just a good product but a long-lasting company, and did it far from the VC playbook.
He runs Balsamiq, he says, like a restaurant: no sales team, no funnel, no product launches, no obsessive metrics - just a remarkable product, great customer service and word-of-mouth growth, with 20% of profits shared across the team. He talks candidly about growing deliberately slowly, how everything changes at twenty-five people, and his five-year plan to make himself unneeded so the company can outlast him.
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another version or another day of and the final day of Turing Fest twenty twenty. I'm Brian. And as as you probably know by now, it's yeah, it's it's been a it's been an interesting eight weeks at at this side of things.
And it's been, you know, we're coming to the close of what's been a pretty rough year for all of us. And it's been a tricky to say the least, it's been a tricky year in in the world that we're in in in conferences and and community.
When everything sort of started to unfold back in March, April, it became apparent pretty quickly that we were not going to be able to do our usual conference in in August in Edinburgh. So we pushed it back originally to to October. We thought, well, you know, maybe that'll that'll give everything enough time to settle down.
Little did we know, I guess, then how how how dramatically everything was gonna unfold and how serious this was all gonna get. So then in the summer, we made the we made the switch to doing doing an online version, and we came up with this eight week series that this has turned into.
And the feedback that we've had from from plenty of people out there is that they've enjoyed it, that that, you guys are having a good time and getting a lot of value out of it. But I just want to say a couple of quick thank yous before we get into having a chat with our final guest of the series.
The first thank you is to all the speakers. It's they've without without they've done an incredible job and in a in very tough circumstances. Normally, speakers are on stage, they obviously, they get so much feedback from the audience, and they they get a lot of engagement.
They get a lot of encouragement. And it just the vibe of being on stage as a speaker is is pretty special, actually. Even though lots of people are terrified of public speaking, once you get up there, it's actually pretty good fun. But it's a very different situation.
Obviously, people are sitting in their in their home office or their bedroom recording a talk for all of us. I think they've all every one of them has done a great job. And I just wanna say a huge, huge thank you to to them for being a big part of this and helping us all to learn more about building better startups.
The other thing is I wanted to say a shout out to the team here at Dreamfest who've all been tremendous through all of this. It's been a crazy year. There's been lots of ups and downs, lots of lots of WifiO moments, but we're standing and everything's coming together nicely in the end.
So shout out to Tanya, Linda, and Marcus for all their great work through the year, really helping keeping the show on the road, particularly when I was sort of had a bit of a loss at times. And a final shout out then to Erin, our producer, who's in the background of all of this, and she's just right across from me now.
And she's like, I'm I was gonna make her come up on camera, but I think she'd probably freak out. But but a huge thanks to her as well. She's been great. She's been recording all of our videos since two thousand sixteen. So doing a killer job, and it's been it's been great working with her.
She's also the person I've seen the most probably in the last eight weeks. So we've been hanging out. We're gonna have some beers afterwards. Okay. So that's we we have of course, we've got got a bunch of sponsors to thank as well. And particularly the headliners, Deliveroo, Current Health, Free Agent, administrate, and Mailchimp.
And we'll I'll them a shout out again at the end. But they you know, none of this Amazon Development Center as well. None of this would happen without them. And particularly in this year, it's been amazing to see how supportive all of those partners have been.
Things have been very different for some of them to what they signed up for back in, you know, maybe November, December last year. But they've all rolled with the punches really well, and supported us and without them really, really this wouldn't have happened.
So a huge thanks to all of those. Okay, let's get into it for our final chat of, Turing Fest twenty twenty. We're going to Bologna. I think he's in Bologna. It could be. Who knows? People could be anywhere these days, but he's normally in Bologna.
And he's he's the CEO and founder of Balsamiq, everybody's favorite wireframing tool. So let's get into it with Paldi Gilzione. Paldi, are you there? Yes, I am. Hi. Thanks for having me, and thanks for the conference. I've been enjoying the slow pace once you know, one or two talks a week.
It it's been really good. Yeah. That's that's great to hear. And we when we were figuring it all out, we're you know, we were thinking about like, what, what does a conference look like when, you know, you're not all in the same place at the same time.
So yeah, we, we decided not to do the two full days of the program, etc. We just thought it was too much to be sitting looking at your screen all day kind of being, you know, it's like been an amazing museum. Right? It's great for a couple hours, but even the best museum, you need a break after that.
So, yeah, I think I hope we've got it right. There's lots of lessons to be learned, and we'll be we'll be emailing everybody for feedback over the next few days. So we'll get some more info then. On your website, on the Balsamiq website, it's in the about us.
It says, since we started in two thousand eight, our goal is to help people create software and websites that are easier to use. We do this by providing software tools, teaching UI designs to non designers, and by building a long lasting company. And then you also describe the company as your favorite restaurant, which I love.
So maybe we could we could start with with those, you know, the mission and the choice of how to tackle that mission, providing software tools, teaching UI design to non designers. Let's talk about that a little bit. The bit I'm maybe most interested in here is building a long lasting company.
As you know, it was you that connected me to Natalie, Natalie Nagel. She spoke earlier in the week, we've had Nick Francis on, we've had Chris Savage, Ran Fishkin. There's a bunch of people that we've spoken to this year who, you know, are kind of in the same, maybe philosophical mode as you and balsamic.
So we can get into that a little bit a little bit later on in the chat. But yeah, for now, maybe maybe a quick bit of how how balsamic began. And, yeah, what what made you decide to leave your your comfortable job at Adobe to do this crazy thing?
Yes. So let's see. I was a programmer at Adobe for a long time. And my goal was, when I moved to California from Italy, was to learn as much as I could of about how to make software. You know, I was just graduated from college, and so so I went and I spent six years there.
And during those that time, I realized that what I really wanted to do was become a product manager. I didn't know this, job existed at the time, but, what I really liked about the product management job was that you get to work both with everybody.
You get to work with developers, designers, support, legal, business, customers, user research. And so, I actually tried to, switch jobs inside Adobe as a product manager and failed. But then because you had to have a MBA then, which I didn't have. So then a number of things happened, and I decided maybe I'll take a year off and try to build a little tool, a tiny little tool, all by myself.
And that way, I will learn so much about all the things that are required to go from idea to development to pricing to support for a product. And so that's kind of how I approached it at the beginning. And now it's been over twelve years, and I'm still doing that.
I'm still on the first product and I'm still learning a lot. And now I'm still kind of the product manager, but I also have other jobs that I do at Balsamiq. Yeah. It's it's interesting that so you you you decided I'll try one product.
It and it's sort of taken over your life in a good way, I guess, mostly, hope let's dig it. We can talk about that a little bit. But it's kind of interesting talking to Natalie the other day about wild bit and what they've done.
And I think they approached it from a different angle, and herself and her husband were non technical and so came from a very different space. But they they built a they've become a company that builds products and go move on to and not just like spinning out loads of products.
They have a a relatively small number of products, but they, you know, and they have more in the pipeline, etcetera. Whereas balsamic turned into it was a product that became a company. And I'd love to I'd love to get your thoughts on the difference between building a good product and building a good product company.
That's great. That's a very good point. When I started at the beginning, my thought was I was gonna build four products a year. I I was under the impression that I could build a product in three months and then spend another three months marketing the product and and build another one in the meantime.
And so that tells you how clueless I was back in the day. But so I also had the idea of building very small products and building lots of them. The problem is I'm not finished with the first one. So instead of three months, it's still it's more than a decade to finish a product.
The thing is you learn that a product is not really ever finished because the market evolves, your customer base evolves, you understand what, what the market wants from your product. So for me, it became a one product company pretty quickly because I realized that if I didn't spend a hundred percent of my attention on the one product, I was gonna do a disservice to the product and to the customers.
There was basically so much to do, and there's still so much to do on this one thing that if I if I diverted my attention to something else, the the quality will go down and the speed will go down. And, basically, I'm I I know how to do one thing at a time.
That said, we sell the same product in several different ways. We sell it as a web app. We sell it as a desktop app. We sell it as a a integrated with Google Drive and Atlassian Confluence and Jira. So we have a a little portfolio of products, each with their business model and their, you know, pricing scheme.
But the core product is always the same. So we're kind of in between, a classic SaaS that only does one thing and more like a wild that does multiple products. The idea of becoming a multi product company has been with us from the beginning because we always say, well, let's finish this and then we're going to have to do a second product, right?
We're gonna have to do a second album. But, you know, a decade into it, we're still on the first one, and I'm thinking, maybe we don't need to do a second thing. Maybe we just need to rebuild this over and over. So I actually, I was in Chicago a couple years ago and I went and spoke with Jason Fried, and I asked him exactly this, how do you feel doing base camp forever, right?
Because at the time, they had said, This is all we're going to do forever, right? And he said, There's nothing wrong with wanting to solve the same problem over and over. As long as the problem is there, why shouldn't you solve it? Right?
Just build rebuild it again from scratch like we just did, and they did with Basecamp a few times. There's nothing you shouldn't be ashamed to say this is what we do. This is the product the problem we're focused on, and we're focused on it forever.
As long as there's a market for it, and you love the product and you love working on it and, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. And so now the idea of doing more products is still there, but it's less less of a urgency than we used to have.
Yeah. Just as you were as you were talking about that idea of single product versus product suite, I was thinking about thirty seven signals. Because at one point, they didn't they they did have a couple of didn't they have campfire as well? Thought I thought that.
I right. Yeah. They had a few years where they were splintering off several products, left and right. And then they said, no. That's it. We're changing our name to Basecamp. Basecamp is the only thing we're ever gonna do. And then, of course, three years later, now they have an email client and you know?
So Yeah. People can change their mind. That's totally allowed. For sure. So maybe a bit give us a bit of context about Balsamiq. How many people so the company is from two thousand eight. Right? But how many people are in in the team?
How many locations? How many customers? Where are your revenues? What you know, all that sort of whatever whatever you can share. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything. Alright. So we are now thirty three people. We are about half of which live in Italy and half you know, less than half in the US.
We have a few people in California and a few people in Illinois. And then we have two people in France and one in Germany right now. So we've been spread out since the very beginning. The second employee was in California while I was here in Italy.
And what else? We usually grow one or two people a year. In the last year, I managed to not hire anyone without suffering much, which is always a success. I try to grow the company as slowly as possible. But maybe next year, we're probably gonna have to hire three or four people.
Revenue this year should be around seven point two, seven point three million dollars, which is quite an increase from last year, maybe a ten percent growth. And last year was, again, the ten percent growth. So, we are actually, benefiting from, well, let's say we didn't get hurt from COVID.
The the trend that we were seeing before, continued, as if, nothing happened. So, I feel like as more people move home and move to working online instead of on a whiteboard in some conference room, then our tool becomes more useful to them. What else did you ask?
Customers. How many customers have you got? Oh, well, it's hard to tell. We don't know because we we never built a system to to track to actually count individual customers. We don't track anything. I don't know if you know that about us. We we don't even we don't have a funnel on the website.
I don't even know what that means, really. We don't track downloads. We don't track anything. But I know that we have sold over a million times. So some of those are recurring subscriptions, some of those are licenses that are one off, but in our database of all the, you know, the the one that talks to Stripe, there's over a million records now.
So we have we have a lot of customers. That's pretty fascinating that you don't that you don't track. Well, like I said, you don't track anything. No funnel on the website, and you're not sure how many customers you have. You don't you don't hear that much from from SaaS companies.
I know. I know. People usually fall off the chair when I when I say that. Yeah. We never did. I'm interested. Have you got a board? No. Because it's the sort of thing that gets reported to board meetings. Right? You know? X number of new customers this month.
So I guess so. No. And I'm so how how are you guys managing to to book the trend to, like, go against the perceived wisdom of this is how you're supposed to build a software company, etcetera. Do you and or do you feel like you're doing that?
Do you feel like you're you're going off on your own in this kind of maverick direction? Is that deliberate, or is that just how it's all happened? No. I don't I don't care if I'm doing it right or wrong. I care that I'm learning, figuring out how how to do it myself.
That's my main motivation for starting a company, and it's still my main motivation for working every day is let's let's see how we can do this, how we can solve this problem. Let's roll up, you know, roll up our sleeves and do some research and see what works for us.
And so since the beginning, I have used, I have, created a very tight feedback loop with my customers, and they always told me what to work on loud and clear, and that is still happening. And so that's all really that I need. I don't need to, try to divine what people want by looking at some metrics of what feature people are using or not.
They just tell me, we have forums. We have an active Twitter community. We have an active Slack community now. We have emails. We we do, we interview people all the time. We just do it in a way that works for us. And the other thing that I would say is that I don't feel like I'm the special one.
I'm running balsamic like I feel like the vast majority of businesses I run. Have you ever heard a a restaurant tracking metrics? You know? They just focus on building good food, and people will come. It's it's not about I feel like our industry is a is a a bit weird.
I'm running the business just like my hairdresser does. You know? Yeah. I love that. And and it's but it is something that you don't hear very often. And it's maybe one of the reasons is because we, in general, the tech industry, I guess that we're often looking at the intersection of capital and technology, right?
We're and we're looking at companies being funded by investors, investors wanting to see growth, growth, depending on metrics being reported and optimized and all of those kinds of things. Whereas you've gone a more independent route, a more organic route, but ten percent growth, seven point two million.
Everybody sounds like they're pretty happy at balsamic. Looks like it's working quite well. Yeah. You know, we have so little in common with the VC industry. It's like saying that, I don't know, a cardiologist is the same as a massage therapist. Right? They both work on the human body, but they work in very different ways and they do very different things.
The only thing I have in common with the VC world is that we both build software, but other than that, we're on completely parallel worlds, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. I do know a few VCs that you could you could genuinely say that they are involved with building software, but I think most of them are just involved in funding it.
Yeah. That's a different thing. Yeah. For sure. Although they don't always recognize that. Question for you, just digging in a little bit more on the on the growth versus metrics and stuff. So you're thirty three people in Balsamiq. You're you've got a unique approach to your your revenue and growth side of things.
Maybe not unique, but yeah. Probably unusual. How many of the thirty three people in the team are on in commercial roles? And how do you have any marketers who don't let you track? We don't really. Yeah. We don't have a sales team, and we don't really have a marketing team.
I mean, we do, but we do marketing in a very different what we consider marketing is every interaction that anyone has with us is marketing. So our privacy policy is marketing. Our support team is marketing. Our product is marketing. We don't really do any traditional marketing like, here's a message, and we have to, we have to do a launch.
We've never done a launch ever. You know? For us, it's it's all about product led product and and customer service in the broadest sense of the word. If we make the best product out there and we treat our customers the best way ever, that's all really we can do and that will pay off.
And so far, it has. Word-of-mouth, I think, is our main our main marketing channel. But, yeah, we don't you know, we deleted our Facebook page. I'm trying to get us to delete our Instagram page. We don't we don't do much of that. We have a Google Ads, but it's someone else that does it for us.
They tell me how much to spend. I don't know anything about it. They kinda roped us into that with some, you know, free promotion. And it I I think it works. They tell me it works. They track some metrics, but they don't I don't wanna know what they are.
So, yeah, we don't our marketing is is different. It's it's all about let's for any piece of output that we have, let's try to make it remarkable and the best in the industry, including the documentation, including every every little thing. And that's more fun Interesting. In my mind.
So the central philosophy of the company, I guess, it's product led and customer led and and maybe sort of thoughtfulness is the is the is one of the central center points. Yeah, I mean, it makes so much sense. I'd like to say, it's kind of, it's odd that this is odd, right?
You know, exactly. Exactly. People say that I'm weird. I'm like, no. You are weird. Everybody else is weird. Yeah. You got a point for sure. I wanted to ask you about there was maybe three, four, three years ago, maybe I think you did a talk at, business of software, tremendous conference, one of the best conferences in the industry, I think.
And your talk was about I think it was called everything changes at twenty five people. Yeah. Can you can you dig into that a little bit? And and, you know, because you you're not that far past twenty five people, but because you grow so slowly, deliberately, adding people is is a big deal and something you're you're not, you know, you're sort of on that opposite track again.
So what what were the what changed? What are the, you know, was everything great before and terrible afterwards or vice versa? Or or did things just evolve a particular way? No. So the the, you know, one thing that I learned over time is that the company is its own, you can treat a very, very much like a product.
With versions, it has its own sort of life cycle, and it has its own growing pains. And you need to have automated testing, you know, checks and balances for the the company just like you do for the for the product. And so it kind of feels you know, at the beginning, it felt like a baby, and then it felt like a teenager, and then it felt like a, you know, more grown up.
So if over time, you kinda learn to to to recognize that things are changing. Often, this happens if you hire a bunch of people all at once. So one big change was when we went to ten to sixteen within a year. And that meant that all of a sudden we had to have a handbook in the wiki that described how we do things.
Before we all, you know, we were all in one Slack chat room and that was it, right? Then at twenty five, it becomes, you have to start protecting people from distractions because there's just too much going on. And if everybody's in the same Slack channel, no one gets anything done because everybody's following every project, right?
Right now, we have about Let me check. I think we have usually Right now, have seventy three open projects inside the company. So you we had to split up in teams because you could you couldn't do it all at once. And so splitting up in teams, what what does that mean?
We still don't have managers, and so we had to come up with what does a lead do? What does an organizer do? We have these roles that we came up with to sort of try to help us stay efficient and continue to do quality work.
So it's just that I feel like it's natural for every company to go through these different growing phases. And they're usually painful because you're dealing with people and they're much more complicated than software. But it's all part of the learning. The ups and downs is all part of the journey.
We're lucky that we don't have a board, we don't have investors. We're free to make our own mistakes and figure things out a little bit of the time. So in the in the company culture that you so the the culture it sounds like the whole company has evolved very organically, but also quite deliberately organically and at this slow pace so that you don't break things.
How much of the culture in the company do you feel like you are the main shaper and driver of versus the rest of the team? Or is there a small leadership team that has an outsized vote or or influence on that? How does that all work?
Great question. So at the beginning, it was me setting the example sort of, you know, this is how what we do. This is what we don't do. Even though I was doing it kind of reluctantly because I never like to be considered the boss.
So I feel like my even if I was effectively doing it, I feel like my style has always been inclusive. Let's let's figure it out altogether. But when we turned ten a couple years ago, I said, you know, I looked in their wiki and it said, our company values.
And they had these, like, five bullets that I wrote back in two thousand seven. And I thought, that makes no sense. Now we're you know, we were about thirty people at the time and we knew we we had spent a a decade together with a bunch of these people.
And so I thought, let's do a project company wide where we define our culture right now and what we hope it will, you know, so that for the next decade, we have a culture that we codified together. And so that was a six month project, and we interviewed everybody, and we did surveys, and we did meetings, iterations.
We created a cross functional team, And the result is, you can see behind me, is these, six, company values that, we came up with together. And each of them has a a page that describes what it is and, you know, everybody gets a poster now.
So I feel like now we have a culture that is, it's not that different than what it was before, it's just that we defined it together, and so we all own it as a company. And we're kind of the stewards of it going forward.
And of course, we plan on doing the same exercise in five years and then again in another five years. It has to evolve with the company because, like I said before, the company changes character as it ages. And so, it's it would be wrong to to keep the values fixed over time.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. That seems to be a pretty common common thread in successful organizations is that they understand that they need to change. Does you you come across I'm sure I'm sure you've had lots of conversations with people where and you hear it all the time about people who are in a startup and everything's great and they love how to start up.
And then it becomes bigger and it starts to turn into a thing that's not the startup anymore. And then you get people leave the company. They're like, oh, that's not I wanted the the fun early bit. I don't want this corporate bit, but it's just growth and scaling and maturing.
Yeah. You know? But it's it's a difficult journey, Yeah. The growth of the company is hardest on the earliest employees because they are the ones that have to keep changing over and over. If somebody just joins now, this is what, you know, this is what they find, and now it's it changes more slowly, and so they have an easier life.
It it is definitely something that I I learned that the earliest employees are the ones that you sort of have to, you know, maybe they resist, the change more because that's not why they joined. They joined because they wanted to work for a three person company, not a thirty person company.
And we've had one person leave because of that, and that's fine. You know? Yeah. It's yeah. Like, you see, you mentioned something earlier that people are harder than software, which is anyone who's tried to manage both would would agree with. Something I wanted to ask you about around people around company culture and happiness is around me remuneration.
How so there was a post there was interesting post by Nathan Barry from convert convert Converticate about about a year ago, where he had switched his mind changed his mind. He'd originally thought that profit share was the best way to motivate the team because he didn't think he was gonna sell the company, etcetera, etcetera.
And then he he had a change of heart and he goes it's a it's an interesting blog post where he digs into it all. How do you how do you manage all of that, you know, salaries, equity, profit share, etcetera, at at Balsamiq?
Now I'm interested in reading that blog post. I I missed that one. We have a profit sharing program. We've had it since we were three employees, I think. We give twenty percent of profits to the employees, split with a different with a formula that basically means that over time, everybody ends up getting the same, the same amount.
There is a seniority, but there's also another formula that basically spreads flat. So first, it was five percent, then ten percent. Now it's been twenty percent of profits. And, you know, it's a big it's a big chunk of change. So I've you know, it makes a difference on on people's lives.
I've always preferred profit sharing to any kind of equity because we're not for sale. We've never been built to be for sale. And so, basically, I would be giving people a piece of paper that's worth nothing. And so instead, with profit sharing, every three months, you get a dividend from the company.
Right? I don't do it for motivating. I feel like motivation is an intrinsic thing. Don't like to motivate with money. I do it because, I feel like it's the right thing to do. People are, this company is run by people. It's not run just by me, and so everybody should participate in the profits.
Yeah, it's a it's an interesting philosophy. It's one I think that we're starting to see emerge more and more. I mean, maybe there's I could be I could be reading too much into it. But it does feel like twenty twenty has been a little bit of a tipping point in the in the tech industry where there are more and more people building software companies that are not taking VC money.
And they're going different routes. And they're looking at people like DHH and Jason Fried as, you know, the sort of the people who started that journey. But I guess you and people like Joel Spalsky, we had Michael Prior on the stage at Turing Fest a few years ago talking about the Trello journey.
You know, it's great to see other other pathways getting more airtime. I feel like the VCs have kind of monopolized the airways a little bit for the last few years. Yeah. But I mean, we don't care about the airways. There's there's hundreds. There's thousands of companies like like mine, like the ones you mentioned.
There's really so many. And we don't do it to get on the news. We have, you know, the VCs have all the incentive to make the news, right? Because it's all about valuation. It's all about, you know, attention, right? But for us, what we care about is making our customers happy, not making any journalists happy or any investor happy.
So I feel like what's happened in twenty twenty or in the last few years is that the big players have gotten more bigger and bigger. So there are fewer people that can acquire a startup, right? When I started, Yahoo was buying a bunch of companies.
Now Yahoo's gone. Right? You I feel like even the big players now build instead of buying a lot more. So I feel like the VC market is probably not doing so well. I mean, judging by how many VCs call me all the time, it seems like they're a little bit desperate.
So it feels like the world is is splitting. That that that crazy world of attention and and news is doing its own thing, and then the rest of the world is continuing to to, you know, just build useful stuff and sell them to customers and doing the normal way.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The normal way like business has been for, you know, thousands of years. So just on your own, sort of a more personal question. You've been on the this journey with balsamic. This has been your the focus of your professional life for twelve years.
It sounds like, you know, you talked about in five years time, you'll re review visit the values and five years after that, again, you the company is not for sale, etc. You're going to be doing this for a while, that sounds like. Obviously, that's, it's good that you enjoy it so much is staying mentally fresh.
Is that a challenge? Or how do you? Are you are you when you think about like ten years from now, I'm still going to be or fifteen or twenty years from now, I'm still going to be working on this one product, maybe. Is that a thought that makes you excited?
Scared? How do you keep fresh? Yeah, that's a very good question. It's It goes in It depends. It depends. Am actually My five year project right now is to make myself not needed by the company, to remove myself from the company, ideally completely.
Not because I don't wanna work there anymore, but because feel like it's a good goal to have. If I reach that goal, then it means that I will have built something that can outlast me, and that's really my goal. My goal is longevity, not growth.
And if I fail, then it doesn't matter because the company will be stronger because of this process anyways. So if everything goes well in a few years, I will be no longer needed at Balsamiq. That means that I can then either do something else, or I can more likely help different teams or different people.
I can imagine myself doing more training with people, you know, or spinning up new products or new teams, helping them with that and then letting them run. You know, basically, once I'm no longer needed, I can work on whatever I want inside the company.
So that's really that's really my goal right now. And to stay fresh, I feel like, at some point, you have to start actively working on separating your own identity from your identity as the founder of a company because that's not healthy in the long run.
Just like when you have a child, at some point, they are they become their own adult and they leave the nest, right, you should be able to have the company leave you and you should be happy with what's left, right? So in the last few years, I've cultivated some more hobbies.
The first decade of balsamic, I didn't feel like I had time for hobbies, but recently I started making time for woodworking. You can see I have a lot of plants around me now. That's another recent hobby. I do all sorts of things with my hands, any sort of a craft that I can learn, I've been learning.
And just, you know, just as a hobby for now, but who knows? Maybe in five years when I'm no longer needing a balsamic, I'll do halftime furniture making and halftime balsamic. Basically, to stay fresh, you sort of have to make a commitment to do it, to wanna do it.
And it's not easy because the company's your baby, and you don't wanna, you feel like you should give it as much attention as you can afford, right? But over time, it's not so healthy. You kinda burn out. And I guess over the over the past few years, you know, particularly the you're quite a small team.
You you grow slowly and intentionally. You've got a very purposeful culture and a very carefully curated culture. So I guess in your leadership team, you've got the people that, you know, could take the if you get to that five year planned obsolescence point, you know, it's gonna be it's that, like, it it's probably a big day.
Right? Step one of that plan is to establish a leadership team. Because for until now, like I said, we don't really have any concept of managers. So now we have recently agreed that that would be beneficial for the company, not just for me, but for everybody.
Because clearly, I can't do a good job managing thirty two people. Right? I'm not doing a good job. So other people are kind of doing the work, but it's not official. So instead, now we decided we're gonna have people managers, and we're gonna gradually have the best managers in the industry, you know, just like everything else we do.
We start not knowing what we're doing, but the goal is to learn together and get really good together. So, yeah, that was step one of my long plan is to be able to leave. I feel like we need a strong leadership team, and it will take time.
Are you scared or or worried that you might break what you've got in that process? Always, but we're taking it very slow. So very slow, very considerate, very inclusive. This project to say, let's add managers is probably gonna take a year and a half.
Because first, right now we're starting to do interviews about what do you think a manager would be in the balsamic culture? What would they do? What would they not do? What would you want from having a manager? So that and that's one step.
Then there's another step, which is let's figure out how salaries are set because I still set everybody's salary even though I don't work with some of the people barely at all anymore. Right? So we're taking it very slow and careful and we have great people and a great culture already.
Worse comes to worse, we don't change. We just stay the way we are. We're pretty happy this way, you know. We we try a different way. So we're very lucky that we're not under very much stress at all competitively or financially. So for us, it's like the whole journey is the fun of it.
So why rush it? It's yeah. It's it's a great it's a great position to be in, and I I know you appreciate that. I've I feel like it might so I had a software startup before TuringFest. And we use balsamic like we needed to some wireframing.
So of course, we use balsamic. I don't. I'm sure there are other wireframing companies, but I don't I don't have any of them. It's just like balsamic is what you use. And I feel like you, your company is, your product is is is admired your company culture, think is admired as well.
And other people are maybe looking at what you're doing and sort of maybe going on, let's maybe we should learn from them and model ourselves, you know, learn those lessons. Who do you look at? Or who did you look at maybe in the early days?
Who do you look at now? Other companies, you know, you mentioned thirty seven signals, Jason and DHH, Joel Spalsky and the frog frog frog Creek gang. Yeah. Who who do you think about as particularly for this next phase that you're going into, right, where you're maybe gonna hand over your baby.
You know, is there do you look at anyone else? Are you on the phone to people who have done that? Not a lot. I mean, is the people that you had speak here, right? I had a great chat with Rand Fishkin. He's been through it before.
Natalie Nagle, wild bit and balsamic are very parallel in the size and the growth. So we're in touch quite often. Michael Prior is a great friend and mentor. So I have a few people, but, you know, I we check-in maybe once a year or so, or if we go to a conference and we meet on a conference, we hang out.
But right now, you know, I I've had lots of advisers over the over time. But like I said before, my main motivation with this whole adventure is to face new problems and try to figure them out on my own. So I do like to do a lot of online research, and I do like to to to ask for advice.
But my favorite part is to try things out and see how they go. More doing than researching. Feel like I have to start a process in order to learn about that process. I can't just do it all, you know, plan it all in my head and then execute.
To me, goes together, the research and the doing, they have to sort of happen together. I like that. It sounds like you're you're a b testing your your company culture, and your your your business strategy. It's very, very much developer led thinking. It's cool.
I have Pelti, that's that's we're pretty much out of time. Unfortunately, because this is a great chat. We could go on for ages. And I think we should we should do this again over a glass of wine somewhere sometime. But But for today, thanks so much for being with us.
Thanks for sharing. What's a really like the insights are amazing. The company's is one that I think is really, really highly admired. I think you've you've built something to be very proud of. So thanks for being with us today and telling us about it.
And, yeah, let's do this again sometime. Thanks so much. I'd love to. Cheers, Baldi. Okay, well, that's it. That's the the final chat of the of our eight week series. But a lovely lovely guy. I don't know Paldi well, but we've been in touch recently.
I got connected through Rand. And he is he really does seem to be one of the one of those sort of the good guys of the industry. And to be honest, I think the speakers that we've had this year, you know, we've had we've had a whole range of people we had way back on on, I think week one, so week one or week two, had Mark McCloud who'd been the CFO of Shopify, you know, so we've we've had from the from the finance of, know,
one of the biggest fastest growing unicorns in the world to people like Natalie Natalie Nagel and Paldi who are in the sort of at the other spectrum, the other end of the spectrum of tech, but doing amazing stuff and building great businesses, great products, and, you know, changing the world a little bit for the better.
That's so that's it. We're done for Turing Fest twenty twenty. Thanks so much for being with us on this on this journey. All these videos, by the way, from the past eight weeks, what have we got? We have thirty two I think thirty two talks three thousand and thirty one so far.
All that's going to be available on demand for for all delegates. So we'll be in touch over the next week or so. With more info about that. We've got some exciting developments coming up in early next year that the team told me I can't tell you about because we're not quite sure when we're doing what.
So there'll be more email about that, probably the other side of Christmas. I thank you again to to our partners that have really supported us all the way through the year through what's been a tough year, let's face it. But from and there's a few that I haven't actually given a shout out to before and boundary RSM code plan, CMS, iZettle and digital, administrate, current health, Mailchimp, Deliveroo, and Amazon Dev Center Scotland.
But there's one of those I haven't mentioned there that I really want to give a particularly heartfelt shout out to because they've been a supporter all the way through Turing Fest since twenty sixteen. They're one of my favorite companies. They're one of the best tech companies in Scotland, without a doubt, they probably got the best engineering around.
And that's free agent. We had Rowan speaker earlier with Ollie speak last year, Ed has spoken in the past, we've had other people from the team attending, etc. So a big shout out to the free agent team. Thanks so much for for all your support.
And to everybody else who's who's been on the journey this year, To all of our delegates to all of our speakers. That's it. We'll, we'll see you again soon in person. Let's hope. Take care.
