The latest news from Balsamiq:
An overview of the new, extensive “About Us” section of balsamiq.com

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Our gift to you: some light reading material for your holiday break! 😉

We’ve been around for a while…

Balsamiq launched in June 2008, which in the software industry is roughly a million years ago. 😉

We’ve always been very transparent about our business, and we’ve learned that many of you appreciate it when we share behind-the-scenes details of how we work. Heck, that’s what this newsletter is all about! 🙂

For years, our primary way of sharing was via the Balsamiq blog. We still have it, with its ~800 posts.

The problem these days is that we’re inundated with information, from blogs and social media. It’s like trying to stay afloat of a giant river of information that just keeps on coming.

Finding something useful that you saw a few months ago is frustrating and inefficient.

So we decided to change things around: we decided that our “timeless” content should not live in the blog, but on our website.

Nicely curated, organized logically, appropriately cross-linked, and easy to find at any time in the future.

It took us about a year, but we’re proud of what we did. We took our best content, updated it with our latest learnings, and created a giant new “About us” section of our website.

Since you’re part of our inner circle, I thought I’d give you an even shorter summary of it all, to save you some time. 🙂

How We Work

Balsamiq has been a remote-first, geographically distributed, flattish company since long before those concepts became mainstream. This means we've had to chart our own path and create and evolve our own ways of doing things. In this section you'll find articles about our company values and our people-centered company policies.

Building teams and culture

How do we build a cohesive team when everyone is remote? It starts with a strong set of company values, but it requires ongoing effort and experimentation.

Caring for our team

We constantly evolve our HR policies to keep up with the needs of our growing staff. This section includes a few of the policies that have withstood the test of time.

2 more sections coming in the future

We are working on adding 2 more sections:

Working Together - about project-based work, how we like the concept of pace over deadlines, etc.
A Learning Organization - about how we treat everything as an experiment, and how we’re motivated by getting better at what we do.

How We Run Our Business

Running a software company requires much more than writing software. In this section you'll find articles about the various disciplines we've learned to master over the years.

Business Strategy

How we grow our company, slowly and organically. We never took outside investments, and are focused on longevity, not growth.

Product Management

How we create and deliver industry-leading products. We prioritize bugs over features, and are big believers in the 'whole product' concept.

Marketing

We consider most of what we do to be a marketing activity. Every interaction is a chance to impress, or disappoint.

Customer Service

From day one, we wanted to create the kind of company that we wanted to do business with ourselves. Providing exemplary customer service is a critical part of our business.

Company History and Our Locations

If you want the highlights in a chronological presentation, this page is for you: Company History.

If you want to see our home offices and learn our philosophy around being remote-first, check out Balsamiq's Locations Around the World.

We also have an office, which we use mainly for retreats and events. We call it The Balsamiq Nest.

Talks, Interviews, Press

For the super-duper fans who just can’t get enough of us, we now have these 3 lists:

Talks — people seem to like these! 🙂
Interviews
Press Mentions

Product news

We published our monthly release, the 10th this year! This one was all about bug fixes and performance enhancements.

We really like our pace lately, delivering a good mix of features, chores and bug fixes.

Because we like to enjoy our winter holidays, we don’t release in January, so the next release will be in early February. Stay tuned!

Wireframing Academy news

We are closing in on completing our year-long project to create guidelines for every UI control included with Balsamiq. We added 11 more this month, leaving only 9 to go. Check out our newest UI Control Guidelines for Alert Dialogs, Progress Bars, Charts, Cover Flow, Special Pickers, Devices and Browsers, Icons, Audio and Video Players, Images, Maps, and Cameras.

Beyond that, we scheduled our next webinar for January 27th. The topic will be “How to Use Wireframes With Agile User Stories.” Register for the webinar here. Hope to see you there!

Last, but not least, Billy and Leon were interviewed for the SaaS District podcast. Read more in the Company news below.

UX/UI links for December

Designing for Enterprise Search — by Shikha Verma
The Ideal Line Length & Line Height in Web Design — by Oliver Schöndorfer
Designing Better Links For Websites And Emails: A Guideline — by Slava Shestopalov
Writing for Errors — by the Adobe Design team
Incorporating UX Research in Agile-Based Product Development — by Victoria Claypoole

Company news

We just finished a whole series of interviews for the Saas District podcast - they did 6 episodes all about Balsamiq, interviewing several of us. If you’re a superfan and really want to know how we work, this one’s for you. 🙂

As usual during this time of year, we do our employee donations. This year we donated $32,500 to 40 different non-profits. We love this program so much!

Sponsorships and raffles: We’re back with more of our upcoming sponsored events including the UXINDIA, You Got This In Cyberspace, StarHacks and more!

Notable recipients of our Free Software Program:

Serenze Global’s mission is to increase access to technology education for under-represented individuals within the tech industry to help create a more diverse and inclusive IT workforce.
House of Chamorros provides cultural and historical knowledge of the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands.
Kamran Ahmed is the creator of ‘developer roadmap’ which is the 7th most starred project on GitHub, providing community driven roadmaps, articles and resources for developers.

That's it for this month!

I hope you found something useful in all the links above! 🙂

If you have any feedback about anything you read on the new pages, please reply to this email and let us know! You’re our inner circle, we want to hear from you first!

We see this as just the beginning, now we have the right sections in place in which to share new useful content in the future. We’ll announce it all here, don’t worry.

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Balsamiq - Balsamiq’s New Company Pages

We’ve been around for a while…

How We Work

Building teams and culture

Caring for our team

2 more sections coming in the future

How We Run Our Business

Business Strategy

Product Management

Marketing

Customer Service

Company History and Our Locations

Talks, Interviews, Press

Product news

Wireframing Academy news

UX/UI links for December

Company news

That's it for this month!

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