Hacker News Reader

Comment by balsamiq | Hacker News Reader

Hi there. Just FYI, I'm reading this if you have any questions. Peldi

Being Italian myself, I'd like to commend you guys for your job: this kind of entrepreneurship is really rare in Italy and it's great you are contributing with such a fantastic example.

I have just read on your blog < http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/10/14/personal-whats-your-... > how it all started and I found it so inspirational (maybe just because I am in a similar situation right now?!)

Can I ask you if you ever regretted moving back to Italy? It seems to me you managed to separate the good aspects of life in Italy (Bologna and the family) with the bad ones (taxes and servers, i suppose, are in the US).

Ciao crocowhile, we have not regretted moving back to Italy at all so far. Our servers are in the US, taxes are split in both places. HTH!

Hey Peldi,

Congrats. I've read your marketing advice in your blog. Do you have any other tips for small software companies getting their product reviewed or mentioned in the press / blogs ?

Cheers

Hi samh, I revisited my old blog post as part of this interview: http://blog.asmartbear.com/balsamiq-studios-uncommon-intervi... - I hope it will be helpful! :)

Thanks

Hey, just a quick question:

Why don't you make it possible for the user to move the UI library pane from the top of the app to the left? It's a little bit of a pain to scroll left/right instead of up/down.

It IS possible! :) Get the latest build, then in the View menu, look for "UI Library Position": http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download

I am officially an idiot. I was trying to drag-drop the pane to the left, instead of doing the most logical thing. :-)

Thank you, kind sir.

Stating the obvious, but clearly at that time for you that was the most logical thing.

How come you didn't include website traffic stats like you did last year?

Totally forgot, but it's also an indication of how little time I spend looking at them. What stats are you interested in? I can look them up for you.

can you post # of uniques and # of page views?

also a little bit more specific, so only post these if you want to...but can you post the top 3 traffic sources to your site for the last year.(if you have the user defined hack on Analytics, I'd love to know the specific urls which sent the traffic. But if not, just top level domain would do.) and maybe the top 3 keywords Google search queries that brought you the most traffic.

Ok here's the graph of visitors and page views: http://skitch.com/balsamiq/np3ws/balsamiq.com-2009-stats

Traffic sources are here: http://skitch.com/balsamiq/np3w5/balsamiq.com-2009-traffic-s...

FYI, I practically NEVER look at any of this stuff. But maybe I should? :)

I think it helps you know what words you rank for and where your traffic is coming from.

i.e. if you see that a particular site(that you never heard of), sent you 200 people, where each person went through 6 pages, compared to your average of 2...you know it's probably a good idea to go buy some ads there, since you know that site's audience will convert

Looks to me like approximately 1% of visits to your site result in a transaction (1146608 visits, somewhere around 12000 transactions in 2009) -- does this sound correct to you?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com