Balsamiq Mockups Makes Big Impression on Hacker Community
thenextweb.org
thenextweb.org
Not exactly. Peldi seems to be doing well so far, but I'd characterize his story to date as riches to rags (and hopefully to riches again). It's only been 7 weeks or so since he launched, so it might be a bit early to anoint balsamiq as a huge success.
I sure hope it is though. Very inspiring.
Still a nice success story so far though.
axod, I agree that Mockups alone might not be a sustainable business (though it's doing MUCH better than I expected at the moment). My plan is to develop 2 new products a year, and to port them to as many Web Office platforms as it makes sense (i.e. turn them into plugins to wikis etc). I have an ever growing list of ideas for new products already. Together these sources of revenue should be enough to keep a small business going, we shall see...
Good luck
Previously, if I needed wireframes of the sort that Balsamiq appears to be good for, I'd use Omnigraffle. But I've known others to use everything from Photoshop to Illustrator to Visio to Excel. And, of course, for web apps and wesbsites, html mockups are always in the mix.
At the end of the day, you need to use what works well for you and anyone else you are working with. But a hybrid approach that mixes different tools depending on the task is generally what I'm after.
The beauty of it IMO is it makes you think about the layout of the app/site, not the look of it.
But, saying that...I will be sticking with photoshop for my mockups, just because I DO use my mockups for the design too, but thats just a personal preference, I know a lot of people want to build the layout then find a nice design, thats where this tool is cool!