What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what exactly makes their companies tick? And the goal here, as always,
is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful
online businesses.
Joining me in today's episode is Peldi, the founder of a company called Balsamic Wireframes.
Balsamic is a graphical tool that you can use to sketch out the user interface or pretty
much anything. So if you're building a website or a web app, a mobile app, or even a desktop
app, it doesn't really matter. No matter what it is, you can use Balsamic to quickly put
together a wireframe for what the interface should look like. On top of that, Peldi was
also one of my earliest inspirations as a indie hacker. He famously started blogging
about his adventures as a solo founder and what he was working on and even exactly how
much money he was making way back in 2008 when it seemed like pretty much nobody else
was doing this except for a small handful of others. So it's safe to say that any hackers
itself would not be here if not for the efforts of Peldi and people like him. So Peldi, welcome
to the show. I am stoked to have you on here.
Thanks for having me, Kordland. You're too kind.
You started Balsamic in 2008. So that means the company turned 10 years old last year.
And to the best of my knowledge, you guys are generating something like six or seven
million dollars in revenue annually. Is that right?
Yeah, around six, more six than seven.
What I want to talk to you about the most today is Balsamic's longevity. How exactly
do you bootstrap a company as a solo founder that ends up growing and staying healthy for
over a decade? So that's it. That's my only question. The rest is just going to be 50
minutes of you answering that question.
No problem. Luck is the answer. No. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. Interview over.
My goal here is really just to ask questions that date you and make you feel as old as
possible this entire episode. I did the same thing to Rob Walling.
Yeah, you know, I was looking at all the other previous guests on this podcast and I was
like, oh, man, you know, these people are all younger, better looking, more interesting
than me. I feel like an old guy now, but that's all right. I'll take it.
Well, I don't know about younger or more interesting, but better looking for sure. So let's talk
about the early stages of Balsamic. And I know this is ancient history at this point.
This is 2008, but I think most people listening in are at the phase where they just want to
start a company and they're looking for inspiration around like these very early days. Do you
remember how you first came up with the idea to start Balsamic?
Yes, I grew up in Italy and I moved to California to go to Silicon Valley and, you know, be
a programmer there. And what I told my parents was I'm going to go to San Francisco, learn
everything I can about making software, and then move back to Italy and apply that knowledge
here. And that was a total lie. It was just a way for them to be able to say, yes, okay,
you can go as long as you promise to come back.
But really what I was thinking was I'm just going to move to California. I'm just going
to work for a large corporation, climb the ladder, and I'm going to be happy doing that.
And so that was my goal. I didn't really have any entrepreneurial spirit right out of school.
So I worked for Micromedia, then became Adobe for six years. And every year I started as
a QA engineer, then I became a developer, then a lead developer. You know, every year
I would sort of get a promotion, get a new boss, and climb the ladder, which was fantastic.
Then after maybe four or five years, I read somewhere about this book called You Have
to Be a Little Crazy, The Truth About Starting Your Own Business. And I thought, oh, that
sounds interesting. Let's see. And so I bought it. It's a short little booklet. And I got
to page 16 before throwing it in the corner saying, no, no, no, no, this is not for me.
I'm never going to start a business. It's insane.
What turns you off?
Well, I mean, it just basically spoke about all the realities of the pressure it puts
on your family and yourself and financially. The book is kind of biased. It only talks
about the bad stuff, of course. But it worked for me because it really made me happy to
be an employee where I was.
So then after another two or three years, I was kind of getting tired of just being
a developer. I worked on a large team at Adobe. We were making online meeting software. And
I worked with designers, product managers, other developers, QA, translation, legal,
sales, support. I kept thinking, what do all these people do all day? I understand the
development part. And that's fun. And I love it. But there's a lot more. How do you price
a piece of software? How do you decide to support things?
I was just very curious. And so I thought, maybe I'll become a product manager because
the product manager I could see was kind of the in-between person, the interface with
all the other teams, including the development team that I was part of. And I thought, that
sounds like a fun job. That way I can learn more about all these different parts of making
software.
And so I seriously considered becoming a product manager. The problem was that at Adobe, you
had to have a business degree, an MBA, in order to become a product manager. That was
a prerequisite, which is not there anymore, I've heard. But at the time, you had to do
that.
And so I seriously considered going to business school just to become a product manager. And
then my product manager friends at Adobe talked me out of it. Thank goodness. Basically, they
said, you're already making too much money. You have a family now. You're not going to
be able to forego your current salary and spend 100 grand a year for 3-4 years to go
to business school. That's too late.
Also, a big part of the value of going to business school is the Rolodex that you get
at the end of it. So these are your contacts that you will work with. And it's your network
that will serve you well during your career. You don't really need that because you already
have a network of colleagues and friends.
And so they said, buy this book called 10-Day MBA, read that, and you'll get the basics
of the actual business part.
And so I did. And it was very interesting. It was all new to me, and it was very fascinating.
It was very interesting. And I thought, OK, if I'm not going to become a product manager
here, how else am I going to learn all the business stuff, all the non-programming stuff?
And at the same time, I had seen another company called Gliffy, who was these two guys in San
Francisco. And they made a diagramming tool that interfaced with Atlassian Confluence
Wiki. And I heard there was two guys, and we loved this tool. And I thought, oh, man,
I could build something like this.
The tool was also built in Flash, which is what I was working on. So I was like, maybe
I can do a similar tool, but more focused, smaller, because it was something that we
needed for work. And so I thought, this could be a way for me to learn. I could just start
a company of one person, and that way, every single thing has to go through me, and I'm
going to have to figure out every single thing.
That's really what my motivation was to venture out. It was the whole thing was a learning
experiment that I never believed would last more than a year or two. So what I did was
I decided I was going to do this, and I put away enough money to live off of for a year,
and then I quit my job. And saying, I'll probably be back in a year, please, you know, I might
come back in a year when this fails. But I want to basically take this sort of sabbatical
to try it out, to learn all this stuff. So that was my motivation.
And luckily, you're in San Francisco, where quitting your job to start a company wasn't
even that crazy.
Yes, yes. That was the thing to do in 2008, or it still is, I bet. It is kind of a crazy
environment where that's considered sort of not so crazy. And in fact, a lot of people
do it. My difference was that I couldn't afford to do this while living in San Francisco.
And so I moved back to Italy, where I'm from, to do it from here because the cost of living
was going to be much cheaper here.
Yeah, I tried to stay in San Francisco and bootstrap indie hackers from here when I first
started it. And the rate at which I was burning through my savings, I do not recommend it.
Do you remember some of the early decisions that you made when you left to start Balsamic
and how the idea kind of shaped in your mind early on?
Well, my instinct is to reply nothing, but actually it was not nothing because I had
worked a large, successful software company for six years. I had absorbed a lot from my
time at Adobe. And so I often tell people who are out of school and they're thinking
of starting a business that it's much riskier to do it that way rather than go work at Google,
go work at Apple, go work at some large company for a while, do your time, do your homework,
build a network, make your mistakes in a sheltered environment before jumping in. You will learn
so much and you will have a network of advisors. And I know that's not advice people want to
hear, but I feel like for me, it was critical to my success.
So I knew I think of or two because of my experience there. And then when I decided
to quit and jump, I started reading books like crazy. I read usability books, web design
books, marketing books, not just books, but back in 2008, we had a thing called RSS. So
I was devouring articles on different blogs and resources. Thankfully, content marketing
was becoming a thing. So there was all this free content to learn from, not too much like
right now.
It was just the right amount then. So I spent months, the months before launch, just studying
and studying and studying. And you know what? I haven't stopped. I still don't know what
I'm doing and I'm still learning a ton and doing online research about this and that.
And you know what? To me, that's why I'm doing this. That hasn't changed at all. My motivation
has always been to learn and keep learning and keep getting better and just try to crack
this crazy nut that is owning a software business.
I've watched a lot of your talks over the years and I think more so than anyone, you
spend a lot of time quoting other founders, other entrepreneurs. And so yeah, I can kind
of see that. You're forever a student and you're always learning from others.
Yeah, absolutely. Being a pundit to me, that's sort of offensive. I don't know anything.
I just try to learn from everybody and put it together and try to give it my spin. But
I don't feel like I've come up with a single good idea. So that's kind of a probably heartening
for your listeners. You don't have to be this crazy genius that can have these deep thoughts.
You can just absorb from others.
Or you can always pretend to be one. So you got pretty far as a solo founder before you
ever started hiring anyone. Do you remember how far you got as a solo founder?
Yeah, so I think it was about 3,000 customers. It was about eight months since launch. I
was alone. Actually, I'm lying. About five months in, I asked my wife for help to answer
some emails because I was drowning. And she did that for a bit. But then after about eight
months, I started doing support all week. All the non-development stuff all week. And
then I would code in the weekend when the emails were not coming in so quickly. And
so I did six weeks of this regime. And then one morning I woke up sweating bullets thinking
I was going to die. I can't do this anymore. And so I thought I'm going to have to hire
someone which was terrifying to me because that was never the plan.
My inspiration was Patrick McKenzie who spoke on this podcast before. He had this bingo
card creator. He had a one-person business for many years. That was my goal. Or Andy
Bryce with Perfect Table Plan. I love that idea that you can have a tiny little thing
that you just care for and you serve your little niche market and you do that. And that's
your lifestyle business. That was my absolute dream. Hiring someone else did not fit in
that dream. It was going to be much more responsibility than what I wanted. I was not that ambitious.
But I sort of found myself being forced to make tests to change my dream. And so I hired
a developer telling him, listen, I have one year of salary in the bank right now. I can
guarantee you that. After that, we'll see. I was still thinking it was going to fail.
But then it grew from there. So over the years, I've had to do this changing dream. I've
been forced to change my dream several times as the company grew and grew.
3,000 customers is a gigantic amount to grow to in, I think you said, eight months just
by yourself. Do you remember how much revenue you were generating?
Yeah, it was not fun. I don't really know. Let me try to remember. I think the first
year I generated about $165,000.
Wow.
That was in six months. 2008, that was in the first six months. It basically blew up
in my face. Talk about product market fit. The first sale happened four days before I
actually officially launched. I got an email from the credit card processor. And I was
like, that's strange. I'm not testing that right now. And then I looked and it was an
actual customer that had found me via Google. And I bought the software even before I launched.
That's great.
So it really sold itself from the beginning.
Do you remember what you were doing to find customers? I mean, it sounds like it took
off from that many customers. It's not like you found them each one by one by hand.
No, nothing.
What kind of effort were you putting into defining people?
Nothing. I was trying. I felt like being on the outside of a rocket hanging on with my
fingers. And the rocket was just going and I would kick it to try to steer it in a direction
or the other. It just came by itself.
What I did was focus on the product. The product was good and was unique. It had a viral component
inside the product. Before Balsamic, the sketchy look, the hand-drawn look only existed in
SketchUp, the 3D modeling tool. It's very weird to build software that lets your customers
generate crappy looking things. That took some guts.
But it's the right thing to do. And as soon as anybody saw a wireframe made with Balsamic,
they would immediately ask, hey, how did you make that? That's very unique. So the software
itself was its own marketing.
Other than that, I was really craving feedback because the software was 1.0. It was a crappy
piece of software. It was very young.
So I wanted to find out which were the roughest edges, what I should work on first. And so
I was craving feedback. And so what I decided to do was to donate the software to bloggers
in exchange for an honest review.
And this had the side effect that my software was on everybody's blog, all of a sudden.
Turns out that bloggers really like free stuff. And so I had a ton of reviews and they're
mostly favorable. And they link back to my site, which generated a good SEO. In hindsight,
it was a genius move. But at the time, I was honestly doing it as a way to sort of get
reviews, get ideas on what to work on next.
Yeah. I'm reading a blog post from 2008, I think, or January 2009, where you're looking
back at 2008 and you mentioned that you were the number one result on Google searches,
not only for Balsamic, but also for web office plugins and for just the word mockups. So
I imagine that this blogging strategy really paid off. You had tons of searches coming
in from Google.
Yeah. The other thing is that I picked a tiny niche. And I did because I wanted this software
to exist and I Googled around and found nothing. So clearly, the other players that were there
were not very good and did not do good SEO. So the bar was pretty low when I came in.
So 10 years is a long time. We're talking about stuff that happened back in 2008. I
don't even know how to walk through the story of Balsamic in 10 years and just the time
we have remaining. Let me ask you, if you had to divide Balsamic up into phases or eras,
what would they be?
So yes, I think right now we're around version four. So in 2007, this was before launching.
We call this phase the idea, right? I made a business plan and I built a sort of MVP,
et cetera. Then 2008 to 2010, a couple of years was more of a version zero or let's
see if this works kind of phase. It was me and then it became two or three of us. And
then in 2010, we had our first company retreat. There were six of us. And I thought, this
is it. This is what I want forever now. I don't want a large team. I wanted to be alone
and that failed. But I think with six people, we can do this for a long time. And I'm comfortable
managing five people. That lasted three months that day. Because what happened in 2010, we
got an acquisition offer and we came very close to selling the company. And as part
of that, we realized that this vision of staying with six people was just not realistic. And
so we were sort of forced to come up with a new vision quickly. And so we rejected the
offer and entered this new phase, which was we hired three or four more people and we
tried to grow to become big enough that we won't get an acquisition offer ever again.
That was the goal at the time. And so that was sort of balsamic 2.0. And then in 2013,
we hired six or seven people because we could afford to. We were overworked and we decided
to create a handbook in preparation for hiring all these people. And so the company went
from 10 to 20 people around that. And that felt different. Then in 2014, for a few years,
we sort of matured. We cleaned up a few things. We built some tools internally that helped
us work better. So for a few years, we did that and we sort of refined our processes.
Then let's see, 2016 until today, we were about 20, 25 people. And so we sort of codified
more of how we work. We're still a flat company and I have a whole talk online about this
phase. And then recently, the last six months or so, or maybe 12 months, we're entering
a whole new phase where we basically try to get set up for another decade of success.
The first decade was too much revolving around me. And the goal of the next decade is to
have balsamic become independent of me, stronger than me, just a bigger, more solid, better
than me. And so we are in the process of trying to define how that's going to work.
I met you at the Business of Software conference last October. And you gave a talk about this
new phase, this next decade of balsamic. And you called it, you've made it now what? And
I really want to talk about that, hopefully, toward the end of this episode, because it's
a fascinating talk that I haven't really heard very many people speak toward.
But before that, you made a lot of early decisions at balsamic, you made the decision to have
your mockups look like these hand-drawn sketches. So they didn't look great, but they were quick
and dirty. You made the decision to target a really tiny niche. Looking back now, 10
years later, are there any decisions that you fretted over in the early days that ended
up not mattering at all? And which decisions would you say mattered the most for you to
build a company that lasted so long?
That's a tough question, because I have very bad memory. I am still fully oriented in the
future. I don't dwell on past decisions much. And maybe that's part of the reason for my
success, I think. So who knows? I've made lots of bad decisions. I do it all the time.
It doesn't really matter, though. What matters is how quickly you can fix them and learn
from them. So it's hard for me to say, you know, good, bad, good, bad.
So about worrying about things, at the beginning, everything seems impossible. It seems like
you're facing this giant wall and you have to climb it with your bare hands because you've
never done it before. Hiring a lawyer, right? Things like that. Accounting stuff. Figuring
out accounting stuff, right? It's things that are so foreign that they look so daunting
and how am I ever going to learn about this? But then you just have to do it and you learn
it. And then once you learn enough, you look back and you think, how silly of me to be
so worried about this. It's not that hard. It always looks much easier after you've learned
enough. You don't even have to become an expert to feel that way.
So I've learned after a few of these experiences, I've learned to not be afraid of the giant
wall and just know that it just looks giant because it's new. It's probably not impossible
to master, right? So that's the advice I would give to someone just getting started. If you
feel that way, it's a good sign. It means you're about to learn a bunch. But be optimistic
that in just a few weeks, you will look back and think, why did I lose sleep over this?
Do you feel that way? Has that happened to you?
Oh yeah, all the time. I remember the early days of Indie Hackers, I was terrified to
send each and every email newsletter that I sent. I was afraid to email advertisers.
I kind of delayed doing that for two or three months just because I don't know. I just had
some block around and I didn't want to do it. The podcast was terrifying when I first
started. Even now, making changes to the website is always kind of nerve-wracking.
Yeah, some of these worries are actually healthy. For many years, I was behaving under the assumption
that revenue could go to zero tomorrow. And I wanted to be okay with that. I wanted to
be prepared for that. So that means that we have always saved a bunch of cash in the bank
or when that day comes. We still have a policy where we keep 18 months of expenses in the
bank at all times in case revenue goes to zero. That way, we know we have 18 months to
figure out how to make revenue restart. And that's a good thing to do in general. So some
of these worries, even if they're completely stupid, they help you behave responsibly.
So they're healthy that way, I think.
That's a really interesting example, because it's illustrative of what I was talking about
earlier, which is that you've bootstrapped a business that was built to last. Balsamax
has been around for 10 years. And that's because you set out to build a sustainable business
that would stand the test of time. And you're worried more about the business sticking around
and being a healthy business than you are about it, growing as rapidly as it can at
all costs and reinvesting all of your profits into growth.
Yeah, no, that was never the goal. And our goal is longevity, not growth.
I think you're a guy in general who has a lot of unconventional ideas. I mean, you were
doing a remote-only company way before it was cool. You kept your organization flat.
You had avoided having managers for as long as you possibly could. You tried all sorts
of experimental things like holacracy. You described yourself as being allergic to collecting
and analyzing metrics, which I think is anathema to many companies and startups. I think the
list goes on. So what's the deal here? Why go against the grain so often?
Well, it's not deliberate, really. It's not that I want to be different. It's more about
trying things out and seeing what feels right. I don't think I'm that much against the grain.
I focus on the product and just the business model of selling a tool for money. That's
not against the grain. You are against the grain. Silicon Valley is against the grain.
Selling items for money is the oldest business model in the world. The attention economy
is the passing, terrible business model of the last 20 years. I'm not the different one.
Everybody else is the different one. Same for all the other things. Trying to make a
business focused on making it last a long time. Even the big startups, that's what they
say they want. Maybe for some of those startups, in order to be lasting a long time, they have
to be the winner that they saw. That's fine. If it works for them, that was never my ambition.
Well, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's because I don't live in Silicon Valley anymore.
Maybe it's because I'm not from there. Maybe because I am more cautious than ambitious.
It's my upbringing. It's the people around me. It's what I read. Who knows? Every person
is different.
I want to talk a little bit about the feeling of success, because there's this concept of
a hedonic adaptation, or sometimes called the hedonic treadmill, where no matter how
much things change, we as human beings are pretty good at adapting. You make a million
dollars a year, a year or two later, you've completely adapted to that. You no longer
feel that much different than you did beforehand. Balsamic has always been growing. You said
you're doing close to a little over $6 million in revenue a year. Now, you've got dozens
of employees. At what point did you acclimate to this? Did it ever become normal? Are you
still looking around going, wow, I can't believe this is my life?
There's a good amount of that, a good amount of feeling blessed and lucky and privileged.
A lot of my success comes because my parents sent me to California in the summer to learn
English. If you read Malcolm Gladwell, the Outliers book is all about you are the sum
of your generations of people before you and the right timing too. I'm very much aware
that I am a white male. There's a lot of intrinsic privilege there. I am very much humbled by
the success that I've had. At the same time, in the last few years, as revenue has stabilized,
it's easier to get used to it because a lot of it is SaaS, recurring revenue now, so it's
more predictable. With that, you start feeling more secure that this thing is probably going
to keep going for a while. At the beginning, it was up and down, up and down. It was like
let's live day by day, let's not plan further than two months because we might not be around
for two months. But then as the company matures, the horizon gets longer and longer.
About the treadmill, it is a very tempting treadmill to be on. It's very true. It's human
nature, but I try to resist it. After a while, if you make a million dollars a year or two
million dollars a year, it's really not that different. The biggest difference right now
is that I fly business class on planes and that is amazing. That is the best. To me,
that's the biggest luxury that I want to give myself. Everything else, it's fine. It's all
about sustaining it. It's all about making it last a long time. I have taken less dividends
this year. I will take very little next year because the company, I want to reinvest in
the company we hired another bunch of people last year. That's fine because I know that
if I do things right, this thing will last a long time and then I'll take dividends again
in the future. Again, it's more about longevity than a quick buck. If it was about a quick
buck, I would have sold. Let's talk a little bit about the practical
aspects of longevity. A lot of people have companies where they figure out how to acquire
customers. They figure out how to make a product that works for a year or two and then things
change and they have to change everything about their business just to keep up. Has
that been the case with you? Are there any big decisions you've had to make, changes
you've had to make to Balsamic to keep it running and make sure it didn't become obsolete?
Not a lot because of the problem that I chose to solve or because I was lucky enough to
choose a problem with certain characteristics. The wireframing space is both too small for
big players to go after and too big for small players to really compete with. If the market
is about $10 million a year, if the global market for wireframing tools is maybe $10-15
million a year total, that's not enough for a big player to want to play. It's not worth
their money to go after such a small market. At the same time, there's not too much room
for big players in the sense of Balsamic big in a space like that. We were lucky to start
dominating this market pretty early on. The first few years, it was competitive and then
we became the leaders in the space and we've been left alone on both sides. This is a luxury
that I have because of the size of the market that I went after. If you're going to try
to become the next Instagram, you better believe that big people with a lot of money are going
to go after you because the potential is huge. But if you choose a small enough market, people
might largely leave you alone.
What about some of the practical aspects of acquiring customers? Have you changed the
channels through which you guys have found Balsamic wireframes users? Has SEO become
more or less important over time or blogging or has it pretty much stayed the same since
2008?
We still basically don't do any marketing. We lead with the product. The product has to
be so good that people tell their friends about it. Again, it sounds radical but that
was what Steve Jobs used to say about Apple products. If the product is good, everything
else comes easier.
How do you make a product that's so good that you can really grow via word of mouth and
people like to talk about how good it is to their friends and spread it that way because
I think that's kind of a common goal. Especially as a solo developer, it's not an easy bar
to hit.
No, it's not easy. It's true. It's not easy. Usability is user experience. Interface design
is not an easy thing. It doesn't come for everybody naturally but it can be learned.
In fact, we have a whole section of our new website, balsamic.com slash learn, which is
all about learning how to do interface design as a non-designer. It's not easy and it takes
a ton of discipline. You say no 90% of the time because it might make a few customers
happy but it might muddle the experience for everybody else. It's a lot of self-discipline
and focus and also this lack of ambition. We don't want to be the tool for everybody.
We have a very narrow focus. We're a wireframing tool, not a prototyping tool. We're not going
to give you... You can link screens together but that's it. We're never going to give you
conditional flows or hover actions or all that kind of stuff. Other tools can do that.
If we did that, we would have to charge more, compete with different players, change things
completely and the tool would be harder to learn. We're happy being the first tool you
use and part of your tool belt. We don't have to only use balsamic. You use balsamic and
other things. This laser focus and a willingness to leave money on the table is tough to maintain
over time. The temptation is strong but I feel like if you don't do it, you're shooting
yourself in the foot. We've seen it with a bunch of competitors that will compete with
us and not be able to and they would add a bunch of buttons everywhere and a bunch of
features and then two years later they were dead.
Let's talk a little bit about this talk you gave at the Business of Software and the way
that your role has changed and the last six months you said where you're really looking
forward now to balsamic over the next decade being a company that doesn't depend on peldy
and doesn't necessarily need peldy. You at some point tried stepping away to help the
business run without you. When did you start feeling like that was something that you really
needed to do and what triggered those feelings?
Let's see. I think what triggered it was the fact that we turned 10. That to me was a milestone
that I'd been looking forward to for nine years. I thought, all right, we lasted a decade.
We're now 30 people. We're still flat but we're not really flat because I'm the only
people manager. I'm not doing a good job at that because I don't have enough time to be
the manager for a good manager for 30 people. What am I really needed for and how can we
redesign balsamic to be stronger than just me? Because I'm not going to be around forever.
No one is. My focus shifted from building the product. The product is 10 years old,
it's mature, it's good. We know what we have to do but overall, it doesn't require all
my attention like in the past. After I had finished this milestone of running a company
for 10 years, I needed to come up with another dream and another 10-year project for myself.
I thought maybe this could be it. It could be figuring out how to build this company
so that it can surpass me, not just outlive me, but also be better without me than with
me. To me, that's very exciting. That is an exciting experiment that I'm happy to dedicate
the next five years or more to. The first step was let's find out what am I really
needed for. I did it in a reckless way where I said, okay, starting today, I don't do anything
at all anymore. Let's see what breaks. I did that for a few months. Thanks, bro. In the
end, the experiment worked.
One of the things you started doing once you were able to pull back and let things break
without your direct day-to-day involvement was go back to strategizing and thinking at
a higher level and watching videos of other founders giving talks and giving more talks
yourself. A lot of people in the audience are trying to learn this business of starting
companies. What are some of the things that you learned once you pulled back and did more
learning yourself?
I wish I had pulled back and spent time learning and strategizing. Really, what I did was I
pulled back and panicked and got depressed and didn't know what to do with myself or
my life. What I learned is don't do it this way. Do it much more gradually. I think the
main lesson is try to... I know this is nearly impossible, but try not to tie your sense
of worth to the company. Try to have a separate, fulfilled self than the business. That's,
like I said, nearly impossible because if you're a founder, that's all you think about
day and night forever. There's no time to do anything else, to be anything else. Although
I've always kept a good family life balance, but it's not about the hours you spent working.
It's more about how you describe yourself to yourself. I've always been founder and
CEO of Balsamic. That defines me. But that's not healthy. It's healthier to have your own,
be able to like yourself even outside of the work. For instance, I joined a woodworking
class and there nobody knew me. People laughed at my joke, not because I was the boss, but
because I was funny and that made me feel good. Try to invest in your social life, in
your connections outside of work. Try not to think about work all the time. Try to do
this. Try to think about your job as a job. Someday, you might not want to do that job
anymore. I know it's hard to imagine if that's your company that we're talking about. But
you'll be 75 one day and maybe you'll be tired of running the company. Thinking about it
that way prepares you and I think is a good way to make the company stronger as well.
One of the really cool things I think that you did after you started feeling this way
was you called up a bunch of other founders who have been in similar situations, who were
very experienced, who had long lasting companies. You sort of asked them what they thought about
life after an exit. In fact, you actually read a paper called Life After an Exit. Some
of the quotes that you talked about in your talk were you had a quote from Joel Spolsky
where he asked, do you remember why you liked bootstrapping in the first place? You had
a quote from DHH who advised you, hey, it's your company. You can shape it however you
want to make yourself the happiest. Chris and Natalie Nageli at Wildbit told you that
sometimes hobbies can make things worse. That was an interesting morning. Jason Cohen told
you to be careful about running away from something versus running towards something.
How did this advice shape you and how should other people who are building companies think
about really making the decision to sort of separate themselves from their companies and
do what you were just saying earlier? Try to not define yourself as the founder.
This is all the great advice that they gave me. The main benefit of reaching out was that
I no longer felt alone with these struggles. Lots of people go through whatever you're
going through. There are other people that are going through the same phase of the company,
the same struggles you have. Having a mastermind group is, I feel, critical. It's like having
a therapist, but better because they know exactly. They're living it as well.
There's the study where they say that the strongest correlation to happiness in life
is not money or anything. It's the number and quality of your connections. That's something
that I feel like a lot of founders tend to neglect because they're too busy or it's lonely
at the top. You have to be the sort of solo hero at the top of your company, but that's
a mistake. Try to sort of always cultivate a group of peers, which will change over time
because you might outgrow your group, right? But try to really have these conversations.
The conversation themselves is what matters.
I think that's a great way to end the episode, talking about the keys to happiness, the number
and quality of relations to other people, which is tough to maintain as a founder, working
so hard on a business. Anyway, Peltier, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been
great hearing your story. Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about Balsamic
and the things you're doing in your personal life as well, if you share that kind of stuff
online?
Yes. So to learn more about Balsamic in my history, you should go to balsamic.com. It's
spelled with a Q instead of a C because we're not vinegar. And then if you go to About Us
and there's a talks and interviews page where you can watch talks that I've given over the
years since 2010. And I think that those are very useful for other founders, I guess. And
then personal life, I don't share it. I'm retreating from social media more and more
other than privately sharing to family and things. That's a whole other conversation.
All right. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Peltier.
Thank you very much, Kordland.
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