Man Writes Software, Blogs About it, Makes $100k in 5 Months

We love this story. Back in July we wrote about the inspiring experience of Peldi Guilizzoni, a lone software developer who'd built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and who was opening up his financial records on his blog to show everyone how things were going. We'd been following his progress since before he launched, but just 6 weeks after Balsamiq hit the market at roughly $79 per license, we wrote that Peldi had already made $10k in revenue.
That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that he's just cleared $100,000 in sales of the four variations of his product. Talk about a simple tool coming along at just the right time! It's cool software, too.
In addition to selling Mockups for Desktop, Peldi also sells Mockups for Confluence, Jira and XWiki. Desktop sales have dominated, as any designer can use that software, but wildly popular enterprise wiki service Confluence has a big ecosystem of developers interested in mockups as well.
Peldi says that while October was slower than September, and sales seemed to slow a bit when news of financial crisis was breaking out, so far November looks to be his biggest month yet.
He's got an active community of supporters cheering him on at his blog, too. He tracked the lead up to his launch, its aftermath and the product's early momentum right out in the open on his blog. He displays financial numbers throughout the blog. It's been a model of the paradigm of radical transparency and it's a whole lot of fun to watch.
What's next for Balsamiq? The tiny company has put together a remarkable board of advisors, Peldi has hired his wife Mariah to move from graphic design for the Balsamiq to a full time position, he's hired a few contractors and more projects are on the way soon.
We love stuff like this.