An Open Letter to Peldi Guilizzoni of Balsamiq

Hi Peldi:

About eight months ago, I emailed you and the Balsamiq team asking a favor: I had an idea for a polling application, and I wanted to use your software to build the prototype. The only problem? I was broke from paying off my student loans. Yeah, I know, $79 software is cheap as hell. But when you’re broke, cheap is expensive—everything’s expensive.

So, I sent you an email, and I asked you for a free copy. I’m sure you don’t remember, but within thirty minutes, I got a reply with a free license—no questions asked.

That day, I started building the prototypes for Quipol—the project that would go on to consume my existence.

As you probably don’t know, Quipol launched five days ago. It was the scariest and proudest day of my life. I still have a ton of work to do, and I’ll need a lot of luck to make it work, but here’s the reality: had you not been so gracious, Quipol might have never happened. I might have become discouraged, distracted, or disenchanted by this, that, or the other thing. But I wasn’t. You gave me a gift, and I was so excited to use it—I was so happy to know that such good people are still on this earth.

So thank you, Peldi. You have a customer for life. I can safely say that you deserve every dollar that you make, because you really care, and it shows in more ways than you could ever know.

—Max Yoder

~~P.S. I’ll get you that $79 ASAP.~~

Update: Instead of paying him back, Peldi has asked me to pay it forward and buy a copy of Balsamiq Mockups for the next aspiring entrepreneur. If you’re that person, email me at max [at] quipol [dot] com. If you’re not that person, but know somebody who is, share this post with them for me. Thank you!