We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.
Thanks for letting us know! We're happy to hear that.
We've changed the product quite a bit in response to the huge projects that our users create on our design platform. Nevertheless, we've also faced quite a few engineering issues in respect to browser performance and real time backend data synchronization.
Moqups[1], our HTML5 based mockup/wireframing app, is completely free for education, non profit and open source projects. To our great surprise, we get a fairly large amount of requests each week from many universities and from open source developers. Aaaand we're happy to fulfill all of them :-)
It's probably because Firefox does not support many presentation attributes as well as proper font antialiasing for the text and tspan SVG tags. It looks like they did create their own text layout engine with support for flowing around arbitrary shapes.
I'm curious how well this works, since emulating native text capabilities (just think RTL vs LTR) requires an insane amount of Javascript and the performance is pretty terrible for texts longer than a few hundred words. If they got this right, it must be a masterpiece of Javascript code. Google recently introduced their own text layout capabilities in Google Docs (also SVG based) and it's pretty buggy beyond simple text. Just to highlight the complexity of the issue, they used to render text into SVG on the server until recently.
It's one of the reasons we had to use foreignObject with pure HTML inside for Moqups instead, although it prevents us from supporting IE at all, including IE 11. We can at least target Webkit/Blink & Gecko this way.
Hi Matt, don't worry - we really appreciate and reflect upon all kinds of feedback, specially the most honest ones. We may disagree on various topics, but that's what makes a good debate!
Thank you - you have a very valid point with the image limitations so we'll reconsider.
We're also planning many more integrations and Basecamp is close our radar. We're seeing huge amounts of traffic coming from tools like Aptana, Trello or Basecamp so this makes a lot of sense.
It took us a while (and more than 60,000 free users!) to better understand our business metrics and see what our opportunities are until we've made these not always easy decisions. We also had a look at what our competing products are offering and many times it's nothing more than a free, very limited trial.
Let me try to shed some more light about the free version:
- We've tried to avoid disabling common sense functionality just for forcing users to upgrade. Unlimited saving, unlimited exporting, unlimited pages and so on. Keep in mind that all mockups are throwaway artifacts that one can simply export and then safely delete their projects. It's a little inconvenient but it's not a finite resource that users can't replenish like in a case of a time limited trial. The premium features are typically wanted by business users who like a little more granular privacy settings, run multiple projects through their many customers or prospects or have extremely big projects that can benefit from productivity features like master pages. The premium users even avoid using our service for free if they don't have some confidence that someone is running a sustainable and trustworthy business in behind.
- There is no data loss when you downgrade from a premium plan. The only thing we do is gracefully disable some premium functionality and restrict editing (not viewing) to projects created in the premium period.
- All the users who signed up before got to keep their projects and the editing capabilities. Some of them have more than 150 huge projects.
- On top of this, we are giving non profit and educational organizations as well as open source teams free premium plans.
- We rarely say no to users asking for discounts or extended trials if they can't afford the premium plans.
Our most important goal for us is to create a business we can grow so we can bring more value for our users - we really have a ton of great features in the pipeline that we're excited about.
Time will tell whether we've made the right steps or if we have to make certain adjustments to our business.
You could also consider having a limit of 1 or 2 private projects and make all the others public.
If you give public mockups a publicly accessible page and create a base representation that is indexable by Google, it might be an interesting source of additional incoming traffic (and leaves you open to become something like SpeakerDeck for Mockups.)
We decided to avoid publishing an indexable listing of public projects so we can protect the privacy of our users at least to the extent where they don't publish the unique, indecipherable link themselves ("Available to anyone who knows the link"). We think it's the most ethical approach for handling this situation.
Good link - but there should still be one on your blog. And it should be the most obvious, most clear, and easiest to click thing on the entire page.
Like 60% of blog posts on HN make this mistake. It surprises me quite a bit, but I guess it should make you feel better that apparently everyone makes this mistake.
We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.