What's up, everyone?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked 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 do they get to where they are today?

How do 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 Peldie, 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, Heldie was also one of my earliest inspirations as an

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 indie hackers itself would not be here, if not for the efforts of Peltie and people like him. So Peltie, welcome to the show. I am stoked to have you on here. Thanks for having me, Cortland. 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. I got one at 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.

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.

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