I have the feeling I am not doing enough charity-wise. Yes, we do have a “free licenses” policy for Napkee and I also tried to convert any unnecessary XMas present into a donation to Charity:Water.
A few days ago I had the chance to watch an inspiring video from TED and that made me say: developing countries! We should give them a hand so they can grow and build themselves a better future.

That’s why from today on we are giving out Napkee for free to students, organizations and companies that come for one of the ~150 developing countries you can find on the IMF list.
So, if you are so lucky that you can read this post, or if you know somebody in a less-fortunate area of this planet, write us your story and we will give you a license free of charge.

One step after the other, one small action after the other, we can all make this world a better place.


Happy holidays everybody!!
Enrico

The numbers

In this short period we have already sold 27 licenses that covered the initial expenses and started to pay for our food

In the initial expenses I included all the services and goods used for Napkee, that means:

• e-books ($69)
• screencast music! ($30)
• software related ($271)
• hosting and build server ($60)
• skype related ($106)
• lawyers ($600)
• mailing campaign ($8)

That makes $1,144 of expenses and of course I had to pay my-self the amazing amount of $0/h. All the software licenses I already owned before Napkee and the computers are not included as well. As you can see, if you really want to start a micro-ISV you can do it without external capital  :)

The licenses we have sold to 8 countries so far brought home $2,047, so Napkee is amazingly profitable (+$903) just 8 days after its launch!

First marketing steps

I didn’t do any major marketing operation with Napkee. Right now everything was held on Twitter without any promotional tweet. I use TweetDeck and I keep a search open on “balsamiq” and follow whoever is posting something about Peldi’s company or products. I had a couple of tweets from Peldi that generated a lot of buzz, a contest and a guest blog post on Balsamiq’s blog…

guess when that happened

Donations

We also donated (and still processing the requests, be patient!) 29 licenses to charities, bloggers and presenters.
You will probably ask yourself why we gave out more free licenses than the ones we sold. I suggest you to read this amazing and inspiring blog post to fully understand why we decided to give away so much.

In the meanwhile…

After the first release announcement I got really busy following all the posts on GetSatisfaction, finding some bugs and releasing six minor versions of Napkee that fixed the ones found by the great community of Napkee users and made it a full 15-days-trial application!

We doubled the amount of licenses for the winners of the contest and announced the lucky followers that got one (have you missed that? check it out here)

What’s next?

I have a long list of new features I want to implement in Napkee. It includes, in this order:

• displaying not available controls
• changing the global N icon to single icons that represent the ones you find in Balsamiq
• usability improvements
• nice and exciting features I got from GetSatisfaction

Thanks for reading this post and stay tuned, the next time I will talk about the process and the tools that made it possible to release Napkee in about 4 months!

Enrico

I love GetSatisfaction. It has been just two days since the launch of Napkee and we already had so much feedback! Thank you all! We’ve received some bug posts – fortunately! keep coming with those, you are making Napkee a better software for you and for the others! – and some feature requests as well.

The post that got immediately my attention was an idea called Restricting Export = Less sales. Long story short: if I’m a customer and I really want to see the potential of Napkee I have to see the export. I completely agree!

That’s why I released Napkee 1.0.7. You have 15 days to try out the export functionality, with no limits regarding number of exports, numbers of mockups, etc. Just a plain, complete release of Napkee, the same you have after you bought a license number.

Since I received a few emails regarding the subject, I also want to briefly share my thoughts with you on trust and software piracy.

I believe that the best relationship between the customer and the software vendor is based on reciprocal trust: I trust you giving you a fully functional software to work with and you trust me and Napkee because of that, because of the openness of the company and because we listen to you.

Enrico, aren’t you scared about one-time users and software piracy? Well, no.

For the one-time users (read as: I need Napkee now, for one project, and I won’t use it anymore after that): I hope Napkee was useful for your project and spread the word about it!
For the software piracy: I completely share Peldi’s views on this subject.

Talk to you soon and thanks for making Napkee a better product!

Enrico

It has been quite a long ride from March till now but I’ve learned an incredible amount of things and I’m ready to share them all with you.

In the meanwhile you can download, install and try out Napkee! Feel free to contact me personally at enrico@napkee.com or use any other contact method to let me know what you think about it!

I would like to say thanks to Julia who loves me and supports me in everything, to Peldi for all the things he has done for me and for Napkee till now, to Jon who cheered me up all the time and pushed me to do my best, to the beta testers – you have done a wonderful job guys and girls – to Juraj for the skin and to Eva for the pictures!

Talk to you very soon!
Enrico