Office hours with Balsamiq mentors
We have some very senior people at Balsamiq, leaders in their different fields. We also love to give back to our community in any way we can. Giving advice to our customers is one of these ways.
How it works
It's very simple: we set aside some time every month to meet with our customers and answer any questions they might have for us.
You get advice on your current problem / career / life plan, and we get to make a new friend in the process. Win-win! :)
Just choose one of our mentors, schedule the session, and meet us for your 1-hour video chat.
The only thing we ask in return from you is to join our Research Program, so we can get your help to improve our offering in the future.
Topics that are out of scope for this program
This program is about personal and career advice. For other topics, please see below:
- How to use Balsamiq's product: please refer to our extensive Tutorials or Documentation pages instead.
- How to wireframe your idea: please refer to our Balsamiq Academy site instead.
- Asking for investment: we don't do that, sorry.
Meet our mentors
Alberto Forni
Alberto is a software engineer. Nowadays, he focuses mostly on the frontend, but he has experience in microservices architectures, testing and continuous integration and delivery. Alberto worked in a few different countries and a variety of companies from startups to consulting agencies. You can chat with him about programming, career path, and how to foster collaboration between designers and developers.
Arielle Johncox
Arielle is the Head of Marketing at Balsamiq, driving brand and growth through acquisition, lifecycle. communications, content, brand, product marketing, and more. She has years of experience across B2B and B2C in a variety of industries, and is happy to help you with advice on marketing, strategy, team building, or career.
Brendan Saricks
Brendan Saricks is one of our Customer Champions and a lifelong customer advocate. His goal is for everyone to have human interactions with their customers and users. Whether you have a specific issue, or just want to brainstorm ways to make your support as human as possible, Brendan is more than happy to help you however he can.
Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni
Our founder and CEO Peldi knows a thing or two about building sustainable, bootstrapped, geographically distributed software businesses. He's always happy to help entrepreneurs who are just getting started. Watch these talks and read these posts before scheduling, you might just find your answers there! Peldi does NOT invest in startups, so no pitches please.
Laura Lei
Our graphic designer Laura Lei is passionate and enthusiastic about web and graphic design, lettering, and live music photography. She runs the Bologna chapter of Ladies, Wine & Design. She also created Feeling Things Deeply, a visual project to raise mental health awareness.
Marco Botton
Marco is the lead developer of Balsamiq for Web, Mac, and Windows. He loves everything that lives on client side, especially if it’s a multiplatform app made with a bunch of different technologies, but which behaves like a truly native app. He is also genuinely obsessed with software performance, simple code architecture, and good looking UI. Schedule an hour with him to chat about software development on desktop and web, and how not to go crazy because of it.
Michael Angeles
Michael Angeles is our interface designer. He is known in the UX community as Konigi. He was one of the original founders of the Information Architecture Institute, and has written about interface and interaction design since 2001. He has been known to play career therapist in the past. He can lend an ear or offer perspective and reflection to new and seasoned UX designers.
Stefano Masini
Stefano Masini leads the development of our Balsamiq Cloud product. He's been developing software professionally for 20+ years, occasionally giving talks at technical conferences. He loves tackling new problems with a down-to-earth, hands-on approach, trying to pull simplicity and elegance out of complexity. You can talk to him about a wide range of topics, like React, Javascript, Typescript, Python, GraphQL, AWS, scalable architectures.