Announcing New Mentors of Our Office Hours Program
Two years ago, we launched our Office Hours program: a few of our senior staffers set aside one or two hours each month to meet online with one of you for a 1-hour advice chat.
We give personal and career advice for free, as a way to give back to our awesome community. The only thing we ask in return from you is to join the Balsamiq research program and help us make Balsamiq better for everyone.
I doubled my user base in 6 months by following his advice. Thank you, Balsamiq team for such an input into a random guy who you allow to book a call, I appreciate that! — Ihor
But giving back to the community is a real treat for us as well. Working from home gets pretty lonely sometimes, so meeting our customers even for an hour is a great way to expand our networks.
Moreover, the program turned out to be a huge help for our mentors to face the solitude of the COVID-19 quarantine.
I was lucky enough to have a session with Peldi, CEO of Balsamiq... he was very kind in sharing his experience of growing Balsamiq and the challenges he faced along the way. He also took the time to explore what I was working on, the challenges I was having, and how he'd approach them. I'd highly recommend it — Stefan
Meet the new Balsamiq mentors
When we sent to you the first newsletter about the program, we didn’t know what to expect. We thought we would have received a few replies, and that we could schedule them one by one. Imagine our surprise when we received over 40 requests in the first 24 hours! 🙂
Now we have a new system in place: Peldi built a sweet internal tool to help us schedule meetings, each mentor can manage their availability as they please, we can send reminders… so now we’re finally ready to grow the team!
We asked for more volunteers during our last all-hands meeting, and several people stepped up:
Alberto, who can talk to you about programming and career paths for programmers
Marco, who loves to discuss software development on desktop and web
Natalie, who joined to talk with you about how to build a financially healthy company and a safe work environment
Stefano, great for chatting about various programming languages and scalable server architectures
Of course, our current mentors are still available:
Billy, always happy to chat about UX, product design and management and leading design teams
Brendan, happy to brainstorm ways to make your support as human as possible
Peldi, who can field questions about building sustainable, bootstrapped, geographically distributed software businesses
Lei, with whom you can discuss graphic design, lettering and photography
Leon, happy to discuss wireframing, web design, remote work and UX career paths
Mike, who loves to discuss UX career paths
Don’t forget to come and meet us, we’d love to hear from you.
See you online!
Laura for the Balsamiq Team
