posted23/01/10
Welcome back to Creately - we’ve got a brand new release on the way and we’re very excited to give you a lil glimpse into our plans.
Scheduled Downtime
Before we can release the new plans we’ll be doing some internal housekeeping this weekend. Our Creately.com service will be shut down for 3 hours on Saturday Night (PST)/Sunday Early Morning (EST). This will allow us to set up the internal infrastructure to introduce these great new updates over the coming week.
Downtime Schedule
Australia - Sun 24 Jan 2010 5:00 - 8:00 PM
United Kingdom - Sun 24 Jan 2010 6:00 - 9:00 AM
US (EST) - Sun 24 Jan 2010 1:00 - 4:00 AM
US (PST) - Sat 23 Jan 2010 10:00 PM - 1:00 AM
Upcoming Features
Over the coming week, we will be announcing a new Team Plan - that will make it simpler for you to collaborate with your team and clients.
Along with the Plus and Pro plans, the new Team Plans will come with advanced user and administrator management, unlimited project sharing and billing management capabilities.
Also All users will get better project and diagram management features - including the ability to move diagrams between Projects, better support for PDF exports on Linux and a new Profile page to manage your account.
We’ll have more here next week - so subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date with Creately’s Visual Collaboration platform.
@charanjit
posted20/01/10
Last week, the entire Creately Team (except Graham - we missed you mate) gathered in our new office in Colombo for a week long strategy and planning session. We reflected on the past year, our successes and learnings, evaluated the market and primed ourselves for an exciting year ahead in 2010. We talked a bit and drew quite a lot during the week. We’re firm believers of visual thinking and communication and ended up capturing most of our thoughts and findings in mind-maps, concept diagrams and the like. Over the coming weeks, we’ll share some of these diagrams that we feel can help other young startups like ourselves do better in 2010.
Today, I’d like to share a Concept Map that Chandika put together - Critical Success Factors for a Web Startup. It captures key elements of a Startup’s operations that need the Entrepreneur’s attention and how these elements impact your success as a web startup. With so little time and so much to do - anything that helps keep an entrepreneur focused is very useful. So if you’re like me, you’ll want to print it out and pin it someplace you’ll see it everyday. Click image to enlarge 
What else do you think should go into the diagram? Did we miss something crucial that you’d like to add? @charan
posted16/01/10
Setting up your own web product company? Start following the founders of Creately on Twitter to see a mix of interesting and insightful tweets!! And, yeah one such tweet is what made me contribute today! I found an really useful blog post on Mashable - ‘10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs‘. This was tweeted by Creately’s co-founder Charan. This post grabbed my attention cos I wasn’t aware of some of the tools listed here.
To help me remember, I thought it would be worth it all into a diagram that would capture the essence of each of these services visually. I created this diagram on Creately. With Creately’s slick Upload Image feature, I managed to pull through all the icons of the Social Media Tools in the list, added a short description and it was ready to be published.
So here’s a simple chart to help you remember 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs and Startups!
If you enjoyed this - remember to check out how easily you can create visual maps like this with Creately - Online Diagramming.
@induja
posted10/01/10
The great thing about working in an Internet start-up is the learning we get to do every single day of our lives. We don’t always know the right answers to every question we face, but the very nature of the Web lets us try out new ideas and quickly adapt them to achieve the best results for our online businesses.
The Big Kahuna Question
The Cinergix team faced this ‘hard’ question 3 months ago when we launched our online diagramming service, Creately, to the public. After being in beta for almost a year, where we spent a lot of time and effort in engineering, we were faced with the question of how much to charge for our service. Of course we had tons of ideas and projections in our business plan, but now that it was finally time to start generating an income, we weren’t exactly sure how much our customers should be paying for our collaborative diagramming application.
Our customers’ feedback and reviews told us we had a service that was loved and valued by users, but we struggled to quantify this value. Creately was being used in small businesses, software and design companies, startups as well as by students from all around the globe. We felt Creately would be valued differently by each group - depending on what they used it for.
A web design agency using Creately to work collaboratively on a Web Site project with their clients receives immediate economic value by shortening the turnaround time of designs and raising customer satistfaction. This would make Creately a valued tool - in essence allowing us to charge a “Premium” to this customer. But a student using Creately may not see such immediate economic returns, and hence would not be willing or able to pay the same price.
Faced with this dichotomy of users and our desire to ensure Creately remained accessible to everyone who needed it, we devised a simple Pricing Experiment that would help us better understand Creately’s perceived value to our customers.
The Experiment
We set up a new Creately Plus plan and decided we would let our customers choose how much they would pay for Creately each month. We called it the “Pay What You Want” offer and set about putting the plan into action.
We set up a simple Upgrade page (see screenshot below) with sample prices of similar diagramming applications, and launched it with a Press Release and a newsletter to all our beta users. The experiment would run for 2 weeks and we hoped to get a better sense of our customers and how much each of them valued Creately.
Marketing Sequeway
This also proved to be a bit of a marketing coup. I thought we had an interesting story with our PWYW plan, so instead of putting out a Press Release announcing the launch of Creately - we pitched the unique “PWYW” pricing angle. This lead to stories on TechCrunch, TheInquirer.com and a host of other blogs. We didn’t realise this at the time, but not many people (besides Radiohead) have tried this before.
The Results
I would be lying if I said we were not pleasantly surprised by the initial results of our experiment. This along with the publicity we received convinced us to continue to run the pricing experiment for 2 months instead of the planned 2 weeks.
We received a wide range of offers from $1 (the minimum allowed) to $100, with the mean ranging between $4-$5 and a median of $3.
- Customers who paid $1 were mostly new users who’d heard about the PWYW plan and signed up on the first day. This group of customers was also the most likely to cancel their accounts over a period of time. Many of them did not use the application intensively and would have been fine with a Free plan.
- Customers who paid the Mean Price of $4-5, have made good use of their Creately accounts, including creating multiples diagrams and publishing them. These customers come from a diverse range of industries including small businesses owners, marketers, teachers and students. These users have shown less propensity to cancel their accounts as they were extracting good value from their accts.
- Customers who paid more than the Mean Price provided the most valuable insights. These customers incorporated Creately into their work and business processes and derived significant value from Creately’s collaboration capabilities. Customers in this group included tech-savvy small businesses, software teams, design companies, Webmasters and business consultancies. This group made the most use of Creately to collaborate with co-workers and clients, valuing our visual collaboration platform to communicate and solve real business problems across cross-functional teams, instead of simply using Creately as a diagramming tool.
Another very interesting point that stood out from our experiment is the difficulties that so many of our users faced with completing their subscriptions with PayPal. The complaint emails as well as large percentage of abandoned transactions - forced us to work on alternate payment methods.
Lessons Learnt
Understand your users
We’ve learnt that its very important to understand who your customer is and why someone’s your customer. No two customers are the same so it’s important to learn what each type of customer gets out of your product. This is important if you want to stay relevant to your most valuable customers and helps you focus your marketing and development investment to maximise your returns.
Give Customers What they Need (or To each his Own)
We are even more committed to the idea that Creately delivers differing levels of value to our customer. We don’t want to forgo any customers and will need to continually work to ensure Creately is available where its needed.
Sustainable?
The PWYW scheme did a good job in helping us gather invaluable data on our customers, but may not be sustainable over a long run. This is due in part to the fact that although we ask people to be Fair, not everyone is. Also, for a startup with limited resources, it becomes very hard to do any real business planning & projections when you add variable pricing to the mix.
Action Plan
We’ve been working on a set of actionable activities that we worked out as a result of our experiment.
- Make it easier for teams to work together on our visual collaboration platform, by introducing Team Projects.
- Introduce Pro Plans that deliver greater value to customers who use Creately intensively.
- Focus on developing a clear market position that resonates with our high value customers.
- Put in place a new payment infrastructure to replace Paypal. This will be announced shortly.
- Institute a Creately Scholarship programme to give access to charities, schools and colleges at deeply discounted prices.
Conclusion
We may not have fixed every concern we had, but this experiment has definitely helped us identify our strengths and understand the market response to Creately. Even though we gave out quite a few Creately Plus accounts for $1, we believe the data we collected over the 2 months has more than paid for itself in terms of lost revenue.
Tell us what you think of our findings. Would you have conducted this experiment in a different way? We’d love to hear from any online service that’s faced this question before.
Some Good References on Pricing Strategies for Startups
posted07/01/10
Firstly I’d like to say Happy New Year from the Inbox!
Creately is really pushing technical boundaries to bring collaborative diagramming to the masses. But while its all very exciting building new features and functionality, its good to remember who we are doing it for. You guys! Our customers. So the way we handle our customer service must be as good, if not better, than the service we offer.
Great Support is part of the Creately Experience
Quick and efficient support is one of the key offerings of our product. But we don’t just see customer support as a necessity, or just another offering. Engaging with our customer enables us to unearth a wealth of fantastic ideas from our user community, to help us push Creately forward, helping us develop it with our customers’ needs at the forefront of our product plans.
Whether you are on the Pro, Plus or Public plans, when you send us an email, submit feedback at the end of a session, give us a heads up about a bug, send us a message on Facebook or enter a suggestion on the forum, we always read and respond to it with our 24 hour support. This seems to surprise one or two of you as you think your comments fall on deaf ears. No way! Your comments provide a lot of benefit to us and we encourage you to send us as much information as you have time to. You love to get chatting to us about what you do or don’t like about Creately, with positive comments or giving us ideas for improvements - and we love every bit of it.
To start this year off we are working on improving our approach to customer service so we continue to give you the best possible support for your inquiries. As the number of customers grows, so does the amount of support requests, suggestions and general inquiries, and we don’t want to let a single one of you down with a poor response! We will soon be implementing internal service level agreements (SLA’s) to ensure our paying customers receive priority attention, but that our non-paying customers, on the Public plan, will still always receive a quick response, particularly on critical issues. This is being done so that, while we keep growing as a company, we keep customer service friendly, efficient and helpful with clearly defined expectations and targets which will allow us to measure and improve our performance over time.
Talk to Us Anyway you like
As a first step to achieving our customer service goals we have logged all the places that ideas and feedback come from that influence Creately’s development. Given the importance we place on Social Media, and the number of different channels of communication available, we want to make sure we (as a company) are aware of all the different places where you engage with us. In other words, are we listening to our customers effectively and in the right places?
We will continue to post customer service developments on this blog, and feel free to let us know what we are doing right and how we can improve. Don’t forget, we love chatting to you guys, so keep the feedback rolling in!
Graham
