Creately Blog

Beta Over - Creately Launches New Plans

Today is the most exciting and exhilarating in our journey with Creately - Creately is out of Beta!

With our move out of beta we are also announcing two new versions - Creately Public and Creately Plus!

After a year in beta, during which we showcased at Demofall 08 & TechCrunch 50, we now have what we, and the majority  of our users (over 90% of people give us 4 or more stars) consider to be the best online diagramming and design tool on the Internet. By moving out of Beta we are offering our users and future customers the opportunity to tailor their Creately experience and enable us to continue to improve and keep Creately development moving at the pace it has been.

Creately Public is as the name suggests - Free for anyone to use - it costs you zip, zero, nada, nothing! There are few limits to what you can do with it but it won’t stop the diagram dabbler from creating beautiful looking diagrams.

Creately Plus! is the first of our paid plans - it offers what the heavy user and privacy concerned user will need. (I didn’t say pro here as this is coming in a future version).

A lot has been argued about the merits of Free and Priced models by smart people like Chris Anderson, Malcom Gladwell and Fred Wilson and I am not going to re-iterate the same discussions. We have a fresh (and dare I say adventurous) perspective on the matter.

As a business, we need to make money for our shareholders and to allow us to continue to build Creately and other tools in the future. In order to do this we need to increase revenues and profits.

Increasing revenue is two fold.

• By increasing the number of people using Creately

• By converting more free users to paying users

And to improve profits, we could;

• Charge high prices, or;

• Cut costs

Charging high prices is out as we don’t want to rip off customers. Our operational costs per user are pretty low (but not zero as there is still IT infrastructure to support and at some point everyone needs support - we do provide really good support).

That leaves us with increasing our revenue through user growth.

Basically, if we can increase the number of paying users, we can run a better, bigger business.

When we look at users, we think there are 4 types, those that:

1. Pay whatever the price, because they can’t live without it.
2. Pay because they think it’s worth the price.
3. Pay because they think it is the only option.
4. Won’t pay or are against paying for software.

We obviously prefer types 1 and 2. Type 3 and 4 alone are unsustainable for a business as a competitor will always come along and disrupt you. However a mix of these makes a healthy business and user community - we want all types working with Creately.

We believe there is a lot of potential in type 2. However the price one finds ‘worth it’ is extremely relative to one’s economic situation and usage patterns, be it commercial or private. Given we have really passionate users from all corners of the world and our team is from various parts of the world, we understand these factors deeply.

(In case you didn’t know Creately is developed by Cinergix. Cinergix is based in Melbourne, Australia with team members based  in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Jakarta, Indonesia and London, UK. A fairly diverse lot over here.)

So what is the right price? It’s relative.

So we are offering Creately at ANY price our users are willing to pay.

(but keep it above one dollar - unfortunately Paypal isn’t free

You may be thinking - They are Mad!!

We might be, however just because one person pays $2 does not mean that is the value to everyone. Perhaps that’s all a student can afford, but to another person using Creately to build mockups for his/her client, it may be worth $20 - the decision has to be personal and realistic.

We think the following factors will help us pull this off:

• We have built a great piece of software. Using our signout feedback widget we polled over a thousand users after they had used Creately and over 80% said WOW, almost everyone else said it’s Great. People constantly say that the Creately experience is far beyond their current experience from existing similar products.
• Most people are fair. Creately is a high-value application, for similar products you’d pay hundreds of dollars for a license. So when compared to the alternatives we believe people will choose a sensible price.
• Our entire team is really passionate about helping customers and it shows in all our user interactions. You guys have told us how much you like our support.

This may be a fairly risky proposition and we know it might not work or be sustainable. So we are piloting this with our group of Beta users - right now this trial is time limited -  so upgrade now while you can name your own price. The offer ends on 17th September 2009.

We’ll keep you posted on how this ‘pricing experiment’ goes. Wish us luck.

Creately Collaboration for All

Collaboration for All

We’re happy to deliver The No.1 most requested feature on Creately Community Support. Its been sitting on the top of the request list for some weeks now, but now we’re confident our systems are ready to ensure you and your team always have an excellent user experience on Creately.

Why it took this long?
Most users have been very excited to share Creately with friends, colleagues and classmates. We appreciate that, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure we can provide each and every one of you with the best possible Creately experience, both online and offline. We feel we are now ready to provide a much larger user-base with the type of Support, that we at Creately hold so dearly. So to open up Creately to more of you, we needed to put in the people and resources to ensure you and your team continue to enjoy working on Creately.

Go on, invite someone already!
From today, there’s no more waiting around for a Creately beta. If you’re invited, you’re in. So you can now invite your friends and team-mates who don’t have a beta invitation to use Creately. We’ve endeavored to make this process as simple as possible, so go on, invite a friend or two to share in the magic of Creately. They will receive an email with a link to register and can then immediately view your shared diagram.

3 Steps to Team Collaboration (or How to invite a team-mate to Creately)

Step 1	Step 2
Click to open the Share panel on the right of the Creately app	Enter email addresses you want to invite & hit Invite
Step 3
Add a note to the collaborators and Send

Go on, log on to Creately now and share a diagram.

@charanjit

Creately’s New Clothes

New Skins for a New Creately

Of all the updates, features and fixes we’ve put out this month, my favourite has been the new skins we’ve put on for Creately. The previous skins were fine and we felt they did a decent job, but as we prepare to get out of our beta phase we wanted to give Creately a truly professional finish. We hope you like our new togs.

Cleaner, Smarter and Faster
We’re added a whole bunch of nice little UI tweaks as part of the new clothes we’re put on Creately. Simple little bubbles come up to help you work better with Creately. Along with these new tool tips, we’ve improved mouse interactions so there’s no more mouse flicker and far greater responsiveness from Creately. We’ve also fixed some niggling bugs around resizing of shapes, multi-select and copy’n'paste. Timing out of Creately will also no longer be a problem now that we’ve got a quick login window - so all you serious diagram-philes can keep Creately running all day.

Visual Feedback for Containers
Many of you may not have realised this, but most of our Shapes are also containers. What does that mean? Certain shapes (for example the Browser Shape in the UI library) behave as containers giving them context specific properties. When you drop another Shape into a Container Shape, the 2 shapes can interact smartly to give you special behaviour that makes working in Creately a breeze. Going back to the Browser Shape example, next time you drop a TextBox into it, you will notice a green border around the container. In this case, the TextBox shape will stick itself to the Browser without requiring you to lock or group the objects. That’s what we mean by intuitive!

Connectors
Those little lines that run all over your diagrams have had a major face-lift too. Now when you group and select, your connectors are included, and these connectors are now smarter than ever. With our new Magic Gluepoints, you can stick a connector to any part of your object and it stays there. To use this, simply mouse-over the connector endpoint on any part of a Shape, until a large dot is revealed. When you see the dot, release your mouse and the connector will now be fixed to that point. That’s ultimate flexibility built right into Creately. Expect even more innovation with our connectors in the next release.

Help Window and Shortcuts
We know you love your shortcut keys, so we’re added a whole lot of them to Creately. And its easy to find them as well. We’ve added a new Help panel next to the Share and Comments window on the right of the drawing canvas. We’re working on adding more Help tips as we go along, so keep checking back.

And here’s one that should make using Creately easier right away - Next time you’re entering text in Creately you can use the TAB key to save the Text and exit the edit mode. If you don’t want to commit the text, just press the ESC key and we’ll drop all your changes. When not editing text you can also use the TAB key to move between fields and components in Creately.

Diagrams getting Bigger

As you’ve started to use and like Creately, we’ve noticed your diagrams are getting bigger and bigger by the day - we understand, so we’re introduced a new Page Size feature, that will let you define the size of you drawing canvas when creating a new diagram. Now you can work on those large scale design projects without worrying about running out of space in your diagram.

Did I mention Clearer too?
In the last release we introduced a whole bunch of new Fonts, but our users told us the fonts needed to be sharper and clearer. So our Dev team put on their thinking hats and we’re reworked our fonts to make them a whole lot more crisp and print ready. Check it out- they’re beautiful.

@creately

PS… Keep those ideas coming.

Explaining ‘Easy’

If you have been following us, you’d know by now that we focus a lot on being ‘easy’.  And if you’ve tried Creately, seen the video or gone through our list of features, you’ll know Creately is a feature-rich application. We have powerful features that are ahead of most other products in our market.

And yet, we only speak of easy. Not of our endless list of features. Why? because we believe all those features exist for the sole purpose of making the process of diagramming & design ‘easy’.

Easy does not stop at building an intuitive UI. It becomes ‘easy’ is when you consider what the user is trying to do and your application makes it easier for that goal to be achieved.

Lets take an example. Nick wants to redesign his office computer network. So he needs to

1. Map out the current network structure
2. Plan the future structure
3. Get the rest of the IT team involved, gather ideas and feedback
4. Get approvals
5. Implement the network
6. Maintain it over the next year and then again start planning for the next upgrade.

So when we mean easy, we look at the whole process.

Here, the diagram is the central artifact. A diagram is drawn in steps 1 and 2.  So we focus on making drawing network diagrams easy. Large number of nodes, typically belong in groups. So collapsible groups - Check.

Also the diagram is about a real situation. A situation rich with data and information that needs to be referred to over and over again.  So objects need to have attached data like IP addresses etc.  Check.

Involves a team, so collaboration is a must. Check.

Maintaining it over a period of time means frequent updates. Multiple revisions - Check.

Overall, small mistakes in planning cost a lot in hardware. So some simple validation to tell you when you run out of ports on your switches help in the planning stages. - Check.

That’s just a snapshot of how we think about a specific use case.  We start at drawing and from there we visit each step and evaluate how we can make that visually driven task easier and more intuitive.

With our KObject technology and a contextual UI, we are able to do this for many types of diagrams in different disciplines.

So now that we are nearing the public release of Creately, are we done? Not at all.

We’ll keep going up the use case ladder to higher order user goals that are centered around diagrams and visuals. And we will find ways to make things easy. That may mean complex functionality that shows only when its required, new KObjects or just a small amendment like a tooltip.

If we’ve learned one thing with Creately, is that ‘easy’ is not easy to do. But when you get it, it wins you die-hard fans. Fingers crossed!

@chandika

PS - Have any suggestions on how we can use KObject technology to help the work you do in your field easier? Write to us or suggestion it on our Community Support Site.

Image: spackletoe

New Private Beta Launch Competition

To celebrate the launch of the new Creately Private Beta Release we’re running a little competition on Facebook where we’re giving away 3 full year subscriptions to the Premium Creately offering for Free.

How to Win

1) If you already have a Creately account - Login to http://creately.com, draw a diagram and save it anytime today. We will pick a diagram out of our Creately hat and send you a Free 1 year subscription to Creately.

2) If you don’t have a Creately account and password - Just sign up for Creately anytime today and stand a chance to win a Full year subscription to Creately. Remember to mention “Facebook” when signing up to improve your chances.

3) Already signed-up and waiting for your Beta - Simply leave us a comment on our Facebook event wall or leave a comment below - tell us what you’d like to use Creately for, what else you’d like to see in it, or anything amusing that will bring a smile to our Fans.

So get moving, the day’s almost up. Check out the competition on Facebook.

The Creately Team
Online Diagramming Just Got Easier