Creately Blog

Is the Creately application logging you out too quickly?

Do you Google Wave?

The beginning of October saw the release of invites to the Google Wave preview. I signed up for the early developer sandbox access right back when Google Wave was first announced. I found the sandbox fine for development but not very useful for regular early adopters or businesses wanting to actually use it. In fact it might have been considered a bit of a fishing trip by Google to try and determine the quality use-cases for Google Wave. It seems that just providing what email might be like if it was launched today has not really been enough to capture the imagination of people. Ross Hill has written an interesting article on how Google Wave worked for him and his co-workers and what aspects of Google Wave make it appealing. However it is interesting to note that the use-cases he highlights could easily be achieved through other Internet tools already available (Etherpad springs to mind as well as regular threaded emails) which are simpler to understand. Life hacker have a whole heap of other use cases that you might like to check out.

I’m sure you all know by now that we are passionate/obsessed about supporting our users. We currently provide everyone with 24 hour support and reply to all your queries as quickly as possible. Even with this in place, we are always looking for new ways to reach out to our customers and answer your Creately questions and queries quicker. There is nothing more annoying than having to ask a question through a support system and then having to wait days for a reply only to not finish the task and having to go back to it later. This kind of thing can really reduce your task or project closures.

The customer support Google Wave use-case is a very strong draw for us and quite possibly the best use-case we have right now for Google Wave. The ability for a Wave to easily support images (in our case screenshots of your issue), multiple users (so we can help an entire team at once) and real-time collaboration (again to get you going quicker) makes it ideal for support.

Therefore starting immediately you can send us your support waves through Google Wave using our Wave address: creately@googlewave.com (note this won’t work through traditional email) - we will always try to be online but if we aren’t there just send the wave to us and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. We realise that not many of you will have a Google Wave account right now, but if Wave proves as successful as Google hopes this won’t be the case for long. So when you get your Google Wave account please give us a go.

Finally, can you think of any other Google Wave use-cases for Creately? Perhaps you have an idea which will help you, us and all the other Creately users.

@nick_foster

Image taken from Google Wave API page.

Do you want to meet the Creately crew?

On Thursday night I went to Ideapitch ‘09 with was run by Student Entrepreneurs | Agents of Change. This was the finals of the IdeaPitch ‘09 events. There were 8 student groups pitching in two categories. The first being for plain ideas, and second for established ideas or businesses.

There were some fantastic ideas, my favourites being Heart Park (compassionate car parking) and iWannaTutor (social tutor and student network). Special mention to Green Wall Garden, this is very much what apartment dwellers need to grow their own fresh fruit and veg - although its pretty expensive. Finally 37tweets (you might be able to guess where they get their inspiration from) have an interesting idea, and if they work very hard they could well be on the right track to achieving their dream. Take a look at the final results.

Beside the pitching there was also a chance to network with the other attendees. I met some interesting people, all of whom have great ideas. These events always remind me that there are so many great ideas around.

The nicest surprise of the evening was to run into an enthusiastic Creately user. As you know Creately appeals to everyone and it is no surprise that we meet Creately users in all sorts of locations and situations. This user is a student at Monash University where he and his friends had used Creately to collaborate on a piece of course work for their university degree. He said he found it quick to use and it made it  much easier for him to finish his coursework and get it handed in on time. It is always fantastic to meet Creately users in person and get that first hand feedback. After all, this is part of why we made Creately and why we want to make it even better. Hearing how much people love it and how it helps them provides us with the impetus to carry on and strive to be the best diagramming tool and number one visual collaboration business.

We would now like to reach out to all our current and future Creately users and invite you to meet up with us to discuss your Creately usage and to get your ideas for future development and usage. We would especially like to meet those individuals and organisations that are using Creately to help with software development or web development. So if you are based in Melbourne, London, Colombo or Jakarta or the surrounding cities please email us and we can arrange a meet up in the coming weeks (or perhaps even a short chat on the phone). If you’re not based in these cities please email us or leave a comment, we’d love to know how you use Creately.

@nick_foster

Image by: bazzmann/ CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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