posted08/02/10
As Twitter becomes more popular and pervasive, it has become an essential tool for start-ups to engage with their customers. Here at Creately, we actively engage our users, supporters and even the occasional detractor on Twitter.
Recently, we wanted to understand what our customers say to us on Twitter so @Indu went through our Twitter archives and put together this simple connections map of our @Creately Twitter account to capture some of our more active users and what they’re been talking to us about.
Who’s Talking to Creately & What are they Saying.
As @Indu worked on the diagram, she decided to pull together some recent Tweets about Creately to share with the team and you - our customers.
- b3nw: saved by a javascript app creately - http://creately.com after MS Visio just refused to link things, whew. Best $5 i’ve spent in along time.
- UrbanHaiku: learning how to use creately.com to make a flowchart for my blog. I like it.
- JasonStoddard: Highly recommend @creately & checking out their mindmapping/diagram solution. Hosted. Elegant. Stupid-simple. #FF
- megormi: I made some interesting graphic organizers today using creately.com thanks to the suggestion by@socratech
- nocash: Been looking for something like this for a while: Create and Collaborate on Online Diagrams - Creately -http://creately.com/
- Rohlund: I highly recommend checking out creately.com if Microsoft Visio is not your friend. #ittools
Thank you for all your tweets. We try to respond to each and everyone of them - so if you’ve enjoyed using Creately - tell us - we’re always listening on Twitter.
If you’re not following Creately on Twitter - now’s the time.
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
posted02/11/09
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.
