posted12/03/10
We’ve got another new release on the cards and we’re very excited to give you a lil glimpse into our plans (watch for it on Monday).
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 4 hours on Friday Night (PST)/Saturday Early Morning (EST). This will allow us to do major database and application upgrades and push out some important bug fixes.
Downtime Schedule
Australia - Sat 13 Mar 2010 5:00 - 9:00 PM
United Kingdom - Sat 13 Mar 2010 6:00 - 10:00 AM
US (EST) - Sat 13 Mar 2010 1:00 - 5:00 AM
US (PST) - Fri 12 Mar 2010 10:00 PM - 2:00 AM
We’ll have more here next week on the new fixes and release- so subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up to date with Creately’s Visual Collaboration platform.
@charanjit
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
posted13/11/09
Its been a month since our last major release and we’re very happy to announce that a brand spanking new Creately will be out next week with some of those features who’ve been asking for.
We’ve also introduced a new pricing plan; don’t want to say too much about it here, but look forward for the next blog post to learn about our easy pricing plans that will fit your needs just right.
Shareable Projects with Tags - Cos You Asked for It!
Next week, Creately will be launching a brand new feature - Shareable Projects with Tags - to make it even easier for software dev teams, designers and consulting teams to create and better organize their visual artifacts and designs. We have got a new layout for managing all your diagrams in Shareable Projects. This layout is more user friendly and together with user-defined tags will make Creately easier to use for all the project teams out there that live by Creately. Now it’s so easy to invite your whole team and clients to collaborate on projects and have everything organized with tags.
Also, the new ‘Create a New Document’ dialog now comes with a segment to assign useful tags and descriptions to your project documents.
New KObject Shapes
We’ve added plenty more shapes and now offer over 800 free shapes to draw just about anything you need, including these brand-new professionally designed shapes for Value Stream Mapping, Chemistry Lab Equipment, People Silhouettes, UML, Wireframes and more.
1) Value Stream Mapping Shapes
2) Chemistry Lab Equipment
3) People Silhouettes
Great looking people shapes that will give your diagram a real nice professional finish.
Making it Easier to Try Creately
Finally, we want everyone to be able to give Creately a try, and so it will now be accessible to all new users without having to sign up first. So tell all your friends to check it out.
That’s all for now, but watch out for our newsletter in your mailbox when Creately launches early next week.
@charanjit
posted11/11/09
Everyone at Creately have been working really hard over the past couple of weeks adding brand new features and KObjects to the Creately library as well as updating the performance of the application.
Here at Creately, we feel people matter, and want to continue to keep our customers happy. We’ve had a few emails from our users reporting various issues like wonky Text Rotation in Flash Player version 9. We’ve tried our best to fix this problem, but unfortunately certain issues like this have their root cause in bugs inherent in the Flash Player, that we cannot do anything to fix.
So after careful thought, we’ve decided to raise the minimum required version of the Flash Player to run Creately from Flash Player 9 to Flash Player 10.
Besides fixing this bug, we want to take advantage of the new performance improvements in Flash Player 10 to deliver a better experience to our customers over the coming releases.
Other Active Script 3 enhancements available in Flash Player 10 also provide more efficient data structures and will let us deliver smarter and cooler features.
You can test the version of Flash Player you have installed and if you’re not using version 10, click here to upgrade now.
So we’ll leave you with this task as we go through the final stages of releasing our brand new Projects feature.
@charanjit
Image by: Mayuki/CC BY 2.0
posted04/09/09
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;
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:
- Pay whatever the price, because they can’t live without it.
- Pay because they think it’s worth the price.
- Pay because they think it is the only option.
- 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.
