posted21/07/10
You’ve got traffic?
We normally use funnel diagrams to understand the flow of a user through our website, to the application, and then onto the purchase pages (or not). Some great tools are out there and just last week @Indu blogged about using Funnels & Goals in Google Analytics to better understand your funnel and conversion rates.
This week, we went and applied the same to our traffic funnel in three steps.
- Identify how our potential customers find out about Creately. The ‘trigger’ to visit the site.
- What their motivations are. Why are they here?
- Identify the pages they land on, and craft a message that resonates with the visitor’s intent and motivations. This will achieve lower bounce rates and far better conversions in a funnel.
Ok, again: Being relevant is key. but how do we know what’s relevant unless we know what you want?
Map it out!
It’s easier to map this out in a diagram, and here’s ours - How People Discover Creately. Some of the bounce rates are guesstimates though.
We first identified the source for them to come to Creately, then we break them down by their motivations and where they would go on the site to what landing pages.
The next phase is to make sure the landing pages speak to them well and address their questions. That’s another post for another day 
Before I go back to more diagramming and numbers, do you find this approach useful? How do you look at your traffic funnel?
@Chandika
posted16/06/10
Last week the Flash Player team at Adobe released version 10.1. While its a small dot version number change, it is a monumental release in terms of its content and significance to what is happening in the browser market today.
Faster Creately
We’re very excited about the new version. With Flash 10.1, Creately now runs blazingly fast on the Mac (and on PC’s), is overall delivers a more stable and reliable experience. Adobe has thankfully fixed a number of issues that have plagued our loyal customers since the last version, including issues with image uploading on the Mac.
To achieve this performance improvements, Flash 10.1 supports hardware acceleration of 2D and 3D graphics, manages memory more efficiently especially in tabbed browsing situations and includes a number of core improvements to the run-time to reduce execution time.
Another very exciting new feature for us at Creately is Flash Player’s new Multi-Touch support API’s. The team can’t wait to have a go at this in the near future!
The Future of Flash
This release of the Flash Player comes at a time when there has been much hostility against Flash. In light of the the Apple vs. Adobe debate, we feel this release put Adobe in a good place to start answering its critics. We hope they will continue aggressively improving its product capabilities rather than investing in meaningless ad campaigns in an attempt to reclaim Flash’s position as a powerful cross-browser platform.
Of course, the elephant in the room when discussing Flash is HTML5. For us as application developers, the competition between the technologies is great news. And no, they won’t kill each other off, it’s complimentary.
Historically, Flash has enabled us to push the envelope on what’s been possible in the browser well before the browser delivered. Now thankfully, with the focus on HTML5 and the browser wars of the 21st century back in full force, we are loving the amount of standards adoptions, evolution, and aggressive development that is helping the browser itself become a very powerful run-time to build on.
For Creately this means there are more things we’ll be able to do, to deliver awesome user experiences to our customers. It does not matter whether it’s delivered in Flash or HTML - the user only care that the experience is seamless, secure and productive.
We believe many companies including Adobe, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft (yes) get this. Only a few geeks care whats under the hood. End users only care that their job gets done. I’m surprised our friends at Cupertino who build ‘magical’ devices don’t get it. 
posted21/05/10
Here at Cinergix we’ve been working together from different office locations around the world to create, market and support the best online diagramming software - Creately. We spend hours sitting in front of our computers each day working across vast distances and timezones and it can sometimes be a challenge getting everyone on the team working together effectively.
So over the last year, we’ve experimented with a large number of online services to help us work better and support our customers in the best possible way. In each solution we looked for just the right amount of functionality to help us work better without drowning in too much process and too many systems.
Here we’ve distilled the top 5 tools (mostly online tools) that we’ve come to rely on to keep the Creately engine chugging along nicely. They cover everything from project management tools to customer support systems, but each one offers the ease of use and simplicity that we find so important in keeping our team focused on the job at hand.
Thanks to @Hiraash for his suggestions and I hope you’ll find these tools useful for your project teams. If you’ve got any other suggestions that you think will be useful for other web startups and project teams, we’d love to hear from you.
Wrike
Wrike is a web-based project management tool, and the great thing about it is that it comes with a fantastic Gantt chart view that knocks the pants off any other web based PM tool. @Chandika is a big fan cos he loves the fact that the Gantt chart view gives everyone a good idea of the inter dependencies across the projects we work on here at Creately. Unlike most other recent web-base PM tools that have a strong social collaboration angle, Wrike offers a solid PM tool in the same vein as MS Project, but its pricing is a tad on the high side.
Team Viewer
TeamViewer is an easy to use screen-sharing application that’s Free and works really well. I’ve tried sharing my screen with Skype and other web-services but none have performed as well as TeamViewer. Everyone I’ve recommended it to loves it. And it doesn’t just stop there. Teamviewer lets remotely control another computer - even through firewalls. This is an essential tool we use everyday at Creately. Thanks to @Aslam for bringing this to the team.
Creately
For the uninitiated, Creately is a web-based diagramming software that comes with built in tools for easy, secure collaboration. With an extensive library of shapes, Creately supports many diagram types. Naturally we use Creately in-house - mostly for concept diagrams, flowcharts and mockups. Its great for getting those ideas nailed down quickly in a diagram - and really helps bring clarity to the team.
PS - We released a beta version of a Creately Plugin for the Fogbugz platform this week, which makes it easy to add any type of diagram to your Fogbugz cases and Wiki to clearly explain requirements to your team. You can check it out here.
Zendesk
Zendesk provides a customer support portal solution includes email support with a built-in knowledge base. We chose it for it elegant interface and the ease with which we can track support support issues and deliver the type of customer service our customers talk about. It also worked great for providing 24/7 round the clock support that is being handled across 2 locations. There are a host of other customer support systems out there that actually deliver more functionality at a lower price, but we’re sold on their “Love your Helpdesk” theme.
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker is a story-based project planning tool that the Dev Team here at Creately swears by. It is based on the Agile software development methodology and support sprints, velocity, etc but can also be used for other types of projects. If you’re a fan of Agile development - then you’ll love PT, as we affectionately call it.
Best part about PT - Its completely Free (as in beer).
What do you use in your teams? Have you tried any of these tools, and have you found them effective in your business?
@Charan
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
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
