This is great marketing. Tie in your promo to the highly-popular, highly-dubious event as an advertising tie-in to multiply its effectiveness -- as a fringe story involving the event, you're going to have your message repeated automatically by others interested in the event.
You guys just reminded me that a Visio competitor exists, and you got me to try it. You did this by using a marketing message which entertained me -- don't buy now because "tomorrow's doomsday". You gave me some entertainment value in exchange for taking my valuable time. Thanks.
Do you use there straight out drawing capabilities? Or is there someway/plugin which allows the drawings to have the semantics of a graph (e.g. Line routing or layout managers.
FYI I use yEd because it deals with all the semantic stuff very well.
Speaking of Google, their Doodle today celebrates the Grimm Fairy Tales. Not sure if they did that on purpose, but it sure ties in to the whole "doomsday" theme going on.
I know I'm missing something, but looking at the landing page, I can't perceive any way to capitalize on this. Is Draw.io always free, so this is a joke, or am I missing something obvious? All I see is the "Don't Sign Up" button at the bottom.
Granted, it's an early day for me today, so I'm not exactly firing on all cylinders
Would you be willing to offer a larger discount if I bought multiple seats? I want to roll this out across my company before our fiery doom arrives tomorrow.
How about I give you the full source code (normal retail price 999,999), you do what you like with it and in return you give me the keys to your car with the boot stocked full of beer?
No, it's always been free, but hopefully that will be buried far down in the comments. There's nothing to sign up to, everything's free. You can link it up to your Google Drive account if you want to use that as storage, but that's just a permissions thing.
The sign up/don't sign up button is dynamically generated based on the perceived desirability of the user. I wouldn't take rejection badly, the main thing is to learn from it.
How did they determine the "perceived desirability of the user"? Seems a little presumptious to me - I didn't even know what it was until I clicked the link, and the first thing they say is "we don't want you."
I took it to mean "instead of buying, try it out."
After hearing the part about the "perceived desirability of the user", I'm thinking maybe they only want to sell to certain people today, perhaps return visitors? Maybe they want all their new visitors to try it out before buying? They could have the button change based on cookies, and they just started an ad campaign that's on HN's front page.
Edit: This comment was unhelpful? If not, why downvote?
Fine, make fools out of those freeloaders (me), making them/us think they will get a product free for the rest of their lives (which is supposed to last to 24 hours, RE: Doomsday).
I have to say this is pure genius: I "fell" for the JetBrains/IntelliJ IDEA IDE at 75% off (once the site shall be back up).
Whoever started it it's amazing to see other companies quickly react: I guess seeing servers melt under the load of people ordering products made some able to react fast.
The only thing that is too bad it's that it seems very hard to reproduce: rarely are there such doomsday scenario that gather that many attention :-/
Maybe there's a lesson in this for us: if you can tie your marketing to current events then you'll get greater recognition. I'm no marketing guy, so I bet this is pretty much marketing 101 and I'm probably quoting the already-well-understood.
I don't think you need another doomsday, use any current event; and you don't need to have your product be related to the event in any way. Sitepoint[1] always do a Christmas sale, for example, and web design books and Christmas have nothing in common.
I think anyone could tie anything to themselves:
- "have a look at our Olympic offers"
- "we have Royally stuffed ourselves with this great offer" [Royal Wedding]
- "we have stuffed ourselves with this great offer" [Christmas / Thanksgiving]
Unlimited Users
Unlimited Drawings
Full Source Code
$0 / diagram / cpu / user / hour"
And how did you get permission to display all those customer logos on your page? -- Fortune 500 usually negotiate compensation for using their logos like that, which a vendor of a free product wouldn't have time/incentive to deal with.
> Can I get a perpetual commercial license for mxGraph today?
Sure, if you pay for it. mxGraph is dual licensed, being the copyright holders, we can do this.
> And how did you get permission to display all those customer logos on your page?
By having the clause:
"JGraph Ltd is permitted to reference you as a user of the Software in customer
lists on the JGraph web-site, in presentations to clients and at trade events."
In the mxGraph commercial license. A few customers remove it, most don't. Some have asked for their logo to be removed, we always comply. But these are all paying customers of ours that have that term in their license.
You guys just reminded me that a Visio competitor exists, and you got me to try it. You did this by using a marketing message which entertained me -- don't buy now because "tomorrow's doomsday". You gave me some entertainment value in exchange for taking my valuable time. Thanks.