Too Many Features Isn’t a Good Thing with the Co-Founder and CEO of Creately, Chandika Jayasundara, Part 1

In this episode, Eric is joined by Chandika Jayasundara, the Co-Founder and CEO of Creately.

Creately is a visual collaboration platform that helps teams ideate, plan and execute on an infinite workspace, and as of August 2023 they have reached over 10 million users.

Chandika’s founder's journey starts during his childhood - he always had a mind for tech, and loved solving problems using technology while also being a natural creative. He started his first small venture back in school with a group of friends building apps and websites for companies. After graduation, Chandika was focused on learning more on how large enterprises operate their day to day and figuring out how he could help them reach their business goals.

His idea for Creately stemmed from the difficulty of aligning data, visuals and knowledge in the same place so participants could swiftly catch up to what’s going on in high complexity projects. In the early days of Creately in 2007/2008, the status quo for products in this space was either a lackluster feature set, or an offering that’s built exclusively for enterprises and inaccessible to those without a 7 figure budget allocated for this particular problem.

Creately found their initial product validation early on, and built their first MVP. The first roadblock they ran into was adaptation. Using a browser for prototyping was unheard of in 2008, and considered too much hassle by a good portion of their ICP, so Creately had to downscale their initial offering down to a flowcharting and diagramming tool so they could effectively go to market.

At the end of 2009, they launched with a “dumbed down” version of their initial tool, and saw a good bit of success. Their UX was much better than Microsoft Visio at the time, which was their status quo competitor at the time. One of the features they pioneered was real time collaboration, which was practically unheard of at the time.

In 2019, a big challenge that Creately faced was the fact that they were on borrowed time due to their platform being built on Flash, which was rapidly becoming outdated. They needed to pivot to Javascript, and ultimately transfer over millions of existing clients to a new platform that wasn’t nearly as feature rich as their previous model. This ended up being a good thing in the long run, as this new Javascript based platform would unlock doors for Creately to acquire larger clients and open them up to enterprise level profits.

Tune in to the full episode to learn more about Chandika’s journey building Creately!

00:00 Chandika’s Founder's Journey
03:21 Why Creately Was Born
07:39 Lessons Learnt Building Creately
12:32 Too Many Features Can Be a Bad Thing
16:26 Rebuilding From Scratch 
20:28 Avoiding Sunk Cost Fallacies
22:19 Rising With the Tide

Connect with Chandika - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandika/

Check out Creately - https://creately.com/

Don't forget to subscribe to the Chaos to Clarity Podcast for more invaluable episodes to help you grow your business and stay ahead of the curve!

To reach out to Eric, visit FullCycleProduct.com

Don't forget to subscribe to the Chaos to Clarity Podcast for more invaluable episodes to help you grow your business and stay ahead of the curve!To reach out to Eric, visit https://chaostoclarity.io/