Let’s start with the big news first, and then go into the why and how. Ready?
Starting today the entire seempli Platform is open to the public for personal use. Anyone in the world can now access thousands of fun open-ended creative challenges, creative-block smashers, and ideation triggers. No sign up required. No commitment. No ads.
Now, let me tell you why on earth we are doing that.
The first beta of seempli.com went live precisely three years ago. When the idea for seempli was born a few months before, I had a clear vision: to help as many people as possible to ignite their creativity. When I was asked who is our target audience, I instinctively responded: everyone.
Now, you probably know that “everyone” is the worst answer possible when you are being asked who are you targeting. But that was and still is my vision. I knew even before we launched that seempli can reach and affect people from any industry, profession, age, and background. The feedback we got as more people were exposed to the idea, and later to the platform itself, supported this notion perfectly.
But it was not all perfect. Despite the clear vision, from a business perspective, we started to define different plans for different types of user. And this is where things got complicated. We had a plan for teams and a plan for teachers; we defined a plan for creative professions and a plan for Enablers. We thought this will help us talk to each of these groups in “their language” and show them the specific value they could get from working with seempli. And after trying that quite some time I now fully understand why focusing on a niche and specific target audience is much more effective from a marketing perspective.
Yet, our vision was not changed. We would like to reach as many people as possible. We don’t want to aim for a specific use of seempli, because that is the beauty of creativity — you never know where it will take you. We want this journey to surprise us by learning together in which amazing ways we can’t even imagine today seempli will help you tomorrow. And this cannot be done by targeting a specific profession, industry, or users with a particular profile.
We all have challenges we can turn into opportunities. We can all change the world — our world — one step at a time, but it has to start with developing our ability to imagine and see things differently.
Which brings us to today.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Starting today the entire seempli Platform is open to the public for personal use” quote=”Starting today the entire seempli Platform is open to the public for personal use”]
We want seempli to be accessible to everyone. We don’t want the subscription cost to be a barrier. This is not a tactical move. It’s a strategic decision derived directly from our vision. So, we completely removed the paywall from the entire seempli platform and made it open to the public for personal non-commercial use.
At the same time, we want seempli to succeed also as a business. We are working every day on extending and improving our platform. We aim to be the best creativity toolbox there is, and this takes time and money.
So, how does an open platform can also be a viable and thriving business? Well, this is where you come into the picture. We know seempli can help you achieve amazing things. But eventually, only you know the value you get from working with seempli. So, we have decided to adopt a Pay as You Feel model. We believe it the simplest and fairest model to run seempli:
- You are invited to use the entire seempli platform without the need to sign up or identify yourself in any way
- If you like what we are doing — keep visiting seempli.com and spread the word
- If you value what you get — we trust you to pay for our unique content based on the value you feel it has for you.
- With your support, we can continue our efforts to ignite creativity and help you change the world. Your world.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”If you value what you get — we trust you to pay for our unique content based on the value you feel it has for you” quote=”If you value what you get — we trust you to pay for our unique content based on the value you feel it has for you”]
Needless to say, we will never track your usage of the platform, and we have no way to correlate usage with any payment done. Strange as it may sound, this business model is built purely on trust.
So, on our third birthday, we are taking a slightly different road. We believe it leads to the destination we were always aiming for. It’s not a trivial change. When most of the world is taking the highway, we are now going sideways. It is certainly a detour — taking a smaller, slower scenic road — but we are planning to enjoy every single minute of it.
Be creative. Change the world!
Lidor