Alexander Käßner, Co-Founder Of Diagrams – Create Beautiful Diagrams As Fast As You Think

Diagrams is an app for Mac that focuses on creating diagrams (not to be confused with charts) in a fast and simple way. It allows you to create structured diagrams that look beautiful. They are still a very small team of 3 people, but they have a lot more planned.

I think most founders and startups don’t value design enough. Not every startup needs a designer as a co-founder, although it can help to see things in a different perspective. A common misconception is that design is only about making things look beautiful or choosing the right colors. In reality, it’s about creating a product that people understand how to use, like to use, and that they actually need.

Involving designers as early as possible in the creation process helps to shape the product in the right way and to a high standard. And people will notice this! They will value a well-designed product! Mostly unconsciously, but some will also speak it aloud. We got a fair amount of feedback from people telling us they like the easy-to-use design of Diagrams.

Read on to know more about Alexander Käßner and his journey.

Please tell me about your background, and what are you working on currently?

Alexander Käßner: Hi, I’m a 24-year-old digital product designer based in Berlin. On February 5th, together with my awesome colleagues Lukáš Kubánek and Ronald Scholz, I launched a new app called “Diagrams.” I’m responsible for everything design, starting at the app itself and extending to the website, tweets, and even stickers.

Diagrams is an app for Mac that focuses on creating diagrams (not to be confused with charts) in a fast and simple way. It allows you to create structured diagrams that look beautiful.

Back in 2010, I first started developing my own small iOS and macOS apps. They still exist today, and I try to keep them updated, so feel free to take a look at the pxlwaves lab. In 2012 I co-founded FingerCoding together with my brother and a few other friends. We created interactive eBook apps for children. The company doesn’t exist anymore, but it was a very interesting experience co-founding a company at such a young age.

Besides all that, I recently finished my studies in Interface Design, just two weeks before launching Diagrams to the public. Now that this chapter is closed, I will focus on working on Diagrams. We have a lot of things planned for the future of our app!

What motivated you to get started with your company?

Alexander Käßner: Lukáš, the developer of Diagrams, came up with the idea during his studies a couple of years ago, and he started working on this project. He founded a company together with Ronald about two years ago. Shortly after that, I joined the project as a freelancer working on individual design tasks. Eventually, my role evolved into being a co-founder and taking overall design activities.

As much as Lukáš is obsessed with creating a tool to describe software systems and their components using visual diagrams, I am obsessed with creating great working software. When he pitched the project to me, what I liked was the simplicity and focus of the app. We think the market is dominated by overly complicated tools that are hard to use. For us, this is an excellent opportunity to modernize this field with great design. Especially for me, the challenge is to create super simple tools for intensively complex tasks. Creating tools that help people without getting in their way is hard but extremely appealing to us.

How have you attracted users and grown your company from the start?

Alexander Käßner: To attract people and ultimately encourage them to buy our product, we tried to pull off a loud launch, meaning that we tried to spread the word as much as possible via our newsletter, press contacts, Twitter, Product Hunt, Reddit, and so on. We also announced our product many months in advance, sharing sneak peeks over time on Twitter. Through our alpha and beta test phases, a decent amount of people could already try Diagrams before the launch while also helping us improve it. Win-win! I also want to mention that Lukáš did an amazing job building connections in the community via Twitter, conferences, and so on. This led to a decent amount of people sharing our product launch because of personal connections.

On our launch day, we had an overwhelming response. Hundreds of people wrote to us, commented, and reviewed Diagrams. We made it to rank 4 of the top paid apps in the App Store (Germany), got #4 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, and our App Store rating is 4.5/5 to this day. So the launch was very successful for us and gave us great motivation to continue our plan to make the best diagram editor for Mac.

Even though we had a fantastic launch, we are still a very small company and are just about to start growing. Effectively it’s only Lukáš and me working on the product. We also have our co-founder Ronald and his Sherpa team doing great work to help us with everything related to finance, strategy and business. Especially in the first days, Ronald did a great job assisting us with founding the company and keeping the business running. Sure, we all hope we can grow as much as we would like to, but two months after our product launch I can’t say much more than this. We are just getting started.

What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue? What strategy worked best?

Alexander Käßner: We sell Diagrams as a one-time purchase on Apple’s Mac App Store. As mentioned before, we worked hard, creating buzz about our product launch on every possible channel. We even got lucky that Apple featured us on their Mac App Store front page. That also helped us a lot in the beginning. 

How much money (funding) have you raised in total so far? When was the recent funding round? (Additionally, any plan for the future?)

Alexander Käßner: Our company never got into fundraising. We’ve received grants for starting up the business from the German state of Saxony, where our company is located. That wouldn’t be possible without Ronald and the Sherpa team. They helped a lot to find and apply for them. From our experience, it’s worth looking out for grants in the early stages of your company, especially in Germany. There are more initiatives than you may think.

What are some marketing tips to help maximize the success of a product launch?

Alexander Käßner: The pre-announcement mentioned above of Diagrams, newsletter, and keeping people interested helped us a lot. It’s vital to have an audience already before you launch your product. Before our launch we wrote a dozen emails to press contacts asking them to write about us. It’s hard work, but eventually, you get one of the bigger news sites to mention you. Getting there doesn’t happen in a week. This can take time! Another thing that worked well to get engagement was creating a catchy trailer to showcase our product. A lot of people watched and liked it!

One thing we could have done better is providing a trial version on day one. So many people asked about it, and so we are currently working on it. People want to try out the software they are going to pay for. 

What is a good product launch checklist?

Alexander Käßner: I’m sure you already heard a lot of these points, but they worked very well for us:

• Grow an audience early to have followers on your launch day
• Share product insights before the launch
• Communicate the launch day beforehand with the press, friends, and your followers
• Create a press kit with excellent material for the media
• Prepare a nice website with a trailer showcasing your product
• Establish an introductory price and communicate this
• Prepare for many many support emails, comments, and questions over the first few days

What’s the hardest thing about product launches?

Alexander Käßner: The hardest thing is the amount of preparation. We ended up working so much on preparing the launch that we had no time to work on our actual product for weeks. So we had to prepare for this by having our app (almost) ready even before the intense launch groundwork started. And in the end, you do all of this work without knowing if people will like your product and talk about it. The worst thing that could happen is that you do so much work to prep your launch, and no one cares in the end.

Once you get people to talk about you, get ready for tons of emails and comments that will keep you busy for quite some time. Of course, not everyone will speak positively about you. Sometimes you need a thick skin so as not to take every comment personally, but rather to take it as valuable feedback you can work on.

What are the most common mistakes founders make when they start a company? (or What should all first-time startup founders know before they start their business?)

Alexander Käßner: I think most founders and startups don’t value design enough. Not every startup needs a designer as a co-founder, although it can help to see things in a different perspective. A common misconception is that design is only about making things look beautiful or choosing the right colors. In reality, it’s about creating a product that people understand how to use, like to use, and that they actually need.

Involving designers as early as possible in the creation process helps to shape the product in the right way and to a high standard. And people will notice this! They will value a well-designed product! Mostly unconsciously, but some will also speak it aloud. We got a fair amount of feedback from people telling us they like the easy-to-use design of Diagrams.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? And What advice do you have for someone who is interested in doing similar things like yours or in a similar direction?

Alexander Käßner: That’s a tough one! People like to give advice, to always take this with a grain of salt is good advice in itself. Opinions are highly individual as everyone experiences life, business and people differently. Therefore I don’t want to give too much advice that you should absolutely follow. The only thing I can say is to see design as a whole and not just the beauty of things, don’t follow the dreams of others but rather your own and if you fail, stand back up and try to improve from the lessons you’ve learned.

What are the one or two things that you would do differently if you could go back to 10 years ago?

Alexander Käßner: Honestly, there isn’t much I would change from the last ten years. I would be back in school starting to learn how to develop iPhone apps. That’s actually the moment I realized I wanted to be a designer making great digital products. That realization is something I do not want to change!

Relating to Diagrams, the only thing I would do differently is involve alpha testers even earlier on and try to launch the product earlier as well. But you probably know how hard it can be to reach a point where you can say: now it’s time to release this baby. Software is never finished, but at some point, you just have to ship it.

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