Please meet HotGloo – the youngest player on the market of wireframing applications. Wolf Becvar, Marketing and Communications with HotGloo, will tell short, but inspiring story of HotGloo. Innovations, focus on pro-users, future pricing plans, unique features, agile development based on users’ feedback and much more in this interview.
Tip: the audio recording has some bonus material inside.

CIO Happy Hour (CHH): Could you please briefly introduce yourself and tell us what HotGloo is?
Wolf Dieter Becvar (WD): Hi, my name is Wolf and for the last six months I have been responsible for all  HotGloo communication and marketing. I work together with Hannes, who is the godfather of HotGloo and in charge of programming of the app, and Michi (in charge of the HotGloo screen design). It actually started as a diploma thesis at the FH for Media Computer Science in Wedel, Hamburg and was realized back in HotGloo with the support of superReal (Neue Medien GmbH), where Michi and I are employed.

Basically, HotGloo is a web-based wireframe application. A tool to create conceptual interactive prototypes of a website in an early project development stage.

CHH: You position yourself as “designed by IAs for IAs”: what tools did you use before releasing your own product? What innovations does HotGloo introduce in comparison to these tools?
WD: We started off using Keynote, then we switched to Axure, then we tried new stuff  like Protoshare, but these tools didn’t feel right for us. Don‘t get me wrong, they are nice, they have tons of functions but they all lack usability. They just don‘t have this look & feel experience we wanted. At the time, Hannes was writing small apps for superReal and the idea was born to finally build our own wireframe app.

First thing we had in mind was that our app had to be web-based and it had to be smart. The era of downloading and upgrading has hopefully passed – web-based is a lot simpler. You don‘t have to worry about updates, hard drive space, compatibility troubles, program crashes and so on. We knew web-based alone wouldn‘t be very innovative, plus a bunch of other mockup apps were launched that time. We sat together to think up something that could be used as a key feature that we thought all the other apps lack.  Ironically, we were put our ideas into a Mindmeister map and bang there it was – INTERACTIVITY & REALTIME COLLABORATION. I admit we are still working on RC, because that‘s a tough one, but the great thing about it is that you don‘t have to export your wireframes, you just invite the people you want to collaborate with or clients who can review the  workflow – in realtime.

CHH:  What will be the pricing plan for HotGloo services and when do you plan to launch fee-based subscriptions? Maybe, you have an innovative revenue generation scheme in mind?
WD: We have been talking a lot about the pricing system lately. We are currently thinking about monthly subscriptions with different plans. There will be a demo or 30 day real free trial. Maybe we will come up with something completely different, who knows? All that I can say for now is that HotGloo will stay in beta for the next two months.

CHH: An extremely predictable question, but it has to be asked: web service vs. standalone application, how do you see the market evolution?
It seems that the market was heading towards web-based services long before most of us even noticed. First thing I remember is friends using Gmail, not in the Mail client but web-based. Hard disc space is getting less relevant. Even operating systems are downsizing, it seems that there is a big movement towards “Less is More”. Plus most machines are constantly online nowadays. The technology has come so far that RIAs are being developed, which have the same functional range as standalone applications and the same look and feel. Why download a software, the whole installation hassle plus annoying updates. You don‘t have to download, upload, upgrade, downgrade, save, delete, there is nothing to worry about! You are start using HotGloo the next day and surprise, we‘ve updated it whilst you were sleeping.

CHH:  What are your expectations on the number of users after the first year of launch? Why should they try you, and what will make them stick with HotGloo?
WD: That is hard to predict, we don‘t calculate like that, we are not accountants. We program and design stuff we would love to use and we take a close look at our beta tester feedback. Why you should give HotGloo a try is because we are not a big software company, we are just a bunch of guys having fun creating something we love to use. We listen, reply and take action. If someone suggests a good idea, we implement it.  And it turns out that most of our users have a similar background, they are designers, programmers, IA`s, UX, project managers – all people we are working with every single day.

CHH: Right now it looks like anyone with no experience in UX design can jump-start using HotGloo. However, it’s designed to be used by professional IAs with high demands and sufficient expertise. How will HotGloo match their expectations as a primary target audience?
WD: To get started, we decided to arm HotGloo with basic elements which are intuitive to operate. We are in a constant feedback loop with our users and try to make HotGloo better every single day. Lately we have been getting questions about the HTML export of HotGloo pages. If there is someone out there who wants to build a plug-in we are happy to let them. We are not going to do it ourselves, because at the moment it‘s not the direction we want to take. Plus I think we would bore ourselves to death.

CHH: What are your plans for further service/product development: low-fidelity, interactivity and demonstrations, high fidelity, site maps and flow charts, full product life cycle? What niche is right for HotGloo?
WD: At the moment I would say HotGloo is perfect for low fidelity wireframing – highly interactive to create a fully functional & conceptual prototype. We will see what the future holds and we don‘t want to commit ourselves to a specific niche. We don‘t want to exclude the possibility that in the future you can also create high fidelity prototypes, picture use case scenarios in order to display complex workflows even more effectively and easier.

CHH: Besides your beta users feedback you have strong competitors, whose ideas and paths you can use.  What is your strategy: follow and offer service at a lower price or innovate?
WD: As I mentioned before, we built HotGloo primarily because there were no applications living up to our expectations. We don‘t want to follow, we want to innovate. This does not mean that HotGloo will be a high priced application.

CHH: Being a relatively new brand, HotGloo’s brand visibility is quite low. How do you plan to use social media tools for promotion and gaining visibility?
WD: We have quite a lot of confidence in word of mouth marketing. We try to spread the word via Twitter, Facebook, our company blog, Friendfeed, content related blogs, and searching for reviewers etc. We don‘t have a lot of financial marketing capital, so we are using every channel we can find. And it‘s working we have about 3000 users betatesting HotGloo, and this number is constantly growing. We are also planning to expand our expertise, travel to usability conferences and talk about our experiences, getting in touch with people.

CHH: Congratulations! HotGloo scored surprisingly high in ‘The Best of RIA 2009′ for a just-launched application. What’s the secret?
WD: Thank you!  We are work hard, constantly improve and we have high expectations towards design & usability, plus we are small, we can adapt very fast.

CHH: Wolf, thanks for the great interview and we are looking forward to meet again in a year to see how well you are doing!

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