Why We *Previously* Shut Aurelius Down (Updated June 2019)

This is an updated post about our strategy for moving from Aurelius v1 to Aurelius v2 

[Aurelius v2 launched February 2018 and is going strong :)]

The original post below outlines our strategy and reasons for having shut down Aurelius a few years ago. 

The short story is that we learned a ton from customers (obviously from doing user research with them) and learned that we should change our product and entire company focus to helping UX, design, research and product teams add, tag, organize, search and share all their user research and insights.

Aurelius v1 was more of a product strategy platform that also had the ability to take research notes, create key insights and add them to product/design decisions as part of a broader product. Through many conversations with active and prospective customers we learned that their primary problem to solve was having a central repository for all their user research notes, feedback and insights. Being that we had much of that capability in version 1, we decided to build a brand new app and integrate the two.

With that, we launched Aurelius “Insights” as a beta product while still running v1 as a product. What happened then was surprising to even us. Very quickly our paying customers began using “Insights” in beta even more than they were our paid for product. Further, we had hundreds and hundreds of people signing up for beta and early access to Aurelius v2. It was clear to us that we should double down and focus entirely on building an awesome user research and insights platform. So, we decided to sunset the original Aurelius v1 version.

Our product you see at the time of this writing is the direct result of user research and three iterations of our company and product. We’re learning more and getting even better every day. 

Check out v2 now live of Aurelius, the user research and insights platform for design and product teams.

[Update July 2018] We launched Aurelius v2 live in February of this year – go check it out now

Before you get too worried, hear me out.

To be more specific, very soon we will not be accepting any new customers for several months.

We aren’t going out of business and we aren’t closing the company. Rather, we are building the next evolution of our platform. Aurelius v.2 will be the smartest user research and insights platform for design and product teams.

Aurelius v.2 is an online platform that helps design and product teams collect, tag, group, organize and search all of their user research findings and customer insights in one place. So you can make awesome products, features and designs.

This is exciting news!

Why are we doing this?

Our current product and wonderful customers have been good to us. We have learned a lot about how we can help UX designers, product managers and leaders create a customer focused product strategy. One of the biggest things we learned (or more specifically saw reinforced) through their use of Aurelius was the absolute necessary focus on user research notes and insights. In short, that is very clearly the most value our customers are seeing from Aurelius.

Design and product teams want to build awesome products and features but have no easy way to turn their user research insights and customer feedback into a product strategy. Aurelius v.2 will let teams tag, group, organize and search every single user research note, theme and insight and link them directly with design decisions and feature recommendations to build a brilliant product strategy.

So what does this mean?

We are so confident that Aurelius v.2 is the future of our company and helping design and product teams build great features and products that we’re doubling down on this effort. For this reason, after a week or so from this post we will accept no new customers until v.2 is launched.

A few points of operation to note:

  • All current and new customers will gain first priority access to Aurelius v.2 (and will continue to be able to use Aurelius today without any interruption)
  • We will be offering limited-time reduced pricing before we close our purchase page
  • We will accept no new customers until our new launch
  • You can sign up here for beta access and to follow our progress on Aurelius v.2

That’s all for now. I sincerely hope you’ll sign up and follow along our journey for this exciting evolution of our user research, customer insight and product strategy platform, Aurelius v.2

Your customers are counting on you…bring them into your design decisions.