New name, new look for Visme

The name Easy WebContent Presenter doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, founder Payman Taei freely admitted.
In May, the flagship product Taei called “the Swiss Army knife of visual content” changed its name to Visme. Though the company’s name technically remains Easy WebContent, that only appears once on its website, at the bottom of each page. It’s one of many changes for the startup of late, from look to locale.
Visme moved to Rockville from Frederick in March, in part to be closer to Washington and Baltimore.
“The primary reason is we’re kind of positioned in a way that getting to D.C., getting to Baltimore, to Frederick, to Northern Virginia, it’s kind of a 30 to 40 minute drive to all of them,” Taei said.
Visme’s presenter product has been in beta since last April. Part of the name change was recognizing and expressing that the HTML5-based app is about more than presentations. Users can create banner ads, animations and pretty much anything else.
“You can pretty much create anything that is visual,” Taei said. “It’s like a perfect marriage between the core features of PowerPoint and Adobe Flash but it’s really meant for everybody.”
Visme lets users work in pre-made graphics, many different fonts and export projects as PDF or image files, or download as an HTML file for offline use. Because the software is web-based and coded in HTML — that is, not Flash or any other plug-in — it’s meant to be platform agnostic and user-friendly, Taei said.
“You’ll feel like you downloaded an app to use on your computer,” he said.
The newest iteration of Visme was launched last month, and the feedback from its users is “just amazing overall,” Taei said.
Taei declined to give specifics about how many users Visme had, but said numbers had doubled in the last several months. Enterprise clients include Microsoft, Symantec and the U.S. external broadcasters Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
In addition to phasing in the new name, Taei is also introducing two premium plans. Visme will remain freely available, but new users are being offered (but not forced) the choice of paying $4.50 monthly for Visme Standard or $14.25 monthly for Visme Complete. Both options remove Visme branding from projects and offer increased storage and a higher cap on the number of projects users can create. The Complete plan lifts the cap entirely, but limits users to 1 GB storage.
“We’re going to continue being in a freemium mode,” Taei said. “What I do foresee happening is that we are going to continue to roll out new features under the premium plans.”