Mollyguard Moves to Cross the Chasm
In organizing next month's mesh conference, we've been drinking the Kool-aid by using as many Web 2.0 tools as we can. Our “portfolio” includes Writely, Writeboard, Gmail and a low-cost registration service called Mollyguard. Frankly, we were drawn to Mollyguard because it's inexpensive compared with many other the online registration service, which charge twice as for much and offer many bells and whistle you would never use. It should be interesting, however, to see how Mollyguard fares with the launch of a premium service. I've come to describe this strategic gambit as crossing the chasm from free to fee in which a service becomes wildly popular by being free before rolling out “premium services” Mollyguard is attempting to cross the chasm by offering many of the bells and whistles as its rivals - at pretty much the same prices after taking into account there are also Paypal fees on the back-end. Mollyguard's strategy is worth watching because it can now offer two tiers of services depending on the features its customer want. For customers want online registration “lite”, there's the basic service (1.9% to 2.9% per transaction); for customers who want all the “bells and whistles” (4.4% to 5.4%), there's the premium service.
