InviteForGood and Koolvite
Each day brings new entrants into the social planner space. Here's a quick recap of the key new entrant market positions:
democratic planning for casual near term events -- Planypus, Renkoo
casual planning via calendar and email extension and integration -- Google events
workflow and vertical integration -- MyPunchbowl
Now let's add two more:
tying event invitations to charity donations -- InviteForGood
The host selects from a list of charities and dollar amounts for invitees to pledge in the gift registry section of the invitation. The early site is plain and could use more polish but the marketing position is unique. InviteForGood could tap the niche of fundraisers or socially active events.
customized invitations -- Koolvite
Koolvite's emphasis on personalized, creative invitations reminds me of Piczo's differentiation angle in the social networking space: give users the power to make homey personal statements. Of course, Evite does offer templates and opportunities to personalize but the templates are too polished and opportunities a bit constrained. Koolvite offers a powerful AJAXy drag and drop compositing tool that allows one to easily select a template, change the background and border, and insert text, images, effects snippets, and photos. Each item has a sliders and dialogs that it feel like a mini-Photoshop or Illustrator. It's obviously a big leap from Evite's templates but is it enough to get people to switch. A creative person must balance expressiveness against community -- will her friends be on the service or will adopting a new service leave uncertain the receipt of the invitation? An alternative tack would be to position the software as tool for creating Evite invitations, similar to the sites that catalogue and customize myspace codes for profiles. Yes it is a pain to insert codes, and it will be a pain to transfer the art into an Evite. People do it, however profiles are long-lived things whereas invitations expire after the party.
I've been beating up Evite -- I respond to Evite invitations so automatically that I am guilty of not bothering to check out the full feature set. I just looked and see that Evite has a rather powerful party planning section. While I have ideas for particular improvements, the presence of it makes me wonder how the likes of MyPunchbowl will gain traction against Evite's dominance if the giant already has that base covered.
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January 19th, 2007 10:10
At Koolvite, we do consider the cost of switchover for an Evite user and minimize it. Our argument is that for most Evite users, the lock-in is (1) UI - everybody and their friends know it (2) event collateral such as addressbook, locations, event history, etc.
For UI, our effort is to provide an intuitive, friendly alternative so that the effort of learning is overcome by the benefits. Invite recipients (guests) do not need to be Koolvite users and hence there is little impact to them.
Regards event collateral stored at Evite, technology trends such as web APIs have severely diminished its value. Koolvite can seamlessly import addressbooks from Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc., is integrated with Google Local to help find locations and is integrated with Flickr to search and insert photos into the invite. Our intention is to continue expanding the choice available to users. Such integration is actually an advantage over Evite because users get best in class services of their choice.
As always, we appreciate any feedback.
January 19th, 2007 16:33
The issue for me is market entry strategy. The biggest lock-in is brand habituation. Example, I’ve gone up the ladder of every one of Gillette’s premium shaver iterations — Excel, Sensor, Mach, Mach II, Mach III, etc — for the past two decades without once considering switching to another brand. (I have on occasion bought other razors when on travel and wanted something cheap for one or two uses.) Never have I considered the selling points of say a Schick and think, “hmmm, Schick promises X Y Z, I should give it a whirl and see if I like it.” We’re talking about something that only costs a few dollars to try and hangs there in the store not far from Gillette’s products. Getting me to switch is pretty much an impossible propostion because Gillette owns the premium position *and* spends a huge marketing budget to reinforce it. I simply have little active interest in thinking something different when it comes to shaving. That’s the same issue when it comes to switching party hosters off of Evite.
So any new social planning service not only has to have good positioning but must also market it well. The marketing currency here is user uptake driven by the early adopters — party hosts — who appreciate the differences and share the experience with the uninitiated through the invitation. In your case, it would be some yet to be specified niche of party hosts who highly prize creative invitations over the *mental* switching costs and brand security.
Brandy security: I know my experience and unless you can sell me different — out position and market the message effectively — I’m not gonna jeopardize it. Social planning is obviously social — more than shaving! — and this is where party hosts really don’t want to rock the boat. On Evite and the new services, no guest has to be already be registered and this has been made a selling point. But that’s really a defensive point. What guarantees to the host peace of mind that he has doesn’t have to explain anything to his guests? After all, he just wants to throw a party not sell a new service.
Take the example of Google events. I used it once and the response was lukewarm. I wasn’t sure if the invite was bad or the system was alien to the users so I quickly stopped using Google events, even forgot all about it. Fast forward a few months, I get two random invites from friends using the service and I am emboldened to try it again. Lessons here, Google is a huge brand and despite that I had doubts about selling the service to my friends. I wasn’t confident until I actually saw other people using it. Even that confidence was had to be by bolstered fact that I already use GMail and GCal and many of them use Gmail and Gcal. (The framing here is important and subconscious, I am no longer selling a new service but showing friends the benefits or teaching them to use extensions of their current service or selling to late-adopting friends from the higher socially validated ground of “hey dipshit vitamin C is great, why aren’t you taking vitamin C?”)
Since I write about these new services, obviously I have to sit down and consider the arguments, but rarely have I actually switched to a new service. Then how do you get someone you can’t sit down and won’t consider your selling points for a split second to switch? I’m not singling out Koolvite for whipping, just pointing out the difficulty faced by any new idea.
In this case, I probably don’t throw enough parties and don’t care enough about invite personalization and care too much about what my friends use. Some niche out there does care about personalization over everything else. Who are they and how do you reach them?