Case Submission – Ezboard – Making Customers Pay

Case Submission – EzBoard – Making Customers Pay

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Group P1

 Akriti Tiwary (15F305)

Hardik Jadav (15F319)

 Priyanka Hariramani (15F337)

Shibin E Balan (15F347)

 Souyam Prateek Kasta (15F351)

Case Facts

Robert Labatt

• Need of the hour

• Make the company cash flow positive of $1 Million per year
• Doubling the revenues each year

Key Challenges

• Generate revenue by transforming the free product into paid
• Whom to charge (Users only, Subscription boards only or both)
• How to introduce the pricing ( Should it make it across the board or should it have a trial run)
• Making money with the already existing platform to quench investors thirst

Online bulletins

Consisted of discussion boards consisting of questions or comments called posts.

Posts were grouped in to threads and were grouped in to forums.

ezOPs – Individuals passionate about a topic and creators of discussion boards

Administrators – Manage the discussion boards

Moderators – They are admins for specific forums

Users- People who read or write comments

Competitive landscape

Major players were:

Ezboard- Biggest and oldest player. 75000 discussion boards. Based on Smalltalk software.

Proboards- Free to use. Advertisement revenue model- Users cannot pay for ad free services like ezboard.

Hosted groups like MSN groups and Yahoo- feature rich, no fee for users. But users cannot personalize their discussion boards or opt out of advertisements.

Script based rivals like- vBulletin or phpBB- Built on newer, flexible technology. Offered more features than ezboard highly customizable and better file sharing options. But admins has to maintain a server on their own server and a lot of technical expertise required to use.

Ezboard was the most competitive and profitable in small and medium sized industries.

Subscription models

Gold community- After the discontinuation of blue community

A graduated payment plan based on the size of the board

No advertising at all and a couple of additional features.

Community Chest

Admins can set up an account where users/members can contribute money through paypal or credit cards.

Ezsupporter

Revamped Ezuser program to put greater distance between those who subscribed and those who didn’t.