My Own Pirate Radio

Scott Annan, CEO of Mercury Grove, followed up on my recent blog posts on tools for private online discussion forums. He wanted to find out a bit more about where Mercury Grove fell short on my requirements, and get any constructive feedback I was willing to offer. Oh, and maybe make me more of a believer in the product while he was at it. :-)  Based on Scott’s input I made a few updates to my second post. I’ve also summarized our discussion below.

Scott explained Mercury Grove is aimed at both intra- and inter-group collaboration, especially within organizations that have lots of group activities or projects running in parallel. In my case I’m really after more of a free-form discussion forum for a relatively small number of people… I don’t have a need for the collab-related features such as task lists, projects, blog integration, and calendars.

I stated in my second post that the integration of blogs struck me as a little odd. Scott tells me this feature is actually used a number by companies with geographically dispersed groups that need an easy way to keep up to date on other groups’ news. Makes sense.

One nice ability that I didn’t notice on my quick test drive was the centralized summary of activity across all groups you belong to. Related web groups need not be information silos.

We also talked about differentiation between Mercury Grove and other online collaboration services like Basecamp. It’s a crowded space. Mercury Grove is targeting the middle to upper end of the market, from what I can see. Pricing is a particular challenge; many people expect everything to be free on the Web nowadays, at least at the entry level. Like Basecamp, Mercury Grove has a free "Community" entry-level offering, which gives you up to 50MB of disk space. I do suspect there is a gap between their Community and SMB lines where they’re losing price-sensitive tire-kickers. Perhaps a Ning-like pricing structure, where you can buy additional storage in 10GB chunks for $10, would make sense? Of course, adding billing and storage in small increments isn’t zero cost. And positioning your product as one-size-fits-all rarely works either, especially when some of your customers are large companies that want to pay a lot more than the little guys. Tough strategy challenge.

In any case, next time I am looking for project collaboration tools I will give Mercury Grove a deeper look.

Thanks, Scott, for getting in touch.