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This article misses the point entirely. LivingSocial just acquired a shit-ton of users for $10 each. Period. That's an extremely low acquisition cost for a life
by plusbryan 16y ago
This article misses the point entirely. LivingSocial just acquired a shit-ton of users for $10 each. Period. That's an extremely low acquisition cost for a lifetime user value of $50 or more. They now have more than a million credit cards and email addresses that they didn't have before.
http://www.lifeinbeta.org/2011/01/why-living-social-can-sell-20-of-amazon-gift-cards-for-10-or-the-economics-of-setting-fire-to-money-as-a-user-acquisition-strategy/ http://www.lifeinbeta.org/2011/01/why-living-social-can-sell...
- ianferrel 16y agoDid they, though? What's the retention going to be on those users? I signed up yesterday to get the giftcard, and my experience was pretty bad: I followed a link a friend gave me, and it asked me for some info, then took me to a landing page with my city listed explaining how LivingSocial works. It had a link for "Today's deal", but clicking on that link just took me back to the same "how LivingSocial works" page. Finally I clicked on the referral link I had again, and it took me to the Washington, DC page, which had the Amazon gift card. I bought it. This morning, I received an email from LivingSocial for the current Washington, DC deal, which is some local pizza place. I unsubscribed. Looks like they didn't test well enough to make things actually work for the huge influx of users. Furthermore, I'm not at all convinced that I'm missing anything. Obviously, the really good deals will be shared on Hacker News and other networks I already pay attention to, so why stay subscribed to a daily email?