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I'm not sure what the right price is for Groupon, but I still believe it's got massive potential. It could serve the same purpose that AdWords does online but i

by staunch 14y ago

I'm not sure what the right price is for Groupon, but I still believe it's got massive potential. It could serve the same purpose that AdWords does online but in the physical world, which is a far larger market. The thing that seems to be holding them back is that they're simply not executing at a super high level yet. It seems like they scaled the business by doing everything the same way but at higher volumes. They need to move to a self-serve model so they can get rid of the overhead of having 10,000 sales/writer employees. They need to simplify their product down to the primary use case. They have at least four products currently: Featured Deal, Now!, Goods, and Rewards. Unfortunately I do predict doom and gloom for them. It would be so hard for them to make the changes required that it's most likely they will not be able to do it. Andrew Mason isn't in the kind of position Zuckerberg is in from a control perspective, which means he'd probably get fired for trying to do this stuff.

vladd 14y ago
Most of their small business owner clients lack decent knowledge in computers in order to be self-served by Groupon, otherwise they would have used AdWords or Drupal by now and would have had their own coupons. But in a couple of years from now, with voice recognition and voice synthesis, I can see e.g. Google having phone bots that are good enough to automate the process (and have human operators just for 10% of the cases where things go bad). Part of the flow is not really automate-able: it involves hearing from the owner the products they have and writing a pitch on Groupon.com that fits the overall theme and style of the site. But it can still be done faster probably if owners were to leave that info with clever phone bots rather then being hand-hold while walked though every stage of the process.
- deleted 14y ago
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- staunch 14y ago
  I think the future of Groupon is something closer to what Google Local wants to be. A place people can turn to when they want to get lunch, a massage, or get their oil changed. I think the daily deal thing, which started Groupon, is not nearly as interesting as this. They could drop it entirely. I believe business owners could absolutely handle it themselves, if you made it really simple. The primary interface could be a smart phone, so it would work for any business. Made it dead simple. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to put up your daily ad.
jonnathanson 14y ago
We can't bet on companies based purely on their market potential. We have to bet on companies based on the potential we believe them capable of realizing. This is highly dependent on the companies themselves: their behaviors, their characteristics, their products, their people, their organizational structures, their capital structures, and so on. As you identify, this is probably tough going for Groupon as it currently exists.
antr 14y ago
"I still believe it's got massive potential" Acts of faith do not justify overvalued companies. Groupon is not worth more than $1bn.
tomkarlo 14y ago
The problem with a self-serve model is that these aren't self-serve customers. Almost by definition a large percentage of small businesses are relatively unsophisticated computer users (at best, middle adopters). It's the same reason why Yelp has to spend so much on direct sales to get these businesses advertising.

by staunch 14y ago

vladd 14y ago

Most of their small business owner clients lack decent knowledge in computers in order to be self-served by Groupon, otherwise they would have used AdWords or Drupal by now and would have had their own coupons. But in a couple of years from now, with voice recognition and voice synthesis, I can see e.g. Google having phone bots that are good enough to automate the process (and have human operators just for 10% of the cases where things go bad). Part of the flow is not really automate-able: it involves hearing from the owner the products they have and writing a pitch on Groupon.com that fits the overall theme and style of the site. But it can still be done faster probably if owners were to leave that info with clever phone bots rather then being hand-hold while walked though every stage of the process.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
staunch 14y ago
I think the future of Groupon is something closer to what Google Local wants to be. A place people can turn to when they want to get lunch, a massage, or get their oil changed. I think the daily deal thing, which started Groupon, is not nearly as interesting as this. They could drop it entirely. I believe business owners could absolutely handle it themselves, if you made it really simple. The primary interface could be a smart phone, so it would work for any business. Made it dead simple. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to put up your daily ad.

jonnathanson 14y ago

We can't bet on companies based purely on their market potential. We have to bet on companies based on the potential we believe them capable of realizing. This is highly dependent on the companies themselves: their behaviors, their characteristics, their products, their people, their organizational structures, their capital structures, and so on. As you identify, this is probably tough going for Groupon as it currently exists.

antr 14y ago

"I still believe it's got massive potential" Acts of faith do not justify overvalued companies. Groupon is not worth more than $1bn.

tomkarlo 14y ago

The problem with a self-serve model is that these aren't self-serve customers. Almost by definition a large percentage of small businesses are relatively unsophisticated computer users (at best, middle adopters). It's the same reason why Yelp has to spend so much on direct sales to get these businesses advertising.