An outcome like selling to Yahoo for $40M is probably the best possible outcome for an Australian Groupon clone. Unless my back of the imaginary envelope math is way off, I don't think the company could really objectively be "worth" more than that. Especially since Groupon clones are already a hyper-competitive space in Australia. Microsoft is backing a company, Cudo, that already has ads on network TV.

My wife, who works in PR here in Australia, passed on this from someone else, suggesting that someone should build it in Australia:

"Journalisted.com - This is a brilliant service and probably one I use on a daily basis. From a PR point of view, it can be used in one of two ways; if you want to get in touch with a journalist about a story or your client, but you aren’t sure if they’ll be interested, you can search for that journalist and look at the articles they’ve worked on in the past. If you want to get in touch about something to do with science, but the contact has only written about politics in the past, it’s probably best to forget contacting them. Similarly, if there’s a subject matter you have in mind and you want to look up journalists who write about it, you can use journalisted.com for that too."

Thought I'd mention it in case it hadn't been done in the US or AU and someone was interested in trying it.

If and when I decide to raise money for an Australian dotcom, I will actually go to Perth first. The city is flush with mining money and has a large pool of investors used to investing in mining exploration -- probably the business most like tech startups in life cycle.