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stevenj

If I remember correctly, Groupon tested its idea via Wordpress.

Blogging software, such as Wordpress, is pretty ubiquitious.

Scaling a daily deals site might be difficult, but I don't think starting one is.

On the other hand, starting a search or energy company would be different.

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I think this is incorrect. Before Groupon was Groupon, they were The Point. A company that applied the same social tipping-point approach to consumer and political organizing. Think "if 2,000 people all agree, we'll donate $10 each to the WWF." Or march on city hall. This was powered by a RoR app that Ken Pelletier and a small team built. I'm fairly certain that the early tests of Groupon leveraged this app. If so, the early version of Groupon was powered by tech far more substantial and purpose-built than Wordpress.

http://mixergy.com/andrew-mason-groupon-interview/

Search: "WordPress Blog"

Interesting. Although I understand this to mean that Wordpress hosted some of the deal copy. The group buying logic would have been served up by those embedded widgets talking to The Point's server logic. My understanding is still: early Groupon = hacked together front end (Wordpress I guess) + slightly modified group buying system from The Point + hacked together fulfillment system. But I'm not 100% certain I'm right about this. It's based on old bar conversations with a few early Grouponers, and given the quality and quantity of beer consumed I could certainly be misremembering.

I saw the earliest Groupon deals. I am almost 100% positive they consisted of a Wordpress install as the base with an embedded js/flash box powered by The Point tech that had all the deal stuff in it.

So yes, they did use WP. And yes, they did use The Point. I figure they created a Point project that happened to be a group coupon, and then embedded the widget on a wordpress blog.

I think for you, "starting a groupon" just implies the tech- the post acknowledges the trivial technical hurdle and argues that the real obstacle is the $30 per email sub. It's not real until you are actually making money on deals, and the cost per email is the real bottleneck.

My first inclination on seeing this post was to look for a "report spam" link. Then I realized it's actually quite informative. :)

Here in Uruguay we have lots of Groupon clones, in addition to Groupon itself. Two of them are at least as successful as Groupon right now (local WooW http://www.woow.com.uy/ and Argentinean NoTeLaPierdas http://www.notelapierdas.com/ ).

I guess one of the easy points for them was that acquiring users wasn't that expensive (not sure how they did it, but 90% of the Internet users have one of two Uruguayan email providers, and getting the email databases wasn't that expensive last time I heard about it). They also use Facebook (By the way, I read here that Facebook ads weren't having good conversion rates, but both me and my girlfriend have made purchases based on Facebook ads. By comparison, I never bought anything off a Google ad, surprisingly).

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