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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.

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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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