Groupon

“I left in 2014. We're doing about two hundred million annual revenues.”

“What's really held up, like, a lot of the techniques and the specific tactics from Lean Startup are a little dated now. I mean, you know, Groupon is a case study. Like, it's old now. It came out in 2011. But I think the principles have held up really well, and…”

“Groupon as an original Groupon is now run by Czechs as well. You know, some of our friends and client, and it's our client actually have bought in as a private equity. Yeah. Yeah. I have redesigned the whole coupon and data using Kabula.”

“So we learned trial by free, not so good. If I pay for it, and I love the results, they stay. And that has been a hallmark of the company, high retention.”

“At one point we were producing 400 celebrity videos a year, you know, and our team, like, figured out that process, was really good at learning from that process. Like, that's why we, like, that's why we were the only ones who did a celebrity that made it. We'…”

“Dropbox, Dropbox, like with the referral program, Groupon and email, Pinterest and SEO, Duolingo, and just like a totally unhinged social media, right? All of them were kind of first to this concept and it really, really worked.”

“If I remember right, we were selling three-month subscriptions for 45 dollars so 15 dollars a month, but you'd probably have a 20 dollar cost of goods in every box.”

“And from having the idea to actually launching the thing took 30 days.”

“Ultimately, the first business that ran on Groupon was a pizza shop. We offered 20 dollars of value in pizza, cost 10 dollars, so people are saving 50%. And we had to sell 20 in order to hit the so-called tipping point and actually have the deal become real.”

“Well, we didn't take that much at first. We might have taken, if we're 10 dollars a unit, we might have taken a dollar, if anything, in those first deals. As we did it more, and we started to see the value that these businesses were getting out of it, and star…”

“The emergence of what became literally thousands of Groupon clones added intensity to it because we felt like we had to stay ahead.”

“The Proliferation of clones was undermining the foundation of the business model. The business model was based on scarcity. It was based on the novelty of one of these things existing per day in a city, and when you have 50 different Groupons in Chicago, all o…”

“When you're a founder, you just have this, you just get a free pass on a lot of stuff. I guess you bring something to the table or people just like assume that you're stuck there or something like that, and they're willing to give you some slack and understand…”

“In April of 2010, you raised around at 1.3 billion dollar valuation.”

“Google got wind and came along, and that was more exciting. There, like, Google was the... The cool company.”

“And it could have, maybe it could have been, were it not for some execution mistakes that happened after we made that decision.”

“What happened was we had an all hands meeting at this church down the street from the office and, you know, they're the 500 or a thousand Groupon employees were in this church. And I came up to the stage. I said, hey, I have a special announcement... I said, h…”

“That was basically part of the agreement with the board.”

“You go public in November of 2011 and despite all of that, despite all of the negative press, it was the biggest internet IPO since Google in 2004.”

“12 and a half billion dollar valuation at the end of the trading day.”

“We're not a subscription business. It's harder to understand what's going to happen, especially when, like, You're completely turning over the inventory of your website every single day with completely new stuff. So, so I think we were like difficult for wall …”

“I think, like, for sure, there are businesses that lost money on Groupon. It's a little tricky because it's this new form of advertising, basically. Businesses lose money on advertising all the time.”

“My CFO and I were meeting with investors in Barcelona or Madrid or something like that when we got a call from our French office that there was some, like, error in the spreadsheet they were using to Track stuff, and we were gonna miss our number in, in France…”

“I mentioned earlier that we didn't have the same vision on, on where to take the business, so I wasn't super into that idea. And I was like, you can do that, but you'll have to fire me.”

“Anyway, it was all, like, good and fun when we were a private company, and then when we became a public company, it was kind of weaponized as a sign that I was, like, not suited for the job and immature. It didn't make sense to me, because it's like, I was thi…”

“Yes. At this point I was like, I need a break from investors. Like, I get the role, but I just want to build something truly great without thinking about anything else other than building something truly great.”

“Everything that I've done that's been any form of success has not been the obvious thing from the start. Like, you end up finding it in the rubble of some mess that you've created.”

“My friend of mine ran as a Chicago based company. He would hire a lot of comedians and basically show writers to write their one, their descriptions of products that they were selling on Groupon.”

“Groupon was smart to stay in Chicago because it's a sales-driven business, and sales is not Silicon Valley's strong suit.”

“And the e-commerce platform, quote unquote, Waxman, which was acquired by Groupon. Also not true. He has also been an advisor and investor for numerous startups. Including Uber, WeWork, and Snapchat. That is not true.”

“My synthesis of Groupon is it's a story of massively lost potential. In, in, in my view, that company had all the potential to be worth 30 or a hundred billion dollars and really to have earned it. But they made kind of one critical mistake, which was taking t…”

“When Meituan first started and they started off in kind of group buying, they were the part of the Groupon clone wars, as it was called. There was, you know, Startups doing Groupon cloning, and then Meituan localized the fosters and went with a different strat…”

“Groupon honestly was very much the opposite. If a quarter was coming in soft, the response was often to, hey, send more email. You know, we'll pump up the short term, but it's a little bit like eating your stock seed because it burns up your core customer base…”

“A lot of them find as they, as they're growing, they scale out of their cities. So, you know, Chicago had Groupon, and, you know Foursquare had, it was in New York, and they can only hire so many engineers, particularly engineers, but also the senior executive…”

“And this happened to us at Groupon, and it was kind of frustrating because I felt like there were all these other people there. I felt like I was, frankly, ending up with more money than I needed. Wanted or knew what to do with. And there were all these other …”

“LivingSocial literally had to pivot the entire company to basically competing with Groupon because the app wasn't very retentive in those days.”

“Many of you know Andrew from his company Mixergy and where he's interviewed over 1500 entrepreneurs and startup founders such as the founders of Airbnb, Twitch, Groupon, and LinkedIn.”

“Salesforce had just landed them as a huge customer. Back in the day, it was a marquee customer. I don't know how much they paid Salesforce, but I know it was eight figures a year.”

“We returned at four to five times the money for investors. In about a year, right? In about nine months actually.”

“They had acquired a company with about 20 people and, you know, not really significant revenue, and then within a couple months we had over 700 people, over twenty million a month in revenue, so it was really Groupon's, you know, kind of extreme growth Story.”

“I think that Groupon itself will always exist. They've been doing a tremendous job... But I think most of the other companies are going to go away.”

“So beginning of August, 2012 with little money left, we were able to get Groupon to feature us and to push us national and not take a percentage because we were a social good business, and so and then we sold 2000 quilts in, in a week, and so that put a 100,00…”

“Matt is Director of Seed Investments at Betaworks, who have invested in the likes of Tumblr, Airbnb, Groupon, and Twitter, and have internally built startups such as Chartbeat, Bitly, and Socialflow.”