I was one of the many unhappy customers of this company. They made tons of money for themselves and investors using an aggressive and unpleasant sales force to overpromise results to small businesses, who had to discount deeply to make the system work, and who never got any repeat business. This guy was responsible, and he still doesn't get it. They can burn for all I care.
The business model was bad, and the sales tactics were bad, and the handling of the contracts was unethical at best. The salespeople pushed us to give a big discounts on the list price of our service, saying that the promotion would bring long-term business. But that never happened due to the one-off nature of the advertising. Instead, we made a loss on every customer due to the discount, while Groupon made their commission (25% of the list price if I recall correctly) whatever happened. Making excessive money while your clients lose money is not a viable business model. So we dropped them, as many others did, and they moved on until they finally ran out of victims. If I recall correctly, the second time we tried, they changed the contract percentages on us without informing us, similar to the story another business owner tells in a comment on the Medium post: http://bit.ly/1SRjksX
Before I opened my retail business I founded a free magazine that built up over 14 years to $4 million in annual sales, so I have a reasonable idea of how advertising works. We succeeded because our interests were aligned with our advertisers. We worked with clients over the long term to make their ads work, and we only made a small percentage profit. Groupon didn't care if we made money, they wanted our deal so they could make money. As for foot traffic, perhaps Groupon might work in large cities, but for us, in a smaller city, the foot traffic was very poor. That said, I am interested to find success stories, if you have one.
Groupon used to over promise the results you'd get. The business generally loses a chunk of money (and time away from profitable customers) on each Groupon user with the hope that they'll turn into a repeat customer. Unfortunately, most Groupon customers only go to these businesses to get a good deal. I have a couple different friends in NYC with businesses that tried Groupon and will never do it again now. The customers were far more demanding, quicker to complain, more likely to demand additonal free or discounted services, and more likely to threaten bad reviews to try to get their way. Groupon likely works for very specific businesses that cater to customers concerned with price above most other concerns who are willing to run regular sales and discounts to keep those customers a la department stores.
And I say the above as someone that has bought physical products through Groupon a couple times.
I imagine it has to do with the type of customers the advertising attracts. The type of customers a Groupon attracts would generally be short-term, coupon-chasing customers. I personally have around a dozen gift cards in my desk for restaurants I wouldn't normally go to but will eventually go to for the sake of spending the gift cards. Many entrepreneurs, from the owner of a market stall in India to the owner of a bootstrapped startup in Silicon Valley, will tell you that the frugal, hard-haggling, discount-chasing customer is the worst customer to have.
That and the fact that those customers were Groupon's customers, not the businesses'. Their loyalty was to Groupon and the never-ending stream of discounts they provided.
OTOH, the businesses that offered the discounts were essentially commodities in the scheme. They created the value via their discounts that Groupon then sold to customers. Few cared about the businesses, as people were not buying the underlying service or product from those businesses.
Instead, the product was the discount itself, which they were buying from Groupon.
In my experience those customers also expect and demand the world for the discounted price, whereas those that pay full price are generally less demanding. Not sure why that is...
Purchasing luxury goods and services is generally about personal relationships, atmosphere, and other context.
If you pay too little (not just get a discount or other small favor, but actually pay too little) then you are compromising your own experience and actually getting less value than the people paying full price.
So it's no surprise that such people are ultimately less satisfied. The primary benefit they are getting out of it is the chance to tell their friends how low of a price they got.
There's a good explanation for this. Imagine customer X is willing to pay up to $10 for a service, and customer Y is willing to pay up to $30 for the same service. Who needs the service more? Y, right? Y really needs/wants that thing, so is appreciative of getting it. X doesn't really get much value out of it (and this is reflected in the price they're willing to pay). Even though X got a discount, they're not going to be satisfied because this wasn't the right service for them in the first place.
Advertising leads to increased profit, on average. Groupon did not. Their whole proposition was bogus, and they knew it from the beginning. Their business model required a constant supply of small business owners who'd make the wrong decision. It was despicable.
The difference is that Groupon never acted in good faith.
So imagine it's the Groupon heyday (2010-2012) & also imagine you own a restaurant-- you want customers and get call from a rep. For reference, your food costs are 30%+/-
Groupon rep comes in and sweet talks you or your manager into running a 50% discount but frames it as one or those $20 for $40 arrangements so it doesn't hurt so much for you to sign the contract.
Now Groupon isn't going to go to all the effort here without getting a taste themselves, right? They take 50% of your 50% so you'll get about a quarter. That's not exactly great economics to always take a loss when food costs are 30%.
But fine. All advertising costs money. And this Groupon thing definitely drives foot traffic, right? That's genuinely impressive and it WORKS...the problem is that it's the wrong kind of foot traffic.
Problem 1: Bargain-hunters. These are the coupon-cutters and very "high-maintenance/low-margin" type of customers. You don't want a lot of them, if any. You'll only see them again if you offer the same or "better" deal. Groupon will drive them to you by the busload b/c they're living on Groupon and it also makes it incredibly easy for them to just kind of coast from Groupon to Groupon. Groupon subverts the whole idea of a coupon-- coupons are supposed to be price discrimination. People with $$$ (in theory) don't bother with coupons because it's not worth their time. Groupon isn't a coupons. Coupons are supposed to be annoying/hard to use by design. No intention to paint with a broad bush, but most of the time these "bargain-hunter" people will look to spend EXACTLY $20 and not a penny more. They want to feel like they're getting their "deal." They also tend to complain the most, are the most demanding, and also for extra credit they're not good tippers. So your poor, overwhelmed/overworked staff dealing with a tsunami of new customers crowding the shop have now got to service customers who are never coming back and your staff won't get tipped out a lot if at all. Ouch!
Problem 2: Cannibalism. Imagine you have a great restaurant concept. You manage to survive w/ razor-thin margins, cut-throat competition, the great peanut/truffle shortage or whatever latest crisis. You also have a bunch of real "fans" who like your stuff and you might even call them regulars. They know about Groupon now too. So your regulars get on Groupon and instead of paying full freight they now are coming in for a discount. It's generally not a good thing when existing customers pay less without buying more-- thanks for the advertising Groupon! These people already like you and they now are paying less or worst case they become bargain-hunters themselves and stop coming altogether.
Bottom line: Almost fundamentally the thing didn't make sense. It had a "holy cow!" effect on restauranteurs because it absolutely did drive foot traffic (Groupon I think was the fastest-growing firm IN HUMAN HISTORY-- google it.) For diners, it seemed like the perfect crime: You can go out to eat but pay half and still get a full meal. The story/hypothesis was if you can get people in the door w/ a discount that they'll be so enamored with whatever you're making that they can't resist and will come back later. Other concepts figured maybe get them in the door and try to upsell them on extras.
Let's be VERY optimistic and say that phenomena was real and people looking for a discount came back to the restaurant. That is a handful of new customers. You still have the fundamental economic shakiness of the concept, the bargain-hunter/cannibalization issue, and the operational stress for decidedly "not-that-great" of a payoff.
It's a really impressive concept but probably not a great idea for most businesses. Perhaps it's a fit for multiple teeth whitening sessions or a service (manicures or something?) but for anything else it was a loser bet.
> No intention to paint with a broad bush, but most of the time these "bargain-hunter" people will look to spend EXACTLY $20 and not a penny more.
This is exactly what was saw running a similar £20 for £40 deal. For weeks ou order list was full of orders with a value of exactly £0, which in grocery delivery is particularly frustrating since typically guide prices will vary a bit, so we'd get customers calling up to moan about have been bill 57p because their steak was a little larger than usual. Eventually we just stopped billing anything below a threshold because the customer support and transaction costs just increased the loses being made.
Hi guys, Andrew here (author of the medium post). Thanks for the feedback. I'm just going to try to summarize the questions/criticisms that have been raised in the comments - it seems like they're all mostly hitting on the same few things. I think it would be great for Groupon to answer them.
Here it goes:
* Groupon attracts bargain hunters that never come back. It can't be compared to other forms of advertising because the customer you get as a result of a Groupon is less valuable than customers you get from other forms of advertising.
* Groupon cannibalizes sales from customers that would have otherwise paid full price.
* In summary, why should I believe that Groupon is a good form of advertising for small businesses when compared to the other options?
* Whatever the answer, why should I take the word of this corporation over the many small business owners who have reported poor experiences?
Since you're trying to capture it in one place, there is a comment hidden down with ctiticism that you did not capture in your list, here it goes:
"unclebucknasty 3 hours ago
That and the fact that those customers were Groupon's customers, not the businesses'. Their loyalty was to Groupon and the never-ending stream of discounts they provided.
OTOH, the businesses that offered the discounts were essentially commodities in the scheme. They created the value via their discounts that Groupon then sold to customers. Few cared about the businesses, as people were not buying the underlying service or product from those businesses.
Instead, the product was the discount itself, which they were buying from Groupon."
I think there is a distinction here between "groupon customer" and "business customer" highlighted in that comment that goes beyond the term "bargain hunter". You can still have bargain hunters that would only come to your shop once you display 10% off or once you're selling out stock that did not go away, but they still bring value to your business. That's different than a situation where neverending stream of discounts means you can change your provider as long as you're loyal to groupon.
That might be just word semantics that I'm missing, but I think there is a major distinction.
fijal is correct that I meant something much more fundamental than the bargain hunter problem.
Groupon's core selling proposition to businesses is that it will bring them people who can be cultivated into loyal, long-term customers. However, it's something of a fallacy because those customers are loyal primarily to Groupon. In fact, Groupon is actually a hyper-competitor to its business customers.
It's not just semantics or an issue of bargain-hunting. The model itself actively works against the core promise it offers to businesses.
BTW, while I'm not much of a Groupon fan, as a fellow-CEO whose tried something new and taken a lot of flack for it, I'll offer a little unsolicited advice: Don't let 'em get you down.
I haven't followed Groupon closely, so it might have already been addressed, but a couple of years ago I heard a very curious criticism of the company: Groupon holds money that goes from customers to vendors for quite some time (from the time customer prepays to the time the deal is over and Groupon handles over the cash minus commission to the vendor), and this other people's money sitting in Groupon's bank account makes the company quite a profit. I'm not sure what kind of accounting magic is involved, but it seems like a believable scheme.
It's not quite so awful, but Groupon don't immediately pay out - they sell the coupons, and as customers redeem them they'll pay out a week a so later (I can't remember the exact period), so if you're a cash business that could hurt. The company I was at when we tried it do all payments online, so we were used to a waiting period from our payment processor.
The other place they can potentially make a ton of money is people who buy a coupon but never redeem it. In that case the supplier never sees any of the money, Groupon keep the lot effectively making 100% commission.
For me, Groupon went from feeling like a cool outsider way to get a deal to a company squeezing small businesses for money.
In your article, you say, "as a small local business owner, I can’t imagine a lower risk, more cost effective, or higher impact way than having Groupon send a one-time offer to 500k people in the Bay Area about Detour, with a few thousand of them buying it for half off." I think that sounds great. It's like posting a flyer on the bulletin board of the local coffee shop but thousands of times more effective. Basically, you want a community megaphone that you get for a day.
The problem is that once everyone is listening to that megaphone, power dynamics come into play. If I own that megaphone and can only let one person use it each day, I'm going to be picky. I'm going to want 50% of the revenue generated and at least half off so the conversion rate is high. That's driving down what the small business is taking in to 25% of list price or less. I'm going to want to give the megaphone to someone that has no limit on the number sold so that I'm not limiting my revenue which is 50% of the take. I'm going to want to give the megaphone to people who are already popular rather than someone more quirky or with more limited appeal. Target wants the megaphone? Yea, I'm sure people don't know Target exists and. . .well, lots of people will want money off at Target and I'm getting a 50% cut. While we're at it, rather than someone from the community, let's get a pro at the megaphone so the conversion rate will be better.
Ultimately, I just don't think that really works as a profitable, growing company simply because of the power dynamics. When it's new and quirky, it's this weird community megaphone. As you try to scale that up, it just doesn't feel that way. It feels like a company that gained access to people's inboxes as a funky, friendly thing that's now trying to squeeze revenue.
And the problem is that it's hard to scale a daily deal. You can't just send your list 100 emails every day. There's a limit on the number of conversions a small business wants. There's a limit on the number of days in a year. There's a limit on how high you can push conversion rates via writers and such. That somewhat necessitates a pivot if your expectations for revenue growth are high.
I think there are other valid criticisms, but this is what left me lethargic about Groupon. Groupon wanted to scale and daily deals just don't scale nicely. Either you have to start eschewing local coffee shops for the Gap or milk higher commissions or steeper discounts (for higher conversion rates) or more than one deal a day or something. And I think that's where the power dynamic comes into play and people hate power dynamics.
As you said, "If I was working my ass off to build a tech startup and I saw [Groupon] come along and get huge, I’d be like, fuck that. It’s the tech startup equivalent of camping in an undetectable corner in an FPS and sniping people — it feels like cheating." It feels like Groupon was this quirky, funky email promoting one small, local business a day whose profit incentives push it away from being what it started out as. It feels like cheating because it went from that quirky megaphone to something else - something that would gain the revenue needed for a billion dollar valuation. Pizza deals don't drive multi-billion dollar valuations. But it's past 4am here on the east coast so this might be totally incoherent.
Groupon, and Andrew, really did solve something hard: local customer acquisition and attribution. Others who had been toiling away at this problem for years were stupefied. Really? That's the most valuable local commerce company (as Andrew notes)? But when those looked in the mirror they couldn't say they were guaranteeing customers with no risk. That's a powerful value proposition to the small local business.
I believe they were capable of generating an increase in customers but I think the incremental customer base rarely converted into repeat business or very loyal customers, since the sorts of people who are looking to take advantage of "too-good-to-be-true" customers are not the sort of people who necessarily express consumer loyalty.
They're looking to take advantage of whatever deals (consumer advantage) are available and so the value-proposition offered by a Groupon campaign was way-overvalued by both Groupon and the businesses who bought into it.
I do think there are those customers that are just looking for rock-bottom deals as you suggest, but I think the problem is more one of presence of mind than necessarily for the deep-discount shopping only crowd. For example, if you see a single ad, you don't remember the business... you need multiple impressions for it to start to stick. I think the same can hold true for new potential customers: the first visit may be positive, but in a couple or so weeks, it's not necessarily the first place they'll think of the next time they have need of the product.
Groupon (and others like it) represent should be one small part of a larger marketing initiative. It can give you the opportunity to get in front of customers you wouldn't otherwise get in your store/buy your service/etc. But capitalizing on that first impression is where many small business fail. With a clever bit of follow-on marketing, I think you can get it to pay off.
For example, for those that come in with the Groupon, offer another coupon for the next visit... don't make the deal so sweet perhaps, or make it a bring-your-friends sort of deal (2 for 1, etc). You train them to come back and think of you while at the same time train them to start accepting your regular pricing.
Naturally this depends on your business... if it's wedding photography, you probably don't go down the Groupon type path to begin with. But if it's say, a dining establishment... this sort of thing could work.
Of course. Many small business owners are simply not good business people when it gets right down to it. The small bookseller who loves and knows literature inside and out may not know how to market that business, find opportunities and niches, nor appreciate the financial pros/cons of any given decision. I think that's the biggest issue of all. They're the types likely to sign up for Groupon a get the initial visit, but never capitalize on that.
I agree, that's what I meant by "overvaluing" the proposition offered by GroupOn. I think they were great as an introduction or reinforcement to existing customers but the value of the deals demanded to run a promotion was too high.
A staged proposition as you have outlined seems far more prudent.
Yep, as a local small business owner (pet boutique) I can assure you that the hardest part, by far, is getting customers into the store. Groupon is/was definitely the best service we ever found to do this. And it's pretty incredible that you only have to pay when people actually come in AND buy! I never felt very sorry for businesses who complained about the economics (even though they were bad, they were pretty straightforward). And I certainly didn't feel ANY sorrow for the businesses who "sold too much".
I don't know if Groupon would have been such a hit with different discount structures. The "half off, a quarter to Groupon" was compelling to customers and easy to understand. I'm trying to envision "1/3 off and 10% to Groupon" or whatever.
"Are you seriously using that coupon company instead of Groupon?"
This was the bitchy-voice Groupon sales rep phoning me direct when I used a different coupon service in Japan. I asked whether she was talking about the same Groupon of "Great Osechi Ryori Disaster and CEO's Fake Apology of 2011"-fame and it shut her up real quick.
So many things wrong with this company, failure couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch of people.
I'm not sure that Groupon ever had - or ever will have - a viable business model. It raised enough money when it IPO'd to keep it solvent but that safety net appears to be on the verge of running out - http://jackgavigan.com/2015/11/04/is-groupon-on-a-glide-path...
I'd love to know whether Mason and Lefkofsky ever genuinely believed they had created a viable company or whether they knew they were riding an unsustainable growth hack.
My money is on the later. I recall reading an article in which Groupon got extremely tight-lipped about the viability of its business model. Like someone asked a few questions about how sustainable it would be once it scaled and then the person representing Groupon basically went into siege mode and gave only short, resentful answers.
Does anyone know of actual data (blog-articles, surveys) regarding the behaviour of Groupon customers: e.g. % of repeat customers, difference in CLV, difference in cost of customer-acquistion compared to other channels, etc.
The discussion of Groupon usually ends up in „they don't add value“ vs „they add value“ but without actual data it seems easy to find explanations for both sides.
Yes, I used to work at Groupon. As one would expect, we tracked merchant satisfaction very, very closely. Most merchants were satisfied and most did repeat business. Of course, it's usually the angriest people who are the noisiest and even in the case of very vocally happy merchants, it's not that exciting of a media story.
Also it's worth pointing out that the value proposition for different types of businesses is wildly different. As you can imagine for an info product, Groupon is just like doing an affiliate deal with virtually no downside, for a high margin item like a spa it's excellent, and for something with very high unit costs, like a meal at a restaurant, the merchant has to be a lot more judicious about creating Groupons.
I'm blown away by all the hate, though. Maybe it comes down to how good / aggressive the sales team is. From a merchant's perspective, Groupon should be treated like marketing. You don't spend so much money on Adwords that unit economics are bad without some plan to create repeat purchases on the back end. Why would promotional discounts be different?
There are several differences between Groupon's model and standard discounting/advertising. The spirit of these can primarily be summed up as "most advertising services don't compete directly on price with the clients for whom they are supposedly advertising."
Groupon's product was its discounts, which it sourced from local merchants, then sold to its own customers. The businesses were not so much customers, but suppliers. However, the businesses paid Groupon for the benefit of supplying the product (the discount), and yet competed directly with Groupon when Groupon sold discounts for the restaurant across the street the following week.
Now, here I have discounted deeply and taken a loss, however, I cannot compete with Groupon in my efforts to retain any new customers and recoup those losses. This is because Groupon encourages a certain customer mindset, based on demand for deep discounts. This is a demand which Groupon alone can endlessly satisfy because no individual competitor could sustain such losses. However, the aggregate loss of those businesses is the very source of Groupon's profit.
In short, Groupon was actually a hyper-competitor to the businesses it was supposedly serving.
Why would this be taken as anything but a plea to have the stock he holds increase in value? It's sort of mind-blowing to see this discussed as if it has any other purpose.
I root for Groupon because I'm in Chicago and it's great for a company of that size to have originated here. Andrew has a great reputation in the area but Eric and Lightbank are almost universally detested which is a shame. I hope the company turns around and more importantly I hope Eric and Lightbank revisit how they treat entrepreneurs.
I didn't realize LightBank was looked down on. I'm also in Chicago and work for a Lightbank-funded startup. Have you heard from other local entrepreneurs about poor treatment from LightBank?
Yes, the overall mentality of anyone I talk to is don't even approach Lightbank. Word on the street is they are terrible for entrepreneurs to work with. It doesn't help that Lightbank has seemingly had high turnover and my limited interactions with them in other matters have sent me mixed messages. Again, it's a shame. Brad Feld from Foundry replies to almost every email he gets. Chicago needs a guy like that.
My Chicago company is not Lightbank-funded, but all I see in print is relentless small-town boosterism - what's a more reliable source for sounding out a firm's reputation?
I found the little plug for his current startup to be interesting:
> My current company, Detour, is for all intents and purposes at its current stage, a small local business. We sell walking tours of San Francisco. To be successful, we have to do the exact same things other local travel companies do.
That description brought to mind exactly the startup SideTour, which Groupon bought out in 2013:
Sidetour did more than walking tours...I only used it once, to go on an excellent tour of the now-defunct 5Pointz in New York...and according to the TechCrunch write-up, the point of Groupon buying out SideTour was to include the kind of things that Detour purportedly does:
> A little over a week after Groupon announced the acquisition of hotel booking service Blink, today comes one more purchase that moves Groupon further yet out of the realm of daily deals. Groupon has bought SideTour, a marketplace where people can book places for small-scale, bespoke activities, and post their own events, too.
SideTour sounds quite different from Detour. The latter is an iOS-only audio walking tour app. There are no humans involved in content delivery (except at the creation stage, of course). It's not the only mobile-audio-walking-tour app, but its content is really, really good.
"I often find myself wishing that the original deal-a-day version of Groupon was around today; looking at the other paid options available to me as a small local business owner, I can’t imagine a lower risk, more cost effective, or higher impact way than having Groupon send a one-time offer to 500k people in the Bay Area about Detour, with a few thousand of them buying it for half off."
Daily deals cannot scale and Andrew knows this better than anyone. When you're small you can price daily deals in a way that works for SMBs and your bottom line. But when you're huge, you only have 365 deals per year and the price you need to charge is out of reach for small businesses. You have effectively equaled the reach of a traditional media company.
Here's a quick history of the evolution of the Groupon model.
Groupon started out as one deal a day. We had a massive waiting list from merchants - 9 months, at one point.
With so much merchant demand and Groupon only running one deal a day, clones started to appear. Instead of waiting to be featured on Groupon, merchants ran with the clones.
Most customers didn't really care whether they bought from Groupon or its clones. So we realized what in effect was happening was that the model was moving to a marketplace... just one that was distributed across multiple sites.
We decided if the inventory was going to exist, it would be better on Groupon than spread across a zillion clones, so we moved to a marketplace model.
In other words it was mostly competition in a fairly commoditized space, and not scalability issues, that drove us to the marketplace.
That's not to say that scalability wouldn't have been a challenge with a daily deal model, but there are things you can do. A lot of the needs in the space actually balance out nicely. Some merchants want 20k customers, others want 20. Most merchants prefer new customers, some are indifferent. Both customers and merchants want category diversity so Groupon remains interesting and non-cannibalistic. In theory you can get all those things with smart segmentation and personalization. We experimented with that in the transition to marketplace but ultimately went ahead with moving to the "many deals" (which in the short term, is exactly what customers want) to stay ahead in the brutal competition for marketshare. Hard to say whether I'd do that part differently today... if we'd been less focused on maintaining marketshare NYTimes might have just written the obituary for Groupon instead of Livingsocial.
Respectfully, I don't buy it and I think the the marketplace is bearing this out. Local advertising was temporarily disrupted when Groupon owned the market (eyeballs) and offered a product that businesses thought was superior to traditional forms of local advertising.
Once competition fragmented the market and businesses realized that 50% off coupons attracted bargain hunters rather than loyal customers, there wasn't any going back.
Using Detour as an example of a local business is disingenuous. Detour's marginal cost per customer/tour is ~zero. The businesses that Groupon targets are mostly those delivering a physical good/service, like food or a massage. Those require materials and/or human effort, which are more expensive than bandwidth and electricity.
Yes, daily local deals. Mason was wishing for some version of Groupon that would affordably deliver 500k emails to people in SF for his local business Detour. Such a thing does not and cannot exist.
500k signups in an area is a lot to ask for, especially if your daily deal email doesn't have an interesting range of products like all the other daily deal emails...
Ads only work when you can convince people to try someplace or something new using words and images and symbolism. There's lots of experiences and businesses that can't do that - not just because of size or money or location, but because words are fairly limited. I don't want local businesses to just have better ads; I don't even know how that would help me.
Used well I think Groupon let's a business really put themselves on the line: we're willing to probably lose money on customers because we think those customers will learn the value of what we provide by experiencing that value. That's a risky proposition, but a fair one. Used that way, yes, I think it's good Groupon exists.
I'll give one, both as consumer, merchant and partner. I have never owned stock in the company and don't know anybody there.
As a consumer, I've discovered tons of new restaurants and services through Groupon.
As a merchant, I ran several groupons and they kicked butt. Of course you need reasonable expectations about margin and repeat customers.
As a partner, I've referred dozens of brands to Groupon Goods, who are easy to working with, pay their bills on time and pay MORE than traditional retail channels, because there zero loss/spoilage.
I can't speak to sales tactics but my experience was virtually 100% positive.
Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing. I can get why he wants to look in the mirror and say, "No, I really did do something worthwhile. Really, really!" And it's great that his wife is trying to buck him up.
But trying to convince the rest of the world? Via rambling, need-an-editor Medium posts? Where he helpfully analogizes Groupon to a drug that turns people into shuffling, addicted zombies and destroys their lives?
Totally disagree. Andrew is a super smart and generous guy, built an extraordinary company, albeit not as successful now but still multi-billions in value. Local business, a totally admirable market to serve, has a very difficult time marketing and Groupon is/was a godsend.
Not knowing him, I have no opinion on his smartness and niceness. But as far as I'm concerned, Groupon was an enormous pump-and-dump built on a short-lived marketing fad.
I agree that local business is a great market to serve, which is why I think Groupon is especially repulsive. In his race to cash out, he caused enormous pain to an enormous number of local businesses. Whether he did that willfully or negligently I have no idea, but either way his attempt to chipper his way out of Groupon's history is sad.
