On Daily Deals
Instead of lending rise to an ecosystem, GroupOn gave birth to a litter of niche-babies. The difference? The babies will eat your market share instead of sharing (finite amount of daily deals to be had).
A platform play could have taken the form of tools to create your own deals, segmented by type (restaurant, activity, bar, etc), they could have kept a piece of the pie and had Yelp, OpenTable as clients. This would have given a more sustainable purpose to its 1,600 person sales team. Instead, it’s a race to the bottom as those and others jump into the fray.
In an effort to offset this, GroupOn’s gone international with an $135 million infusion (some Russian). I suspect that’s just going to delay the inevitable (unless they have the ability to buy all competitors).
-Shlok
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