Categories: Articles

The Groupon Story – One Billion The Hard Way

It’s one of the biggest and most interesting business stories of this year… and in the history of business.

Groupon will forever be known as the first company in the history of business to reach one billion dollars in sales the quickest (making it the fastest growing business ever). If that wasn’t interesting enough, the company recently turned down a six billion dollar acquisition offer from Google. It’s the kind of story we thought we would never hear again after the dot com implosion.

It’s a great business model.

Groupon works at the hyper-local level. They find local businesses (mostly service-based) who can offer up an incredible one-time deal. They help the business set-up the price and the reserve (a certain amount of people have to commit to purchasing the deal for the reserve to be met). This happens daily. As the company evolves, they are opening their services up to more and more cities. As their popularity continues to grow, they are faced with many copy-cat companies as well as more traditional companies (like newspapers and yellow pages) running their own Groupon-esque like deals.

Watch this…

Two days ago, Groupon founder, Andrew Mason, was on Charlie Rose. Unfortunately, the Charlie Rose show does not allow their videos to be embedded, so you have to go here to watch this fascinating interview: Charlie Rose and Andrew Mason.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.