When I heard about this the first time, one of the "benefits" of this approach is they only sell deals to companies that actually have demand. And I never understood that. One of the reasons Groupon is so reviled is because the demand for these ridiculous deals causes great problems for the business in question. If the deal didn't have any demand, then there wouldn't be any problem whatsoever and people wouldn't be hating Groupon. If anything, the way Loopt is doing this is far worse than Groupon, as the article demonstrates.
Sam Altman will clean your house for $5
71–74 of 74 posts
Re: Sam Altman will clean your house for $5
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Merely publishing these deals enriches Loopt at the expense of the business -- even if none of them take it. Loopt is building a mailing list of people using the business's brand name and causing customer service issues for them. I've forward to this to some friends in the payments space. This might be considered credit card fraud because they are also taking people's credit card numbers in conjunction with a service…
If we have a lot of users sign up for deals that don't go through, that hurts us a lot. That's the reason we pre-set the discounts at levels that make sense for each category of business, and why we're reaching out to businesses early in the process. We're taking credit card numbers in the same way Priceline does for name-your-own price deals and Groupon used to when deals might not tip. Please let me know what your…
From a payments expert: "I have never seen anything get so close to full on fraud in the open."
Re: Sam Altman will clean your house for $5
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
a) Coupon/discount verbiage is typically done with the consent of the business. b) Please try doing this with Bose and Apple. Let me know how it works out.
http://www.retailmenot.com/view/apple.com http://www.retailmenot.com/view/bose.com http://www.bargainist.com/deals/stores/amazon/#b http://dealspl.us/zappos-coupons
Loopt is going to settle this matter tomorrow by putting up an offer for 50% off the iPad 2 redeemable at your local Apple store.
Wait, they aren't going to do that? Well, they really should... don't you all agree with me, guys?
Snarkiness aside, this illustrates why I don't like the Loopt model. Even if you ignore the trademark use issues, the whole system sets up a situation in which an outside party is allowed to set another business up as the bad guy for not honoring arbitrary deals they may never had any intention of offering.
IMO this is way worse than Groupon because at least with Groupon you sign up to be screwed.
Re: Sam Altman will clean your house for $5
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a very visceral reaction to reading that YC had dirty money from spammers, but to be fair there's a much longer list of startups they've funded who are not airbnb-type scum (at least that we know of).
At least according to them, AirBNB didn't do this directly--it was done by a firm they hired to get leads, and that they didn't continue working with.
As the sysadmins say, Rule #1: spammers lie. If their "policy to forbid such actions" even existed it was a completely unenforced fig leaf of deniability, because that is in fact how their "person-to-person sales" contractors were allowed to spend their time until a third party did a little diligence and caught them at it, and unsurprisingly they're going to get away with it—there's been no mention of a lawsuit or anything to claw back what they got paid for poisoning the well.