Groupon Buys LivingSocial, a Rival Once Valued at $6B • Hacker News Board

Re: Groupon Buys LivingSocial, a Rival Once Valued at $6B

#71

Post by GFischer » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 8:44 PM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #40

twblalock wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with small businesses is a total pain. Dealing with thousands of them is a major challenge for any business. Many small businesses don't adhere to professional norms of communication, negotiation, payment, etc -- that's not a big surprise, considering that many of them are owned by people without a lot of background in big business. The amount of time put into each deal is very high compared to the money you…

>You can make millions dealing with a small handful of enterprise companies, or you can try to make the same amount of money by dealing with hundreds or thousands of small businesses. This is burying the lede, IMO. Your sales structure should either be set up to catch shrimp or whales. You can have a product that sells itself and provide it cheaply - say, a smartphone app that summons a car to get you where you want…

Joel Spolsky expanded on some of it on his famous blog post:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...

"There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs... So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint"

Re: Groupon Buys LivingSocial, a Rival Once Valued at $6B

#72

Post by MicroBerto » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 9:11 PM UTC

dannylandau wrote: post #37

Daily Deals are great for one type of business -- Dental offices! I used them a few times for to get discounts on cleaning. The incentive to bring new customers by offering steep discounts is definitely worth it for those type of vendors.

Depends on how good the hygienist is. They're not all the same.

Re: Groupon Buys LivingSocial, a Rival Once Valued at $6B

#73

Post by pbhjpbhj » Thu, Oct 27, 2016, 9:12 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #69

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is paywalled. Certainly in the past we were "offered" the opportunity to do a 75% off deal. Then IIRC it was 60-40 in their favour. They got all the breakage (payees that didn't turn up) and we had ty wait until the end of the deal period to apply for the money. It was as close to a con as you could get. Like selling pensioners ludicrously expensive fascia boards and guttering when what they needed was t…

Interesting. My memory of the subject is pretty out of date by now, as I don't follow Groupon much, but I'm certain that's how it worked during its hypergrowth period. Indeed, it appears that we're both correct, assuming you're not in the US. Interesting article from 2012 sheds some light: Some context about how the company operates: Groupon has had two very different payment structures. In what I call the American m…

Yes, UK here and I didn't follow the later progress as after being propositioned (early in the Groupon era) as a mark by them I pretty soon decided it was far from being good for the business I was in at the time.

Good follow up, thanks.

I wonder why they took those differing approaches - regulatory pressure?

Re: Groupon Buys LivingSocial, a Rival Once Valued at $6B

#74

Post by joshu » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 4:03 AM UTC

GFischer wrote: post #71

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can make millions dealing with a small handful of enterprise companies, or you can try to make the same amount of money by dealing with hundreds or thousands of small businesses. This is burying the lede, IMO. Your sales structure should either be set up to catch shrimp or whales. You can have a product that sells itself and provide it cheaply - say, a smartphone app that summons a car to get you where you want…

Joel Spolsky expanded on some of it on his famous blog post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie... "There's no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I'll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs... So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint"

Dunno. I am finding a ton of it in the CAD/CAM world.

Re: Groupon Buys LivingSocial, a Rival Once Valued at $6B

#75

Post by ajmurmann » Sat, Oct 29, 2016, 2:48 AM UTC

DrStalker wrote: post #46

ajmurmann wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about their engine and viewer was still do bad last time I checked that I would be shocked if they could possibly pull proper VR off. I never understood why the controls completely reinvented the wheel instead of being more like what we are used to from video games.

The nature of Second Life makes optimization a challenge. The geometry is fully dynamic so you can't pre-compute line of sight or use a lot of other performance saving tricks. The people making things are not skilled with efficient 3D design, so even if there was a way to do things like remove hidden triangles from models most people would not use it. Textures get uploaded in ridiculous sizes for things that should b…

I agree with everything you say. However, my point was really about the HUD and keyboard and mouse controls. Just moving around used to be so hard and unintuitive. Not sure if it still is because I haven't logged in in years.