January 2011 Archives

The daddy, Groupon, trading since 2008

Groupola, one of the many copycat services (note even the video copy and content is virtually identical)

A bunch of group buying sites have started and failed but Groupon's particular mix has struck a chord and it doesn't look like they're going anywhere soon.

Here's a concept I produced back in 2008. The big idea was to build a platform that supported traditional (crowd-sourced and user organised) buying clubs with the buying power of the large corporation.

This is a different model to Groupon and one I still think addresses some the scalability issues of traditional group buying systems while giving the successful network creator a competitive edge:

Anyone can make a Groupon competitor, but it's a lot harder to tie customer and company bidding and buying together. For the company that gets this right I think this could be a great addition to the competitive toolkit.