Good job on crunching the numbers and making it profitable. Groupon is definitely a win-win in some cases.
Did the Groupon people help you with all this, or did you have to figure it out yourself? My main complaint is that Groupon doesn't seem to be looking out for the small biz owners and steering them toward successful deals. It sucks to feel like you can't rely on a partner to look out for your interests.
GroupOn helped us a lot. They didn't really do much due diligence to see if we could handle the promotion. They did however tell us what to expect, showed us similar deals that had gone on across the country, told us to buy more phones and hire more people to work them the day of our deal. They basically told us to get ready for war.
Let me tell you. You have not known fear until you are on the receiving end of a GroupOn. Those people are animals. It was like the Mongol Hordes were coming to rape and pillage our business.
GroupOn is amazing. Like Andrew said, they breathed life into our business. We'd still be here, but they changed everything.
We get the money up front, breakage is insane. The promotion we ran in March, about 30% of people have redeemed their Groupons. And we have already had the benefit of sitting on alllll of that cash this entire time. They aren't the best customers, but they are pretty damn good. They buy things, they bring friends, they purchase 12 GroupOns and use 3 of them. GroupOn is great. These businesses complaining about being pillaged, they really have no one to blame but themselves. I am by no means a savvy businessperson, but to me this was a no-brainer.
Did the Groupon people help you with all this, or did you have to figure it out yourself? My main complaint is that Groupon doesn't seem to be looking out for the small biz owners and steering them toward successful deals. It sucks to feel like you can't rely on a partner to look out for your interests.