Groupon: The $5Bn Company That Started As A Blog

Groupon has been in the news for sometime now. The big news sorrounding Groupon’s dormination of startup news in recent times is that Google offered to acquire the local deals site Groupon Inc.( a daily coupon website with more than 35 million users). As of Friday December 3rd 2010, Groupon Rejected the $6 Billion Google Offer.

Andrew Mason is the Founder and CEO of Groupon. Launched in November 2008, Groupon features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in a variety of cities across the U.S., Canada, Europe and soon beyond. The company became profitable in 2009, reach a reported 1.35 billion dollars, that’s over a billion dollar valuation in 2010. In an interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy, Andrew Mason had this to say.

All we did was we took a WordPress Blog and we skimmed it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post with the points embedded. It was totally ghetto. We would sell t-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We’d say in the right up, ‘This t-shirt will come in the color red, size large. If you want a different color or size, email that to us.’ We didn’t have a form to add that stuff. We were just, it was so cobbled together. It was enough to prove the concept and show that it was something that people really liked. The actual coupon generation that we were doing was all FileMaker. We would run a script that would email the coupon PDF to people. It got to the point where we’d sell 500 sushi coupons in a day and we’d send 500 PDFs to people with Apple Mail at the same time. Really the first, until July of the first year was just a scrambling to grab the tiger by the tail. It was trying to catch up and reasonable piece together a product.