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we have Russian kids hanging off the buildings I don't you've seen these videos where and YouTube's allowing what is Susan Wojcicki thinking over at YouTube that she would allow them to post videos of people hanging off bridges literally hanging off bridges to get pageviews
it's a crazy whipsaw up and down it was like kind of the poster child of web is that web tour
Groupon was in there any crew obviously very fast yeah IPO too still public right still public yeah and has Brett wheel revenue makes over a billion dollars I think
we were really selective about the businesses that we worked with and um built a lot of customer loyalty as a result and that's kind of what drove the the growth was just getting rid of the awful things around it.
I think we have the same kind of challenge as we had with Groupon early on which um pe there's a stigma around the audio tour. Like in the same way there was a stigma around, you know, half off deals.
we saw this at Groupon like when we when we created really sold really great um walking tour guided tour type of experiences like there was one of uh architecture tour uh of of Chicago that every time we put it on the site we'd sell 20,000 tickets in a matter of hours and completely sell out.
There have been a lot of kind of more focused versions of that idea like Kickstarter or Indiegogo or Groupon that have been successful.
I can't comment on the state of it other than that people are still using it. It's continuing to grow like you said. I think there's a lot of people that that really love the service, a lot of businesses and customers.
I think you know what I think about is uh how do we not become how do we not start to suck and I want to make sure that all those things that like Yahoo did or even did that made them start to suck don't happen to us
there are James Beard award-winning restaurants uh that have worked with us all over the country um there's like World reowned art museums like the Art Institute of Chicago we sold 5,000 memberships in a day and this is like a year ago which increased the membership base that they had been building over the last 100 years by 6% in a single day
if a business doesn't need customers then they don't need us there's not there's nothing we can do to help a business that doesn't need customers because that's what we do
what what gets people to the top of the list is really the demand for that business how well reviewed is it what's the location uh what what kind of business what category is it that sort of thing
we look at this as our job is to balance the equation of that win-win between businesses and consumers and we it's not all it's about getting the best deal that the business has ever offered but we our goal isn't to get this to 99% off because then it starts to lose value for for business owners um we found that like the the our average discount I think is 60% um that works well for a lot of businesses
the question will be whether there's really a market for a second tier of of group on clones to see to serve a second tier of businesses and whether that will have sustaining interest for for consumers
the good thing about it is though we have the luxury of picking and choosing the best businesses that we want to work with and we and we make sure that we have enough inventory to serve the best businesses
the biggest problem we have as a business which is What's led to the proliferation of clones is the fact that we have far more demand from business owners than we have Supply we have the self-imposed Restriction that we think is quite important of only offering one deal per day um and in cities like Chicago or San Francisco or New York you know the larger markets we have waiting lists of hundreds of businesses that want to be featured and that's after we've turned away 00s more that didn't meet
staying focused on the long term you know there's a lot of things we could have done to um to cut Corners along the way like with the writing for example pissed off a huge amount of businesses early on because they didn't understand why we did those things that way but the reason we did is because we knew that we wanted to speak to our audience in a way that they that that showed respect to them and our we thought of our audience to people like us we wanted to speak to them like we would want to
focusing on building a product that solves a problem for me as a social recluse that always goes to the same bar the same movie theater um and and trying to create a tool that would nudge me out of the house um and then and then building it in a way that entertains me instead of figuring out if it's going to trying to figure out what uh what nerves the pluck in order to entertain other people I think that's useful um in terms of building a genuine cool product that people want to use
I really think what we've done so far is just the tip of the the iceberg um we could screw it all up but we have a lot of awesome ideas that if we do them right I think could could could make what we're doing now look very similar
we'll continue to expand we'll be in Europe in months
so when that started um I was a graduate student in public policy and i' had the idea um and a fellow in Chicago who's a seral entrepreneur and investor named Eric lovsky i' worked for him in the past and he heard about the idea and called me up in school one day and asked if I wanted to to drop out and turn it into a company and at at that point um I didn't know anything I didn't know what VC was I didn't know what Angel Investors were I didn't consider myself an entrepreneur um but he just sai
I'm over it at this point I mean I I was a musician before I was an entrepreneur and and as a musician you know when I first started seeing these things the kind of I could only think plagiarism um there there's some something offensive about it but apparently it's just the uh the way things work in in this world so you roll with the punches you get used to it and um uh we're we really just try to stay focused on making our product cool and I I don't pay much attention to them anymore
so for us it was an opportunity to get some uh to get some liquidity for the early Founders a little bit more growth capital and uh hopefully bring some some really patient and smart Partners uh into the fold
we were introduced through Jim Brier at Facebook um and and we've I mean since last summer we've just had a line of investors uh at the door and occasionally we decid to talk to some um so so that's how we met them we we liked them they they they were really uh came off as entrepreneurs investors you know people they like to pick two or three category defining Brands a year and get behind them in a big way and kind of leave the entrepreneurs alone to do what they do well
we seem to have found a way to make e-commerce work for local businesses which is always been um something that that people have tried to do and we seem to be doing it so we're going to continue to explore that I I think it can get quite big
we focused on local products where we actually could go out and cut deals that were significantly better than anything else out there
intentionally tried to keep it on the down low until maybe the summer of 2009 when we really started to expand
we launched in Chicago in November 2008 with about 400 subscribers on our mailing list and started to realize that we were on to something I guess in early 2009