Just sticking to restaurants, how many of those restaurants are potential customers for the groupon product as it exists today, let alone repeat customers?
Off the top of my head, I'd say the top 10-15% of restaurants would have no interest in trying Groupon because it cheapens their brand.
Then account for chains who don't really need Groupon's reach to offer such promotions (or rather will find it more cost effective to do something like this themselves).
As for the rest of the restaurants, once the novelty of groupon wears off, how often will they come back to give the general public 50% (actually close to 75% off, because Groupon takes half the cut) off meals ?
The Groupon Now idea is a bit more interesting but I think it's something that's going to be best captured by a less physical method of scaling (i.e. not emplying 4000 sales people)
Disclaimer: I'm currently working for a startup in the restaurant space though it does not have any element(s) of a daily deals/groupon clone.
Restaurants also have unused tables and surplus food. Is there another reason why they are not great candidates for deals? Because the reasoning above does not seem sound.
Selling food is a low margin business because food are high. Whereas other businesses with excess capacity and most of the costs are operational don't have these problems
Off the top of my head, I'd say the top 10-15% of restaurants would have no interest in trying Groupon because it cheapens their brand. Then account for chains who don't really need Groupon's reach to offer such promotions (or rather will find it more cost effective to do something like this themselves).
As for the rest of the restaurants, once the novelty of groupon wears off, how often will they come back to give the general public 50% (actually close to 75% off, because Groupon takes half the cut) off meals ?
The Groupon Now idea is a bit more interesting but I think it's something that's going to be best captured by a less physical method of scaling (i.e. not emplying 4000 sales people)
Disclaimer: I'm currently working for a startup in the restaurant space though it does not have any element(s) of a daily deals/groupon clone.