

Today’s Stockholders’ Letter  - spathak
http://www.groupon.com/blog/cities/todays-stockholders-letter/

======
dfriedmn
To go against the tide in these comments, this is actually exactly what they
should be doing. They've properly identified the problem (finally), and do
have enormous resources in attacking it. As long as the daily deal product can
hold its own and not bleed money, they're well-suited to build the 'operating
system for local,' an analogy I've been waiting for. They could do some
interesting work in B2B products, vertically targeted/non-discounted/package
offering, and generally use their existing resource base to get people offline
together in new and creative ways.

~~~
sunahsuh
Definitely agree: they have everything in place for this. Having a personal
relationship with that many small business owners around the country is _huge_
and there's so much low-hanging fruit in the "MIS for small biz" space.
There's a lot of startups that are making headway here (Square, etc) but they
don't nearly have the resources (the biggest being the massive sales org) that
Groupon does. As soon as Grpn ships a new product along these lines, they can
call hundreds of thousands of potential customers _that already know the sales
rep on the phone_ and are possibly already paying a competitor for a sub-par
product.

If I were Andrew Mason, I'd be looking to acquire a small-biz focused product
company at this point to accelerate the process and start shipping asap.

(Yes, I'm aware I'm totally armchair CEO-ing here.)

~~~
dfriedmn
Not to mention trying to partner with dating sites and the like to offer
offline inventory to their users - new revenue stream for both parties, and
solves the problem of awkwardly have to choose where you're going and figure
out who's paying...

------
georgespencer
> We improved our GAAP EPS during the year from a loss of $0.48 per share in
> the first quarter of 2011 to a loss of $0.12 per share in the fourth quarter
> of 2011.

Groupon is still accelerating towards demise. It's just now accelerating
slightly slower than it was before.

~~~
joelrunyon
Also, this one > We improved our operating margin from negative 134% to
negative 14% for the full year.

Isn't this stuff supposed to be worked out _before_ you IPO?

~~~
nkohari
Not necessarily. Companies with high enough growth rates just need a line of
sight to break-even to be able to go public. Now, whether you should invest in
such companies is another topic entirely.

~~~
joelrunyon
Does -134% operating margin count as a "line-of-sight to break-even?"

------
mikemarotti
Gotta love the "throw mud at the wall and hope some of it sticks" business
model.

At least they threw enough mud before the IPO to cover up the writing on the
wall.

------
jasonkolb
I really hope they succeed, simply because there are a ton of developers
employed by them in Chicago. If they go under it's going to be bad news for
the local developer ecosystem.

------
xsmasher
Yelp seems to have "local" sewn up for restaurants. Angie's List is a strong
competitor in other categories. The road is not exactly clear for Groupon to
take over local.

------
ljd
So it's a $1.14bn pivot.

Awesome.

