The Wall Street Journal’s Bari Weiss spent some time with Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason and wrote a flattering profile on the company.
Two key takeaways for all social marketers and entrepreneurs:
1. Build a business model, an organizational culture, and customer relationships — in other words, a brand — around one clear, essential organizing principle. For Apple, one could easily say that the company stands for revolutionary design. I was impressed by how well Andrew Mason was able to articulate what Groupon was fundamentally about at such an early stage: surprise. It’s the sign of a visionary leader.
Irreverence is part of daily life in the downtown office. Last Wednesday, someone brought a monkey dressed in a Santa suit. This past summer, Mr. Mason paid a male actor to strut around the office in a tutu for a week—totally mute. Less outrageously, the company has no dress code and no vacation policy, which Mr. Mason credits to Netflix.
“The way people think about jobs, the nine to five . . . it’s the same routine over and over again,” he says. “Groupon as a company—it’s built into the business model—is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We’ve carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.”
2. Groupon started — and failed — as a social action platform. It was a big idea, but it was too big, too abstract, too idealistic. Groupon caught fire once it focused on satisfying a basic “selfish” need that people already had (to save money on things they want to buy) in a social way. Because it has become a powerful business platform that enables “collective buying power” among millions of users, Groupon can now be used as a powerful change-making platform. In Andrew Mason’s words, “the world-changing ends up being a side-effect.” Groupon’s $15 for a $25 Kiva loan deal was a notable example of its potential to be a force for good.
Like so many other successful tech ventures, Groupon grew out of an earlier, less successful idea. ThePoint.org was a website for organizing campaigns like protests or fund-raising drives. And, like Groupon, it was built around the tipping point concept: The campaign was only carried out if enough people committed.
But ThePoint never took off. “The big problem with ThePoint is that it’s this huge, abstract idea. You can use this platform to do anything from boycotting a multinational company to getting 20% off a subscription to the Economist,” says Mr. Mason, who dropped out of the University of Chicago’s master’s program in public policy to build ThePoint with $1 million investment from Eric Lefkofsky, a former boss and serial investor who later helped found Groupon.
One lesson Mr. Mason learned is that for a site to be successful, it needs to be simple and easy to use. ThePoint, says Mr. Mason “was overly complex and we needed to pick . . . one application of the larger abstract idea and execute it really, really well.”
Another was a broader lesson about the nature of do-gooder ventures. “One of the things I realized . . . is how few success stories there are in websites or products or businesses that exist primarily for an altruistic purpose. Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that. Whether its Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or Twitter, all those things have made the world better by the way that they allow people to share information. But that’s not why they were created. It was so they could share pictures and videos of scantily clad women or kittens or whatever. And Groupon’s the same way. And it caught me by surprise.”
Full article here.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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