Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Why is Groupon being valued at $15 Billion ?

I have tried to understand what is Groupon's secret sauce. What is the big fascination with a company that offers 50% off door crasher sales using the internet to advertise the deal.

A Groupon event today is not a true win-win for the merchant as a merchant only gets 25% of the original price after they give 50% to the buyer and 25% to Groupon. No Merchant! - No Groupon!

The Chinese invented the groupon model and China now has over five thousand groupon clones. The numbers are growing at a phenomenal rate in the rest of the world as well. So what is Groupon's secret sauce? I don't get it. Anyone that wants to invest $300 in a groupon clone site can start a groupon clone today.

Again, I ask what is the secret sauce?

I see a lot of the same things happening around Groupon that happened ten years and resulted in the Web 1.0 dot com crash. It appears that the business principles don't need to make sense because the personal data that has been gathered is the value that drives the valuation. Future revenues generated from the selling of the subscriber's personal data?

Is it the access to the personal data that is driving the $15 billion valuation? Is this why the investors want to invest in Groupon and help with the IPO because they will have access to 40 million + subscriber's data. Why does Facebook have such a high valuation? It seems today that valuation today for the social companies is based on the number of subscriber e-mail addresses and personal data and not necessarily the actual benefit of the program to the subscribers.

For additional reading, please visit the blog post by Sidney Hill.