GroupTabs offers location based group deals. As soon as enough people check-in, the deal unlocks, and everyone gets the deal.<p>www.GroupTabs.com<p>We launched last week. Our first two deals have already gone down, and our third deal is set for tomorrow night.<p>We combine the popularity of discounted group deals with location based services. Our goal is to incentivize the many people with smartphones who have never heard of foursquare/Gowalla/etc (at least until last week's Facebook Places announcement) to try out checking in. We are hooked up to Twitter/4sq API already. Gowalla is next. Facebook Places we will do as soon as they unlock Write access.<p>We went non-native via gtb.me to hit as many phones as possible on launch. Android/BBerry apps are almost ready for public beta. iPhone works based non-natively, ironically, so it comes last.<p>...And, to address what is probably the first question, our deals our small, so they are designed to 'tip' rather quickly. And we require that participating merchants have some special going on until our deal unlocks, so you are rewarded just for showing up, even in the event the deal doesn't tip.<p>Advice that we can offer from our launch: This has been said a lot of times, but it should be said again. Read http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios/ We read it adozen or so times. If you are launching a startup you need to read it. Pledi's advice is invaluable. We were covered by VentureBeat (http://bit.ly/a8s2Ad), Mashable (http://bit.ly/9alqKF) and ReadWriteWeb (http://bit.ly/9UmAjH) among others before we even launched.
Pretty neat idea, and I commend you guys for going up against Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter who are sure to provide the exact same functionality at some point.<p>A few things I noticed right away:<p>1. I can't tell what city you're servicing right away, I had to search for the tiny address at the bottom of your homepage (NY I take it). You should make it very obvious where you're targeting right now. Maybe put the address in the hero section where you have the other event details, and perhaps provide an embedded google map too.<p>2. This is a minor design issue, but your main logo pushes your hero section down almost 200px. I would tighten things up a bit, but that's just me.<p>3. Design again: get a good designer to help you with your typography. If you're DIYing your design, look into grid systems, your alignments are headache inducing.<p>Where is your revenue coming from? Are the venues paying a fee for the potential of foot traffic?<p>Also, what would stop me from creating a similar service which simply queried Foursqure, Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, etc. for location info and providing deals based on how many people checked in? It would essentially just be a deals site that functions on check-in services: you advertise a deal, you negotiate with the venue, and all people need to do is show that they checked in with one of those services.<p>Good work so far, though!
May want to change the name. GroupTabs sounds like everyone is paying together (are they?).<p>If we are just unlocking deals by having enough people show up - its certainly a chicken or egg problem determining if the people go. What happens if not enough people show up? They get screwed out of the deal that they went to a specific place solely for. The appeal for business owners is to get people to come, right? This means that the ones you are attracting are by virtue not customers otherwise. This is tricky and may require pre-organization from the users to make sure enough people show up to unlock the deal.
Yeah, "GroupTabs" doesn't imply anything related to what you do IMO. I agree that a name change is a priority.<p>Also, how is it different from Groupon?