This article is more about if you were in Groupon's shoes could you have done the following...<p>Yes. I think I could build my own Groupon... in fact hundreds of people have and many are quite profitable.<p>Could I build it to scale? Could I build a sustainable business that will be there for the long haul or be significant enough to be acquired? Could I find an untapped niche that the group buying biz model could exploit?<p>The writer doesn't even list many accomplishments and the barriers to entry that Groupon has created (besides capital and what access to capital buys you i.e. PR, buying competitors, buying super bowl ads.<p>He should have said... Could you compete against Groupon's salesforce? Could you compete with their ever decreasing cost of customer acquisition? Could you compete with their high gross margins while you are forced to cut your margins to compete?
Most of those people are idiots. Even if you don't take into account everything listed in that post, considering you need enough people to tip a deal for it to work is hard enough. In the early stages of building a Groupon clone, the toughest challenge is getting enough people on board day 1 to tip a deal. If you don't get enough people and the deal doesn't tip, you already suck. Most people who aren't in the marketing world don't realize how difficult this is and I'm sure this is at the top of the list for many of the 2000+ Groupon clones as to why they fail. The ones that succeed are those lucky enough to get enough users early on to tip onto the next stage. But even then there are more challenges than merely how "simple" an idea Groupon is. And Groupon isn't the only exception. Every startup has a list of challenges people on the outside can only begin to imagine.
Keep in mind that the concept of Groupon not just need a group of people to tip the deal but also would need a "sustained effort" of a group of a people behind the scenes to get the interestingness of Groupon going. If you think about it, it's not that easy of a part to find those interesting local deals and set constraints on top of it and on and on...<p>To me, that's one reason all these clones fail miserably.
'Put together a business plan to raise the $1million needed to take it from an idea in your head to an actual business'. How would you possibly spend $1M simply getting a Groupon clone started?