How to launch a GroupOn clone: Groupy Deals

A few of us* founded Groupy Deals earlier this year, and we went live over Queens Birthday weekend. It’s going really well.

Check out the GroupyDeals business site as well.

*Groupy Deals was founded by Scott Kitney, along with Andrew Hunt, Fay French and myself.

Groupy Deals is following in the footsteps of Groupon – a US business that has managed to dominate the US market for daily service-oriented deals. They also managed to raise US$135m in 3rd round funding at a valuation of $1.35 billion – a feat which garnered a lot of global attention.

Alas we are not alone.

So it’s no surprise that we were not alone in our idea to copy Groupon. Our competitors include DailyDo – an Auckland based crowd, DailyOffer – another Auckland crowd, and APN/Bradley Media <edited – thanks Shane>  backed Groupdeal, which is yet to launch. We are quite disappointed with that last, err, group, as our business name of Groupy Deals Limited and our business site (GroupyDeals.com) are very similar to their proposed trading name. It was close, but we were first, and we’ve asked them to change. <update2 – they have – thanks Shane and the team.>

Then there are the one day sale sites. First-in was the first one I found a while back, but check out TheSniff and LoveOneDaySales for the lengthy list of sites now.

We think we are going well. Since launching 2 weeks ago we have had some cool deals, and sold 190 coupons for services. The businesses love it as they get new customers to try their services, and customers love getting great deals – and trying those new services.

Our next step is to launch in Auckland and other cities. If you’d like to help, and you can sell, then please get in touch.

So what are the secrets of starting a GroupOn clone?

Well – you need great deals, a good number of fans that are looking for great deals, and a simple to use website.

We have great deals in Wellington, found by our own super sales person – Fay French. We integrate with Facebook well, have our own Facenook pages, such as WellingtonGroupy, ability to like a deal and good conversations. We have also given away a bunch of credit to people referring friends – payable when those friends also buy a deal.

Our website was build by Scott, who as part of the Trade Me dev team just gets this stuff. He’s also spent time at Cannla and Winnla, and gets how to develop for Facebook.

In the spirit of open competition, and fairness, here is the site along with some annotations. Please – if you are a competitor I am sure you can do it better your way. Really ;-)

Never forget to user test

Microsoft just keeps getting it wrong on usability.

Here what happened when I updated Microsoft Office on the Mac this evening with the latest fixes.

After running the update program (top, background), it downloaded and ran the updater itself (bottom). That program then popped up an error message telling me to close the first program.

Rather than making me feel as if I have done something wrong, Microsoft’s updater should have automatically closed the first program and got on with it.
Then I would not have been bothered to take a screen shot and write a blog post.
The moral of the story is to never forget to user test, whether you have millions of customers or just a few.

Place function before fashion – Mons Royale

Via Hazel Philips at NBR I read about local company Mons Royale – who make merino underwear aimed at boarders. Rather tellingly the title of the article was Fashion before Function.

The clothing range is a good idea – practical merino underclothing with a bit of colour and splash, along with stying that appeals (hopefully) to their target market. I’m a huge fan of merino myself for skiing and motorcycling in the cold, and it’s good to see a number of Kiwi competitors to the fantastic Icebreaker emerge.

Hazels’ article made me think about checking out and perhaps even buying some of their products, but the website made me stop that process.

Indeed the Mons Royale website is appalling – placing function well south of fashion. Even then the website design fashion displayed is dubious at best.

In the above screenshot the only obvious thing to do is to click the yellow “2010 range” tag. So I did.

Then it got tricky:

I have no idea what this is, and what I am meant to do. Most importantly I cannot see the cool gear, just a guy holding a towel or something. I eventually worked out that this was some sort of flash based book, and that I was meant to click on the pages on the bottom.

I did:

It looks cool. But that “How do I buy” phrase in red was put there by me out of frustration. There is absolutely no way to buy a garment from this flash monstrosity.  There is also no indication of price, and not even a link back to the home page. Seriously – try to find a link to the home page.

So I altered the url and went back to the home page. Eventually I discovered this:

This being the second yellow tag – “where to find it” which only becomes visible on mouse-over. It’s as if the designers have decided that they don’t really want to sell the products. And the linked Where to Find It page backed that up.

After looking for a while at the bland page (why not put the store logos there?) I noticed that three stores had “Shop online here” tags, so I clicked through. The bottom one was false as it was not an online store. The middle one yielded a home page from where I eventually navigated to this page:

The Mons Royale gear looks rather bland and certainly does not capture the flavour of the intended brand and design. The range is forgettable in this site, and the site itself is not going to drive me to buy.

But the top online store, gnomes.co.nz, was worst for Mons Royale . Again I had to navigate to the products from the home page, and again the gear was buried inside the site. However this time there were no product photos at all:

The site gave me no reason to buy, so I left.

In summary Mons Royale appears to have some nice gear, but has not asserted control of their customer experience. This is difficult to do for a start-up placing products into retail stores, but it is imperative to do it right online. Getting it right online gives full margin sales, and also makes it easy to connect with early adopters throughout the country and world. It’s these customers that will be come the evangelists for the products, and so it’s important to make things easy for them.

So what should Mons Royale do? Well I feel they need to get the basics right, so here are three quick wins:

  1. Transform the flash-book site into HTML – use WordPress or similar. Keep the glossy photos and big design, but make it easy to use and make the links you want people to click obvious.
  2. Create a simple e-commerce site, and drive the visitors from browsing to buying. Put big buy-now tags on every page.  Control the process so that customers get the branding feel that you want. Use WordPress or similar, and ask one of the many excellent home-grown web companies to do it for you – someone with a track record in local ecommerce.
  3. Over-deliver and continue to improve: track what customers are doing on the site, and work to improve sales per visitor. When you do sell a product then wrap it distinctively, send it promptly and engage them post-sale. Over-deliver to your first customers as they are the ones that will spread the word.

It looks to be a good product range – I hope the founders can get this right.

Brass Monkey 2010

It’s the first frost, and ski season starts tomorrow (at Coronet Peak), so clearly it’s Brass Monkey time. Here’s the first batch of photos, sent while sitting in the sun on a farm near Fairlie during a cat-dog stand-off.

Qantas media awards for blogging

I entered the best blog category for the Qantas media awards and didn’t make the finals. Here were the four posts I put up, with apologies to Russell Brown, Telecom XT and NBR for opening old wounds.

Telecom XT Outage – Unacceptable

Why I don’t read Public Address

NBR’s performance since the subscription wall was built

How to twitter if you are a corporation

I had always assumed that Kiwiblog would run away with the award, so am a bit sad that Dave Farrar’s site did not even make the finals. Neither did Russell Brown’s Public Address, and each of these should be perennial contenders for the award.

I didn’t expect to make it – and indeed I may have been DQ’d, either because I judged another online category or as I was insufficiently news focused.

The easier question is whether or not Kiwiblog should be there as I fully expected. There are three possible reasons for Kiwiblog not to make it: application, disqualification, or judging.

The first, and I hope most probable cause, for Kiwiblog’s absence from the finalists is that Kiwiblog did not apply for the Qantas awards. While from a judge’s perspective this is frustrating as the universe of potential award recipients is defined, it also avoids the ‘black hole’ of endless numbers of possible award winners for the judges. So if Dave chose not to compete, then sobeit.

The second possible cause is that the judge decided that Kiwiblog did not qualify under the rules. The site may have been deemed by the judge not to have met the “news related” requrements for a Qantas award, or the judge may have considered blogs as personal journals rather than harder news and opinion sites. The guidance given to judges on this was scanty, and so the judge was within his or her right to determine eligibility.

The third possible cause is that Kiwiblog was deemed by the judge to be inferior to the three finalists. That depends in part on the criteria used by the judge (these were not made clear to judges) and by the judge’s opinion.

Most likely, and by far, is the first.

The Qantas awards are the premier journalism award, and to be Highly Commended or to win an award is an honour. The online categories are still in their infancy, so I expect the quality and quantity of submissions to grow each year. So next year let’s make sure that we get as many applications as possible.

The new interest.co.nz – review

It’s early days, but the team at interest.co.nz must be happy that their new site is now up and running. It’s running on a much better platform so they should be able to tweak it a lot in response to readers.

And tweak they will need to do. Sadly for me the site has taken a giant leap backwards. I enjoyed reading the blog, but now all that lovely content seems to be buried and scattered. Buried in that only the first sentence of an article is directly visible, and scattered in that the content is spread amongst the sections. The scattering shows up interest’s problem – their daily content for each area is thin, while their content itself is rich. So I feel the news site approach is not the best for them. A good case study is Kiwiblog, which releases about the same (and this is a wild guess) number of articles each day.

I like the tagline for interest.co.nz -“helping you make financial decisions”, but the site could do so much more to do so. If I go to, say, the insurance section, then I want to see a combination of general information, widgets that help me select a provider and, say, a mother-in-law guide to insurance clauses. The possibilities are endless.

So this review in pictures is pretty critical – sorry Bernard – but the real work starts now, with constant improvements promised. I’m looking forward to where it is going.

<update – pictures now click through to larger versions>

The Home page leaves me confused to interest.co.nz’s purpose.

News. This was quite disappointing, and where I expected the blog content to be. If I want short snippets of news then I’ll go to Stuff or NZHerald. I come to interest.co.nz for more insights, which is why I’d like to see the words.

Property seemed vacant

Borrowing is all about what could be done in the future

As is saving.

So many obscure terms – I wonder what they mean?

Interest.co.nz should be the definitive guide to NZ financial institutions. It’s not (yet).

Insurance

So, Lingopal, you have 208,000 search responses

I was happy to see Lingopal returned 208,000 responses on Google. That’s pretty good right?

Well – it is, but it’s pretty humbling when compared to some other products.

I expected we’d be a lot smaller than “Sex”, “drugs” and “rock and roll”, and “Avatar” and “Apple” had great publicity. But “iPad”, which  didn’t even exist as a brand before this year, is approaching the popularity of drugs. Meanwhile Avatar and the iPhone are becoming almost as popular as sex.

So we have a long way to go.

Regardless – the reason for this post is to announce that we released 45 new iPhone applications in the Lingopal range – and they are all free. They are Lite versions of the 44 target language apps, along the Lingopal 44 (everything) application.

Try them out.

Welcome to Cadimage

I’ve just joined the board of directors for Cadimage, joining majority owners Campbell Yule and Tracey Gatland. Actually – there are three companies involved but one smart team.

Cadimage subsidiary Graphisoft NZ resells and supports ArchiCAD, which is the most popular CAD program used by architects here. It is pretty cool.
archcad

Graphisoft supports the industry in NZ in a few ways – but the one I like the most is the annual sponsorship of the New Zealand Institute of Architects Student Design Award. The winner last year, Simon Harrison, apparently designed a ‘neighbourly high-rise building’, putting urban spaces into the building itself. The runners up moved out of their flats into an old gallery to complete their installation – crazy stuff. It’s a great award, and the finalists and winners also send a fantastic signal to employers in what are pretty tough times for new graduates.

CAD has certainly come a long way since I played with a brand new program called Autocad on an IBM AT back in the day. That computer had a new fangled thing (for PCs) called a hard disk drive. Today the programs are immensely powerful and probably dangerous in the hands of someone like me.

The latest release of Archicad, for example, is all about better collaboration between architects and with engineers. It lets engineers use their program of choice, such as rival Autocad’s Revit Structure, to work on Archicad projects. The engineers make sure the buildings stay up – while the architects make sure we actually want to buy and use them. (Clearly I’ve already gained a deep understanding of this industry.)

The bit I’m excited about is that Cadimage develop and sell worldwide a range of add-on tools for Archicad – these are included free if you buy in NZ.
tools
The tools help architects be more productive by making it easy to do things like extrude shapes, build doors and windows and annotate their work. Cadimage sells them to a growing list of customers across the world, building from a vibrant Archicad community. Our aim is to help architects the world over to focus on delivering their vision using the easiest and best tools around.

It’s great to join an already successful company, and I am looking forward to understanding the business more and helping them with the challenges of growth.

I’m on a learning curve, but rest assured I won’t be producing any architectural drawings any time soon. Or later.

NZ Government’s $321m for technology fails to help

I’ll use three companies where I have equity and active involvement in to critique the announced $321m new funding for Research Science and Technology in business. In short the program will help none of the 10 or so NZ companies that I am involved with.

While it may work for larger companies this program does not recognise the significant role of tiny companies in driving research and in commercialising technology.

MyTours is a startup founded by Glen Barnes (@barnaclebarnes). We have spent a number of months developing our signature product, which allows museums, city councils and tour guides (and anyone else) to create their own tour iPhone application. You can create your own right now, or check out the Wellington City Council Welly Walks application.

Pacific Fibre is a much larger undertaking, where we are raising USD$500m, selling capacity and engaging with vendors to try to build and operate a 5.12 Tbit/sec cable connecting Australia and NZ with the USA. We will have no revenue until the cable is lit in 2013.

Texmate is an R&D driven company that specialises in developing control systems that go into other companies products. Our revenue is between $2m and $3m each year, and we spend over 10% of our revenue on pure R&D. We also perform bespoke design and contract manufacturing for a growing and very interesting client base.

None of these companies will qualify for any help under the Government’s new funding.

MyTours has no revenue, and so despite all of our efforts being R&D driven we simply do not qualify. There used to be a program called Enterprise Development Grants for Market Development, which would have supported our current efforts to sell at Museum conferences and the like, but this was canceled as NZTE was directed to focus on bigger companies.

Pacific Fibre has no revenue, and nor are we conducting any R&D. The cable will of course use new technology, but that technology is provided by the vendors, and we will select vendors partially based on that. Pacific Fibre will help Research, Science and Technology, but with no R&D going on there is as yet no case for these sorts of funds.

Texmate is just too small – failing to make the $3m threshold although our over 10% of R&D spend easily exceeds the 5% x $3m minimum. We spend more on R&D than qualifying firms will need to, and indeed spent a lot more on R&D in the past, but had to reduce spend and staff after we lost some NZTE funding. However at, say, $250,000 spend the maximum we would get under this program would be 20% of that, or $50,000. That’s a good amount of money, but much less than we need to employ an extra person, and pretty small compared to the pain of the process.

However that process is yet to be defined, and we could yet be surprised. We’ll pass the revenue threshold pretty soon given our recent growth:

There will be a short process to assess applications and award funding. Successful applicants will receive funding for a period of three years which should provide them with certainty around the level of support for their R&D investments.

The three year period is interesting, but this flies or dies on the bureaucracy required to obtain and retain the grant.


Successful applicants will be able to manage the ways in which the grants are used, provided they meet certain conditions.
The launch of the grants is planned for October 2010. More information on how the grants will work will be available closer to that time.

The devil will lie in the details on this one – I’d resist going for any money that has strings attached that allow the Government to direct whether to invest in one kind of research over another.

There is also a voucher program to match university talent with firms that do not have research capability, which is not useful in any of these situations.

My stock answer, I’m afraid to say, is to distort the tax system, and to allow benefits of some kind for R&D expenditure.

WSJ Upsell – Go Pro now

A very clever move by WSJ.com, who have introduced a way to eek more money out of subscribers.

It’s WSJ Professional Edition – and which professional cannot resist having their employer pay the $25 extra per month to get these extras:

Frankly those extras should be included with the WSJ subscription, and this is simply a way to price discriminate. But I confess an admiration for the way the upsell works. Included is a more powerful search feature, which covers multiple sources – some that are also subscription based.

a better company search..

and – well that’s about it. This is a new industry page, but really there is not much here that shouldn’t be here already.

The clever thing is that the WSJ is the business paper of record, and many readers will feel obliged to upgrade. It’s easy for those readers to spend their company’s money, but still totally optional so that readers like myself will not feel too left out.

So now there are 3 levels of price – free for a few articles, $155 for online only subscribers and an extra $300 per year to make $455 for Pro subscribers.

So – will other online media move to offer readers to Go Pro? Who knows – but the industry will watch eagerly.

I do think it is important that the WSJ is adding functionality without anything taking away from ordinary subscribers (I hope). It’s also good that the WSJ has something valuable to sell and readers that need no excuse to spend more money.

How not to survey social media, and how to recover

You want to run a survey on social media – so you ask give StopPress a chance to ask their readers for questions.

Unfortunately the commentators have a different take on your great idea – and accuse you of firstly not being social media experts and secondly of being lazy. It doesn’t help that you don’t even have a form or forum on your own site for people to use, and not did you even bother to write a blog post on your own site to gather responses. It really doesn’t help that have blog posts titled “In social media just like in PR, there’s no such thing as bad publicity” (there is) and “Social media marketing is not easy?!?!.”

It’s a bad situation made worse by the comments that appear in the StopPress article. Many of the people commenting really know what they are talking about, and as yet there has been no response from the Fast Forward agency who are doing the survey. Let’s have a quick look at some of the fall out and then ask – how could this be done better?

First the very amusing Batman used wonder-tonic to change the website to look like this. It was my first impression of FastForward:

Then some other commentators asked some questions – like Gerry Kookmeyer:

“Stoppress is an obvious vehicle to elicit response to marketing related surveys but I can’t believe a company that claims to be an expert in social media is actually asking us to come up with the questions. Is this a case of stupidity or laziness?”

and Dave didn’t like self-professed experts

“Unless you can show us REAL case studies of your own work – please don’t call yourselves experts.

We’ve all had enough of the direct marketers, copywriters, media planners and journos who setup a Twitter and become a ‘guru’.”

and Courtney Lambert (@cjlambert)

“I would also like readers to turn up to my work, do my job for me, and I get paid. In the spirit of sharing, I’ll tell you how I spent the money. Top five people ‘doing my job for me” get to do my job for me!”

There is plenty more – read the comments yourself.

I checked out the real Fast Forward site as well. The site was very basic and included a few charts – like this one, which has a catchy name:

The page on Social Media tools was out of date – with Bebo rating a mention, Twitter (100m users, 70k applications, over 1 billion tweets/month) getting short thrift and the largely irrelevant Second Life (maximum ever online 38,000, members 18m) gets good airplay.  It’s hard to stay on top of social media as it moves so fast, but if you are going public to the community then you do need to make sure you are pitch perfect.

How to do it better

Fast Forward should have done three things – and still can:

1: Get out there and engage with the comment, twitter and blog streams. Try to turn the conversation around and let people understand that this is a genuine opportunity that can benefit them, that you are seeking help from experts and that you are not professing to know it all as they portray. Help them understand that they can take advantage of the free survey and get their questions in.

2: Create a comprehensive blog post on the Fast Forward blog site, and explain the survey goals, the sampling method, the target groups who will be surveyed, the questions that are currently in the instrument and how the results will be presented. Ask for feedback on the existing question set and the whole approach, and change it continuously in response. Post comments over at StopPress and other forums referring to the post.

3: Update and upgrade the Fast Forward site, firstly systematically and quickly bringing the content up to date. Fix the basic usability stuff – like linking to the main site from the blog – or just replace the entire site with a WordPress.com blog in the meantime, using pages for the main site (that’s all it is) and so forth. Get a designer to help you update the look and feel, or at least use a standard WordPress template, like Vigilance which you used for your blog. Progressively add functionality that will let you engage your clients and the community in a conversation, and above all keep the site up to date.

Copyright Bill submission

I just made a submission to the Select Committee reviewing the Copyright Amendment Bill. You can too.

Here it is:

The bill is much improved from previous versions, and I thank the committee for that.

Like the other co-founders of Pacific Fibre I was driven to start the project by a sense of frustration at the digital divide between New Zealand and the rest of the world. I believe we will be left behind until we live in a country where high speed uncapped data, wireless or wired, is a fact of life, where internet access is pervasive and all of our devices are connected continuously. We seek to help NZ get to this vision. It is therefore frustrating to see a bill that drives us in the other direction.

(I write for myself not for Pacific Fibre in this submission)

I wish to object to the concept of disconnection being a reasonable penalty.

Internet access is increasingly a basic utility for everyone. The internet generation grew up knowing that is is always there, and even I, over 40, cannot function in society or work without it.

I use my home internet connection almost constantly for work and leisure, including for delivery of media such as television and movies.

I spend more time using internet telephony and video services than I do my cell phone, and have not connected a home telephone for years.

While it can be difficult to keep up with the latest social networking craze, it is important that everyone has access to these sites so that they can remain a part of their society. This is particularly true for younger people, who are those most likely to be affected by disconnection.

In short disconnection removes the right to work, to communicate with friends, to participate in society and even to make online submissions. It is also ineffective as a deterrent for the biggest offenders, who will use relatively simple methods to disguise their behaviour.

At worst disconnection may even bring a risk of accidental death – perhaps someone in trouble who has no other means of communicating, or someone who requires urgent access to medical information, or simply an alarm system that fails to operate.

I do believe that we should have a very tough penalty for the worst offenders – and if removal from society is to be that penalty, then let us use prisons for doing so. The punishment should relate to the crime.

Many thanks for the opportunity to submit on this bill. I would welcome the opportunity to appear before the committee.

Lance Wiggs

Wellington

Unleash those cabinets please

A surprising puff piece from Chris Keall in the NBR sings the praises of Telecom’s Chorus Division’s cabinet roll out:

The Telecom division is now half way through its government-mandated project to roll-out 3600 roadside fibre optic cable cabinets around neighborhoods nationwide. Each shortens the distance that data has to travel over an older copper line on its way to a phone exchange.

The aim is to give 80% of New Zealanders access to a 10Mbit/s to 20Mbit/s internet connection by the end of 2011.

Costing north of $1 billion, it’s the largest telecommunications infrastructure project currently under way across Australia or New Zealand.

While it’s great that Telecom are spending money on infrastructure my understanding was that cabinetisation was less than optimal.

I was cabinetised recently – I found out when my internet disappeared and connected that event with the chap playing with wires in a box down the road.

To reconnect I needed to downgrade from naked ADSL 2.0 (no phone number required) to an ADSL 1.0 product which required that I start paying for a telephone number. I have yet to plug in a phone, and resent paying the extra dollars each month.

I’m a decent distance from the exchange and as xDSL degrades over distance the cabinet process worked, and my average connection speeds went up.  I now get 12 MBPS from my house to to the local Wellington server – so thanks Chorus.

But how good it would be if I was able to use an Orcon ADSL 2.0 connection, and not have to pay for a phone line?

So Chris – I have a couple of questions – maybe you can answer them, or maybe Telecom and Chorus can next time you chat:

  • As I understand my ISP, Orcon, cannot put their own ADSL 2.0 (or VDSL for that matter) inside the Chorus cabinet – is that right? (I actually don’t know)
  • Indeed are competitors able to get unfettered access to these cabinets?
  • Will those cabinets support delivering fibre to the premise? I’d really like really fast two way connectivity.
  • Was this really a government mandate as the article says – or just Telecom’s way of delivering to a broadband mandate?
  • Can anyone sign up to a Telecom service without committing to a 2 year contract?