Groublogpon – The Serious Blog of Groupon

2/4/2010, CHICAGO - The revolutionary collective-buying website Groupon already enhances people’s lives by offering a daily deal on the best local goods, services and cultural events. Now we’ll be going one step further – from enhancing someone’s life, to dominating it.

Groupon is proud to announce the LIVE OFF GROUPON challenge. One chosen online applicant (call him or her “The Groupawn”) will be challenged to live exclusively off Groupons for an entire year, blogging regularly about their experiences.

The Groupawn will be required to put their savings in escrow, cut up their credit cards, and surrender the keys to their home and loved ones. They will be stripped of the trappings of routine, as well as their clothing, and released back into the world in a suit made entirely out of Groupons and a few electronic gadgets. If they can successfully live exclusively off of an unlimited supply of Groupons for ONE ENTIRE YEAR they will earn an apology stipend of $100,000. read more »

I’m frequently asked how Groupon chooses which businesses to feature.

Variety is obviously important—part of what makes Groupon fun is the mix of business types and neighborhoods. And of course, we make sure we’re offering the best price out there. But most importantly, we focus on quality. We’re extremely proud of the fact that our customers discover and try new things simply because they’re featured on Groupon. We’ve earned that trust by strictly adhering to rules we set for choosing our merchant partners. Every business we feature goes through a vetting process, when our team of 30 writers, researchers, fact checkers, and editors scour online and offline media for an objective consensus that the business is respectable. read more »

Thanks to all of our friends who continue to send in photos of their experiences redeeming Groupons. Competition is heating up – we received more entries last month than ever before!

Some exciting contest news: now you can win $100 in sweet Groupon credit for your video entries, too. We will pick one video and one photo each month and post the winners here.

This month’s photo winner is Shirley of Washington D.C., taken as she visited the ICE! exhibit at Gaylord National. Even the horse looks cold.

A Groupon Trip to ICE! at Gaylord National, Washington D.C.

Shirley writes:

The entire exhibit was refrigerated at 9 degrees Fahrenheit, but we had so much fun that the temperature didn’t matter. The highlight was going down the slides built of solid ice!

You’ve got to visit our Flickr stream to see our favorite runners-up, including one family’s trip to trapeze class, a man who truly knows how to kill time at work and the best foot photo to grace the internet.

Do you want to win $100? Send your best videos and photos to pictures@groupon.com and don’t forget – entries must include the Groupon certificate!

It was the perfect mix of dancing, libations and the releasing of souls at the Groupon Customer Appreciation Party “The Grouponing,” held last Thursday night at Carnivale Restaurant in Chicago. read more »

We were on the brink of launching our first hyperglobal deal (70% off a panculturally-designed spoon, flashlight, and sword combination guaranteed to solve at least one problem in any country), when our trusty mob of consumers spoke up with a better idea. As usual, we let the mob determine our business model, and so we’ve decided to pull a 540 (a 180 plus extra physical comedy) and instead go hyperlocal.

We begin today in Washington D.C. by expanding our coverage into Northern Virginia and Montgomery County. D.C. subscribers will be able to choose which region they would like to see as their main feature and the other nearby deals will be displayed less prominently in the daily email.

Eventually, we have grand plans to offer nanobiological deals, offering more deals inside your body, but first we we’ll rolling out regions for L.A., New York, Chicago, and some of the other places our largest consumer mobs call home. Once more areas are available in your city, you’ll be able to change your primary region at any time. With unbeatable deals even closer to home and multiple features in neighboring areas, Groupon will save you money on local activities and on the gas it takes to get there. That’s why we’ve offered celebrity Matthew McConnaughey to recite our new hyperlocal tagline “Groupon hyperlocal deals will save the economy, the environment, and you!” in an upcoming hyperlocal television commercial to air in Northern Virginia and Montgomery County as soon as McConnaughey can master the hyperlocal accents of those respected regions.

We’re extremely proud to be nominated for the Crunchie for Best Internet Application. Seriously, after this, who could ever say that advertising doesn’t work?

For those who aren’t familiar, the Best Internet Application Crunchie is like winning a Nobel Prize and an Oscar and a MacArthur Genius Grant all at once—unless we don’t win, in which case it’s a meaningless, patronizing, and barbaric trivialization of our craft and whoever does win should refuse it in a gesture of solidarity to fellow entrepreneurs.

I think what makes me most proud is the quality of our fellow nominees. In particular, Yelp, whose peer reviews are part of the foundation that makes Groupon possible. But don’t worry, loyal Groupon customers: our respect for these people won’t stop us from slandering them in yet another shameless and futile quest for victory.

So I’m not going to ask you to vote for us because I don’t believe people should try to do things unless success is absolutely certain, but, you know, there’s the link back there.

We’ll be at the ceremony in San Francisco next Friday so we can lose in person and experience the disappointment which is inevitable despite our extensive emotional and rational preparation. So please, if you see me, come by and say something disparaging about Animoto, Dropbox, MOG All Access, Posterous, or Yelp.

Every year since 1978, we here at Groupon have used New Years as the impetus to find solutions to address our several, numerous shortcomings. When these solutions fail, we try them again as REsolutions. Now, for the first time, Groupon wants to reward you for sticking to your resolutions. Groupon’s New Years Resolution week, December 28th – January 3rd, will feature deals to help you stick to your goals, like personal training sessions to help you get in shape, salon deals to give you a new look, and meal delivery programs to help you spend more time with your family and more time with meal delivery men.

“Wait, but I want $10 dollars,” you say – well Groupon’s Resolution week has got you covered. Purchase any two deals during that week and we’ll reward you with $10 in Groupon Bucks, the only private currency that can be used towards the purchase of any Groupon and is accepted as cash by helicopter pilots all over the United States.

In addition to making your own life better, Groupon is partnering with the Children’s Miracle Network to help our customers improve the lives of others, as well. Visitors to Groupon can donate to the Children’s Miracle Network through their city’s home page so that their donations stay local and do not help fund secret vampire cities, like Tucson, or Anchorage, where the yetis have firmly taken over. Let Groupon help you start 2010 off right with great deals, charitable donations, and free money.

We here at Groupon High Command (located deep below downtown Chicago) are pleased to announce that we’ve recently sold our one millionth Groupon – that’s way more than 100, which is another popular number. Our millionth customer was Heather Baker of Denver, Colorado, who purchased a gourmet walking tour. To thank her, we’ll be sending her a link to this blog post.

To put our one millionth Groupon sold in perspective, it helps to understand just how big that number is. Sure, we could give you a bunch of fancy equations to show off how smart we are, but instead: If you laid all one million Groupons across the equator and then counted them, before long, you’d get to Quito, the capital of Ecuador – that’s a lot of numbers! We’d like to sincerely thank Heather and everyone else who’s purchased a Groupon for helping us reach this milestone. Each Groupon sold gets us closer to our real goal: to build a treehouse with a light-switch for the ten-year version of myself back in 1991.

This post is to acknowledge hereby the truth of the fact that Groupon has raised a bunch of money. It feels like it’s taken ages, but my original fake plan is progressing swimmingly.

So what are we going to do with the money?

• Hire a full-time conductor so we can nail the four part harmony on next year’s Christmas card
• Invest in fabricating videos that are even more slanderous than this one so we actually win some awards next year
• Donate more money to Groupon Addiction Awareness (are you among us? Call our automated hotline for help: (312) 673-1515)
• New commercials will have more fireworks
• Relocate our 120 employees to San Francisco
• Rent a monkey for the 40 million Americans currently going without
• Hiring people (seriously!)