One of the questions I am most often asked these days is why Half Off Depot acquired CrowdSavings. It's a fair question. To many the skyrocketing deals business now feels like a fading shooting star.
The answer is really quite simple. As Sarah Lacy recently wrote:
We will see another company that seeks to become a modern Web-based customer acquisition engine for small businesses, likely relying on discounts and coupons. It may look a lot like Groupon — if it’s close, it’ll be met with wild derision. But at some point, someone doing this will succeed. And give it a few years, but people will try again. The need is just too big and Groupon’s execution was too obviously flawed.
The transaction gives us the scale to be a sustainable independent local marketing oriented company that is just a bit below all the noise of Groupon/LivingSocial and the exit requirements of their capital structure.
We are large enough to have staying power and still nimble enough to effectively pivot.
We have the flexibility to create offers that stand out for consumers and have uncovered other ways to drive online acquisition for local businesses.
We can make money beyond the initial offer to our consumers, from our core customer, the merchant.
We are moving beyond merely online couponing to post couponing customer retention.
We are giving our merchant partners the ability to drive incremental revenue.
We execute on these basic premises we succeed. It is all about execution.