Yesterday Groupon shares tumbled more than 10%. The stock is down 67% since the beginning of the year and 74% since its IPO last year. On top of this performance there are a mass of stories that question if offering a deal is good for small businesses. Mostly anecdotal stories such as Wafflegate. The end […]
Continue reading →Last week I celebrated my first full year at Half Off Depot. It has been a pretty amazing first year. Some of the stuff we have accomplished, purposely partially masked through statistics. We raised $7 million via venture capital and $1.5 via venture debt. Subscribers have grown by 450%. Over 200% in 2011 and over […]
Continue reading →About a month ago Half Off Depot announced that it had acquired Dealster. To quote the release: “Dealster marks the first acquisition for Half Off Depot. In addition to its membership base, Dealster’s value to Half Off Depot lies in its proprietary platform, which includes social elements for customers and merchants as well as other features […]
Continue reading →The other day I wrote about the partnership that Half Off Depot and Google had entered. It's a big deal, but perhaps even more important then the deal itself was what it signified. Half Off Depot has grown to the point where it can do some partnership marketing. Six years ago, I wrote an article […]
Continue reading →This week was pretty exciting at Half Off Depot. Google announced that they were expanding their Offers program to include more cities and more deal partners. Half Off became one of 30 Google Offer partners. We have long considered ourselves to be a top ten participant in the online deal market so this in some way […]
Continue reading →I get the question every week, perhaps at least once a day. "What do you think of the Groupon IPO? That's good for you guys, right?" To which I reply a hearty "maybe." For those of you that have no idea what I am talking about Groupon, the biggest competitor to Half Off Depot where […]
Continue reading →When I joined Half Off Depot back in May I started looking around for a competitive target. Not the 800 pound gorilla Groupon LivingSocial type of competitive target. A smaller yet significant company that we could set our sights on. That company was BuyWithMe. As best as I could tell BuyWithMe was the number three […]
Continue reading →So October turned out to be another record month for Half Off Depot. Our more established markets showed some nice growth and our expansion markets came up to speed nicely, most of them exceeding rather aggressive growth plans. But this week I had to let two people go. That's always tough to do. Hard saddening […]
Continue reading →We have been looking for a community manager to join Half Off Depot for sometime. The basic plan was to have introductory meetings and then move forward with second interviews where the candidates would provide an overview of what they would do if given the job. Best plan gets to execute kind of thing. I […]
Continue reading →When I joined Half Off 100 days ago I figured we were a top 20 competitor. In short order, according to USA Today, we have cracked the top 10.
Continue reading →