The Point Blog

As we are anticipating more regular Groupon-related blog content, we decided split up the blogs for The Point and Groupon. Groupon’s Blog (”Groublogpon”) is here. If you’re an RSS subscriber, make sure you grab the feed for your city, or you’ll end up with all kinds of stuff that will be completely boring to you.

-Filed in Uncategorized

If you’re interested in Groupon’s origins and how it evolved out of The Point, Crain’s Business explains it all (and more) in the following piece from their excellent Entrepreneurs in Action series. Past segments have featured our friends at EveryBlock and CrowdSPRING. Our thanks to Brandon Copple of Crain’s for the excellent work!

-Filed in Groupon, The Point

The Point has outgrown our office space! Yesterday, we moved down a floor of our building into a larger space. Here are a few photos I took of the move.

Ken and the tech team packing up

Alex grabbing some last things

Nick setting up the new phone system

Unpacking in the new space

Aaron and Ben in their writing sanctuary

Our new conference room

-Filed in Groupon, The Point

From last year’s Chicago New Media Summit (now the Chicago Convergence). I tried to fit a ton of content in 14 minutes, so its a bit fast – enjoy!

Watch Andrew Mason, The Point, Online Collective Activism in Game Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

-Filed in The Point

After successful launches in Chicago and Boston, Groupon is coming to NYC, and we need some talented locals to help us make it happen.

In general, we’re looking for people who know and love New York City. Groupon is a fast-paced and fluid startup – you should be able to think on your feet. You have to be hardworking, self-motivated, blah blah blah, all that stuff that everyone says. Read on for available positions.

Outside Sales Executive

We’re looking for a full-time sales executive to help us get the coolest New York businesses featured on Groupon. Each day, you’ll call (and occasionally visit) restaurants, theaters, spas, dentists, and everything in between, negotiating unbeatable deals on behalf of Groupon’s customers.

You should have experience in outside advertising sales. You should be skilled at negotiation and relationship building. You should have existing relationships with bars, restaurants, and other local businesses.

Compensation is competitive. To apply, send your resume to jobs@thepoint.com.

Freelance Writers

We need freelance writers to compose positive, funny descriptions for the daily deal. Good write-ups seamlessly entertain the reader and communicate the value of the deal. Also, since Groupon is a community site, it should be written by someone who knows the community and can bring that perspective to their writing.

The tricky part here is that we’re looking for “funny” writing, where funny is defined as, “what makes our managing editor laugh.” The best I can do to elaborate is to offer a few examples of past Groupon write-ups: Kafka Wine; Lincoln Park Massage Chicago Chamber Music Ineeka Tea. A few things we think are funny: The Onion; Adult Swim (in particular, Xavier: Renegade Angel and Tim and Eric).

Compensation is competitive. To apply, email us a Groupon-style write-up for a restaurant in New York City that you’ve never patronized with a Yelp rating between 3.5 and 4 stars. We won’t consider applications without a sample write-up.

-Filed in Groupon

Check this out – Desire2Learn will donate $1,000,000 to charity if Blackboard drops a patent lawsuit.

I like this “you wouldn’t hurt a puppy, would you?” style of building support for a cause. But what if you don’t have a million dollars? You can raise a pot of money on The Point, which are only released if the offending organization does as you please.

This has already been tried on The Point in an attempt to get Bono to retire from public life by donating a lot of money to fight AIDS if he does. Hasn’t worked – yet.

-Filed in The Point

Develop useful job skills! Make new friends and networking contacts! Drink delicious sparkling waters! That’s just a few things you can expect as a Sales Intern at Groupon. As an intern, you will be able to develop and apply a mix of creativity, hard work and sales skills to find cool and useful things to do at super-low prices. Each day you’ll call restaurants, theaters, gyms, and even dentists in a particular geographic area and negotiating massive discounts on behalf of Groupon users. We need driven, hard-working and intelligent individuals. Experience or interest with online sales, inside sales, and the Internet is preferred.

General Responsibilities

• Actively engage in cold calling businesses and negotiating deeply discounted prices on “things to do”
• Brainstorm new and creative businesses and activities to be featured
• Follow up on warm inbound leads and land contracts
• Miscellaneous tasks to help promote Groupon

Experience

• Interest or past experience in a sales capacity; inside sales is a plus
• Ability to focus in a fluid, changing, and quickly growing business
• Working on or completed a college degree

Characteristics

• Strong negotiating and people skills
• Ownership and accountability
• Driven and hard-working
• Enjoys and thrives in fast-paced, fluid work environment
• Can think on your feet

Compensation/Benefits

• Incentive-based stipends

Interested? Just send your information to Nick Cioffi at nick@thepoint.com. Good luck!

-Filed in Groupon

Catch those gurgling goo-goo noises emanating from your computer speakers? Oh wow, you better see a psychiatrist about that! Hah hah, just kidding. No, that cooing that you hear is the dulcet sound of Groupon Boston, who was born at midnight on March 16, 2009. Right out of the Interwomb, Groupon Boston started working on behalf of Boston-area small businesses and consumers, offering a $40 voucher at the Brighton, MA restaurant Zocalo Cucina Mexicana for just $20. Smartypantses that they are, Bostonians responded with gusto, buying up 78 Groupons so they could enjoy mucho mas mole por menos.

Lil’ Baby Boston Groupon has had a smashingly successful first week on earth, with each daily deal scoring way more purchasers than necessary to make the deals tip over. We’ve got a community manager on the scene to nurture Boston Groupon into a modern-day Hercules of daily discountdom, as well as some sales nannies who are working tirelessly to secure those awesome deals that Chicago Groupon fans have become so used to by now.

“How come Boston, and not my town?” you’re probably wondering. Well, Boston has a ton of universities that churn out thousands of web-savvy graduates, some of whom even go so far as to marry their computers. It’s got a diverse, vibrant local business scene. And perhaps most importantly, we are exceedingly Old School patriotic — so patriotic, in fact, that we come to work every morning riding horses in the manner of Paul Revere, and dump a box of tea into the nearby Chicago River. Horse-riding and tea-dumping are activities that staffers must endure in order to enter Groupon HQ; anyone who fails has to spend the morning in front of our building, locked in wooden stocks and subject to the mockery of tomato-wielding colonists. So we pretty much had to go for Boston, or else we would have felt vile and seditious.

Worry not, Rest-of-America: We’re totally on board with the Brangelina/OctoMom modus operandi when it comes to birthing Groupon babies — i.e., more equals better. So expect more Baby Groupon news in the next few months.

-Filed in Groupon, Tactics, Tools

We’re excited to announce that we’ve integrated Facebook Connect into The Point, making it possible for Facebook users to use The Point without setting up and managing a separate account or maintaing a separate login.

Back in December 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect – a service that lets people use their Facebook login and identity on third party sites that provide integration, like The Point.

Connect!

If you already use The Point and have a Facebook account (who doesn’t!?) clicking the Facebook Connect button will link your account on The Point to your Facebook account and you’ll be able to use your Facebook login from then on.

New users of The Point can just click the Facebook Connect button when joining a campaign for the first time, and a quick Facebook login is all it takes – no account setup, no account activation.

Your Facebook login information is never sent to or shared with The Point in any way; it’s entirely handled by Facebook.

Your Portable Identity – You Can Take it With You

Once you’re connected, your identity on Facebook – your name, profile pic – even your friends – will be available on The Point.

Tired of that profile pic?  Change it once on Facebook and it’ll be visible on The Point.

Your Facebook profile information is subject to the same privacy controls on The Point as you set in Facebook.

Let Your Friends Know What You’re Up To on The Point

When you join a campaign on The Point, we’ll ask if you want to publish a Facebook feed item to share it with your Facebook friends.  You’ll see a preview of what the feed item will look like, and have the chance to post it or, of course, say ‘No Thanks’.  It’s up to you.

You’ll also see your friends’ activity on The Point on their feeds so you can keep up with what they’re up to.

What’s next?

Of course, what’s Facebook integration without friends, right?  We’ll be adding features over time to let you see which of your Facebook friends are also using The Point and let you invite them to connect.

For example, you might want to know which of your Facebook friends are already members of a campaign you’ve joined.  Or maybe you want to invite your Facebook friends to a campaign on The Point.

What about Groupon?

For those of you using Groupon in Chicago (and soon Boston, and beyond!) to get great deals through the power of collective buying, you probably know that Groupon is powered by The Point.  We’ll be making the Facebook Connect features of The Point available to all Groupon users in the coming weeks.

-Filed in Groupon, News, The Point, Uncategorized

From the “you mean to say that you had a website in the year 2009 that didn’t have that feature?” department: now you can view and print your Groupons online!

Until now, we sent your Groupons as pdf attachments, which were difficult to keep track of. Now, you can login to your account on The Point to see/print all your Groupons and see when they expire.

What else would you like to see on your Groupon list? Send us your feedback.

-Filed in Groupon