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

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

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

We’re pleased to report that EveryBlock – the up-to-the-minute neighborhood news website – is now syndicating Groupon deals! If you haven’t used it, EveryBlock provides you with a news feed of crime reports, neighborhood news, civic information, business reviews, and now Groupons. Stop by and subscribe to your neighborhood’s news feed – be warned, it can be addicting.

We’re big fans of Everyblock’s work, and are proud to count the team behind the scenes as fellow Chicagoans. Stop by their blog to see what else they’re up to.

-Filed in Groupon

Groupon, Chicago’s deal-a-day site, is coming to Boston! And we’re hiring a resident editor / community manager to help.

If you haven’t seen it already, check out Groupon Chicago to get an idea of what we do.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Help us find deals

We don’t know anything about Boston. We don’t even know how to fake the accent. You’ll help find cool places to feature, and then work with us to set each week’s deal schedule.

While sales operations will primarily take place here in Chicago, you’ll most likely be doing some sales as well.

Write

We write a positive, (arguably) funny description of the product or service we sell each day. Good write-ups hawk the deal without boring people to death. Here are a few of our favorites from Groupon Chicago:

• Kafka Wine
• Lincoln Park Massage
• Chicago Chamber Music
• Ineeka Tea

Promote

Help us build our mailing list by visiting campuses, attending events, and using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. You’ll also promote the daily deals using a variety of online and offline tools.

Upkeep

You’ll load each day’s deal onto Groupon and schedule/maintain the newsletter. You’ll also run customer service for Groupon Boston.

REQUIRED ATTRIBUTES

You must know and love Boston. We need someone who can guide us towards offers that will resonate with the indigenous population.

You must write well.

You must be a participant in “Web culture,” i.e. you have a blog, use Facebook, Twitter, etc.

You must be comfortable in a startup environment where no one knows what the hell they’re doing. Meaning, you make things happen without waiting for people to tell you what to do.

WHAT TO SEND US

Email us writing samples and a cover letter explaining why you’re the right person for this job.

-Filed in Groupon

The project in a nutshell: develop a harmonious design language that can be shared by Groupon & The Point, allowing us to easily reuse ideas for both sites, while preserving a distinct experience and mood for each site.

Background

The Point, launched in November, 2007, lets anyone start a campaign asking people to give money or do something as a group, but only if the campaign hits a predetermined tipping point. By building a critical mass of like-minded people before taking action, The Point makes collective action easy and efficient. Learn more here.

All campaigns on The Point follow a general structure if X, then we, the members, will Y. We the members will give money or do something, but only if X happens. This basic model can be used for everything from arranging a party to boycotting a multinational corporation to organizing a fan-based bid for a major league baseball team.

In late 2008, we decided to step up a search for a business model for The Point. One of the options we’d been thinking about from the beginning was group buying – use The Point to offer a product at a discount, but only if a certain number of people sign up – enough people to make it worth it for the business to take lower margins.

We wanted the group buying experience to be dead simple. Campaigns on The Point can be used for a wide range of things – that’s nice, but it also contributes to a sense of “what is this place exactly?” that is a barrier to entry for casual users. We wanted to get all that stuff out of the way and create a focused experience for people who are looking for deals. For a number of reasons, we also decided to start with a narrow geographical focus – things to do in Chicago (our hometown).

Thus, Groupon was born in November, 2008 – a site that features a deal a day on something to do in Chicago. The guts of Groupon belong to The Point – you’ll notice all the action happens inside a The Point campaign widget that has been skinned in a Wordpress blog. We did it that way to get it running quickly, knowing we’d integrate it into The Point if and when it started to look like we were onto something – and that’s just what’s happening.

The Task

We’ve pushed Wordpress as far as it can take us. Now, we’re gearing up to integrate Groupon into The Point. We’re doing this for a few reasons:

• To take advantage of some of the features we’ve already built for The Point (discussion, invitation system, user-to-user messaging, Facebook Connect, etc.)
• To add new functionality to Groupon that would be foolish to add onto Wordpress – it’ll be easier and faster to add it to The Point’s codebase.

When I talk about “integrating” Groupon into The Point, I don’t mean they’ll “feel” like the same site. Groupon and The Point have different audiences – people looking for deals in Chicago, and (mostly) people looking to do good, respectively. Each site will maintain its own identity – we don’t want deal-seekers to be forced to contend with activism campaigns, and vice versa. While we’re pulling Groupon into The Point’s codebase, that is so it’s easier to add functionality; it’s a top priority to preserve Groupon’s focus and simplicity.

Looking at Groupon and the same campaign being displayed on The Point, you’ll notice that we’ve laid out the information differently on each site. In some cases, the variations reflect the requirement differences between Groupon and The Point. But in other cases, we just found a better way to do it on Groupon. We want to look at each difference between the two sites, and say, “is there a reason it shouldn’t be this way on both sites?” By doing so, we think we’ll be able to reduce the differences to a small enough number for a harmonious design language to be established.

If we can establish a common design language that is shared by Groupon and The Point, it will allow us to repurpose the elements that are shared by the two sites and develop both sites much faster. I’m speaking mostly of information architecture – can we reach a stylistic middle ground that allows us to reuse elements like user profiles and discussion?

The best analogy I can think of is Google. Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader are clearly different sites, but they use a common language that makes it easy for Google to repurpose page elements across the sites.

Who we’re looking for

Depending on how much background you have in UX, we’ll probably do the preliminary IA work in house, i.e. we will develop an initial “unified” wireframe for you to design against. Our familiarity with the model and all its edge cases makes it easier for us to put something together quickly, but we’ll be looking for your input on the overall sanity of our IA decisions.

We aren’t looking to do a major redesign of either site – just the minimum necessary to achieve our goals. This project will be limited in scope and time (no more than a week or two), but if we like working together, we have a lot of ongoing design needs and we’d like to have a trusty standby.

We’re looking to get this project started in February and wrap up by mid-March, at the absolute latest.

To apply, send examples of your work to andrew at the point dot com.

-Filed in Groupon, The Point