Groublogpon – The Serious Blog of Groupon

As Groupon grows (now at 400,000 subscribers and $7,000,000 saved!), we’re increasingly drawing the attention of our nation’s newspaper people. Since you’re initiated enough to be reading our blog, stories describing Groupon are probably deeply uninteresting… but I’ll post a few anyway.

• TIME – Interview With Groupon Founder, [Me]
• CBS Early Show – Retail Stores Making Deals
• Chicago Tribune – Social entrepreneur finds money-making power of crowdsourcing
• Chris Brogan – Groupon – Clever Collective Buying Site

For more, check out our press page.

Recent Site Upgrades

We hope you’re enjoying Groupon’s new design! The original version of Groupon was a hacked-together combination of WordPress and The Point, and while it did a great job of getting us through the first months, we’re glad to be rid of it. The new site is built in Ruby on Rails (still sharing the same code base as The Point), and sports a classy new design courtesy of our friends at Firebelly.

When designing the new site, we assumed that most of our users were like us – skeptical about huge discounts, assuming that they’re too good to be true. For that reason, we focused on making each deal’s specifics as transparent as possible. If there are any special conditions, you’ll find them prominently displayed in the cheekily named, “The Fine Print” section towards the top of the page. And we’ve added user commenting, so you can check what other people are saying before you decide to buy.

Speaking of commenting, many of you have asked for ways to communicate with other Groupon users… planning Groupon outings, reviewing past Groupon experiences, suggesting ideas, etc. In a few days, we’ll launch Groupon forums, where we encourage you to chat about Groupon until your fingers fall off. Actually we recommend stopping while you still have one finger – you’ll need it to make future Groupon purchases.

New City Launches

Groupon is launching shortly in Dallas, Houston, Seattle, San Diego, Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Denver, doubling our cities. Related fact: people are generally appreciative when you tell them about things that make their lives better. So if you’re into being appreciated and you have friends in one of those cities, you are now equipped with the tools necessary to incrementally increase your happiness.

What Else?

Right now, the number one request we receive is, “bring Groupon to my city!” We’re doing what we can to oblige; Groupon will be in at least 25 cities by the end of 2009. And we continue to hack away at new features that will make Groupon even better. What else would you like to see?