Groupon: Start in Physical, Get to Digital

Groupon is on an incredible tear, so we’re not buying the “inevitable fall” question in today’s infographic). We’ve recently started helping the daily deal company navigate the M&E space – and their phenomenal growth is well-timed to reinvigorate social commerce across most verticals. On background: thePoint.com first landed on our ‘social good’ radar at Participant)

With Amazon’s relationship with LivingSocial and xxx hundred copycats (remind any of the early Facebook, niche social network days?), it will be very interesting to see Groupon grow beyond daily emails into other discounted merch models.

One potential trend, companies like Groupon, Netflix and Amazon are smartly rooting themselves in physical goods, but as with Amazon and Netflix, will eventually scale to soft, aka digital, goods: hosting, streaming movies, email packages and the like.

Once you presumably own a category, it then becomes time to optimize customer relationships and these three have established their user experience satisfaction levels well. Simple, easy and physical product-based moves to digital products very easily.