A recent interview with the founder of Groupon, Andrew Mason, revealed that the successful startup that just denied a 6 Billion dollar buyout from Google, started humbly with WordPress!
Just goes to show how a simple open source application can be used to do so much.
Check the full interview after the jump:
All we did was we took a WordPress Blog and we skimmed it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post with the points embedded. It was totally ghetto. We would sell t-shirts on the first version of Groupon.
We’d say in the right up, ‘This t-shirt will come in the color red, size large. If you want a different color or size, email that to us.’ We didn’t have a form to add that stuff. We were just, it was so cobbled together. It was enough to prove the concept and show that it was something that people really liked. The actual coupon generation that we were doing was all FileMaker. We would run a script that would email the coupon PDF to people.
It got to the point where we’d sell 500 sushi coupons in a day and we’d send 500 PDFs to people with Apple Mail at the same time. Really the first, until July of the first year was just a scrambling to grab the tiger by the tail. It was trying to catch up and reasonable piece together a product.
Anthony says
Thanks for this! Just what I was looking for, but didn’t know I was looking for it. Or something like that, haha.
Eric Dye says
😀