"To demonstrate the economics of our business model, we have compared the revenue and gross profit generated from the North American subscribers we acquired in the second quarter of 2010, which we refer to as our Q2 2010 cohort, to the online marketing expenses incurred to acquire such subscribers. The Q2 2010 cohort is illustrative of trends we have seen among our North American subscriber base. The Q2 2010 cohort included 3.7 million subscribers that we initially spent $18.0 million in online marketing to acquire in the second quarter of 2010. In that quarter, we generated $29.8 million in revenue and $12.8 million in gross profit from the sale of approximately 1.2 million Groupons to these subscribers. Through March 31, 2011, we generated an aggregate of $145.3 million in revenue and $61.7 million in gross profit from the sale of approximately 6.3 million Groupons to the Q2 2010 cohort. In summary, we spent $18.0 million in online marketing expense to acquire subscribers in the Q2 2010 cohort and generated $61.7 million in gross profit from this group of subscribers over four quarters."
They are seeing >3x profit on typical cohorts, so they decided to buy as many users as possible (which is smart).
Here's a piece of the S1 that I haven't yet seen cited:
"To demonstrate the economics of our business model, we have compared the revenue and gross profit generated from the North American subscribers we acquired in the second quarter of 2010, which we refer to as our Q2 2010 cohort, to the online marketing expenses incurred to acquire such subscribers. The Q2 2010 cohort is illustrative of trends we have seen among our North American subscriber base. The Q2 2010 cohort included 3.7 million subscribers that we initially spent $18.0 million in online marketing to acquire in the second quarter of 2010. In that quarter, we generated $29.8 million in revenue and $12.8 million in gross profit from the sale of approximately 1.2 million Groupons to these subscribers. Through March 31, 2011, we generated an aggregate of $145.3 million in revenue and $61.7 million in gross profit from the sale of approximately 6.3 million Groupons to the Q2 2010 cohort. In summary, we spent $18.0 million in online marketing expense to acquire subscribers in the Q2 2010 cohort and generated $61.7 million in gross profit from this group of subscribers over four quarters."
A typical cohort that returned >3x what it cost? Sounds like a good business to me.
blippy.com is hiring:
Chief Security Officer, engineering, and product.
We're trying to free your purchase data to allow any developer (including us) to add value. Social commerce (as a space) is ripe to explode, and we are at forefront.
Some of our tools include ruby, rails, haml, memcached, mongodb, sphinx.
Backed by August Capital, CRV, Sequoia, Ron Conway, Evan Williams, and many other awesome angels.
Clixpy is a decent clone of clicktale.com, userfly.com, and exactostats.com, but doesn't seem to have a "shtick" that differentiates it from the other offerings. With userfly.com, we tried to make everything dead simple, and much cheaper than clicktale. We also focus on capturing quality user sessions (lots of page views, lots of actions fired per page, bounced users don't count against your quota).
However, at the end of the day, watching individual user sessions, one after another, doesn't really scale; you need a way to aggregate the data to identify trends that may suggest pain points for the end user, and we haven't really cracked that nut (and neither have our competitors).
I would concentrate on a mobile strategy. It is probably very difficult to get anyone to placemark anything without some kind of mobile integration. Additionally, you might want to consider adding incentives for placemarking via gaming mechanics. Or perhaps ride the geocaching trend. There are a few iPhone apps that you can use for brainstorming (for instance, check out GoWalla).
Its tough for a startup to attract big players to use their messaging platform or service because it is difficult to guarantee uptime, reliable service, etc. Might be perfect for mashups and hackers, but they won't pay.
Cool stuff though; I had a lot of fun playing with it.
We're still unsure of the cost to run this service as we scale up. We are looking for beta testers to try out our advanced features, so please email us, and we can get you a pro account for free, and start to iterate on the product to meet your specific needs (and lighter weight JS is definitely something we can fix for you).
We will likely have to do customer specific fixes to get advanced event captures working well during our beta phase, which is why we want you to email us if you are at all interested.
Honestly, we haven't thought enough about our pricing; the cost will likely be proportional to the # of users you need to capture in a given period of time. For small sites I don't see us charging more than $10 a month. We are also playing around with the idea of licensing our software, so that companies can run the captures internally to enable ajax functionality, and keep their data private.
To answer your first question, we don't actively capture username/passwords. However, in order to follow a user into an authenticated site, we have to either setup some type of proxy (which requires some work on the client's side), or we do some simple cookie capturing (which requires no work on the client's side) to see what the user sees. Obviously, cookies might contain sensitive information, which is why we're offering this as an optional premium service only.
As for your second question, we can certainly setup the service such that it captures a certain percentage of users, and it's certainly a route we would consider depending on the size of the client.
Thanks for the feedback. Your idea about offering certain users a chance to take place in the study is dead on to what we think is the next logical step. Connecting an actual user with actionable contact information could help companies close the loop with an actual user, and interact with them in the same way they do in paid usability studies.