Question: what if you have a launched business + the trademark to the name and someone still owns and won't sell the .com URL? We own the .co and all other extentions but the .com is preferred, would you go about thr same way groupon did it in this case?
You can't force them to relinquish it. They should know that because you have the trademark, they can't launch anything with that name. They're probably just hoping that the longer they wait, the more invested you'll get in the name and the more you'll be willing to pay.
It's not spammy but it does include graphics, colors, layouts, etc. Also I could be wrong but I think using an html email gives you a more accurate open rate.
Sure some people can misuse html email's but I don't think they are all bad.
We pulled all of these localized resources from the city specific StartupDigest's we publish. Thought it would be a good idea to put them all on page and accessible outside of the email newsletter.
Would appreciate your thoughts and if you have any city specific (national + international) blogs, news sites, or resources to add leave it as a comment below.
If you are targeting restaurants (if not pick a good segment, small business is huge) then I would suggest going at off hours (very early or late), going in person, and talking to the owner face to face.
Most likely if its a small business restaurant the owner will be there. Even better is buy breakfast or dinner at the restaurant.
Then when you get a chance explain the problem you are trying to solve and a brief explanation on what you are doing, with the goal of getting feedback and their opinion. Only then if the owner is interested in hearing more should you follow up with an official pitch/presentation on what you can do.
It's a hard and slow process but no one said #startuplife is easy
Never used Groupon, but you might want to try emailing/calling some of the Retailers that have used Groupon in the smaller cities and see firsthand how effective it is.
Might be hard to find a "Retail Owner" here on HN.
Thanks - that's a great idea. I actually am friends with the operator of one of these clones and she herself has expressed that it might hold dubious value for most business owners. I will try to hunt down some retailers offline who've actually worked with them.
Good stuff! May I ask what your open-rate is? The trend I've seen at a few places I've worked at is that Facebook has become the dominant traffic driver (Twitter in 2nd) for bringing people back to the site. Lot of factors behind this (demographics, ad teams abusing email lists over the years, etc), but I'd pretty much written off email since I know so many of our addresses are people's middle school Hotmail accounts (which I'd remove, but the ad team wants to claim they're sending to X-thousand people). Glad to hear it's working for you. Subscribing now!
Open rate varies a lot city to city but we see anywhere between 20%-60% opens across all of the issues.
We still use twitter/facebook to spread our blog posts, archives, etc but email is our main channel of distribution. For us we see twitter bringing ~30% of our subscribers, facebook doesn't do so well for us.
