10k: Weekdays only, $159. Low margin, low volume. We were planning to phase this product out.
15k: 7 days a week, $199. Good margin, high volume. Discounts available, custs usually end up paying $179.
18k: 7 days a week, $259. Ridiculous margin, low volume. Discounts available, custs usually end up paying $239.
All of these skydives cost pretty much the same thing to produce, about $80. The cost goes up about $5-10 for every level. So a 18k might cost around $90 to $100.
We chose to run a 10k for $99. The standard Groupon cut is 50-60% of revenue, so based on this standard we would get around $50-60 for each Groupon (the TOS precludes us from talking details, so I am not going to say what our margin was). In advance of the Groupon we raised our 10k price to $169 so that the discount percentage was higher - the price was raised for all customers, not just Groupons.
Our first promotion sold 700 in March 2010. It was insane, the phone rang off the hook and we were slammed with customers. They weren't the best customers, but there were a lot of them. Skydiving is seasonal, in winter we do anywhere from 15-50 tandem jumps per month, 100% on the weekends. In the heat of summer we did about 200 jumps per month, Friday through Monday.
We saw an immediate uptick in business. While our volume was increasing, our net was slowly decreasing. We ran another promotion in August that sold 950 Groupons. That August we did 400 jumps, by far a record for us. Then in March of 2011 we ran our third promotion, selling 1350 Groupons.
We felt the Groupon crunch. Right after the promotion our books were full, 2-3 phone lines constantly ringing, 80-90% of customers on weekends were Groupons. We did what we could to keep things in check and have weathered the storm. This last March we did more jumps than in any month, ever. March is historically a slow month, usually about 20% as many jumps as a busy summer month.
How we made it work for us:
-Apparel: We sell at lot of cool shirts and hoodies at a great margin. We didn't really have enough volume before for this to really make sense.
-Cross sales: We sell Video packages a pretty good margin to about 60% of customers. We also offer a 'Same Day Special', allowing customers to buy another jump at 50% the same day they have skydived. Sometimes upwards of 40% of customers purchase this product.
-Up sales: If people want to jump on a weekend they need to upgrade to a higher altitude. $30 to 15k gets them twice as much freefall time, and $90 to go to 18k is a fairly popular option.
-Post experience contact: We post their videos to Youtube, encourage them to check-in and like us on Facebook, and add them to an email list where we run our own promotions on tandem skydives and solo training.
-Breakage: It hovers around 30%. This directly boosts the effective payout of each Groupon. Also, many people take close to a year to use their jump, turning their Groupon into a business loan which we use to invest in maintenance, marketing and equipment purchases.
-Scheduling: Unlike a coffee shop, we can control how many customers come in our doors. If we're booked up we can tell them so, rather than have a line out the door.
Why it is kind of painful:
-The people: Lets face it, they are kind of stingy and leave a higher ratio of bad reviews. The bad reviews have been a great incentive for us to make the business more efficient.
-The cost: Groupon is expensive. If someone buys a Groupon and jumps without buying anything else, (with a standard Groupon margin) we'd lose about $20. About 30% of Grouponers fit into this category.
For our company, Groupon was an amazing experience. It is costly advertising, but we don't plan on keeping our ratio of Groupons/non-Groupons at 80% where it is now. It is expected to precipitously drop off as the year goes on, and when it does we will enjoy the collateral benefits of a huge word of mouth campaign and an email marketing list 10x what it would be otherwise.
We have learned to survive on the razor thin margins that Groupon throws at you, so as this ratio shrinks in size, even if our volume goes down our net will recover and we will continue to grow. Skydiving, as a business, has a lot of features that differentiate it from other retail businesses and make Groupon a lot easier to stomach. That said, I feel that all of the Groupon horror stories floating around are from businesses that would be in trouble regardless. Remember, the attrition rate for B&M businesses is scary."},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["groupon"],"value":"Tell HN: Our experience with Groupon"}},"_tags":["story","author_joeguilmette","story_2654788","ask_hn"],"author":"joeguilmette","children":[2654859,2654865,2654884,2654889,2654896,2654898,2654900,2654916,2654924,2654972,2654991,2655020,2655029,2655054,2655063,2655097,2655101,2655196,2655203,2655263,2655363,2655366,2655576,2655865,2656085,2657183,2657260,2657482,2657971],"created_at":"2011-06-14T21:16:38Z","created_at_i":1308086198,"num_comments":105,"objectID":"2654788","points":562,"story_id":2654788,"story_text":"For three years I managed a skydiving facility. In March of 2010 we chose to run a Groupon promotion. At the time I hadn't heard of Groupon, and frankly, not many others had. They were new and at the beginning of the discussion with our Groupon rep, we had no idea what to expect. Another skydiving facility in the area ran a promotion and sold something like 250 Groupons. IIRC it was a 15k jump for $129. We had three products to choose from:
10k: Weekdays only, $159. Low margin, low volume. We were planning to phase this product out.
15k: 7 days a week, $199. Good margin, high volume. Discounts available, custs usually end up paying $179.
18k: 7 days a week, $259. Ridiculous margin, low volume. Discounts available, custs usually end up paying $239.
All of these skydives cost pretty much the same thing to produce, about $80. The cost goes up about $5-10 for every level. So a 18k might cost around $90 to $100.
We chose to run a 10k for $99. The standard Groupon cut is 50-60% of revenue, so based on this standard we would get around $50-60 for each Groupon (the TOS precludes us from talking details, so I am not going to say what our margin was). In advance of the Groupon we raised our 10k price to $169 so that the discount percentage was higher - the price was raised for all customers, not just Groupons.
Our first promotion sold 700 in March 2010. It was insane, the phone rang off the hook and we were slammed with customers. They weren't the best customers, but there were a lot of them. Skydiving is seasonal, in winter we do anywhere from 15-50 tandem jumps per month, 100% on the weekends. In the heat of summer we did about 200 jumps per month, Friday through Monday.
We saw an immediate uptick in business. While our volume was increasing, our net was slowly decreasing. We ran another promotion in August that sold 950 Groupons. That August we did 400 jumps, by far a record for us. Then in March of 2011 we ran our third promotion, selling 1350 Groupons.
We felt the Groupon crunch. Right after the promotion our books were full, 2-3 phone lines constantly ringing, 80-90% of customers on weekends were Groupons. We did what we could to keep things in check and have weathered the storm. This last March we did more jumps than in any month, ever. March is historically a slow month, usually about 20% as many jumps as a busy summer month.
How we made it work for us:
-Apparel: We sell at lot of cool shirts and hoodies at a great margin. We didn't really have enough volume before for this to really make sense.
-Cross sales: We sell Video packages a pretty good margin to about 60% of customers. We also offer a 'Same Day Special', allowing customers to buy another jump at 50% the same day they have skydived. Sometimes upwards of 40% of customers purchase this product.
-Up sales: If people want to jump on a weekend they need to upgrade to a higher altitude. $30 to 15k gets them twice as much freefall time, and $90 to go to 18k is a fairly popular option.
-Post experience contact: We post their videos to Youtube, encourage them to check-in and like us on Facebook, and add them to an email list where we run our own promotions on tandem skydives and solo training.
-Breakage: It hovers around 30%. This directly boosts the effective payout of each Groupon. Also, many people take close to a year to use their jump, turning their Groupon into a business loan which we use to invest in maintenance, marketing and equipment purchases.
-Scheduling: Unlike a coffee shop, we can control how many customers come in our doors. If we're booked up we can tell them so, rather than have a line out the door.
Why it is kind of painful:
-The people: Lets face it, they are kind of stingy and leave a higher ratio of bad reviews. The bad reviews have been a great incentive for us to make the business more efficient.
-The cost: Groupon is expensive. If someone buys a Groupon and jumps without buying anything else, (with a standard Groupon margin) we'd lose about $20. About 30% of Grouponers fit into this category.
For our company, Groupon was an amazing experience. It is costly advertising, but we don't plan on keeping our ratio of Groupons/non-Groupons at 80% where it is now. It is expected to precipitously drop off as the year goes on, and when it does we will enjoy the collateral benefits of a huge word of mouth campaign and an email marketing list 10x what it would be otherwise.
We have learned to survive on the razor thin margins that Groupon throws at you, so as this ratio shrinks in size, even if our volume goes down our net will recover and we will continue to grow. Skydiving, as a business, has a lot of features that differentiate it from other retail businesses and make Groupon a lot easier to stomach. That said, I feel that all of the Groupon horror stories floating around are from businesses that would be in trouble regardless. Remember, the attrition rate for B&M businesses is scary.","title":"Tell HN: Our experience with Groupon","updated_at":"2026-05-10T00:05:06Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"FDSGSG"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["groupon"],"value":"US puts NSO Group on trade blacklist"},"url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.ft.com/content/e381b556-c859-4a3b-8f7c-5fe80d3272d2"}},"_tags":["story","author_FDSGSG","story_29095265"],"author":"FDSGSG","children":[29095660,29095731,29095897,29095907,29096162,29096395,29096898,29097009,29097415,29098725,29100124,29100660,29102868,29103107,29103813],"created_at":"2021-11-03T14:38:04Z","created_at_i":1635950284,"num_comments":184,"objectID":"29095265","points":419,"story_id":29095265,"title":"US puts NSO Group on trade 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sales rep threatens restaurant with negative Yelp reviews","updated_at":"2024-09-19T19:50:19Z","url":"https://www.facebook.com/SauceSF/posts/10151880503224575"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"jagira"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["groupon"],"value":"Try to digest the Groupon story"},"url":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["groupon"],"value":"http://shortlogic.tumblr.com/post/6142108636/groupon-ipo-pass-on-this-deal"}},"_tags":["story","author_jagira","story_2616412"],"author":"jagira","children":[2616447,2616537,2616552,2616568,2616579,2616580,2616615,2616617,2616621,2616654,2616657,2616672,2616684,2616786,2616818,2616823,2616836,2616940,2616949,2617023,2617068,2617351,2617361,2617652,2618642,2619418,2619450],"created_at":"2011-06-03T14:20:58Z","created_at_i":1307110858,"num_comments":165,"objectID":"2616412","points":372,"story_id":2616412,"title":"Try to digest the 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Disaster","updated_at":"2024-09-19T17:16:38Z","url":"http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2010/09/groupons_success_disaster.html"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"contactdick"},"story_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["groupon"],"value":"I took a friend out for dinner last Friday and thought it might be a good time to take the plunge and Groupon it. It was an \u00a318 pound deal to get to get \u00a346 pounds of food at a Tapas bar. My thinking went something like this. I like Tapas, the restaurant is a little out of the way but that's ok, the savings mean we can get some nice food, a good bottle of wine and try new place. So I made the booking, slightly curious about how it would all pan out.
When we arrived, the place didn't look too appealing from the outside though it did have that kind of Film Noire dirty back alley appeal which I guess is a charm in itself. But you can't judge a book by it's cover so I made joke about it, took a mental to at least Google Earth the next blind restaurant I book and strode on in.
It was a much more pleasant experience from the inside, a friendly waitress greeted us and asked if we'd like a bottle of wine. We ordered a pretty decent bottle - upper range of their price list and chatted about the menu. When she came back to take the food order, I pointed out that we'd be using a Groupon voucher to cover part of the cost of the meal (not that it should make any difference but just as a politeness thing). I did this in a slightly awkward apologetic way, using a voucher to pay for a meal isn't something I do often and it just makes me slightly uncomfortable.
As soon as this happened though, a dark cloud came over the proceedings. The whole atmosphere of the meal changed. The face and cheery demeanor of the waitress visibly dropped. It was like I'd sucked the fun out of her. She glumly pointed out the bottle of wine we'd ordered wasn't available on Groupon so we'd have to pay for that separately. The wording of the voucher had been 'Authentic tapas for two with bottle of wine at xxx tapas bar and restaurant - value \u00a346.00'. We also had to order the other bottle which was not on the menu but priced around \u00a320 pounds leaving us with 26 to spend on food (when we tried it later, even my limited wine palette could tell that \u00a320 pounds wasn't exactly fair value for it). She did actually say to another waiter passing by \"it's another Groupon on table 4\" which did more to make us feel cheap and dirty.
Having read about the Groupon experience from a business side, I felt some sympathy. I know that %50 - %100 of the money we paid for the voucher was going to Groupon and that Groupon customers are apparently 'tight and argumentative' - they were probably sick of people like us by now and trying to recoup some costs with the old 'cheap overpriced compulsory wine switch'. Anyway, having \u00a326 pounds left to spend on the food, we went a fair bit over. It was decent, but I'd never go there unless they were offering a massive discount as they were. Our portions were surprisingly small, and in my new found state of Groupon paranoia, I looked around at some of the 'non Groupon\u2019 dish sizes for a size comparison.. I hope it was just my imagination. \nThe meal ended up being \u00a342 pounds + the \u00a318 we'd paid in advance. \u00a360 pounds for an average meal and two bottles of wine isn't great value, but more significantly, I learned the restaurant actually despised 'Grouponers' - clearly they had become jaded with the Groupon experience. Fortunately for us, we could simply scratch it from our list of restaurants to visit and forget the whole experience. As I was walking home, I went past the Tapas bar on my street that is only 3 months old but continually turns people away because they are too full. I had the realisation that good restaurants don't use Groupon because they don't have to - word of mouth is much more effective. Bad restaurants use Groupon because they have to - and any place that can discount so much for their customers makes me question how ridiculous their prices are to start. To any small business thinking about using Groupon:
1) The only reason I went there was for the discount\n2) I will never go back there\n3) If asked by my friends, I'd say it was overpriced (relative pricing is a powerful thing)"},"title":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["groupon"],"value":"Why I won't be using Groupon again.. A consumer perspective. "}},"_tags":["story","author_contactdick","story_2648720","ask_hn"],"author":"contactdick","children":[2648739,2648897,2648922,2648924,2648935,2648940,2648961,2648963,2648979,2649087,2649116,2649126,2649170,2649179,2649180,2649223,2649230,2649262,2649289,2649307,2649313,2649324,2649355,2649368,2649464,2649581,2649590,2649610,2649740,2649863,2649946,2650129,2650166,2650418,2650439,2650467,2650635,2650686,2650708,2651497,2651500,2651635,2656329,2656406,2668050,2669110,2680116],"created_at":"2011-06-13T11:44:36Z","created_at_i":1307965476,"num_comments":173,"objectID":"2648720","points":196,"story_id":2648720,"story_text":"I took a friend out for dinner last Friday and thought it might be a good time to take the plunge and Groupon it. It was an \u00a318 pound deal to get to get \u00a346 pounds of food at a Tapas bar. My thinking went something like this. I like Tapas, the restaurant is a little out of the way but that's ok, the savings mean we can get some nice food, a good bottle of wine and try new place. So I made the booking, slightly curious about how it would all pan out.
When we arrived, the place didn't look too appealing from the outside though it did have that kind of Film Noire dirty back alley appeal which I guess is a charm in itself. But you can't judge a book by it's cover so I made joke about it, took a mental to at least Google Earth the next blind restaurant I book and strode on in.
It was a much more pleasant experience from the inside, a friendly waitress greeted us and asked if we'd like a bottle of wine. We ordered a pretty decent bottle - upper range of their price list and chatted about the menu. When she came back to take the food order, I pointed out that we'd be using a Groupon voucher to cover part of the cost of the meal (not that it should make any difference but just as a politeness thing). I did this in a slightly awkward apologetic way, using a voucher to pay for a meal isn't something I do often and it just makes me slightly uncomfortable.
As soon as this happened though, a dark cloud came over the proceedings. The whole atmosphere of the meal changed. The face and cheery demeanor of the waitress visibly dropped. It was like I'd sucked the fun out of her. She glumly pointed out the bottle of wine we'd ordered wasn't available on Groupon so we'd have to pay for that separately. The wording of the voucher had been 'Authentic tapas for two with bottle of wine at xxx tapas bar and restaurant - value \u00a346.00'. We also had to order the other bottle which was not on the menu but priced around \u00a320 pounds leaving us with 26 to spend on food (when we tried it later, even my limited wine palette could tell that \u00a320 pounds wasn't exactly fair value for it). She did actually say to another waiter passing by \"it's another Groupon on table 4\" which did more to make us feel cheap and dirty.
Having read about the Groupon experience from a business side, I felt some sympathy. I know that %50 - %100 of the money we paid for the voucher was going to Groupon and that Groupon customers are apparently 'tight and argumentative' - they were probably sick of people like us by now and trying to recoup some costs with the old 'cheap overpriced compulsory wine switch'. Anyway, having \u00a326 pounds left to spend on the food, we went a fair bit over. It was decent, but I'd never go there unless they were offering a massive discount as they were. Our portions were surprisingly small, and in my new found state of Groupon paranoia, I looked around at some of the 'non Groupon\u2019 dish sizes for a size comparison.. I hope it was just my imagination. \nThe meal ended up being \u00a342 pounds + the \u00a318 we'd paid in advance. \u00a360 pounds for an average meal and two bottles of wine isn't great value, but more significantly, I learned the restaurant actually despised 'Grouponers' - clearly they had become jaded with the Groupon experience. Fortunately for us, we could simply scratch it from our list of restaurants to visit and forget the whole experience. As I was walking home, I went past the Tapas bar on my street that is only 3 months old but continually turns people away because they are too full. I had the realisation that good restaurants don't use Groupon because they don't have to - word of mouth is much more effective. Bad restaurants use Groupon because they have to - and any place that can discount so much for their customers makes me question how ridiculous their prices are to start. To any small business thinking about using Groupon:
1) The only reason I went there was for the discount\n2) I will never go back there\n3) If asked by my friends, I'd say it was overpriced (relative pricing is a powerful thing)","title":"Why I won't be using Groupon again.. A consumer perspective. 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