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by pg 5473 days ago
Merely publishing these deals enriches Loopt at the expense of the business -- even if none of them take it.

That's not true. Unless this is genuinely valuable to enough businesses, it won't be sustainable. If too few businesses accept the offers made to them by buyers, the buyers will find the service useless and won't recommend it to their friends, and traffic will dry up.
2 comments
potatolicious 5473 days ago
> "That's not true. Unless this is genuinely valuable to enough businesses, it won't be sustainable."

I agree it's unsustainable, but this seems to miss the point: while the business model of the idea in question does not revolve around win-lose deals and trademark infringement, something ethically questionable has happened here.

This is reminiscent of the AirBNB brouhaha - while the service itself may be valuable, the means by which the company chose to market and launch itself was sketchy to the extreme. If AirBnb's core offering was not compelling, spamming people on Craigslist would've been unsustainable, as it would be here - but the fact that the product doesn't suck is not justification for questionable behavior such as this.

Some material harm (thankfully it would seem, not much) has come to at least one business involved, and had it continued in that format (i.e., vague text that doesn't seek to distance Loopt from these unaffiliated merchants) it would certainly have caused more damage.

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rockya 5473 days ago
Publishing results in: - Loopt getting subscribers to its list. That seems like a benefit to me. - Merchant getting perceived as a discount brand. For many merchants, that's a negative. - Merchant having to deal with customer inquiries about a deal they know nothing about. That's a negative.

It should also be noted that Loopt picked really high profile businesses like Bi-Rite and Ritual Coffee. These places usually have lines and don't have much need to run large discounts.

If Loopt had picked obscure businesses, it would make it easier to claim they weren't trying to benefit from the business's good name.

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pg 5473 days ago
Loopt getting subscribers to its list. That seems like a benefit to me.

But not a net benefit. Unless this is sustainable, it will have been a very expensive way to collect email addresses.

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rockya 5473 days ago
This whole model is going to collapse for a lot of reasons. I wrote about that here:

http://redesignmobile.com/2011/06/22/loopts-u-deals-offer-an...

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