Getting our John Hancock Sports & Fitness Expo gear together. We're very excited to spend our weekend enjoying Boston's Seaport District.

What's Next For Groupon & RBSS?

Shares of Groupon (NAS: GRPN) hit a new 52-week low yesterday. While this doesn't affect RBSS directly, since Groupon and LivingSocial are the faces of daily-deals with 90% of the market, it's important that they do not tarnish the general prospects and image of the flash-sale industry. How did Groupon get here?

Two months after filing for its IPO, Groupon's revenue calculations came under scrutiny by the SEC. This resulted in Groupon restating its 2010 and 2011 earnings downward. Its 2010 revenue was revised lower by more than half and almost 60% through the first two quarters of 2011. Two weeks ago, because of insufficient cash-on-hand needed to handle refunds, Groupon revised the previous quarter's results with a $14.3 million revenue reduction. OUCH! This has also lead to an SEC investigation into their accounting practices.

So how does this apply to RBSS? Well, one of Groupon's fundamental issues as a large company is actually the reason for our existence, a low barrier to entry. When I decided to launch a business based on my passions, the flash-sale model immediately came to mind. While a lot of time and persistence is needed to launch RBSS, at least initially, very little capital is involved. The key to flash-sale and daily-deal sites alike is relationships. Once you develop these relationships, the business can take off. Groupon has an enormous amount of established relationships but this doesn't prevent anyone else from following their model and approaching their customers and service/good providers. The moat surrounding their business cannot be established and maintained the way a fleet of trucks and planes protects UPS and FEDEX or the way a patent can protect Apple or Microsoft from competitors.

Furthermore, Groupon is facing competition from not only the other copy-cat deal sites but also from Amazon, Microsoft and Google which have all entered the daily-deal space. And all of these companies have shareholders to answer to. As far as we can tell, while we have many tangential competitors, since we have focused our niche, our only direct competitors are The Clymb, Planet Gear, which is female-focused, and a very small site called IntheBivvy. While it is intimidating to have established competition, it also proves there is a market for RBSS. Plus, since we, nor our competition, are massive companies focused on the bottom line, we can stress the culture and relationship of RBSS over how far in the black we are.

So what's next?

Well, while Groupon struggles to regain shareholder and consumer loyalty due to funky accounting and enemies at their gates, we are forging ahead at promoting the RBSS brand and making sure that once a customer or business becomes aware of our presence they understand that we are a resource for them to improve their outdoor experience and image. Groupon is going to struggle to maintain or improve customer loyalty. That is something we can stress since we answer to our customers and not shareholders. So please keep an eye out for us on all the relevant social media sites because we will be constantly rewarding our customers with deals and account credit.

Bill

Daily Deal Fatigue

One of the issues that has me most nervous about our business and our model is the concept of "deal fatigue." With so many deals, deal sites and offers flooding my inbox daily, I completely understand of growing less and less enchanted with such offers and sites because...wait for it... I also suffer from deal fatigue.

When I first learned about Gilt Groupe and Gilt Man, I purchased several items within the first month and was completely psyched about my purchases, the savings and the prospect of future buys. While, I haven't completely stopped visiting the site and buying from them when I see a product or brand that I love, my visitation and interest in their platform has waned intensely. At RBSS, we are having intense debates about how to fight off deal fatigue. I'm firmly in the camp of incitivizing interactivity with the site. This includes account credit for tweets, likes and comments as well as  the standard referral. I also like the idea of customers receiving products that they recommend we list on our site. We put out an A.P.B for product and brand recommendations and if we wind up offering the product, the "recommnder" will get that product for free.

On the flip side, it is of the utmost importance that we maintain strong and beneficial relationships with the brands that will be supplying our site. I know with the recent missteps of Groupon and other deal sites, all similar models are being called into question. However, I really want to stress the fact that I feel like we have customers on both ends of our model. I aim to please not only our customers but our suppliers. If customers will be rewarded for suggesting products and sharing information about on facebook, twitter or by email, I think it is just as important that we reward our suppliers for letting us offer great products and having a successful sale on our site. I already want to offer the basic courtesy of wiring our suppliers their money instead of mailing it to them. I can't wait to hear from suppliers what will make their life easier and want them to work more with us.

As we transition over the next weeks from a full on marketing/launch blitz to loading up on products, brands and everything else of quality we hope to offer, I am most excited about exploring the alternative purchase and sale agreements I hope to develop and negotiate with businesses.  Just thinking about it, makes me want to start randomly cold calling the businesses I know and love to get the process rolling.

Bill

P.S. Since we want to reward our customers in all manner of ways, if you retweet this post on Twitter or like it on Tumblr, tell us and you'll receive a free $10 account credit once you register on runbikeswimsave.com

Crowdfunding Our Startup?

President Obama signed the JOBS Act on Thursday, making it legal for startups to raise up to $1 million a year in small increments over the web. Currently, RBSS is bootstrapping its way to glory. Actually, we don't have too many expenses at the moment which makes bootstrapping the logical choice. However, there will come a point (very soon) where we will have to pay for some expensive things and we won't have the capital Our options for funding at this point are, going into debt, selling equity to a angel investor, asking friends and family for a loan or hitting the lotto. Crowdfunding, will be a new source of capital for startups and appears to be an extremely attractive opportunity. Unfortunately, crowdfunding platforms are not allowed to go live for another 9 months. But it's nice to know this will be another avenue available to us in the future.

I know crowdfunding is not right for every start up after reading  a post by Microventures CEO Bill Clark. But since crowdfunding platforms still have 270 days before they are legal and must win approval from the SEC before going live, we have some time to figure out if crowdfunding is right for RBSS. And hopefully, RBSS will have grown exponentially by the time crowdfunding is legal next year to the point where we may even be profitable. One can hope!

On a more general level, I think the JOBS Act has a lot of pros as well as some cons.  But I believe crowdfunding is a genius idea that will drive incredible job growth for small businesses. If you look at the jobs numbers over the last 20 years, small businesses, with the exception of a couple of boom years, have been the exclusive factor in jobs growth in the U.S. If crowdfunding can provide small businesses with access to capital and allow them to expand, that is not only good for the small business but good for America in general. Large companies are an excellent indicator of the U.S. economy but the catalyst for American prosperity across all classes has always been the small business. Crowdfunding is an excellent way to support and aid small businesses across America.

A final content note, I just invited my co-founders to contribute to this blog. Hopefully, they will sign up in the next 72 hours and post something. If not, it is a holiday weekend and maybe they will be on board come next week. And as I mentioned last post, I'm going to D.C. until Sunday night. I've never posted via the tumblr app so I'm going to try to figure that out while I wait at the terminal later this afternoon. If you're lucky, you may get some fresh content before next Monday. Have a great weekend, if I don't post again.

Bill

Startup Updates

So I've been lazy and haven't been posting to the blog. However, I just read this post from Dharmesh Shah at Onstartups and got fired up about inbound marketing.  Thus, I'm back and hoping to keep this blog as current and interesting as I can.

Here's what's new:

The RBSS team is now 3 people. Me, your fearless leader, as well as my two good friends I met playing hockey. The first to come on board was Mike Dietrich. He is a former pro cyclist, business owner, and is fired up about RBSS. He is going to be an awesome asset to  the team. The second is Greg Norcross. He is a marketing/design wiz and came up with our new logo in no time flat.  There are two great examples of it on our twitter page.  We've all sat down a few times and are getting really excited about what we can put together.

Second, we ordered 500 business cards and 3 t-shirts because we will be attending the John Hancock Sports & Fitness Expo in Boston's Seaport District next Friday-Sunday. It's an event to kick off the Boston Marathon and is a great place for our coming out party. I'll be sure to post pictures of our new swag when it comes in early next week and plenty of pics and live posts from the expo. We are very excited to get the RBSS word out at such a major event.

Third, we are closing in on 500 followers on Twitter. We are running a contest currently that will award a $25 account credit to our lucky 500th follower. Our new follower rate has slowed down since we can no longer add new followers over 2,001 without unfollowing people we already follow. However, I'm hoping we hit 500 followers no later than tomorrow. I'm excited as it is a great way to validate our idea. I'm also hoping to find more leaders in our niche/industry to follow and engage with.

Fourth, we have created a rather elementary Facebook page. It doesn't have too many likes at this point but it's a start. Mike and Greg did most of the work on this. It has shown to be of some value so I'm hoping Mike and Greg can keep it fresh.

That's the RBSS update for today.  I'm hoping to add to this almost every day. I'm heading to D.C. for the weekend so I'll probably break my promise unless I post some small updates via the tumblr app.

Bill

Yesterday Was Exciting

First off, twitter is starting to generate leads.  We more than doubled our followers in the last 24 hours.  We're up over 150 followers, 200 tweets and at almost 1000 accounts that RBSS is following.  I'm liking the numbers from just that one medium in a few days.  

However, we now have 7 signups from 35 views on our launch page which is good for a 20% conversion rate.  More impressive was that fact that one of those signups was  a referral from a previous sign up. That is excellent on a lot of levels and very encouraging.  As I believe I mentioned, about 20 of those 35 views are mine through testing and editing of the launch page.  Thus, while our views are probably closer to 15 than 35, this means our conversion rate is close to 50% which is very very high.  We're not going to have thousands of visitors overnight.  However, if our sample can shows that the people who do visit our site are interested in our idea, it's the proof we need to continue working.

Furthermore, a company contacted me about listing their product with us.  They have yet to launch, like us, but this is very encouraging. It also encouraged me to contact another company who I noticed had signed up on our launch page.  They were interested in establishing a relationship once we get off the ground.  So now I also have a couple leads for brands to offer on our site which is way ahead of the game but still nice to know I have in my back pocket.

As I nice added bonus, I was able to take my first Hubway ride of the season yesterday when I commuted home from school.  My commute is usually a solid 15 walk.  With Hubway it's about a 2-3 minute walk, a 3 minute ride and a 2-3 minute walk.  Obviously, it's nothing to brag about but it's always nice to hop on a bike. Plus, when I start commuting to work on Hunway, my 15 walk will be cut into a 2 minute walk, a 5 minute ride and a minute walk.  I'm nervous, however, about the availability of bikes and terminals for my commute as it looks like a few stations are not returning by my work for the new Hubway year.  I tweeted my concern but haven't heard back.  

That's all for now,

BD

Day 3 at RunBikeSwimSave

Technically, I think this is Day 4 but I bought the RunBikeSwimSave.com domain towards the end of the day on Saturday after some drinks with friends on St. Patty's day. Since I am almost 100% of Irish decent (1/16 English), I celebrated most of the holiday with three gentleman-warriors named Will Sheehy, Jay Fahey, and Dan Costigan.  It might be time to diversify the heritage of my friends!

Anyway, I also made a small $1.50 purchase that morning and received a Kennedy half-dollar for change. I took it as a sign and good luck charm.  Thus, that night I launched RunBikeSwimSave.com but did little else. 

Inspiration struck again today when I remembered my friend Mike. I play hockey with Mike once a week and he is a former pro cyclist. Once I have a little more progress, I'll be approaching him to see if he would like to join RBSS.  I expect his connections to be excellent.  However, he also has an entrepreneurial spirit as he founded and runs his own real estate company. He is the perfect fit for this type of endeavor and I'm astonished it took me this long to think of him.

We also just cracked 100 followers on Twitter -  a very small but meaningful milestone. This community we hope to befriend and engage is massive and I hope our numbers continue along this upward trend.

I'm also a little discouraged.  When Gilt Group launched they had a mailing list of 15,000 people they were able to send their website out to.  From there almost 75% of their customers were generated by word-of-mouth.  Currently, my LaunchRock metrics say that my launch page has been viewed 23 times.  I'm certain I am almost all of those views.  Only one person has signed up. I'm very surprised my twitter activity hasn't driven more traffic to the website.  I ran a $25 credit giveaway for our 100th follower and even they didn't view the website (yet).  Back to the drawing board I guess. I'm going to keep my twitter activities as a priority but if traffic doesn't start coming by the time I hit 1,000 followers then I think it might be time to start becoming active on forums and other blogs.

I don't expect to have 15,000 people to email when we go live, at least 15,000 interested people, but I truly hope I can start collecting emails soon.  Once I can say I have X many twitter followers and Y many emails, I'll be confident enough to approach companies with a pitch.  Until then, it's not in my best interest to sink the majority of my time into building the website or contacting companies/brands.

Bill

Welcome to RunBikeSwimSave

I'd first like to say that I'm sorry that this is yet another blog using the Minimalist theme.  I promise RBSS will be way more original and innovative than this theme implies.

Today, I launched our blog with this here post.  Over the weekend, I also launched our MVP (minimum viable product) over at launch.runbikeswimsave.com using LaunchRock which is an incredible idea and such a simple and useful product.  I had the idea for this company/service for a few weeks, and decided to give it a go this weekend.  I bought the domain and had the MVP up in about 90 minutes thanks to LaunchRock.

We're also in the process of contacting suppliers to establish relationships.  Hopefully, that will allow us to bring high quality deals on primo gear, travel stuff (hotels discounts and flight vouchers) and savings on races and training camps worldwide.  

We are also currently building our website with Volusion, another great and simple product.  Once we have a few deals to bring to you, we will be launching the website.  Until then, please follow this blog and our twitter account for the latest RBSS news.

Thanks,

Bill