Australia has a pretty small domestic market compared to the USA. There's only about 9M people between the ages of 20 and 50 (just guessing that range is the Groupon audience). If you get 10% of that market, you've only got 900K users. This is pretty good, but nowhere near the scale of these sites in the USA. Even if you get every existing Australian in that age range to sign up, you're still not even half the size of Groupon.
An outcome like selling to Yahoo for $40M is probably the best possible outcome for an Australian Groupon clone. Unless my back of the imaginary envelope math is way off, I don't think the company could really objectively be "worth" more than that. Especially since Groupon clones are already a hyper-competitive space in Australia. Microsoft is backing a company, Cudo, that already has ads on network TV.
If you can dominate a market in Australia you may end up being just as good a business as if you are one of ten players in the US market. Spreets was first to market in Australia, but unfortunately many others popped up very quickly so no one really owns the space.
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Australia has a pretty small domestic market compared to the USA. There's only about 9M people between the ages of 20 and 50 (just guessing that range is the Groupon audience). If you get 10% of that market, you've only got 900K users. This is pretty good, but nowhere near the scale of these sites in the USA. Even if you get every existing Australian in that age range to sign up, you're still not even half the size of Groupon.
An outcome like selling to Yahoo for $40M is probably the best possible outcome for an Australian Groupon clone. Unless my back of the imaginary envelope math is way off, I don't think the company could really objectively be "worth" more than that. Especially since Groupon clones are already a hyper-competitive space in Australia. Microsoft is backing a company, Cudo, that already has ads on network TV.
I think you're generally right.
If you can dominate a market in Australia you may end up being just as good a business as if you are one of ten players in the US market. Spreets was first to market in Australia, but unfortunately many others popped up very quickly so no one really owns the space.
About "owning the space", it's a website with deals, how much loyalty can one expect...
I think of the Australian market as being similar in size to a single large US state.
Apparently the state of New York has roughly the same GDP as Australia. This chart matches each state to a country with equal GDP:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/comparing_...
Texas GDP = Russia's GDP!
That's incredible about Texas. I'd heard California was significant on it's own but didn't realize other states could compare to entire countries.