Groupon’s Andrew Mason is well aware of all the Groupon-esque sites but he says he’s picking his battles:
“At first it was definitely really weird, just because my motivation as an entrepreneur, internet person, is so different from the type of person that would go and copy something exactly… The first couple of times we saw these sites it would be just people copying our exact design…to a tee everything that we were doing. When we made changes, a couple of days later they would make those changes. Like even stupid things we were doing, like we could have run a deal on porn and there probably would have been 80 other sites that would have run a deal on porn the next day. It was strange. After awhile you just shut it out and go on doing what you do.
Mason says he’s focused on growing the company with plans to be in 100 cities by the end of this year. Groupon will also break up larger cities into subareas. For example, the suburbs surrounding Chicago or the smaller cities in the Bay area will soon each have their own daily deal. He did not explain how Groupon will continue to leverage and work with social media tools, but he did mention that he’s very “excited about some of the stuff that Facebook’s announcing later this month.”