The startup interview blog Mixergy recently had a clip from an interview with the group coupon service Groupon and how Groupon acquired the Groupon.com domain.
The U.S. based company started out operating on a subdomain but decided they wanted to purchase Groupon.com from the owner, a U.K.-based individual. Their initial contact with the domain owner was unsuccessfully met with a “not interested.” A few months later, they contacted the owner and were again told the owner did not want to sell. Out of curiosity, they asked the owner of his intentions, which was to create a group coupon service – just as they had planned. The U.S. based company offered to work with the domain owner on extending their Groupon concept to Europe, but were again met with a “not interested.”
The U.S. based company continued operating and eventually filed a trademark for “Groupon” – a trademark that was extended to England.
I’ll let the U.S. based company pick up from here…
We contact him and say, ‘Hey, you can launch that thing, but you can’t use the name Groupon because we have a trademark on it.’
So then, he decided he wanted to sell.
I think we bought it in May 2009 or something like that for maybe $250,000, which seemed like a lot at the time and now it seems cheap.
I’ll bet $250,000 does sound cheap to Groupon as they have received $173 million in funding according to CrunchBase. However, unless I already had a business in place, I wouldn’t complain if I were the seller – well played.
There’s plenty more discussion on the startup community HackerNews here and here, including questioning the possible legal ticking time bomb of the trademark filing where Groupon declares:
to the best of his/her knowledge and belief no other person, firm, corporation, or association has the right to use the mark in commerce,
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