After almost four months of building, launching and now growing Cudo I feel that I have sufficient headspace to return to my blog.
Of course the irony of my last post is not lost on me, albeit I knew at the time of writing it that I was about to begin developing “yet another” Group Buying competitor.
I wrote, “Chances are a number of poorly funded Group Buying pretenders will come and go over the coming months, it will no doubt be fascinating to watch!”, and since then I have joined the fray with Cudo.com.au, a rather well funded effort jointly supported by my new masters PBLm and Microsoft. And it has been fascinating to watch!
11 or so months in, and none of the Australian Group Buying companies appear to have failed just yet. And like any fragmented marketplace the aggregators are in the mix too, capitalising on the lack of loyalty or differentiation. I expect they will start to lose interest at some point too having failed to build a decent living out of their thin affiliation! But for now, there still seems to be some room in the market as the shoppers keep shopping, and the Merchants keep signing up to their new found one-day wonder-spruik.
Even with all this new competition there’s no obvious downside to Cudo either as enthusiastic new entrants pour oodles more money into Google in an effort to harvest a precious click or two, while educating Consumers and Merchants alike for the greater good.
I still expect to we’ll see some consolidation soon, but for now, it’s 1pm on a Saturday, back to work I guess… Start-up life!
Hey Billy, I’ve checked out the Cudo site after my daughter swore by it and it seems like a good one among many. Good luck with it especially over the Christmas period!