The massive growth of Groupon
Daniel Guasco and Wayne Gosling launched Groupon in its former guise of Twangoo in 2010. In just over 150 days of the launch Twangoo had already grown massively in scale and was purchased to become Groupon; South Africa’s premier online deal, group buying platform.
The journey from launch to present day, is one of massive learnings, many office moves and an incredible feat of entrepreneurialism. To any South African entrepreneur, Daniel’s story has almost legendary status, which is why I am feeling incredibly thrilled to find myself sitting opposite him at the RSAWEB offices on a beautiful day in May.
Born and raised in Cape Town, Daniel has had a strong entrepreneurial calling from a very young age, telling stories of his past that include successfully privatising the school’s tuck-shop at the tender age of 12 and that his first employee was in fact a driver as he was too young to be able to drive himself around at the time.
Starting with shared office space and 5 people, Groupon’s power in the market has always been their ability to scale rapidly and as with all growth, as they grew, naturally they required more space and more resources. The staff count quickly increased to 40 people in an office and then to over 100, and it was at this stage of rapid growth that Daniel and Wayne approached RSAWEB for assistance on supplying Fibre Internet.
RSAWEB were able to implement an incredibly fast Fibre Optic Internet line into their offices, and then continued their support of the service when Groupon found themselves needing to move to a bigger office and then an even bigger office a few months later. Daniel comments; “not only did RSAWEB assist us by ensuring the Internet access was implemented quickly and efficiently but they also did so not once, but multiple times, as we rapidly expanded and needed to move. The service we have received from RSAWEB has been amazing and they have grown with us and helped us to grow. Their speed and ability to adapt and change as we needed them to, has been massively important in our journey.”
Daniel continues by saying; “we rely on a local connection to access our systems and if we don’t have that fast connection we cannot function. If the staff are working online and the speed of the connection is slow it will of course, restrict the productivity of the individual – ultimately, if we didn’t have Fibre, we wouldn’t be in business!”
Groupon has continued to grow from strength to strength, adding more suppliers and taking on more staff, all of whom make use of a number of Cloud-based software solutions – which further adds to the need for incredibly fast Internet.
Constantly on the move, Daniel and Wayne are also looking to expand the business by moving to new offices once again and by growing into a more market place e-commerce space. As the Groupon website states; “[we are] reinventing the traditional small business world by providing merchants with a suite of products and services including customisable deals, payments processing capabilities and point-of-sale solutions, to help them attract more customers and run their operations more effectively.”
Daniel continues by noting “Ultimately, through the growth of Groupon we will enabled other entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs to launch and grow” and you can be guaranteed that RSAWEB will be ready and willing to assist them as they continue to innovate and expand.
Here is another article we wrote on our City Fibre:
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