Double the size, more innovation on mind says Groupon CTO Colin Bodell

Let’s talk about your journey in India so far.

The company is nearly 10 years old and even today we follow the same business model. We realized there were thousands of businesses in the country that were good with what they did but didn’t know how to connect with the customer base. So we started off with the philosophy of being a marketing agent for companies. The idea was to connect customers with different merchants from different categories and we would offer coupons to customers to entice them to visit our merchant companies. This way the companies themselves could build a relationship with its customers. Soon, the company went big with get big fast strategy. However, to penetrate a bigger market we realized we needed different models and the growth was fuelled by acquisitions. India offers massive opportunities and we rebranded ourselves to reach larger customer base.  

Your previous stint in India did not fare as well as you would have liked it.  What do you think could have gone wrong?  

So Groupon India was not very successful and maybe there are several reasons for that. Maybe economy evolved here and it wasn’t the right time for us. We have different models for different territories but it was much more complex and expensive. It is a capital intensive process to set up a sales organization. However, the right trick is to have the right economic model to enter any country and we will continue to evaluate that.

So what can we expect from Groupon this time?

This time around, however, we have evaluated ourselves and consolidated which means exiting from markets that were not effective for us. Also, we have combined technology into a single platform and there has been tremendous innovation around this. In USA, we have Groupon Plus, which is a common platform, and maybe we will take it to other markets. So, our inventory was limited and now we have ingested moreinventories from merchant companies. So now we will be one stop shopping solution with bundling opportunities. Also, we are doubling our team in India and more recruitment is on the cards.  

There has been immense tech innovation in India in the last five years. How are you competing with startups like Zomato or BookMyShow or HouseJoy?

There are two dimensions to this- tech innovation and how Groupon competes with this. Our objective is to provide view into lots of service options available out there. So what we are trying to do is help smaller businesses who don’t have the infrastructure to reach wider customer base, connect with them and we want to provide them the visibility. So big or small companies, we want them to grow and reach more number of people.

What role is technology like AI and ML playing in building your company? 

We have internal AI platform called Yoda and we are working on improving our data set. We want to use AI for recommendations. For instance, even if customers are not buying anything, we want to understand what they are looking and inform our sales team to go after that merchant. For example, in a particular city, if a customer can’t find the restaurant they are looking for, we will go partner with that restaurant based on our search signals and connect with the merchant. This way we want to bring more conversions.   

What are your goals for India?

You know one of my engineering directors from India, who has been in the USA since his college, wanted to come back to India because the growth here is much faster. To me, this sends a very strong message because that’s the growth opportunities we have here. We will double the size of team in Bengaluru by 2019. In next 12 months we will add 60 more positions and the rest after that. Building our team, supporting innovation and adding more tech expertise is on our agenda.