Gaopeng

» see gaopeng.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A hundred million dollars is the number to hold onto here. Groupon put in fifty and Tencent put in fifty, with Jack Ma's Yunfeng Capital alongside them, and the entire sum was spent inside sixteen months on a Chinese group-buying site that never got above about two percent of its market.

Gaopeng.com went live on 27 February 2011 in Beijing and Shanghai. Tencent took the servers offline the same day, hours after launch, reportedly because Groupon had pushed the site public without telling its own joint venture partner it was going to. That is the founding anecdote of the company and it turned out to be a fair summary of the following year.

It hired the way Groupon hired everywhere, which in China meant a sales army. Ten people arrived from the German operation to start it, fifty local staff joined in the first week, and the plan was a thousand more by March. By August 2011 that had reversed. Offices in more than ten cities were shut and Chinese press put the layoffs somewhere between four hundred and a thousand people in a single week.

The Turkish version of 2011 was smaller and less violent but it had the same smell. Every mailbox in the country filled up that year with daily deal messages promising half price on a restaurant you would never go to, and the sites sending them all launched within a few months of each other and mostly stopped existing within two years. Watching China do the same thing with a thousand competitors and a hundred million dollars was watching your own local mess at ten times the scale.

~ the dossier ~

~ the launch that lasted an afternoon ~

The Tencent shutdown on day one is worth more attention than it usually gets, because it explains what Gaopeng was structurally. Groupon knew group buying and had none of the Chinese distribution. Tencent had QQ, which at that point could put a link in front of hundreds of millions of people, and had no particular reason to hurry. When the American side went to market early, the Chinese side demonstrated who actually controlled the switch.

Distribution never really arrived after that. Gaopeng ran as an ordinary deal site in an extremely crowded market, and by January 2012 it was holding roughly 2.1 percent, sitting behind thirteen competitors.

~ a thousand deal sites ~

China's group-buying period is remembered locally as the war of a thousand groups, and the number was not far off. Meituan, Lashou, Dianping, Nuomi and hundreds of smaller operations were all buying the same merchants and discounting against each other, and almost none of them survived. Meituan is the one that came out the other side and is now worth more than Groupon ever was.

Gaopeng entered that fight late, carrying a foreign playbook and a partner with its own reasons for being in the room. The money bought headcount very fast and bought almost no market share.

~ the shell that outlived the shop ~

On 26 June 2012 FTuan acquired Gaopeng from its owners. Both brands were supposed to be kept and both were folded into a new company, later renamed Beijing Wangluo Tianxia, with Groupon reduced to a minority shareholder. The site kept publishing deals for a while: the archive has city-specific Gaopeng pages for Suzhou in December 2012 and Anshun in January 2013, and then the captures stop entirely for four years.

When gaopeng.com came back in May 2017 it was something else. The page described a Beijing company founded in March 2011 that invested in and incubated firms around Tencent's ecosystem, claiming involvement in roughly twenty companies. The corporate entity had survived by abandoning the product it was created to run. The domain does not answer at all now, from here at least, which is the third state it has been in.

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