Jump On It

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

~ the obituary ~

In March 2012 LivingSocial paid a reported forty million dollars for Jump On It, the largest group-buying site in Australia. Twelve weeks later it switched the name off. That is not a scandal, it is just what the number was for: the forty million bought a subscriber list and a merchant book, and neither of those needed the logo sitting on top of it.

Jump On It was started in late 2009 by three Australians who had each built internet businesses before. Colin Fabig ran it, with James Gilbert and Adam Rigby beside him. The office was on Sydney's lower North Shore and the model was the one everybody was copying that year. One deal a day, twenty four hours to take it, up to ninety percent off a restaurant or a gym or a spa, and the voucher emailed the moment enough people had committed. The name is the mechanic. Enough people jump on it and the deal turns on.

It got very large very quickly. Within three months of launch it was taking millions, and by 2012 the company counted 1.2 million subscribers and about two hundred staff, most of them in Sydney with the engineering team working out of Serbia. For roughly two years an Australian company was beating the American ones in its own market, which almost nothing in this category managed anywhere.

~ the case file ~

~ the facebook trick ~

The clever part came before the product. Rather than buying search ads against the word deals, the founders set up Facebook pages with names like I Love Sydney and I Love Melbourne. There was one for each capital city, and people joined because they did in fact love Sydney. Then the company sold local vouchers into an audience that had already put its hand up for local things.

By late 2010 those pages carried more than half a million members, and they eventually reached 580,000. Facebook was still handing out organic reach in 2010, so a post to a page that size actually arrived in front of people. That window stayed open for about two more years, and every growth story that depended on it ended when it shut.

~ the money ~

Nextec Capital put in the first round in May 2010. In November that year LivingSocial bought 31 percent for five million dollars, which both sides understood as a marker rather than an investment, and the Jump On It team took over running LivingSocial's own platform in Australia at the same time. The press release talked about going from fifty staff to a hundred and fifty within four months and about fifty million dollars of annual turnover.

The full purchase came through in March 2012. LivingSocial was at the top of its arc that year, raising money at a valuation in the billions and buying companies in a dozen countries, and Australia was one of the few markets where it had a clear lead to defend.

~ who switched it off ~

The shutdown came on 8 June 2012. Everyone with a Jump On It account woke up with a LivingSocial account instead, working from the same login. The merchants were carried across the same way. The executive who announced it was Adam Rigby, by then Executive General Manager for LivingSocial in Australia and New Zealand, and one of the three people who had started Jump On It thirty months earlier. His line was that combining the merchants and subscribers into LivingSocial cemented an already leading position. James Gilbert resigned that November.

The same wave hit Turkey at the same time with local names rather than imported ones, and it burned out on the same schedule. Daily deals were never a business so much as a customer acquisition method that a lot of people mistook for one, and the merchants worked it out about a year before the investors did.

LivingSocial itself was sold to Groupon in 2016 for nothing and wound down in 2017. The domain jumponit.com bounces today to a parking lander, and the Australian one does not resolve at all.

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