Tippr

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

~ the last words ~

Groupon made the daily deal look like a format anyone could run, and in 2010 several hundred people tried. Tippr came out of Seattle in February of that year, built inside an existing company called Kashless whose CEO was Martin Tobias. It ran three deals per city per day and made a point of the fact that its scouts, whom the marketing called Tippsters, had personally bought everything they put on the page.

The consumer site was the smaller half of the business. Tippr also sold the whole apparatus as a white-label platform to newspapers and publishers who wanted their own deal of the day without building one, and in November 2010 it went as far as proposing an open standard for describing deals so the industry could interoperate. More than ten million dollars went into it, RRE Ventures among the backers.

What made it different from the other few hundred was what Tobias had bought in the same month it launched.

~ the record ~

~ the pocket aces ~

Mercata was Paul Allen's version of this idea, funded through Vulcan and launched in 1999, where the price of an item fell as more buyers committed to it. It died in the dot-com collapse in early 2001 and its patents on dynamic group pricing went through bankruptcy court to Vulcan Ventures, where they sat for the better part of a decade while nobody had a use for them.

Tobias bought them in February 2010, at the exact moment the idea came back. His line about it was that he had picked up the pocket aces of intellectual property in group collective buying. Read against what happened next, that was less a boast than a filing plan.

~ fourteen defendants ~

In February 2011 Tippr sued fourteen companies in federal court. The list included names that had raised real money, BuyWithMe and HomeRun among them, along with much smaller shops like Click-N-Shout and Deal Co-Op. Almost all of them were white-label deal platforms, which is to say Tippr's direct competitors rather than its category's giants.

Groupon was not sued. Neither was LivingSocial. The two companies with the money to fight a patent case and the incentive to invalidate the portfolio outright were the two left alone, and everyone who could not afford that fight settled or got dismissed by the middle of September 2011. That is the whole story of the deals patent war, which lasted seven months and ended with no ruling on whether the patents were any good.

~ what came after ~

On 24 April 2013 Tippr was bought by nCrowd of Atlanta. Tobias was blunt about why: after three years nobody in daily deals was making money, and a market for software platforms serving an unprofitable industry is not a market. The brand stayed up under new ownership for another year and a half. The archive has tippr.com serving its own deals on 19 December 2014, and by 17 January 2015 the same address was a bare redirect to ncrowd.com.

nCrowd then went down harder than anything it had bought. Its assets were foreclosed on 30 July 2015 by a secured creditor, which left merchants and voucher holders as unsecured creditors with nothing, and the assets moved to a new company called Boomstreet that filed for bankruptcy on 31 May 2016. Canada's telecom regulator later issued a notice of violation over the email the group had been sending.

The daily deal reached Turkey on the same schedule it reached everywhere, arriving around 2010 with the same three-a-day email and the same restaurant vouchers, and it burned out on the same schedule too. The patent fight did not travel with it. That part was fought entirely in American federal court over an American bankruptcy estate from 2001, and nothing about it was visible from a Turkish inbox in 2011.

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