I’m not well aware of the public reputation Groupon holds, but for me, it was a negative one. Being the director of a tight-knit, small community gym, I was concerned about all the horror stories I had heard indirectly about how running a Groupon deal destroyed their business’ positive atmosphere. After debating for some time, I decided to give it a go – at least once – to see what would happen. Here are the results:
Groupon’s Service
I dealt with a very nice woman named Carly who, despite being very eager, was not pushy at all. Coordinating calls with her and figuring out details were a breeze and I’m actually quite shocked at how quickly RocPK was able to get a deal put together and featured.
If there is any negative experience I had, it would be their unwillingness to allow the business to choose their discount rate. For Rochester Parkour, no matter how I would push, we could not run a deal without a minimum 60% discount. As a service provider, our services are already priced incredibly fair and I’m not one to artificially inflate prices simply so we can run a “deal.” Running the deal at their terms was border-line stupid and under-cut our value significantly.
The Offerings
Instead of selling memberships, we decided to simply sell a bundle of class packages as well as private sessions to better determine what Groupon’s membership was more interested in. There were 4 options in total: 1, 3, 5, and 10 classes which were priced at $13, $15, $20, and $35 respectively. The deal ran for 3 days and each option was capped at 50 each to ensure that our small gym wouldn’t get bum-rushed.
The Results
Interestingly, the deal sold-out in ascending order starting with the 10 class package, then the 5, and the 3 and 1 nearly missed selling-out. At this point I was worried. Within a 36 hour time-frame, we had sold at least 1 class to over 150 brand new people. Scared and excited, we braced ourselves for the impending surge…which as of me writing this, has yet to happen. This deal is almost 1 month old and we have yet to be surged. Our classes have gone from a consistent 3 people to a seemingly pleasant 5 students. Why this happens to be the case, I have no idea. Perhaps the surge will hold until right before the deal ends.
Running a Groupon deal ultimately made sense because we are a service provider and thus, have a changing value to the people we advertise to. For us, our gym runs at around 20% of total capacity so there’s no real harm of over crowding if that number grows to 30 or 40% from extra people who value the experience less. Chances are, they will learn to value the service at the same rate as our other members, and if they don’t, then I don’t want them there any way – thanks for trying it out.
In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised by the experience I had with Groupon. Rochester Parkour will definitely look at running more in the future but under different terms and with options that make more sense to build what we’re trying to build. The most important factor for me was for RocPK to make some much needed money in the short-term with little or no atmosphere change in the classes for the older members. To me, this was a win-win and am happy with the result.
Please comment with your experiences

