🧜‍♂️The rise, decline and settling-down of daily deals – with Adam Lovallo (Founder, Thesis; Co-founder, Grow.co)👓

The Mobile User Acquisition Show

Our guest today is Adam Lovallo – and today’s episode is a re-post from our other podcast How Things Grow which ran for a while before we started the Mobile UA show.

We’re now featuring some of the most popular episodes from How Things Grow – especially as these contain some riveting stories and lessons for mobile marketers.

Adam is the founder of Grow.co and also at Thesis. Before Adam started his conference and his agency, he cut his teeth in the whirlwind that was the daily deal space. He worked at LivingSocial, where he came in as an intern, and grew to be the head of UA and growth, managing 9 figure budgets and a team of 15 people.

He saw the company grow from four to 5000 people. He saw from close up the meteoric rise, slow down, crash and steady state settling of the daily deal space.

In this episode, we talk about LivingSocial’s beginnings as one of the leading Facebook app developers in the world. This was far before LivingSocial launched its first daily deal. We go into the unexpected rise of the daily deals business, the signs that it had started to slow down and how it all panned out.

This is not just a fascinating story, but also has some incredibly valuable lessons from the signs that Adam saw at the time about the unsustainability of the daily deals model, about how incredibly challenging it was to transition from a business with digital products to what was essentially one that served local businesses digitally.

Adam’s experiences tell us all about the journey – and we’re excited to re-present this episode to you today.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🩰 The beginnings of LivingSocial

💼 How LivingSocial made products for the Facebook apps that went viral

🤜🏻 Keeping up with the Facebook ecosystem was hard and unsustainable for everyone

👰🏻 Common mistakes that developers made when leveraging Facebook at the time

🏂🏻 How did other social platforms perform when compared to Facebook?

🏄🏻‍♂️ The transition of LivingSocial into the deals space

🥐 Online businesses vs. local businesses

🥧 Adam’s responsibilities as the company was transitioning

🌯 Scaling budgets & cities

🥣 Impact of data from different countries

🧘‍♂️ When did things start slowing down?

🎫 The red flags that Adam saw

🎳 Impact of businesses with high fixed costs

🎭 Merchant retention issues

⚓️ How downsizing affected the morale of employees

🛶 The beginning of Grow.co
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Check out the show notes here:
https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/episode/daily-deals-livingsocial-adam-lovallo-grow-co-thesis/

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