cte

Does this work for marketplace payments?

From Groupon's S-1:

"To demonstrate the economics of our business model, we have compared the revenue and gross profit generated from the North American subscribers we acquired in the second quarter of 2010, which we refer to as our Q2 2010 cohort, to the online marketing expenses incurred to acquire such subscribers. The Q2 2010 cohort is illustrative of trends we have seen among our North American subscriber base. The Q2 2010 cohort included 3.7 million subscribers that we initially spent $18.0 million in online marketing to acquire in the second quarter of 2010. In that quarter, we generated $29.8 million in revenue and $12.8 million in gross profit from the sale of approximately 1.2 million Groupons to these subscribers. Through March 31, 2011, we generated an aggregate of $145.3 million in revenue and $61.7 million in gross profit from the sale of approximately 6.3 million Groupons to the Q2 2010 cohort. In summary, we spent $18.0 million in online marketing expense to acquire subscribers in the Q2 2010 cohort and generated $61.7 million in gross profit from this group of subscribers over four quarters."

They are seeing >3x profit on typical cohorts, so they decided to buy as many users as possible (which is smart).

Here's a piece of the S1 that I haven't yet seen cited:

"To demonstrate the economics of our business model, we have compared the revenue and gross profit generated from the North American subscribers we acquired in the second quarter of 2010, which we refer to as our Q2 2010 cohort, to the online marketing expenses incurred to acquire such subscribers. The Q2 2010 cohort is illustrative of trends we have seen among our North American subscriber base. The Q2 2010 cohort included 3.7 million subscribers that we initially spent $18.0 million in online marketing to acquire in the second quarter of 2010. In that quarter, we generated $29.8 million in revenue and $12.8 million in gross profit from the sale of approximately 1.2 million Groupons to these subscribers. Through March 31, 2011, we generated an aggregate of $145.3 million in revenue and $61.7 million in gross profit from the sale of approximately 6.3 million Groupons to the Q2 2010 cohort. In summary, we spent $18.0 million in online marketing expense to acquire subscribers in the Q2 2010 cohort and generated $61.7 million in gross profit from this group of subscribers over four quarters."

A typical cohort that returned >3x what it cost? Sounds like a good business to me.

Social software doesn't provide value unless your friends are using it.

What specifically is wrong w/ web2.0, consumerism, etc?

Clixpy is a decent clone of clicktale.com, userfly.com, and exactostats.com, but doesn't seem to have a "shtick" that differentiates it from the other offerings. With userfly.com, we tried to make everything dead simple, and much cheaper than clicktale. We also focus on capturing quality user sessions (lots of page views, lots of actions fired per page, bounced users don't count against your quota).

However, at the end of the day, watching individual user sessions, one after another, doesn't really scale; you need a way to aggregate the data to identify trends that may suggest pain points for the end user, and we haven't really cracked that nut (and neither have our competitors).

Out of curiosity, why the long wait before launch?

I would concentrate on a mobile strategy. It is probably very difficult to get anyone to placemark anything without some kind of mobile integration. Additionally, you might want to consider adding incentives for placemarking via gaming mechanics. Or perhaps ride the geocaching trend. There are a few iPhone apps that you can use for brainstorming (for instance, check out GoWalla).

Looks a lot like campaignmonitor.com.