The Point

the social good predecessor to Groupon

Since 2007

Chicago, IL

> The idea that would eventually become Groupon was born out of founder Andrew Mason's frustration trying to cancel a cell phone contract in 2006. Mason thought that there must be some way to leverage large number of people's collective bargaining power. In 2007 Mason launched The Point, a web platform based on the "tipping point" principle that would utilize social media to get people together to accomplish a goal. The Point was intended to organize people around some sort of cause or goal. It gained only modest traction in Chicago, until a group of users decided their cause would be saving money. They wanted to round up people to buy the same product in order to receive a group discount. Founder Eric Lefkofsky wanted the company to pivot in order to focus entirely on group buying. Born from The Point, Groupon was launched in November 2008. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupon#Early_history) Some of the campaigns on the site include trying to get Aquafina to switch to bio-degradable bottles (50,000 participants needed), Universal Music to sell DRM-free songs (1,000,000 participants needed), or CNN.com to separate trivial human interest stories from actual news (1,000,000 participants needed).