What is the opposite of Groupon?
Back in 2014, Groupon reported $7.6 billion in gross billings (that’s the total dollar value of customer purchases before deducting costs, refunds, or revenue sharing with merchants) and I wanted a piece of that action. So I came up with an idea.
What if, instead of companies offloading their leftover inventory at a discount to consumers, we as consumers got together and told companies what we wanted to buy from them and at what price?
If enough people wanted the same thing, I’d approach the company with a pitch like this:
“I’ve got 5,367 people ready to buy your handmade aquarium coffee table for $300 each. That’s $1,610,100 in sales and it’ll cost you $80,000 (5% of total sale) which is a fraction of what you’d spend on a sales team.”
Thousands of people would get what they wanted, the company would get an instant spike in sales and Ian would make $80K.
Dreamhip was born.
I made a video explaining the concept (using the Disney framework, more on that another time). Fair warning: apparently I hadn’t discovered microphones yet, so the audio is rough. But the zooms and rotations still hold up, honestly.
The video lived on a simple one-page website (see it on the WayBack Machine) and I came up with a snazzy tagline “Changing the way friends buy stuff”, I still love that!
The website was just the video and a form asking visitors what products, experiences, or people they wanted to see (like bands, comedians, you name it). This was before I knew how to build user registration or account functionality, so the plan was to manage everything manually. That would have been a complete disaster if it had actually gained traction.
It didn’t.
Less than a year in, I got frustrated with the lack of progress and killed it.
What I learned
This was one of my first product explainer videos, and while the audio is genuinely bad, the zoom-and-rotate approach is something I still think is solid — even a decade later. The artwork? Rough. The concept? Still holds up.
More importantly, this was deep in my “no results fast = kill it” phase, which is a terrible way to build a business. Years later I’d come across this Sam Altman quote that hit hard: “99% of startups die from suicide, not murder.” So many of these early ventures died exactly that way, including this one.
The core idea was genuinely interesting (consumer-driven demand aggregation) before that was really a thing. I just needed more patience, and a better microphone.
What I’d do differently now
- Actually let people register. Accounts from day one — no question.
- Show momentum. Inside the account dashboard, alongside the submission form, I’d display a grid of “Suggested” and “Gaining Traction” deals with each showing something like “Kevin Hart Comedy Show · $15 · 16,778 people in” with a single button to join. Click it, and you’re +1.
- Save payment info upfront. This would’ve been the real unlock. Get permission to automatically charge users the moment a deal is confirmed. Being able to say “Just say yes to the deal and I can wire you the money today” during a pitch to a business? That’s a completely different conversation.
- Sell it instead of killing it. If I’d built it out further but still didn’t want to continue, trying to sell it would’ve been a far better exit than just pulling the plug.