Groupon CEO: “97% of businesses we feature want to be featured again”

In an interview today at TechCrunch Crunchup, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason called his company a, “kind of like a replacement to the classic city guide.”

“It got better as we started to get better businesses. The businesses definately look at it as the best kind of local advertising that has ever been. 97% of the businesses we feature want to be featured again,” said Mason. He said that they have six month wait lists in some cities of businesses looking to be featured.

Groupon has had to tweak the model many times and started out as a way to crowdsource good ideas. “A lot of it early on was figuring out what types of deals worked, and which ones didn’t.” Groupon’s “stealth strategy” was to focus on Chicago early on.

Groupon certainly leverages the social structure of the Web. “The stuff we are selling is inherently social. By tying into the social infrastructure of Twitter and Facebook, we can create a frictionless way to for people to share,” said Mason.

Mason isn’t really too concerned about all of the Groupon clones (Mason says there are as many as 500) – and one strategy Groupon plans use to compete with other large companies such as Google and Yelp by “personalized deals”.

Asked whether it is easier to get new users on either Facebook or Google, Mason said that it fluctuates between the two.

Mason says that they don’t have a good reason to even think about going public at this time and seems preHere’s our coverage of an earlier talk this year that Mason gave.