Overview

InterWest Partners

Our investment in bloomspot: It's about closing the loop in local commerce and "Live life better"

Ok, we confess - we are fans of daily deals! That makes us two out of a hundred million plus. However, there are a few things that have been bugging us about our deals.

First, we frequently get deals for a "Brazilian Blowout". While we are definitely interested in hanging on to our youthful looks, we think this deal is wasted on us given our receding hairline. On the other hand, we would instantly fall for a Napa Valley Culinary Exploration. In fact, anyone looking at our spending pattern would easily be able to tell that we spend a lot more on good food than on good hair. So why do we still get too many offers for Brazilian Blowouts and too few for Napa Valley Explorations?

Second, we are dismayed by the experiences of some local merchants who have been disappointed with their deal campaigns. Many of them think these deals bring in users that are not their ideal customers. These merchants may not run additional deals. This worries us because we like good deals and don't want them to go away!

We have been thinking, "there must be a better way"! We were fortunate to be involved with some early experiences in online advertising and thought those lessons could guide us. Online ads also started off poorly - with untargeted ads causing "banner blindness" among users and poor ROI among advertisers. Then, magic happened! Google and others started to take into account feedback from users in terms of click-through-rate and landing page conversions and used that data to match the right ad with the right user. Bingo! Users and advertiser interests were now aligned - users got relevant ads and advertisers got relevant users. Closing the feedback loop created the massively successful online advertising industry that we see today.

Fortunately for us, we met Jasper & Ashish! From our very first meeting with them, we loved their vision for bloomspot to align merchant profitability and user satisfaction by closing the loop in a local deal offer. Instead of just focusing on brute force sales execution, the bloomspot team is focusing on building a scalable product platform that incorporates analytics to continuously optimize targeting of local deals. This results in matching the best customers with the best merchants, creating a virtuous circle that is bound to usher in the golden era of local commerce.

We are excited to partner with bloomspot and confident that our best deals are yet to come! Hope you join in the bloomspot network to "Live life better".