Mobile answers service ChaCha continues to find itself on TechCrunch’s radar. A tipster points us to this article published on a local Indiana business news site, which reveals the heavily VC-funded company is expanding if not slowly changing its business strategy with the addition of a digital coupon service dubbed ChaChaCoupons.
ChaCha CEO Scott Jones tells the local business newspaper that ChaChaCoupons is a ‘logical extension’ of its core service, which allows users to call or text questions on mobile phones and receive answers from human guides quickly and free of charge. He adds that the service currently attracts about 9 million unique users per month through mobiles and its website, but forgets to mention that the model doesn’t appear to work out all that well for the startup. ChaCha has cut guides’ payments quite a few times since its inception and was forced to lay off a significant part of its staff earlier this year.
Anyway: ChaChaCoupons aims to make it easy for people to search for local companies and offers by business type, area of the city, alphabetical listing, newest deals, and more. Like most online coupon services, visitors can print coupons at their desktop or send them to their mobile phones to be redeemed at their favorite businesses. They can also send a coupon via text messaging to a ChaCha in-store coupon printer.
At launch, hundreds of local offers are on the site with special coupons and discounts in some 13 categories ranging from beauty to restaurants. Conceivably, ChaCha will be expanding the service to more regions and cities across the United States in the future.
The new ChaCha service has also been integrated with the company’s text VIP lists where users sign up to get cellphone offers and news from their favorite businesses. Users can choose to instantly join an advertiser’s VIP List by either text or online at ChaChaCoupons.com, giving local businesses a way of retaining their loyal customer base.
In all fairness, I actually agree that this could be a worthy extension for the regular ChaCha service that the company could turn into dollars, which it is hard-pressed for. That said, ChaCha basically raised approximately $62 million for a mobile answer service, and I can’t shake off the feeling that this new addition is actually the company desperately trying to do new things because its primary focus turned out to be, well, worthless. Time will tell if all this branching out can help the company’s investors get something out of the startup in the long run.
On a sidenote, I had a good laugh when I looked up the most recent question from a mobile phone that was featured on the ChaCha website. It was: “where do squirrels poop?” and I’ll let you check out the guide’s answer and more in the comment section on your own, for shits and giggles (pun intended).
Coupons is hot market right now but looks like most of the 62M is going to be lost….
Hyper-local couponing is going to be huge. As soon as ChaCha and similar services get a better location read from smartphones, the higher conversion of these local coupons will begin to shift marketing dollars from analog media to mobile.
Seems like ChaCha really has a head start on this because the have about 6 million unique users monthly that go to their site http://www.chacha.com and about 2 million that use it on the phone – all those people are looking for deals and businesses want their eyeballs. Makes sense to me.
Hi Mr. VC. We’d like to launch this coupon site. Should throw off about $1M a year! We need $62M to get started. Payback by the time your great grandchildren finish college!
Get the f-k out of my office.
Sounds like somebody is searching for a business model. Better find it before the money’s gone.
Too little too late. Look what Ask.com is doing?
http://www.ask.com/deals
And for stuff people are more likely to want and at a national level.
Goodbye Cc. Your time in the deadpool is way overdue.
i am familiar with the cha cha site, but had no idea they had access to, or had burned thru, $62 million. that’s alot of dough to spend for what they have right now
I wonder how excited the VCs are about putting up $62 million just to get $2 off their haircuts! The only thing that ChaCha has going for it is a good web designer apparently. They change their look as often as they change their business model… monthly.
Unfortunately this time they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to salvage some dignity. I can’t wait for them to say, “Coupons was on our radar from day one.” Just like they’ve said about all of their business model changes.
The funniest part about this one is that the content is the same as http://www.coupons4indy.com minus the fancy web design. I bet the coupons4indy people didn’t blow $62 million to arrive here though, and it looks like they started back in 2003. Sadly for ChaCha, it seems that coupons4indy has the same coupons (if not better) than what ChaCha offers.
But I can hear it now: “We’re gonna send the coupons to your phone via text though!!” Well, I can’t wait to see the look on the mechanic’s face at the auto shop when you hold up your phone to him and say “See… I get $5 off a lube, oil and filter!”
I hear you Ajay, but the other company is run by this little mom and pop shop, i think they are husband and wife. The site looks like they built it with frontpage including the cheesy olan mills family picture…
I am sure with how chacha.com is ranked they will soon takeover the #1 google spot , that sucks for the mom and pop shop when they called on my business that was their number one sales pitch… Onward and upward everyone..