Buyer’s Unite Pitches Reverse Groupon Concept At Startup Weekend Memphis

Chicago startup Groupon has confirmed to the world the power of the group. LivingSocial and countless other startups compete in the same group daily deal model as Groupon with great success.

Joe Kennedy, a self proclaimed serial entrepreneur, has decided to flip that group daily deal model on it’s head. Instead of coming up with the group deal, and having a buy in, his startup puts the group together to form an adhoc buyers group. If you’re not familiar with the buyers group concept the best comparison would be to a food or grocery co-op. This is where communities are able to force a discount by joining together for a group buy.

Kennedy presented the idea at Startup Weekend in Memphis on Friday evening and got more interest from the group in attendance than he thought.  Local young entrepreneur Harold Strong from Yadoog, a startup birthed at 48 Hour Launch in June, dove head first into assisting Kennedy and leading the team of 6 into product development.

Kennedy confirmed at press time that they will definitely be ready to show off proof of concept if not more Sunday evening during the Startup Weekend Memphis finals. In addition to reserving their intellectual property, and hashing out the technical infrastructure they also had to come up with the first vertical that Buyer’s Unite would tackle. The concept itself can work on any vertical but the team chose health insurance to insure (see what we did there), easy quick scalability.


Buyer’s Unite will offer several buying groups that their users can join but for the first group they hope to go to insurance carriers with thousands of people in the group ready to buy. That would in effect force the carrier to offer a sizable discount to guarantee that much business.

There are several monetization options and revenue models but Kennedy likes the idea of a very small fee on the transaction once the deal is complete. Paying $3.50-$5.00 for the ability to save over $100 on health insurance is a win win for everyone.  We’ll see tomorrow if it’s a win for the judges.

Check out the video pitch below:

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More nibletz.com Startup Weekend Coverage here

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