1) Asinine joke about how this IPO isn’t the kind of discount you’d find on the Groupon site itself. Shoot yourself.
2) Discuss: bubble or no bubble? Ponder the existential meaning of being in a “not-a-bubble”.
3) Groupon has lots of revenues! And they’re growing so fast that you’d be justified in using the word “exponentially”. Even if it’s incorrect. Because nobody’s going to check. Because nobody gives a toss.
4) Mention these other things called “costs”, and how there are more of those than there are revenues. Block quote a paragraph from the Risk Factors section of the S-1; like so:
We incurred net losses of $389.6 million and $102.7 million in 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, respectively, and had an accumulated deficit of $522.1 million as of March 31, 2011. We anticipate that our operating expenses will increase substantially in the foreseeable future as we continue to invest to increase our subscriber base, increase the number and variety of deals we offer each day, expand our marketing channels, expand our operations, hire additional employees and develop our technology platform.
5) If you ignored #1, and you’re still here, embed links to any blog with the word “Deal” in it, because they probably know more about this than you do — start here and here. And find a way to link back to earlier FT Alphaville posts about other social media IPOs: it makes you look authoritative even if the transition is strained. Get crazy tangential if necessary. People like windbaggy blog posts, really.
6) List the underwriters in a paragraph that will matter only to underwriters. (Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse: since we got mad love for underwriters).
7) Silently acknowledge to yourself that your post would be funnier if you were Josh Brown or The Epicurean Dealmaker or this lawyer person.
Or scrap all this nonsense and just write a meta post. Because, well:
Related link:
“Google Docks”, or, how to generically and pompously write the Schmidt story – FT Alphaville