Taggle, a startup that raised $8.75 million from Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners ceases to be a group buying platform now. Launched in June 2010, the Bangalore based startup has now transformed into an ecommerce store.
If you look at Taggle’s traffic, there was a peak after few months of starting up (which I believe is because of marketing campaigns, though ~10% of the traffic goes to subdomains like crm.taggle.com, dev.taggle etc. Aside, I strongly recommend the team to remove dev instance, or block it for public IPs, unless they really want to showcase what the dev team is checking-in).
The company spent a substantial amount of money in acquiring Facebook fans, especially before the launch and I guess the marketing was done way before the product was matured enough to handle the eyeballs.
In its new form, Taggle is no different from any other ecommerce player – they are focusing on electronics category etc, which is known to be a margin-sucker category.
In short, it’s a fresh beginning for Taggle – and taking a horizontal ecommerce route puts them in direct competition with the likes of Flipkart, Homeshop18 etc.
What’s your take on Taggle’s new avatar? Given the blood bath in the group buying space, expect consolidation in the coming days.
I have reached out to Taggle team and will update the post when I hear back from them.
Update [Sep 9th, 2011]: Taggle cofounder, Tej Arora shared that $8.75M was a projected need and of that only $1m was received. Now with a change in business model, the old projections are no longer valid.
Also see: Taggle CEO John Kuruvilla Resigns.
