Five Questions for the Founder of Poggled, the Groupon for Nightlife

When Joe Matthews arrived at business school, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, in 2007, he came with typical financial services background: some investment banking experience at Morgan Stanley and then three years at Deloitte as a Strategy and Operations consultant. But when he graduated from the business school two years later, he found himself CEO and co-founder of Poggled, a web start-up aiming to save customers money at popular nightlife spots and events through discounted drink deals and party packages. In April, Poggled raised $5.6 million in venture funding and is looking to expand to new markets, while continuing to offer special nightlife deals such as bottle service packages and $1 drink deals on its website and iPhone and Android apps and spreading word of its services on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

I went to Indiana University in Bloomington and then worked at Morgan Stanley for two years in investment banking. From there, I worked in consulting for a couple of years at Deloitte before going to business school at Kellogg. I co-founded Poggled in my second year at Kellogg. During my time at Kellogg, I worked part-time at an incubator in Chicago, I2A, where people with all kinds of crazy ideas would come in to apply for grants. What we would do was analyze and look for the ones that seemed good and recognized patterns of need. There are all sorts of metrics that exist and good start-ups need to recognize them.

We started the business in March 2009. It originally started as a social network in the nightlife space. There were all sorts of applications coming out of mobile, web and social media technology. We (Matthews and co-founder Sean Strother) thought there was a big opportunity to come out of this.

One of the challenges is that you have to have some hypothesis about why the world needs to be changed by your company and how you're going to create value. No one starts a business unless they stay completely focused on it. At the same time, there are a million metrics for web businesses to track and measure. So I think there is a tension between showing people that your company is something to be pumped about and constantly improving metrics.

We are not a daily deals website like Groupon. Our deals are available for the entire year and customers can buy them forever. The biggest draw for Poggled is the savings. For example, I love having brunch at the Bull and Bear (one of Poggled's featured spots) and every time someone uses the restaurant's Poggled deal, the Bull and Bear makes money on the transaction and customers save money. We also do social parties where we send out an email to subscribers and give out deals to consistent users on Facebook. One deal is brunch for a dollar, so that user will buy the deal and go with friends, and the restaurant will make money from the other people who accompany him or her and pay full-price.

We do have plans for expansion. Right now, we're trying to grow as much as possible in the markets that we are currently in, prove that we are able to scale those markets and when we do that, move Poggled into new markets.

Benzinga and Poggled are partially funded by Lightbank, the technology investment vehicle started by Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky.