Anyone heard of anything surrounding gWallet?
gWallet’s tagline is “reinventing the way you shop”, interestingly close to the first iteration of iLetYou as “reinventing renting”.
Gurbaksh Chahal, founder of BlueLithium which sold to Yahoo, is the poster boy for his third startup.
I’m generally super-critical of any startup that attacks a stronghold market with a product that’s marginally better. gWallet is obviously being touted as revolutionary, but from I haven’t seen as much from what I’ve seen about gWallet so far.
In this particular example, it’s very clear that comparison shopping search and merchant aggregation community (especially surrounding coupons and deals) are very lucrative and profitable spaces.
Become.com and RetailMeNot are recent and even more recent, respectively, examples that seemingly entered when there were already many established players. Revisiting these two examples right now, Become.com seems a little Web 1.0 while RetailMeNot’s secret seems to be clean user experience incorporating social elements of voting and user-generated coupons/content (but probably a lot of competency in core areas such as SEO and PR is the real reason).
On the other hand, there is just so much value to be extracted from this whole coupon/deal/savings space. Lots of companies do it well, but is it really a cornered market? So I am definitely wondering if Gurbaksh Chahal understands this much: that by competently applying a marginally better experience to an inherently lucrative and not completely efficient space can translate to a huge win. Because I’m not personally seeing the ace in the hole quite yet.
Thoughts or anything else to add?
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