<story><title>PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/paypal-to-acquire-shopping-and-rewards-platform-honey-for-4-billion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrfusion</author><text>Couldn’t you basically start any website and pay users $200 and get as many users as you want?</text></item><item><author>kevindong</author><text>$4 billion acquisition price &amp;#x2F; 17 million monthly active users [0] = $235.29 per active monthly user&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;investor.paypal-corp.com&amp;#x2F;node&amp;#x2F;10556&amp;#x2F;pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;investor.paypal-corp.com&amp;#x2F;node&amp;#x2F;10556&amp;#x2F;pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thesausageking</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s literally what PayPal did. They gave users $20 if you created an account. Over time, they lowered it to $10 and then $5. The program cost them ~$70m, but let them grow at 7-10% &amp;#x2F; day. They went from 800k accounts in March of 2000 to 4m in September, and then 11m in September of 2001.</text></comment>
<story><title>PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/paypal-to-acquire-shopping-and-rewards-platform-honey-for-4-billion/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mrfusion</author><text>Couldn’t you basically start any website and pay users $200 and get as many users as you want?</text></item><item><author>kevindong</author><text>$4 billion acquisition price &amp;#x2F; 17 million monthly active users [0] = $235.29 per active monthly user&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;investor.paypal-corp.com&amp;#x2F;node&amp;#x2F;10556&amp;#x2F;pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;investor.paypal-corp.com&amp;#x2F;node&amp;#x2F;10556&amp;#x2F;pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smt88</author><text>Yes, but when potential investors or acquirers were doing their diligence, they&amp;#x27;d find out that your cost of user acquisition was extremely high.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s likely Honey did have a high cost of acquisition, but nowhere in the ballpark of $200&amp;#x2F;user.</text></comment>