That's what it was originally. The idea was that the coupon would only be sold if you got a certain number of people together. So it's sort of like these buying clubs that group a bunch of individuals together and buy from the low bidder. Once Groupon got big there were so many takers for each deal that the buying club aspect fell by the wayside.
I remember a Dutch company which tried that, if a certain number of people would buy the would be slightly cheaper. But they couldn't really attract a lot of customers despite a huge budget across Europe. So it failed.
It's always instructive to look at something from a different context, but the value provided by Groupon is not so much in selling coupons but in creating a system to capture and direct a userbase in order to create new coupons that didn't existing already.
