What I Learned Building A Coupon Codes Website [$2K/Month Profit]
My name is Oleg Segal, and I am the founder of DealA.com. My site helps people to save money when shopping online.
It’s been more than three years since I founded DealA, a coupon codes website that helps users save money when they shop online. It’s still in a negative ROI, with the total spent exceeding $250,000 and an average monthly profit of just $2000.
I reflected a lot in the last couple of months on how I’d do it if I started from scratch, and in this story, I’d like to share my thoughts with you so you don’t repeat my mistakes.
First and foremost, you never know what will work and what won’t. Always do quick tests, no matter how successful you are with past projects.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Since I was an 8y.o. kid, I was spending a lot of time in front of my computer. Not only playing games, but also learning how the internet works, and how to build websites. My mom still remembers me when she was arguing that I was spending too much time using my PC, I was replying that it’s going to be my future job.
I’m 36 years old now, and I was an entrepreneur for most of my life. I started my first business when I was just a student. It was a small advertising agency in my city. It was interesting as a first-ever experience but not profitable.
Then I got the idea of wholesale selling digital CD Keys for computer games. It was a digital product, where I was sending photos of CD Keys via the internet. I remember doing my first $300 in just one transaction sitting in front of my computer. That was an amazing feeling! I unlocked a new achievement - the realization that making money online is not as hard as I imagined.
Then the niche became crowded, and I sold that business for ~$70,000 — huge money for a 25-year-old guy.
The whole next year I was trying to build a new offline business and spent all of my money from my recent exit. I became broke and the only quick solution was to get a job. Back then, my friend was doing his websites and getting traffic from SEO. He offered me a job and saved me from selling my kidney.
That’s how I was introduced to the amazing world of SEO, where I could combine all of my passions: making money online, reverse engineering complicated systems, and making websites.
1 year later, I quit to pursue my SEO ventures.
Now I’m an SEO with more than 9 years of experience. I have had very successful websites before, with one of them being sold for mid-six-figures.
Most of my previous sites were content affiliate sites, which I got bored of. I always liked to work with big programmatic sites (sites with a huge database, where the content is generated automatically), and my ambitions led me to start a site in one of the most competitive niches - DealA.com.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
I had an idea of making a coupon code site for at least 3 years but never had time for that. The main idea (or USP - unique selling proposition) was to not list any merchants without coupon codes or with fake coupons.
If you were ever trying to find a working promo code online, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a pain. Coupon sites often list pages with the only goal of getting a click and commission, but 80% of the time there are no coupon codes at all if they’re not working.
I wanted to change it. So we started to brainstorm different ways to get working coupon codes from different sources, including but not limited to social media and affiliate programs APIs.
The was and still is a golden rule: “We do not add a shop to our site if it doesn’t have at least one working promo code.” The current challenge is to continue adding new coupons to existing merchants, and make sure we mark not working coupons as “expired.” It’s nearly impossible to do with low revenue and traffic.
The easiest solution is to use a rating system, where users vote if the code worked or not. But with the current traffic numbers, those numbers are too low and statistically insignificant.
The design process was in hand with the on-page SEO optimization. We needed to make sure that all the required headings and interlinking blocks were in place.
We analyzed dozens of competitors and wanted to make sure our design stands out. This and my intention for perfection led to almost 4 months of back and forth with the design team before I approved the design.
This is what the first version of the merchant page looked like.
Luckily the backend development team was working on creating the infrastructure of DealA at the same time.
We also put a lot of time and effort into creating a logo. The New York subway signs were the inspiration.
Describe the process of launching the business.
I spent way too much time planning and designing the website. I wanted everything to be nice. The design and first version of the website took more than 1 year.
I found one dev team in my city by recommendations, and they were specializing in creating MVPs for startups. So we signed the contract and started designing and coding my new coupon website. Then we switched dev team and had to re-write the whole website’s code.
I used the money from my previous business exit and current businesses to bootstrap DealA.
My total spending so far exceeded $250,000.
Here is a breakdown:
- $115,000 - Custom website development
- $70,000 - Project manager (handled dev and moderators team)
- $37,000 - SEO (links, some content, etc.)
- $15,000 - Coupon Moderators costs
- $7500 - server and infrastructure costs (we run the site on AWS)
- $7000 - different tools, like GSuite, Notion, Virtual Phone Numbers, SEO tools, etc.
- $2000 - Business domain names
The biggest lesson learned - custom development is freaking expensive and long thing.
The initial launch was super messed up. I tried to rush the release as much as I could and we released a bunch of pages with 404 errors and completely ruined our “first impression” in Google’s eyes. It would be easier to spot and fix, then you have a small website, but we launched thousands of pages at once, hence it took some time to realize this.
Earn some money, then re-invest in the bigger and more advanced platform.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Once we fixed our technical problems, we started to do some link-building. Most of the links were pointing to the homepage, and a lot of them were from the existing articles, which was another mistake. The first links to the website you should build from the new pages, which search engines have never seen before.
Then we also ran a massive Digital PR campaign, with 6 posts, and pitched them to journalists. Few of them were very successful, and we managed to land links on sites like CNBC.com, Time.com, and Fortune.com.
The site started to gain some traction from Google, but felt like still stuck in the “sandbox”. It looked to me like Google simply ignored most of the links for some reason.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
At the moment we are continuing to do more SEO, but instead of focusing on the overall site’s performance, we took a small cluster of pages with potentially high earning potential and worked on them.
We build links to those pages, as well as improve content on them. The idea is simple - if we can rank those pages and get more traffic, we’ll have enough money to re-invest into the next bunch of pages.
The traffic and our revenue are slowly growing, but it’s still far from breaking even.
The goal by the end of this year is to get to the $20K/m revenue milestone and I believe we can do this.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
As I mentioned, I tend to overthink and overcomplicate things. Just to start building a website took me almost a year since signing the contract with my first dev team.
Then I spent one year and $25,000 polishing the design and functionality of the site before the first launch.
After 2 years since launch, DealA wasn’t doing very well in terms of traffic. And instead of trying to fix that with better On-page and Off-page SEO, I continued to improve the functionality of the website.
I saw a lot of sites were doing well with the poorer SEO game that I did, but I ignored the fact that there is a “random” factor, which sometimes allows smaller sites to rank well.
I should have spent more time and resources on SEO than on custom development of the site. Back then, 80% of my budget was spent on custom website development and 20% on SEO. Should have been the other way around.
I also had the distorted concept of MVP in my head. I should have built something in one month and then spent 3-6 active months trying to get the first visitors instead of building something in years.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
My go-to tools are Google Spreadsheets, Google Docs, and Google Drive. We use it almost for everything.
For productivity, I use Todoist and Pomodoro Timer or Toggl (overcomplicated for my needs). My team tracks time using Hubstaff.
For tracking Dev tasks and building our company Knowledge Base, we use Notion.
Now I also use ChatGPT for various tasks.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
During the first few years of entrepreneurship, I read a lot of business books. The 3 most impactful for me were:
- The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz - helped me to think of myself as bigger than I was thinking before, set ambitious goals, and not be afraid of big success.
- Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill - was just a great addition to the first one.
- The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss - Even though most entrepreneurs say that it’s impossible to build successful businesses working this little time, I find this book very helpful to use as a “calibration tool” for those like myself who tend to overcomplicate things. And it’s super fun to read as well. I still try to re-read it now and then when I go on vacation.
For podcasts, I like Tropical MBA.
For SEO, my favorite course is Authority Hacker Pro, their Podcast and YouTube Channel. SEO Fightclub YouTube channel is also great for more advanced SEOs.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
First and foremost, you never know what will work and what won’t. Always do quick tests, no matter how successful you are with past projects.
Create a simple MVP and test it. I know that everyone in the startup space talks about it, but I made the same mistake. Don’t spend too much money and time on something you didn’t test.
In my case, I should have built a 1000-page website on WordPress, manually added coupons without creating fancy parsers and an expensive backend, and worked on SEO until I got some traction. Earn some money, then re-invest into the bigger and more advanced platform.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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