Friendsthatshare.com is a best of breed savings community offering daily deals from local merchants. The Company’s new group buying platform – FriendsWhoSave.com, while having similarities to some of the popular daily deal sites, uniquely facilitates volume buying by leveraging existing already connected local groups. These groups include both locally connected groups (e.g. workplace, church, community groups), as well as virtually connected groups (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter).
Like traditional daily deal sites, FriendsWhoSave.com will sell at least one merchant discount offer (or “coupon”) per day in each of the markets it serves (unless otherwise lowered to accommodate initial growth and/or ramp up). The Company will then share the revenue generated from the coupons with the merchant making the offer. The coupon or discount voucher works essentially as an assurance contract to the advertising merchant: if a certain number of people sign up for the offer, then the deal becomes available to all; if the predetermined minimum is not met, no one gets the deal that day. These terms reduce the risk to merchants, who can treat the coupons as quantity discounts as well as sales promotion tools.
The Company’s niche in the group buying space is built around the premise that current daily deal propositions offered to the advertiser are not serving the purposes of the advertiser. They are slanted highly in favor of the consumer and not designed to build loyalty, word of mouth business or repeat business after the offer expires or is used. The traditional 50% off retail price deals foster reduced margins and do nothing to solve the real problems of local businesses.
The Friendswhosave.com value proposition begins with asking the advertiser questions. “What is it you’d like to see happen in your business?” “Do you need more traffic on Monday or Tuesday evenings?” “Do you have a banquet or meeting room you’d like to see utilized more often?” With these questions answered, offers to the audience are targeted in ways that deliver the highest value to the audience while delivering the best ROI to the advertiser.
We build and seed our consumer lists with influencers who already promote great gatherings and events and provide them a terrific tool to invite their friends to take part in offers that actually get better as more people participate. The dynamic pricing feature incentivizes each consumer to share the offer with their friends, family, colleagues and others. The result being each consumer is motivated to build their own buying group. While traditional daily deal sites also build groups, they are divergent anonymous strangers who are not incented to share the offer with others. To the contrary, FriendsWhoSave inherently results in each consumer sharing the offers to their already locally connected groups, fueling a group multiplication effect.
The Company will target smaller to medium sized communities not presently served by larger daily deal sites. The website will first be launched in Bowling Green, Kentucky, expanding geocentrically to other similar communities thereafter. These small to medium sized cities are ideal for FriendsWhoSave.com. In addition to lacking competitor sites, these communities tend to place special emphasis on local businesses and socially connected groups, perfect ingredients for group buying discounts. The new site will be marketed to consumers primarily through email and mobile marketing, two forms of digital marketing that the Company has been experienced in using for years. Because the Company’s consumer market will primarily be composed of females, the deals will largely focus on restaurants, fitness and beauty, and health and wellness services.
