Neal Rapoport, the president of DealTaker.com, is today’s guest at ProBargainHunter. I asked Neal to talk about his beginnings, and about his site, enjoy!
Hi, I am Neal Rapoport, founder of DealTaker.com. It is a pleasure to be posting this guest blog on ProBargainHunter. While usually I’m very quiet about how DealTaker.com is run, here’s a sneak-peek at how we got to where we are, and some of the more fun aspects of running a deals site. We’re proud to be a top 10 deals website on ProBargainHunter, but we do see an upcoming slide as we’re separating out some of our features into different domains this month. The changes, and much more about DealTaker.com, are addressed in the following Q&A session
What is your educational and business background? What did you do before DealTaker.com?
My background is unique to most other deals sites. In college my major was Communications, and my goal was to be a game show host. After graduation, I found that those jobs are few & far between, and that there was money in computers, so I went to work for Microsoft for a few years, and learned all I could. Then after a few other jobs, I broke out to doing consulting on my own in a particular niche market. The money was great, but I always liked getting a bargain, and so I started DealTaker.com as just a hobby.
Dealtaker.com grew from #18 in November ‘06 to #9 in April ‘07 in ProBargainHunter ranking. What is your formula of success?
We just keep doing what works. Our goals remain steady in getting the users the best deals. Thanks to our great users, they are quite loyal, and are always happy to refer their friends. Our rank will likely go down the next few months as we separate out some of our sites into separate domains. The best formula we’ve found, is just to make the site easy to use, the content fresh, and the users happy. Nothing magical, just a lot of hard work
What are some of the biggest challenges about maintaining the site as it grows?
Well, we started with a single old gateway server in my closet running on a cable modem, and quickly outgrew that to be hosted on a shared server for a few months, then moved to our own servers.. Our biggest technical challenges are constantly adding more servers, and keeping the hackers/spammers out.
You just launched PriceTaker.com, the price comparison engine. Do you have any other planned innovations that we should know about?
While we have a policy against pre-announcing new features, I can say that we’re going to have some revolutionary new additions to our sites that will make bargain hunting, and being able to participate in our community even easier. By the end of the Summer we hope to have rolled out 3 of the planned items. Unfortunately thats about all I can say on the future development right now
At times it can be daunting with the amount of deals/sales, etc. coming down the pipe. How do you manage? Is the process manual or automated?
We have a fairly manual process for adding the deals based on a forum model. Trying to automate what’s going to be a hot deal versus one thats not hot would be pretty difficult. As to the process, we allow users to post content, and we also have a team of Moderators who help post content, and keep the forum clean by adding images/links where warranted, and parsing through to make sure that the deals are all objective. We have a strict policy against self-promotion, because that could ruin a forum.
What’s the best deal you ever got personally? Do you think you buy more stuff because you know about so many deals?
I’ve gotten so many, but my favorites are a $200 27” LCD TV (dec ’05), a Kitchenaid Artisan Mixer for $124, and loads of toys & games for practically free for my kids. Every day there’s always some great deals, or fantastic coupon that I want to take advantage of, but I’ve been spending so much time running the company, that by the time I go to our forums to buy some of the things, they’re already sold out.
Do you ever check out the other deal sites? Do you keep in touch with other deal site owners? What do you discuss?
I used to spend more time looking at the other deal sites, but I don’t too often anymore. The only time I realy end up there is if I search the internet for something and end up there in the results, or if I’m alerted to an issue by our moderators. I still talk to a few of my competitors site owners, but less and less as time goes on. As to what we discuss, sometimes its other competitors practices that we don’t agree with, or particular deals, or even giving each other tips & advice.
Financial Times reports that online sales are up 29% this year. What do you think the future holds for brick and mortar electronics stores?
I’m not the expert, but I think as the internet shopping gains more credibility that the physical electronic stores may have some difficulty. I think some stores like grocery, clothes/shoes & automotive will have a more difficult time moving to online, but other industries could see stores continue to disappear quickly as online sales grow.
If you were to give just one money saving advice to ProBargainHunter readers, what would it be?
Check DealTaker.com before you shop anywhere. ;-) But if you don’t print that, I’d say the best advice is if you see a real deal to order quickly. The best deals sell out fast. Growing up, my motto was “Buy it, you’ll like it.”; I guess that hasn’t changed too much.
Thanks for allowing me the time to write to the ProBargainHunter readers. Hopefully this provided a little insight into our features, and how we got to where we are today, and why our members stay loyal.
