smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

SmallBusiness.co.uk talks to software developer Paul Fisher who in 2010 founded Buyometric, which aggregates deals from savings websites.

How did you get the idea?

I had been doing some private projects and freelance work, and in my spare time I wrote a piece of software that categorised and aggregated freelance jobs listed online so I could be sent the most relevant jobs every day.

Meanwhile, I was frustrated at how sites like Groupon would send so many deals I wasn’t interested in, and I thought the technology I’d produced was perfect to map over these deals, aggregate them and get the results refined to a particular user.

What is the revenue model?

We take the deals from several websites, target them to our user base and we build up a biometric profile of each of our users enabling us to predict accurately what deals they are interested in. Users then click though to the deal website, which gives us a 15 per cent cut of the sale.

How did you raise money?

We decided that there would be more value in building up a user base than actually raising money, so we approached some investors who had a stake in many deal websites. We agreed an arrangement whereby we would get access to a database of 3.5 million users in exchange for equity. It was probably the best decision I have made because it instantly gave us the exposure we needed.

If we had raised funding, it would have been spent on user acquisition and so the deal ultimately fulfilled the same aim, but more efficiently.

How did you get the word out?

Initially it was word of mouth, but once we got the database we had revenue coming in and completed 25,000 deal purchases worth £100,000 to us. We have started doing some pay per click advertising, but that’s difficult because there are some competitors with deep pockets out there who can advertise more.

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