Featured, Features - Friday, December 3, 2010 12:51 - 8 Comments

From thirty dollars to $90m: The RetailMeNot story

Along with his co-founder Bevan Clark (above, right), Guy King (above, left) today became one of Australia’s newest multi-millionaires, as his company’s RetailMeNot site was snapped up by emerging US media player WhaleShark Media for around $90 million. But speaking with the entrepreneur this morning, you get the feeling it hasn’t yet sunk in.

“When I launched the site, I honestly didn’t even consider that I’d be able to make any money from it,” King says. “It’s quite surreal.”

Like fellow Australian coupon startup Jump On It, which last month secured $5 million in funding from a similar US company, LivingSocial, RetailMeNot is one of a growing number of sites globally which are cashing in on an online trend towards using coupons or group buying to obtain discounts from traditional retailers of goods and services.

It’s a trend which has seen multinational sites like Groupon and LivingSocial spring up to become billion dollar enterprises almost overnight. The US technology sector is buzzing with rumours that Groupon will be bought by Google for $6 billion, and overnight Amazon announced a $175 million investment in LivingSocial; and no wonder — the company is projected to top $500 million in revenue in 2011.

The key difference between this new crop of billion-dollar success stories and RetailMeNot? King and Clark can lay a fair claim to helping start the whole movement, more than half a decade ago.

King says the whole cost of starting RetailMeNot was “probably around the $30 mark” in total at the time — with the money going towards registering the domain name and setting up web hosting.

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