Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

Discussion on Local Merchant Advertising Online

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Om Malik posted an item today titled “Local Ads, A Billion Dollar Biz, Some Day.” Om points his readers to another blog post from Donna Bogatin, where she discusses a presentation given at the Kelsey Group Interactive Local Media Conference 2007. Check out the comments in Om’s post for an interesting discussion on why companies working with local merchants seem to be failing lately, and why many companies trying to tap that market are unsuccessful.

Interview with Yelp CEO

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

I listened to an interesting interview today with Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of merchant review site, Yelp. You can listen to the interview here. Stoppelman has some interesting insights that fall in line with a lot of what we’ve learned over the past three years, specifically with regards to the difficulty in reaching out to local merchants to help them effectively advertise online.

On Being a Restartup

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

In 2004, Premity was formed to give life to a product called CityVantage. When we started Premity, we envisioned CityVantage as an online version of the Entertainment Book, with valuable discounts to local retailers, printable from the consumer’s computer.

After building a network of merchants in three cities, a respectable user base that was printing hundreds of coupons per month, we decided that CityVantage was just not scalable enough. By not scalable enough, I mean not profitable.

We took some deep breaths, lasting several months and tried to regroup and de-stress. We took inventory of what we had built and our experience over the prior three years. We emerged with a new business model and a new interface wrapped around our original coupon printing technology.

After months of rebuilding, we now have our new business, the Premity Interactive Coupon System, designed for those companies currently working to promote and advertise retail merchants. Check out who we think would be a good fit for our system.

Our goal is to help retailers turn Web traffic into foot traffic.

Through our experience of working more than three years, abandoning our original concept and rebuilding, I now feel like we’re a startup again. Only this time around, we’ve learned some hard lessons and have a better understanding of what we need to do to build a successful company. We’ve admitted our failures, examined them and relaunched.

We’re a Restartup.