Meh: Day 100, Reviewing The Experiment

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Today we hit 100 days of Meh (aka the Pavlov Experiment). Seems like a good time to check our findings and adjust our variables.

To start, the original thesis: Is a classic daily deal site compelling again? Yes, we think it has proven compelling. Even with all the deal fatigue and behemoth corporate competition, we’ve attracted a few fans and we’ve had fun doing it. We could bore you with charts, graph, stats…oh and we still might, eventually, but if you’re here, we doubt you’ll argue it’s not compelling. So, we’ll continue to sell only one thing a day at Meh. We’ve really enjoyed seeing an active, if fairly small, community form around our idea, and getting to know more of you as you become regulars.

Onto our pretend next thesis: Can a classic daily deal site thrive against stiff competition? For longterm success, we need to grow. A lot. You may have guessed, we’re not reaping insane profits by selling this stuff cheaper than anyone else. To thrive without ruining our classic, focused vibe, and superior discounts, we need a lot more people. Volume, baby.

So we’re taking a look at our variables, to see what we can tweak and test to push our hypothesis that a classic daily deal site can successfully exist, even among billion-dollar competitors with massive marketing budgets and staff count. Here's what we're thinking:

  1. Email: We've all got email anxiety, fighting every day to keep our inbox somewhat sane. But it goes too far to suggest that nobody wants email ever. And proclamations that "email is dead" have made fools of smarter people than us before. We’ll put together an occasional newsletter for our members, and maybe a daily email for the VMP crowd that wants to make the most of their benefits. We might even throw in some jokes (laughs not guaranteed).
  2. Social Media: Brands on Twitter and Facebook are awful. Cheesy and tone-deaf and annoying. But we live on social media, as do many of you, and several of you asked us for Meh to be there too, even if only to give you a heads-up of what's for sale. Since it looks like a few hundred of you might be interested in following us, we’ll drop our opposition, hold our nose and spin something up.
  3. Developer API: In our previous life over at Woot, people built all kinds of apps, sites, widgets, what-have-you to help people follow what we were selling. Most of that has died off with their move away from the daily deal model, but we’re building a dead simple API that lets you pull in daily deal data. Once again, you developers will have a playground to try your hand at putting an app together for whatever platform you like.

A small batch of you have also joined up with our VMP program. Don’t tell the others, but we consider you guys our True Fans. We’re looking into adding a few benefits, that daily email we mentioned, maybe putting together an exclusive sale, or sending you some crap. Along with that, we’ll be shifting the rules so you’ve got to be a member to get the benefits, but if we do it right, we’ll have enough crap going on that we can drag a few more of you into the program.

We’ll check back in after these things are up and running, and see how the experiment is going. Hopefully these tweaks will help us get a little more sustainable while still staying just as Meh as always.