from Hacker News

Harland Clarke Acquires RetailMeNot for $630M

by polysaturate on 4/10/17, 10:53 PM with 78 comments

  • by AznHisoka on 4/11/17, 12:09 AM

    "Never build your startup on another conpany's platform"

    That's true.. and if you followed that advice..

    - You would never have started retailmenot (too dependent on Google traffic)

    - You would never start Buffer and have over 10 million in annual revenue (too dependent on twitter api)

    - You would never would have started Heroku and get acquired for millions (too dependent on AWS)

    - You would never have started SimilarWeb and be valued at over 100 million dollars (too dependent on browser extensions and Google)

  • by poxrud on 4/11/17, 12:12 AM

    They've successful gamed SEO to show up for every "<site> coupon/promo code" search result. Unfortunately it's been years since I've actually found a working code on their site. These days I don't even bother clicking on their links.

  • by madebysquares on 4/11/17, 2:05 AM

    Wow, I always thought retailmenot was like a small 2 person company with a bunch of scripts to scrape coupons and rank high in SEO. What do their 500+ employees do.

  • by rcarrigan87 on 4/11/17, 12:20 AM

    Pretty horrible outcome for anyone who got in on their IPO ($21/share) just 4 years ago.

    It's kind of a fitting end for mostly a sham company. The business model was shaky at best, mostly just milking first page rankings all over google.

    The argument that coupon codes incent buying activity is valid, but literally all this company did was be the first on google. If the actual retailer ranked ahead of RTMN for coupon searches, RTMN wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today, and retailers sales would be exactly the same.

  • by aaron695 on 4/11/17, 1:15 AM

    BugMeNot started RetailMeNot.

    Good example of a pivot from what I assume? was a hack for fun to a business.

    Also a good example of SV style buyouts etc

  • by elvirs on 4/11/17, 5:08 AM

    how do borderline scam businesses like these go public? why do people buy their shares? why has ipo market turned into a swamp where sneaky insiders unload their useless shares to?

  • by knownothing on 4/10/17, 11:36 PM

    Once upon a time RetailMeNot was just a fly-by-night operation that scammed retailers using PPC ads and affiliate links. Look at them now.

  • by mwexler on 4/11/17, 2:30 PM

    They started as such the un-mainstream group, trying to aggregate coupon codes so you could get fair prices without getting hammered with marketing. My, how things have changed. Kudos to them for the payout, but sigh.

  • by unixhero on 4/10/17, 11:45 PM

    Unbelievable