Thread: Idea: Clipper as a local deals site - how much to charge though?

Idea: Clipper as a local deals site - how much to charge though?

I am doing things a bit different than most. i am actually trying to start a local business coupon site. I want to become the go to place to find the best deals and all the specials in my local market. I had initially setup to do a daily deal thing (with a groupon clone) but raelize that would not work well in my area because I live in a smaller area/county where the volume is not there to only do one deal per day. if you get a percentage of only a few coupons sold its not that much. People will flock to coupons but not so much where they have to spend money upfront. So what I am looking at doing with clipper is a weekly price and a monthly price for businesses in our county to post their coupons and deals/specials on the site.

My hope is for when someone in the community is looking for any sort of service or restaurant or anything it will become natural for them to want to check our site first to see if a business is running a good deal or has a coupon for the service they are looking to offer.

so my question to all of you is - how much should I charge businesses? I was thinking $15/week or $50/month. The weekly would allow no updates and the monthly might allow 1-2 updates. That business model is for getting a residual/recurring income. I could also charge businesses per coupon - but that is more unreliable income and would require constant outside marketing to get new businesses aware of the site and sell them on purchasing a coupon post. I really want the residual.

does this sound reasonable? I started local deals facebook page for my county and it BLEW UP. I was running local facebook ads and got up to over 2k people on it really fast. I stopped promoting it as much until I got the site fully ready. I want to continue push it a lot via facebook and get all the businesses involved to also push it.

I know 50/mo per business doesnt sound like much but the thing is you can include ANY kind of business on the site since it is a local deals site. which means if you have 40 local businesses signed up to the monthly option you are making 2 grand a month. It would simply mean talking to the business a few times a month via phone and seeing if they want to update their coupon/offer. This could easily be done in <2 days.

Do you think that is to much or not enough to charge businesses?

Would love some feedback!