Silicon Valley Entrepreneurial story: Dealmoon Love discount to open up the market with micro-blog

Dealmoon founder and CEO Shen Lu Dealmoon website screenshot of North American money saving Express Weibo application "Black Friday shopping assistant"


Dealmoon is the largest Chinese-English bilingual discount information Web site, the 36-Year-old founder and CEO Shen Lu (Robert Shen) is a genuine Beijing boy, graduated from the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, the Department of Electronic Engineering, 2000 years to study in the United States, Got a PhD in computer science from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. After graduating, Shen Lu came to Silicon Valley and worked as a software engineer in Juniper, a network solution provider.


Brewing Entrepreneurial


Entrepreneurship in the Silicon Valley is an atmosphere, perhaps the IT people have a dream, hoping to build their own Amazon or Google. Shen Road is also the same, before the founder of Dealmoon, he also started the development of smartphone applications, but failed to achieve the intended success. However, the most regrettable thing is not failure, but fear of failure never try. After the first setback, Shen Lu to do his job while looking for the next entrepreneurial opportunity.


a variety of entrepreneurial success stories have proved that only to find their real interest in the field, the entrepreneur can be more fully committed to the product, it is more likely to achieve success. Many businesses in the United States offer a wide variety of discounted goods offering coupons (coupon), but it is difficult for ordinary consumers to quickly find the goods they need from the dazzling information. After the 2008 U.S. financial crisis, the economy has not really out of recession, unemployment remains high. The recession has led people to pay more attention to the price of shopping, Costco and other parity supermarkets, and consumers are naturally more concerned about discount information.


have a demand for products, in order to help shoppers find the most needed discounted goods, deals2buy, FatWallet, Dealsea and many other discount information sites came into being. Shen Lu usually pay attention to a variety of discount information, often go to various businesses to find coupons on the website, friends often ask him where there is a discounted life and electronic products. But he found that although there are 5 million Chinese in the United States and many big cities have Chinatown, there is no discount information website for Chinese users, and there is no special discount information service for nutrition and cosmetics that are most interested in Chinese.


Relatively speaking, the Chinese in the United States is a strong consumer group, their shopping needs are different from other Americans, many Chinese people would like to see Chinese information, but this segment (niche) market is not subject to the discount information site attention. After seeing the market blank, Shen Lu decided to try the water venture again. He and his former University of Nebraska two computer department students to the tens of thousands of-dollar savings, founded the Sino-British Bilingual discount information website. The site's original target audience was female, so it was named Dealmoon, offering cosmetics, footwear, and other women's interests. The design of the website also uses pink more to attract women.


Entrepreneurship at the beginning


the end of 2009, Dealmoon officially online operation. The venture was cautious, with a few savings of his own, and Shen Lu and two other founders (one in mainland China and one in Canada) had not resigned from their jobs, using their spare time after work to run the site. They have developed a software that captures discounted information from major businesses and classifies them according to different products, offering more intimate and user-friendly discounted information services to Chinese users.


since the three co-founder is not in a time zone, Dealmoon is able to guarantee 24 hours a day rolling update the most popular discount information, the product is divided into 10 categories of 37 small categories, on the one hand to provide the most suitable for Chinese users of product information, on the other hand also recommend the mainstream market coupons. Their product information is from the Amazon, Best Buy, Macy's (Macys) and other famous businesses, so it is easy to get the trust of consumers.


Entrepreneurship at the beginning is always difficult, for a website, users and traffic is everything. Dealmoon's revenue comes mainly from two areas: bringing users to the merchant Web site to charge a 1%-5% Commission on actual sales and attracting businesses to advertise on the site. And how to attract more attention is Dealmoon's biggest problem at the time.


Shen Lu told Sina technology that at the time they had tried to buy ads on Google, but soon found that high advertising fees were not at all a small entrepreneurial team can afford. At the beginning of 2010, there was a period of time the site traffic did not pick up, Shen Lu and entrepreneurial team once into confusion: is to continue or to give up? Fortunately they were only part-time business, there is income can pay the site's server costs, plus the discount information is indeed Shen Lu and other people most interested in the field, they decided to hold on for some time.


Dealmoon began to go to the promotion of their own road. In order to attract Chinese users, they advertise on major Chinese websites and forums such as Sina, Mitbbs, North America, and launch the North American Life Guide blog on the website to impart practical information about daily necessities to the Chinese. They write a blog divided into home with children, nutrition, health care, life help, Money tips, Amazon Raiders and many other parts, including the most popular car shopping guide readers. Good content to bring good users, the site's user traffic began to grow gradually, some large businesses are willing to cooperate with them to provide feed information; After the hardest start, dealmoon into the growth period.





with the rapid growth of Sina Weibo in the North American market, the shrewd Shen Road is also aware of the opportunities brought by it. Sina Weibo has nearly millions of users in North America, most of them young people with strong spending power, and foreign students from the mainland are an important part of the game. These users may not be in the United States for many years, they need discounted information, they also like to buy quality goods, and more want to get a practical guide to life in the United States. This is the most important target user group for Dealmoon.


this May, Shen Lu, with the help of a friend, launched the official certified microblog of the @ North American Savings Express, issuing the first microblogging "Elizabeth Sabeaton 30 cosmetic bags worth 340 dollars, as long as shopping 55 dollars free to send." At the time their microblogging style was similar to Twitter, very simple and without pictures, but Shen Lu quickly realized that Weibo was not Twitter and needed more content than Chinese users. He began to carefully write ads microblogging, graphic to attract readers to click on the link to enter the site for shopping; In addition, there are also frequent lottery activities, interacting with fans to stimulate user growth and boost the participation of fans.


local time 12th, Apple's official website began to sell the iphone 4S contract machine, North American money-saving Express on the latest flagship smartphone for the prize issued a lottery to promote micro-blog. Although it is noted that only North American users, the microblog in two days to forward the volume is close to 9,000 times. Although Dealmoon also has a promotional account on Facebook and Twitter, the two accounts are far less influential than microblogs. They started earlier on Facebook, but at the moment they have only 3,000 followers and are significantly less active.


Shen Lu to Sina Technology, said the North American money-saving Express official micro-blog online 6 months, fans of nearly 40,000 people, more than hundreds of people per day growth. But more importantly, leveraging Sina Weibo has allowed Dealmoon to establish the status of the American Chinese Circle and become the preferred discount information site for American Chinese. He revealed that 90% of the current Web site users are Chinese, and one-fourth of the traffic is from Sina Weibo.


"Black Friday" refers to the first day after Thanksgiving in the United States, usually seen as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, also seen as a barometer of the retail season's sales performance, and the most important day in the business year. Typically, major U.S. businesses will post discounted ads on newspapers and websites a few days in advance, and offer coupons for big discounts. And by the Thanksgiving Day, it is five or six o'clock in the morning to open the door to meet the crazy influx of consumers to buy cheap goods.


Such an important day, Dealmoon and Shen Lu of course, they will not miss, in addition to the site launched the "Black Friday" page, published dozens of of businesses advertising and practical product search, but also the use of Sina Weibo's open platform to launch the "Black Friday Shopping assistant" application, Prepare to be officially promoted to fans tomorrow.


Future Development


with two years of growth, now Dealmoon has grown from the original 3-person entrepreneurial team to 16 people, in order to better access the various discount information, Dealmoon's editorial team scattered in many parts of the United States. @ North American Savings Express's microblog account is also updated 24 hours a day. Shen Lu keeps in touch with Skype and other employees on the site every day.


website has entered a period of steady growth, Shen Lu and his partners can finally not work overtime after hours of business, he resigned from the Juniper work, concentrate on the operation of the site. Now Dealmoon has become the largest Chinese and English discount information aggregation site, providing black Friday, historical price curve, North American Life Guide and many other functional services, in the non-China circle has also been a lot of users.


Dealmoon Originally is the positioning of female users, mainly provide cosmetics and other merchandise discount information; But as the site continues to grow, the current site has quietly expanded the target users to the home users, joined the mother and child products, credit cards, Amazon Shopping guide, such as more comprehensive content.


Shen Lu revealed that the current site operation has entered the right track, no need to spend a lot of advertising fees, revenue enough to deal with operating costs and development needs. Because of this, he recently rejected a small well-known venture capital fund. Shen Lu says the cost of equity financing is too high and entrepreneurs are prone to losing control of the company, and he believes there is no need to deal with VCs at the moment.


talks about the future development, Shen Lu said that he founded Dealmoon before the mobile phone application, he hopes to launch the exclusive application of Dealmoon, will discount E-commerce and mobile Internet closer together, the recent release of mobile applications based on iOS platform may be released.


Shen Lu has a dream, will be dealmoon in addition to the Greater China region outside the world's largest Chinese and English discount information site, and his dream will be more closely with the development of Sina Weibo combination. Sina Weibo's overseas users are growing, and North American money-saving letters will keep a close eye on these potential target users and build their own electric business dreams with the help of the microblog ship.