Stateless Systems

Guy King

Bevan Clark

The ability to find every retail coupon available on the internet seems like a job for a search engine, but young entrepreneurs Guy King and Bevan Clark took that premise and created a successful business instead.

Coupon aggregator RetailMeNot is now the world's biggest directory for discounts and deals, offerings discounts to retailers from Amazon.com to Victoria's Secret. It records over 10 million unique visitors a month, and contains a database of over 200,000 coupons.

RetailMeNot began as a hobby project for King. But after working what he says were two full-time jobs, one as a web developer and the other maintaining the site, he quit to become his own boss and started Stateless Systems.

"I remember looking for coupons on Google for a purchase I was making and it was spread out everywhere, often on forums which had expired or the sites were really quite spammy and didn't have the actual information that I was after."

Due to King's background as a software developer, RetailMeNot took just one weekend to get up and running, and such low costs meant it was "profitable pretty much straight away".

The success of RetailMeNot has allowed the company, which operates in Melbourne, to embark on a number of other ventures. Its BugMeNot site allows users to block website registration forms, while OurSignal offers aggregated news on social media.

Stateless also offers a content management system, price aggregator and has recently launched a site called Trendsmap, which records the most popular tweet of any location at any time, imposed over digital maps. It has already recorded over 100,000 visits in about two months, and has appeared on Twitter's own official tweet feed.

The company's success is surprising; given its belief of rejecting SEO techniques most companies spend a fortune perfecting. Instead, King says Stateless focuses on providing sites filled with useful content for users, and lets Google do the rest.

"Our strategy is really just going against traditional strategies. One of the key metrics of a good website is time on site, but we are trying to get that figure down as much as possible. We want people to find what they're after as quickly as possible."

And while the business has continued to gain success both home and abroad, King says it will intentionally keep its staff base low in order to keep the business moving forward at a faster pace.

"The small staff lets us move quickly rather than being tied down in the day-to-day administration details. We're fairly busy, and that's an understatement, but we have lots of tools that automate various roles, so we invest the time into automating processes instead of hiring people."

Meanwhile, King says the business's strength lies in "being able to take those crazy business and development methodologies, processes and ideas cooked up during Friday afternoon beers in your old job and actually put them into practice".

MOST CHALLENGING PART OF STARTING UP YOUR BUSINESS?
"Overcoming government bureaucracy. Australian labour and tax regulations don't cope well with an Australian company running a US-based business that earns no Australian dollars."