Diskountz

What it was

Diskountz was a deal-discovery website: one place to find offers worth knowing about, instead of hunting for them across the internet. It was sold through Empire Flippers in November 2016.

The business model

The model was the usual one for a deal site. Be useful to someone who is already looking for an offer, and earn on the referral when they take it.

Simple to describe. Harder to run, because the whole thing depends on people trusting that what you list is real and current.

How the site worked

A deal site is mostly discipline. Offers expire, links break, and a page that was right yesterday is wrong today.

Most of the work was the unglamorous kind: finding deals, checking them, and keeping the site fresh enough to deserve a return visit.

Running it

Diskountz taught me more than anything I had read up to that point.

• Traffic is earned slowly and lost quickly.
• A small site still needs a routine.
• The parts I enjoyed most, building and tinkering, were not always the parts that mattered most.

The sale

By 2016 I was more curious about what I could build next than about what I had already built. I listed the site on Empire Flippers, a marketplace for online businesses, and it sold that November.

Selling taught me something building had not: a business is worth more when someone else can run it without you. Preparing a site so a stranger can take it over is its own kind of product work.

I don't share the price, the buyer or the numbers. The lesson was worth more than the anecdote.