How the cashback, arbitrage and aggregations strategy can help you gain 50,000 customers; with Frank DeBlasi

Intro: 0:21

Welcome to the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. This show will tell you how to get the recognition you and your business deserve. Our guests share their practical insights and tools, which you can use straight away. Your host is International entrepreneur, podcast host, and author Jim James.

Jim James: 0:40

Hello, and welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Today, we're going to Long Island, New York, and we're going to meet Frank De Blasi, who is one of the Co-Founders of a company called "Hoopla." "hoopladoopla.com" is the URL. And it's one of America's up and coming loyalty rewards, shopping portals. Frank, welcome to the show.

Frank Deblasi: 0:59

Thanks for having me, Jim. Good to be here.

Jim James: 1:01

Well, it's good to have you because you have an interesting site we're going to talk about, because you've got over 50,000 customers now. People that are coming to your website and are getting loyalty reward opportunities with over 5,000 retailers. So, we're gonna lucky to hear how you've built that business over the last decade or so, and how you're rewarding both the merchants and the people, the customers to use Hoopla. So Frank, tell us a little bit about Hoopla and how it started, and what it does for people.

Frank Deblasi: 1:35

Well, I started "Hoopla" back in 2009 with my partner Tom, at the time. It was just the two of us. We natively build and manage websites for a living. He's a Programmer. I'm a Front-end User. And the country was going through an economic recession at the time, and we started putting this site together as a "regular deal site," and then just decided to actually start making it into a "loyalty reward site," and actually give a percentage of our profits back to our members in an incentive to shop through us. So that's basically how it got started.

Jim James: 2:06

So Frank, now looking at the website for those people on the video, you'll be able to see, "Every way you save" is on the website and on the screen share. But for those people that are listening, Frank, explain the business model of Hoopla.

Frank Deblasi: 2:20

Okay. The way Hoopla works is we have, as you mentioned, over 50,000 customers and we're partnered with over 5,000 retailers, which are actually, some of them are around the world. We do have worldwide brands. And what happens is we feature all the latest coupon codes, free shipping offers, promotional offers that these companies have and we offer "cashback" in addition to these deals that they're getting. And the way it works is all of our merchants pay us a commission for each sale that we drive to their website through their customer sales that we send to them. And when we get that commission, we give a percentage of it back to the member in the form of cashback. We pay them out every three months with whatever payment method that they select.

Jim James: 2:59

So Frank, it's a very interesting model, really, the sort of aggregation and arbitrage. I can see how it works for both parties. Let's just start with how you managed to get the merchants, first, the vendors. People like Walmart, Disney, Landsend, Walgreen, we can see on your site. How did you get them to give you the coupons in the first place? Because without that, you wouldn't get the people to come to the site.

Frank Deblasi: 3:24

Okay. All of these brands belong to various affiliate networks, okay? These affiliate networks house all of the technology that tracks the orders between them and whoever their affiliates are, whether it's me, bloggers, video content creators. And once you join these affiliate programs, okay, you become a part of the network and you apply for the affiliate programs. Say, Walmart or Macy's or whoever it is. And what happens is once you get accepted into the program, you now have access to all of their creative. Any text links, banner ads, promotional offers, coupon codes that they have, and you're now free to put these on your website, your blog, your video, YouTube channel, wherever you want. And anytime somebody clicks one of those links, you earn a commission from the sale that you drive them.

Jim James: 4:05

Oh, how interesting. So, the work of actually acquiring all those merchants has been done by people. I think CJ's store is one of them, for example, right? Oh, how interesting. So then, once you've done that, just tell us how did you then start to attract people to the website to consume these coupons? Because you're actually giving them access, aren't you, to affiliate deals that otherwise they'd have to go to multiple websites to find.

Frank Deblasi: 4:35

Yeah. Well, the customers are attracted basically through a number of methods. We do traditional marketing, like through social media and email campaigns, and we're actually the last couple years have been tapping into a lot of influencers. Influencers are becoming very popular online, TikTokers, YouTube video creators, there's a lot of, you know, people and services out there that are looking to talk about other people's products and services and get rewarded for that. We've also done some, you know, national TV appearances and you know, we've sent out press releases. And also we even tap into our own customers to actually reward them for driving traffic to the site as well.

Jim James: 5:08

Frank, you've got a number of things that you've done in there and you know, I'd love to dive in a little bit more detail, if I remember rightly, you mentioned that you actually got coverage for Hoopla very quickly on national TV. Do you want to just tell us about that? How did that happen? Because that's really, everybody's sort of "Golden Ticket."

Frank Deblasi: 5:27

It's difficult to get, but I guess you could say it was good timing with a good product and a good idea. We kind of had a good thing going, but we also timed it right? Like, I in in the show when we, the the USA was going through an economic recession back in 2009, and once we launched the site just before we were going to get ready to, you know, start advertising it and doing what we were going to do to drive traffic to it. We got a call from a Producer over at Fox News here in New York, asking us if we were ready for primetime exposure. He says, "You guys have a great concept for putting money in people's pockets during a down US and that's how it all got started. And once we had that Fox airing, other networks started contacting us and other, you know, news outlets, and we got, that's how we got the ball rolling the first couple years.

Jim James: 6:09

But Frank, you had to tell us how did you get the Fox people to know about you first, because that's the secret bit you haven't shared.

Frank Deblasi: 6:15

Yeah. Well, I actually, it was through a Facebook post, believe it or not. So here's where social media comes into a play. So, I actually posted it on social media and some people were sharing it around, and the Producer was actually following one of the posts that I posted it on, and he personally reached out to me. I still have the screenshot of when he talked to me, I saved it.

Jim James: 6:32

I mean, worth framing, I would thought.

Frank Deblasi: 6:34

So he found it through a social media post.

Jim James: 6:36

Okay. That's absolutely awesome. So really, it does pay the share, right?

Frank Deblasi: 6:41

Right. It does work. I mean, other than that, you'd have to send out press releases and contact the studio and just hope for the best. But we hit a good thing at a time where the country was looking for something like this. And that's when the News Reporter actually reached out to us.

Jim James: 6:52

So, that gave you the initial start, which is fantastic. Talk us through then the acquisition. You mentioned Influencers, but also you've managed to build a very effective "referral program," haven't you, for people that have signed up? So, talk us through that, Frank, because in a way, you're giving away margin and you're splitting the margin you are getting, aren't you, with existing customers? Tell us about how you're doing that.

Frank Deblasi: 7:19

Well, I mentioned that my partner and I natively build and manage websites. I do front ends, he does back end. So, after a couple of years into the business, we were looking for something to give the company its next big boost of traffic. So, I was poking around and reading around and talking to some other people and we decided to come up with our own "Loyalty Rewards Program", that actually lets our customers be rewarded for driving new traffic to us. So what we did was we put this program together. So now, people who join our site, whether they shop or not, they get this tracking link once they create their account. And what they do is they can take that tracking link and put it on their website, their social profiles, in their videos that they create, and anytime somebody clicks that link and joins, that person now becomes a referer of our member and they get rewarded anytime that person get paid a commission, anytime someone joins their site. So they can actually build a residual income through my site.

Jim James: 8:07

That is fantastic, and I see here as well, you've got some things, for example, the "Hoopla Happy Cash." So, tell us how is that working, because you've almost gamified this as well, haven't you, Frank?

Frank Deblasi: 8:19

Yeah. It's another attractive feature that, you know, one lucky member of ours every month get through a drawing as they make a certain amount of purchases, they can enter a drawing and just be rewarded $500 a month. And you know, once a month, every time we draw this out, that person gets, you know, announced on social media and it really makes the customers happy. Just being, you know, having that, a fun opportunity like that to be involved in once a month.

Jim James: 8:39

Yeah, no, I can see that. And I see categories wise, you're across all consumer products. Are there some that you're specializing in more than others?

Frank Deblasi: 8:47

We tried to cover all the bases that just everybody would possibly want from clothing to cellphone plans, to electronics, to even booking travel vacations. And it really varies different times of the year where we do more or less traffic with each of these categories.

Jim James: 9:01

How interesting. Yeah, I can see that. And this all comes as a feed, I guess, from these other affiliate deals. But you've obviously made it look and feel seamless for people. Now, we were talking as well, Frank, about, you know, as a business, getting the business noticed. And you'd plainly done that really well with the consumers. And you've dealt with how merchants actually are already working with some of these affiliate programs. So you don't even have to do that work, which is a real brilliant move on your part. We discussed before we started recording about how you've grown the company from you and your partner Tom to the next iteration. Do you want to just take us through what have you done to scale the business and to expand the management team? And how did you communicate that to people?

Frank Deblasi: 9:47

Well, when you start a business, you're going to start to realize after a while that you can only do so much yourself. I mean, you apply your native skills, you do as much as you can. You get the business as far as you can, and you really start to realize what grows a business is the team that you put together. So, one of the most important decisions that you're gonna get to when starting a business is finding the right people to get to that next level. And it took me a good 10 years to find that team, but it was worth the wait. Because the team that we've put together now, they've done a phenomenal job. I have guys specializing in different areas of the business from a Chief Marketing Officer to a Chief Financial Officer to a Chief, you know, an Art Director. We have a dedicated Web Team, a dedicated Marketing Team. But that's really the key to getting to the next level is really just putting the right team together and finding the right people to specialize in things that you don't, to get the business to the next point.

Jim James: 10:38

So Frank, you've articulated the problem, but how did you solve it? Because you say that you've got the right people, but you know, how did you communicate that? Did you do that through another Facebook post? Did you go out?

Frank Deblasi: 10:49

It was basically through networking. Like I said, it took almost 10 years to find these people. We found some of them through... My partner is actually connected to one of them through another business. A couple of guys we found on LinkedIn, and they were partners of other people that we knew. So it's really just through networking and word of mouth. There is really no one answer to say, "I found this person here, this person there." It's really just networking and just talking to business people and just getting the word out and just letting people know what you're looking for.

Jim James: 11:14

Now, one of the ways that you are getting your word out is that you are using this platform called "matchmaker.com", and using podcasts. But also you talk on your YouTube channel about using AI, I think for SEO. Can we also maybe talk a little bit about how you're using the next generation of technology to boost the presence of Hoopla?

Frank Deblasi: 11:36

Yeah. Well, I mean, like I said, mainly what we're doing is just we're mainly focusing on the Influencers, not so much the AI of it, but we're really getting the word out to people who are willing to talk about this type of product. That's really where we're getting the next level of technology from and getting the exposure out, and building the company is talking to people who basically just want to you know, talk about the product, and you know, who basically are influenced by what we're doing and have an audience that they can talk to really get people come to us.

Jim James: 12:03

Okay. And when you're using podcasting, is this for, if you like, for Frank De Blasi, the CEO, Founder with the view to building your own brand or to promote Hoopla? Because I'm finding Entrepreneurs are now thinking about having their own personal brand as well as the company brand. Just interested in your strategy there, Frank.

Frank Deblasi: 12:24

Yeah. See, basically what I do is, you know, because I've had this business, I've been doing what I do for over 20 years, and I've had the business for 13 or 14 years now. What I basically like to do on the podcasting and the radio appearances that I do and any media appearances, I like to basically get my knowledge out to other Entrepreneurs who are looking to build their business and basically get my knowledge out to them as to how I did it. My ups and downs, the struggles that I've had. Basically, the dos and don'ts that I've experienced. I like to get them out into other Entrepreneurs and it's gratifying to me.

Jim James: 12:54

Okay. So that's really, well, very generous and of course, the purpose of this show as well. Frank, where do you see the technology impacting the next generation of Entrepreneurs? Because you and I have grown up building businesses with, well initially the internet, right? And in my day we were convincing people they might need a website. And now things have changed a lot. Are you seeing some sort of developments, for example, around mobile or around AI that will fundamentally change the kind of business that you are running?

Frank Deblasi: 13:26

Well, no matter what business you're doing, I think really you need to focus on your mobile audience more than anything. Because if you think about it, what's really happened in technology, and I saw it in the industry, that I have my business in the online shopping industry. There was a dramatic shift over the last 10 years in the amount of people that are shopping online and where they're doing it. They're doing it on their mobile devices. We have probably over 65, almost 70% of online shoppers, and this is just going by my holiday shopping statistics. They're shopping on their phones. That's where they're doing it. People carry the internet wherever they go. So, whatever your online presence is going to be, focus on the mobile presence first and your web presence secondary, because the mobile technology is in people's hands, and that's really where you're going to get them. Because you'll start to see now, like "push notifications" are very important with companies now, and you're seeing a lot more text, message marketing. That's where people are going. Businesses are focusing on people getting to their phone rather than their computer.

Jim James: 14:23

Very interesting. So, you mentioned notifications. What other considerations would there be, Frank, if you are developing a product and, you know, getting it noticed with mobile? One is obviously screen size. But to some degree, you know, mobile devices are almost maybe more fragmented than laptop, you know, standard screens and connectivity. So what would be some of the requirements that you think you need to put or that you're putting into Hoopla to make it mobile friendly?

Frank Deblasi: 14:49

Well, other than the screen size stuff, it's really just a matter of, you know, it's really more of a communication thing than a presentation thing, okay? Because the real big benefit of the mobile technology is the notifications and getting important information to the customer as it comes out almost in real time. Like, we're sending out deals via text message now to customers in addition to their email box, because people don't always check their email all the time. But a lot of people, you know, most people in the world, they carry their cellphones around. They get text messages instantly. So it's an instant gratification with those type of things, "push notifications and text messages" and you know, things like that, that get to the customer instantly.

Jim James: 15:26

Which platforms are you integrating? Are you using things like "Twilio," for example, within your platform for SMS, that's sort of "omnichannel messaging"?

Frank Deblasi: 15:34

We're not using that. My developers actually have their own platform that they use, that they've put together. So we're doing our own technology with the SMS messaging right now.

Jim James: 15:43

Okay. Yeah, just wondering because as you say, becoming omnichannel, and what about a "mobile app?" Does Hoopla have a mobile app? And is that essential?

Frank Deblasi: 15:51

We actually have one in the works right now. It should be finished and developed probably by quarter three of this year because we've gotten a lot of requests from it, from our customers. We just finished, and we are going to be launching in the next week or two, a browser plugin that whenever you go to a specific website, if you're not logged into Hoopla, you will be notified through your browser. "Oh, Hoopla has this X amount of cashback at this brand." So again, it's sort of like a mobile notification that we're sending to the customer while they're on their laptop that you can get cashback at this brand.

Jim James: 16:21

Very interesting that you said earlier on. It's a matter of communication, not presentation and this sort of need for immediacy that's happening as a result of mobile and just the competition for attention. Frank, is there anything that you'd like to say without embarrassing yourself that you've done wrong that people could learn? Or it's not something wrong, but something didn't work? Let's put it that way.

Frank Deblasi: 16:40

You know, in the beginning when I started this business and even my partner was telling me this too. You know, when you're the only person or with one other person, when you're starting a business, you try and kind of be a hero with everything in the beginning. You try and do everything yourself. You're learning things. And you know, one of the things I wish I had done in the beginning, and it was a learning experience. If there was something you don't know how to do, either go to another expert who does that or just try and watch some YouTube videos from reputable people who have done what you're trying to do. Whether it's marketing, fundraising, putting a business plan together. These are all things I try doing on my own that I don't have expertise in, and you wind up wasting a lot of time doing things like that. So do what you do best. Everybody has a level of expertise with something. Do what you do best and when you need to do something else, if you're trying to find something to do, go to a person who is an expert at what you're doing and it'll save you a lot of time and you'll get it done right. It's all about the end result.

Jim James: 17:32

Frank, I love that. And you know, I always ask Entrepreneurs like yourself, that are successful to help us that are unnoticed entrepreneurs. What would you say is the one piece of advice that's really helped you move the needle in terms of getting noticed for Hoopla and the online portal that you've built there.

Frank Deblasi: 17:49

The one thing I'll say is, and it kind of builds onto the last thing I said, I've learned more things being an Entrepreneur and Business Owner by talking to people who have failed at what they do, rather than succeeded. If you're going to learn a lot more from the person who failed three or four times and then got it right than the person who got it right the first time. Because they're going to advise and tell you what not to do and what obstacles to avoid. And that's going to save you a lot of time in the long run. And it's going to make you excel a lot quicker because you're going to learn from people who have failed on things that you shouldn't be wasting your time on. And that was a big help to me over the years.

Jim James: 18:20

Frank De Blasi, thank you so much for joining me. You know, you have so much experience and wisdom there, but we only have like 20 minutes on this show. If people want to find out more about you, how can they do that?

Frank Deblasi: 18:32

They can visit my personal website at "frankdeblasi.com." My last name is spelled D E B L A S I, frankdeblasi.com. And you can find out more about Hoopla, what I do for a living there, and also other projects I have going on. All my contact information is there.

Jim James: 18:47

And you can go to Hoopla Doopla. That's D O O P L A .com. "hoopladoopla.com" to find out more for those rewards. Frank, thank you so much for joining me and explaining how you've built this amazing business model by taking some content that already existed and aggregating that and sharing that so efficiently with so many people, and how you've managed to reward the people that you partner with and that your clients, I think it's inspirational. Thank you so much.

Frank Deblasi: 19:14

It was my pleasure, Jim. Thanks for having me.

Jim James: 19:17

It's been my pleasure. So we've been sharing today and learning from Frank De Blasi over in Long Island. Of course, I'll put his contact details in the show notes, as always. If you've enjoyed the show, do please share it with a fellow Entrepreneur. And if you like the show, please review it. Now, meanwhile, as you know, all these interviews are made into articles, which you can find on Medium and also on our website "theunnoticed.cc" and are compiled into books. The first one of which is on Amazon, published by Wiley. So, until we meet again, I do thank you for joining me and my guest, Frank, today. And encourage you just to keep on communicating.