Opportunity clicks for Ryan, 23

A BUSINESS launched by a 23-year-old Scottish entrepreneur with just £5,000 has got off to a flying start after attracting 16,000 subscribers in its first 12 days.

Business management graduate Ryan O’Rorke set up LoveOnlineDeals.com after friends mentioned they were being flooded with emails from voucher companies such as Groupon and KGB.

By working with these emerging internet powerhouses, his website allows subscribers to get one message a day informing them of all the deals in their area from a variety of companies.

O’Rorke, who graduated from Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University and runs the business from his home in the capital, said the initial success of the website had surpassed his expectations.

“It’s a lot more than I expected, to be honest,” he said. “It must be word of mouth.”

Before launching the site at the end of August, O’Rorke tried a number of marketing ploys to get the company known, from online advertising to leafletting and “clean advertising”, where a message is stencilled onto a dirty public surface by washing it.

But his spend was limited to £5,000 which he secured from a private investment company and part of that sum was also used to build the website.

O’Rorke’s idea capitalises on the recent trend for consumer businesses such as restaurants and visitor attractions to advertise by offering deals to subscribers of specialist voucher websites. Businesses generally pay based on how many people take up the offer, so there is no up-front cost for their publicity.

However, the explosion in websites offering these deals allowed O’Rorke to step in with a further refinement.

He says his target audience is the “socially savvy, working class, internet-using consumer” who has a medium disposable income and wants specific offers likely to interest them.

O’Rorke has plans to diversify as his business grows, approaching companies directly to advertise instead of working only through the voucher companies.

He also plans to expand to include other UK cities. At present, the website only offers deals in Edinburgh and Glasgow but will soon include locations around the UK.

“It’s all in the number of subscribers,” he said. “The first thing is to build up the business and the hype around it. Then the world’s your oyster.”