About a month ago Half Off Depot announced that it had acquired Dealster. To quote the release:

“Dealster marks the first acquisition for Half Off Depot. In addition to its membership base, Dealster’s value to Half Off Depot lies in its proprietary platform, which includes social elements for customers and merchants as well as other features currently on the Half Off Depot product roadmap.”

The key word being first.

One of the big outcomes of Groupon mishandling its IPO process was that the financial community lost interest in the entire online deal space. As I wrote at the time, “(the) Groupon IPO is good for Half Off Depot as it will make it harder for smaller underfunded companies to remain viable and they validated the market in which we participate.” 

At Half Off Depot we decided we needed to do two things.

The first was to get cash flow positive. We did this back in March and can continue to operate the business with a healthy bottom line while still growing at a nice pace.

The second was to go out and find smaller companies whose access to capital has been cut off but need more money to survive. Dealster was one of these companies. There are lots of companies like Dealster and I am spending lots of time talking to them. I believe that Half Off Depot will be able to efficiently grow its member base, and in turn revenues via acquisitions. We are going down that path. It will be interesting to see where it leads.