Building A Business

Can you believe it? After months of developing and planning for Friends and Family Circle, we’re finally launching – and we couldn’t be more excited!

Some of you may be wondering how Friends and Family Circle came about. With all the social buying sites out there, why start up another? For one, we don’t think people EVER get tired of saving money! But really, it was something we were passionate about. 

Friends and Family Circle is a company under Datran Media, a leading digital marketing company. That being the case, we already had a great relationship with top national brands and a huge group of email subscribers, so we were positioned to be able to deliver the best offers, across the country, not just in major markets.  Everyone likes to save right?  So shouldn't everyone have the chance to get a great deal even if they don't live in New York, Chicago or LA?  We think so.  

We started the process of developing Friends and Family Circle this past Spring. What you see now is significantly different from our original idea, but in a good way. It’s definitely more mature. We had to revamp a bunch of things and we learned a lot in the process. When we started, there wasn’t a lot of market research that existed on social buying sites that dealt primarily with national offers.  There was information available for local sites, but even that was skewed. It was tough in the beginning, but we had to make informed decisions.  We had to ask ourselves, “How do we make this work from a consumer’s standpoint AND a retailer’s standpoint?”  Friends and Family Circle had to be something that worked for everyone.

So we got a bunch of teams on the project.  The creative crew worked tirelessly on developing our branding– logo and all.  HTML coders made sure that whatever the creative team was working on worked across multiple platforms. Technical engineers worked on the website, the e-commerce platform and made sure functionality was in place.  Our legal team checked out our privacy policy and terms of service, making sure consumers and brands were protected. And the sales team did their thing with the brands they managed.

Now we’re a day away from our launch and we’re very proud! For those of you looking to start a business of your own, we’d like to share our top 5 tips!

• Have a clear vision
• Be open to change
• Do your research and establish a clear understanding of the market
• Create a brand that will be recognizable across various channels (online, mobile, etc.) and is unique to your product
• Listen to the experts - you know what you want to do, but listen to those around you who have experience in finance, legal, branding, etc - receiving input and listening to it will indefinitely make your business more successful!

We hope that you’re looking forward to receiving offers that can be used wherever you are. There are deals from some very exciting national brands on the way!