Offering great deals for “local gems,” the recently launched Redmond-based Yubit.com values customer input and feedback and also strives to uncover the stories behind local businesses.
Yubit is a unique spin-off of sites like Groupon or LivingSocial, which sell special offers and discounts to companies in a customer’s surrounding area. Yubit features only local businesses, no franchises and no chains. In addition, Yubit engages its customers by asking for reviews of featured businesses as well as suggestions for new places to feature.
“Yelp and Urban Spoon do reviews, other companies do special offers. We are the only company who does everything end to end,” said Ivan Joseph, CEO of Yubit.
The site features special offers from a different local business, deemed a “local gem,” every two days. Along with the special offer, which can be purchased for immediate use or for future use, is an overview and history of the business, reviews from customers and an interview with the owner.
“We believe every business has a story,” said Joseph, “and what we try to do is bring out that story.”
After two days as the special, the featured business migrates to the site’s On Demand Specials page accompanied by a different special offer where it will remain for six months to a year. This allows customers who enjoyed the business the first time to take advantage of the continued special offers and also gives new customers the chance to discover the business long after it is featured on the home page.
Customers receive e-mails every day, keeping them informed of the new featured business.
The site is interactive and thrives based on customer participation. On its yuSocial page, customers have the opportunity to enter a wish list of merchants they would like to see featured from their area.
“The advantage is that people can see these businesses and they could be featured on the homepage,” commented Joseph. “You tell us what you want.”
The site also allows customers to write reviews of the business or service they have used on the yuTell page.
Joseph, who worked at Microsoft for seven years on the Bing search engine, “recognized that Microsoft is doing a great job on the World Wide Web but locally, nobody was doing a good job. You can’t get this stuff on Google, local is where the transactions happen.”
Yubit launched on May 17 of this year and has seen consistent growth in customers buying the listed products and receiving the daily e-mails.
The Yubit staff, which now has five full-time employees, does the majority of their work online but meet once a week in order to debug and go through issues of the week.
After seven weeks of business, Yubit is already looking to the future.
“We want to be innovative and come out with better and new things,” said Joseph. “We want merchants to feel like it’s a great place to be and we want to tell their story for a long time.”
Joseph said Yubit is not currently thinking about national launches, as “there is a huge opportunity right here that is not completely exploited.”
Joseph hopes to be able to do this for a long time and build Yubit into a significant company.
“We want to stay true to the notion that we will work with good local businesses. Local businesses are the lifeblood of any economy,” said Joseph.
Yubit is looking forward to the launch of its iPhone application, which is almost ready and should be available on the iTunes store this week. The iPhone application will allow customers to access deals and special offers on the go.
When an offer is purchased, whether on a computer or an iPhone, the customer can choose to have the confirmation number sent to their phone as a text message so that no printing is needed in the process. Simply show the business the confirmation number in the text message and they will do the rest.
Joseph encourages all to sign up to receive daily offers. For more information and to sign up, visit www.yubit.com.
