Why do ‘Deals?’

Long story, but I’ll give you the short version. Grab a seat.

See, Local is in our blood. When we launched our first neighborhood site – SalmonCreekLive – back in 2007, our mission was all about connecting in the neighborhood. Connecting people, connecting businesses, connecting organizations.

That philosophy took us out into the community. We spent a lot of time talking to small businesses. Remember, this was 2007/08. Candidly, things sucked for business during that time. In Salmon Creek alone, the florist had closed down, the interior design place, the pizza place, the stove place, a wireless store, on and on. Honestly, it was a little scary for everyone.

As a neighborhood resource, we believed that we needed to do what we could to help small business survive. In late 2008, we started working with neighborhood businesses to promote activities and events happening in their businesses… just looking for any way to help get the word out about them in the neighborhood.

Businesses were pretty blunt… business was off, and they needed to drive more traffic. They asked: Could we help? Pretty Please?

The desire to help small local businesses promote their products and services and work through times of struggle, while bringing a great resource to neighborhood consumers, seemed like a great fit. So in late 2008 we launched Vancouver and Clark County’s first and only LOCAL daily-deals program (unbeknownst to us, it was about the same time as this little company called Groupon launched in Chicago).

Despite our best intentions, our first effort crashed and burned in just a matter of months. The technology wasn’t there to effectively support the program. But I couldn’t shake the concept. Fast forward about 18 months, and in the summer of 2010 technology had caught up to the extent that we could re-engage with the deals platform. After a couple of months of testing and tweaking, we brought back a new and improved Live! Deals program in October, 2010.

The rest, as they say… is, well, yet to be written. All we know is that we look at our Live! Deals program as another way to connect businesses and consumers in our own communities, and through that effort to Keep it Local, we can all live, work, shop and play in a more vibrant and dynamic neighborhood.