Camosun College second-year Business student Forrest Browning and Marvin Janssen, a former exchange student from the Netherlands, saw a need for an easy-to-use deal tracker. They compiled a calendar of different happy hours and lunch specials around town, and dealsohard.ca was born.
“We thought, you know, wouldn’t that be amazing if there was just this single location where all of that was in place and you can make an informed decision?” says Janssen. “It’s also kind of fun—it allows you to discover something new, so that’s the underlying thought there.”
The site includes listings of deals and discounts offered up by local restaurants and pubs as well as a Google map. Clicking on map markers will immediately take you to the corresponding deal in the calendar. Janssen built the app over the course of four months; the simplicity of the service was a priority.
“You just focus on something that’s clean and very fast to use—you just wanna pull it out and within five seconds you wanna figure out where to go,” he says. “We don’t want to bog it down with advertisements and other crazy stuff.”
The duo says that Dealsohard—which launched on December 21 of last year—has approximately 1,000 regular users, but it has yet to turn a profit.
“I was at a Camosun mixer the other day with a lot of big business people and that’s the question that we get asked a lot—how is it monetized?” says Browning. “It’s a little bit of a trade secret, but essentially what we’re looking at doing is altering the order in which the venues are listed, and venues that are listed at the top of the app will receive more exposure, and we’re looking at creating a really flexible rate system where venues can pay to be at the top.”
Dealsohard, with a target audience of students and tourists, has the potential to increase exposure for smaller, independent venues that are often overshadowed by large establishments.
“Some of the little venues that don’t get a chance to advertise very much [and are] kind of tucked away, they have lunch specials and happy hours, surprisingly enough,” says Browning. “You just have to go in and ask them, and they’ve got some hand-drawn menu. You’d never know, really, unless you went there and looked for it, so I think our app is nice because it gives that little guy a fighting chance.”
Building on user numbers is paramount to attracting venues willing to pay for listings; it’s also a method of undermining any poachers who might be looking to steal their idea.
“We feel a little fire under us because we think that we have a good idea and we’re a little bit afraid—maybe not afraid, but leery—if…” says Browning, before Janssen finishes his thought, saying, “…someone might copy it or take it.”
Browning says that the two really feel a drive to expand as fast as possible to keep their dream alive. For now, they’ve built an app that reflects their own desire to have fun out with friends while also keeping in mind the typical restraints of a student’s budget. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.
“I knew a few different happy hours,” says Janssen, “and you show up, and they’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t do that anymore.’ We just don’t want to walk around downtown to find something; we just want to go.”