Featured Listing: Established UK Voucher Code Site

About the business

Tell us a little about yourself. What’s your background? How did you start the business?

I started off in performance marketing but nowadays I’d call myself a growth engineer ― I take business problems and dream up crazy tech solutions to fix them, then build them.

The idea for vouchernaut came whilst working for vouchercloud, one of the UK’s largest voucher platforms. Everything was done manually, and not very well – A ridiculous amount of money was being spent on admin teams and nobody was embracing automation. I built Vouchernaut to show that it was possible for one person to do the same work as 50, and it worked!

As an eCommerce business, where are your products made?

I built vouchernaut to automatically source offers and deals from the AWIN affiliate network, before stitching together even more APIs and sources. All offers are sourced and vetted automatically.

What can you tell us about your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Being an affiliate, we’re dealing with all types of users – Some campaigns bring in massive volume with smaller margins, whereas others will bring in one or two big sales per day. The great thing is that the CPA is roughly the same for both types so there’s great potential to make a margin.

How have you marketed the product and where are your customers originating from?

PPC. The customers are on Google, though nowadays we have a growing cohort of repeat customers that hit up Vouchernaut directly ― They love the speed of the site. The aim of vouchernaut is to get those customers that wander away from our partner’s checkouts, in search of a discount, back to the partner’s site ASAP, and feeling good about their purchase.

Is the asset on your listing owner-operated, how much time does it take to run the business, who else is needed on the team, and what is automated?

Basically, everything is automated! Finding partners, approaching them on AWIN, getting them added to the site, and offering content created, it’s all automated. So is the PPC. Campaigns are created automatically, and the ad copy gets updated daily with new discounts and deals.

Vouchernaut’s been operated by myself for five years, until my business partner, Mike, joined me in November 2020 to help scale the business. Together we focused on adding plenty more partnerships (we’re up to over 1000 monetizable, household brands!) and that’s when it really kicked off. We used automation to build a massive moat ― Getting to this size from scratch would take years and years, whereas Vouchernaut is well known in UK affiliate circles.

Between Mike and myself, we probably spend about an hour a month replying to partner’s emails and looking at the Data Studio dashboard to make sure everything’s good.

What does someone need to do to continue operating the business in its current form?

In its current form, absolutely nothing. As long as you’re buying Google Ads, revenue will keep flowing. Some people get put off by not having tons of organic traffic because they don’t realise how easy it is to control the PPC tap. The system I’ve built is fire and I forget – we always have a good laugh when the Slack Sales Feed pings us with a brand we’ve never heard of to say we’ve made a sale 🤣

Growing the business

Can you list a few opportunities for a potential new owner to continue growing the business?

Obviously some organic content would go a long way here; The site has potential, and a fair few first page results but we made the decision to scale out with PPC and as a result, neglected SEO. Someone well versed there would be able to make quick gains, and we already have the SEM data from the PPC we’re running which obviously provides incredible insights.

We’re a UK based site, but there’s nothing stopping you from expanding to basically any other country you’d like. AWIN supports 30+ different countries so all the automation would work there, too.

Advertisers have the budget for email slots and tenancy, and always reach out to us about opportunities that we have to turn down. They’re willing to pay £150 – 250 for a slot on an email, but we’ve never built that database. Adding a MailChimp signup form would quickly become valuable.

Same for on-site tenancy, adding a few banner spots could become lucrative – We’ve sold logo inclusions on the homepage. Our partners are all about exposure so adding advertising space is a must.

We’ve focused on low-hanging fruit but if sales and account management is your thing, you could barter for exclusive discount codes, PPC rights, tenancy as mentioned above. Being an affiliate opens the door to some of the coolest brands and they’re keen to work with you if you can nurture those relationships.

Oh, and I did a complete redesign of the site (in Figma) including all the options mentioned above but never got around to implementing it! That design also comes as part of the sale 🙂

What has been the evolution of this asset since its launch?

In November 2016, Vouchernaut started off as the SLOWEST, most generic WordPress theme in the world. I then built out the site using React and devised a ton of automation to make everything run like clockwork. More recently in January 2022, I rebuilt it again with Next.js, which means the site is super fast, ultra performant and spits out static-generated HTML.

How does this business make money? What are the current revenue streams?

Affiliate via AWIN network, and one-off tenancy payments directly from advertisers.

What marketing channels are most profitable for the business?

Google, easily. PPC. For every £1 spent, the site currently makes £1.52. We also have some organic sales.

How big is your current team? How many people does it take to run this business?

We’re a team of two ― Mike joined me in November 2020 to help scale the business, but it takes us a collective hour or two a month to run if that.

What’s the reason for selling your business on Flippa?

I run a digital consulting agency and I have dreams of launching plenty more projects! Finding the right buyer for Vouchernaut is going to allow me to realise those dreams.