“This is not an actual deal being offered by the business listed above until the status of this deal is marked ‘Approved.’ Anything but an “Approved” status means that this deal is simply an offer that has been suggested by a user from the Ringleadr community, not the business listed. In no way is this an actual offer from the business listed above and CAN NOT be redeemed for cash, products, services or credit worth anything of value until this deal is marked ‘Approved.'”
This is Ringleadr! It’s a website where people submit deals they wish existed and recruit friends to commit to it in order to pressure a business into offering the deal.
We’ve heard this idea before. It’s usually pitched with an anecdote about Chinese flash mobs organized online at “team buying” sites like this one and storming physical retailers demanding a discount. “I’ve seen six or seven of these [ideas]. Everyone has that story about the people in China,” Jay Levy of Zelkova Ventures said when the idea was presented at The Hatchery’s “Are You Serious?” pitch night. Loopt has had some minor success with this, scoring a deal with Virgin America; here’s a crowd-sourced deals site for restaurants.
Ringleadr just raised $500,000 in seed funding, TechCrunch reports. Apparently sometimes the process actually works.
We tend to agree with Alan Patrick, a London-based founder and seasoned biz dev, over at Broadstuff last month: “In Dotcom 1.0 a number of the aggregation sites (or C2B as they were also known) were mooted (some were even floated, iirc) but it all fizzled out as it seemed that to get a bunch of ‘C’ side people to agree on their demand proposition was like herding cats–it still seems easier for a retailer to ‘propose’ a proposition and consumers to react.”
