In November 2017, the Redbrain founding team was working on Price Comparison Sites, when an email from Google landed in our inbox about a shiny new idea...
Comparison Shopping Services (CSS).
We started messing around and quickly identified that there was an opportunity to provide online retailers with an additional, and largely unknown at the time, route to market. We hacked something together and launched it, making a few thousand in profit. But what followed over the coming weeks & months was insane, sustained rapid growth.
Starting to get excited, we turned on affiliate networks, starting with AWIN in the UK and expanding out to another 4 countries. Small, scrappy, and hungry for more, we started turning retailers on without permission… and ended up burning through Asda's affiliate budget in a weekend (it was meant to be 2 months!).
We had to adapt pretty quickly, as we started getting noticed by more retailers. Within 6 months, we had to expand the team and CSS became bigger than the other projects that we had been working on previously. Like we do today, we operated on a CPA model and at a high performance level.
We worked long nights. Our approach was more, faster, do it, break it, see what works.
- Experimenting
- Testing
- Winging it
- Learning along the way
What we learned is that if we just play by the normal rules, we get mediocre results.
We win by breaking rules and being creative.