Waxing for two at Take-It-Offs in Scranton? $100 worth of Polka lessons for 40 cents? An avant garde grilled cheese sandwich meal with metal shavings in it at Chez Naif for $60? You don’t want any of those daily deals, right? But they’re still coming.
Two people (lovers, really), Edwin Hermawan and Lea Pische, wanted to fight back. And they did. With UnsubscribeDeals.com.
“We stopped buying daily deals a long time ago, but the emails kept coming. We had to find a way to stop them,” said Hermawan.
This site is a tactical nuke aimed straight at LivingSocial City, Gilt Groupville, and Amazon Localstan. You fire it up by connecting to your Gmail account and then you get a list of daily deals sites. One by one, like a sniper taking down stoats at a great distance, you turn off each daily deal. Bang. Dead. The deals, not the stoats.
The site is completely bootstrapped and has seen about 2,000 users so far. Even the backstory is stirring: “I am a recovering attorney. She is a West Village waitress,” said Hermawan.
“We started at a hackathon. At Pivotal Labs if you must know. We were trying to hijack one of their engineers and find our mythical technical co-founder. Unfortunately, all we got were awkward interactions and a random conversation about statistical-regression-mumbo-jumbo-database structure.”
Hermawan is also co-founder of SignaturePages.com. But that’s not important right now.
Pische is a “West Village waitress”. She “ordered too many things from Lifebooker that she never used.” She also has a startup, Runorder.com, that helps restaurants find distributors. But that, also, isn’t important.
What’s important is that they’ve finally solved the daily deals inundation problem. Finally. And for good.
Sure, Hermawan’s a little deluded. “We focus strictly on daily deals. We believe that’s where the bulk of the junk emails come from,” he said. “We knew it was time to go to sleep when Groupon emails start to come in.” Have you read junk email, dude? Have you? No matter.
All I can say is thank you Edwin and Lea. Thank you. I’ve just unsubscribed from Gilt City (did I sign up for that? Is that for girls?) and whatever kgb deals is and I’m a happier man for it. Keep killing those stoats, friends, and stay gold.