What Honey does is takes that consumer in checkout flow who wants to buy and says, 'Hey, we just tested all these codes and we picked out one that works.' It's like winning the lottery, and it makes consumers more likely to interact."
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"Prior to using Honey you see a coupon code box and think there's probably a deal out there somewhere, and you open a tab and search codes and start clicking on links, and in that process, you never get a definitive answer - it's hard to do an exhaustive search. "For two and half years we couldn't figure it out, and we couldn't make money," Hudson said.īut eventually, the co-founders realized that the service was just as beneficial to retailers as to shoppers: "We take a consumer who wants to check out and give them the confidence to do so," he said. Honey's driving force, thanks to Hudson's cofounder Ruan, has been consumer psychology. The trick was appealing to retailers along with consumers Honey's "Drop List" feature allows users to track price changes. Because the founders consider user experience paramount, "there are a lot of things that would make money in the short term that we don't do," he said. Honey provides the Amazon Drop List feature without monetization, although it has affiliate relationships with some of the sites included on its expanded Drop List. Honey has so far chosen not to monetize its product everywhere it could - for instance, Hudson pointed out, a price-comparison toolbar "would monetize insanely well" but it makes for an annoying consumer experience. It has a 4.8 out of 5 stars in the Chrome store. In addition to scouring the internet for coupons during checkout (you can see how that works in a previous Business Insider article) and providing Honey Gold, it has also added features such as a price-comparison element between different seller on Amazon, a "Drop List" that tracks price changes on Amazon - in November, this feature will be expanded to retailers including Target, Loft, Saks, and Macy's - and a travel element that offers discounted prices for hotel stays. Honey isn't just the coupon codes anymore: The app partners with retailers to provide coupons and offer "Honey Gold" - its version of 1%-2% cash back - on verified purchases. Hudson says Honey is currently profitable, but does not disclose revenue. The LA Times reported in October that Honey has raised over $40 million in funding, including $26 million that went unreported in a March Series C round. Honey has saved its users - 67% of whom are millennials - over $170 million from coupon code discounts this year so far. Today, Honey's browser extension has been downloaded over 5 million times on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and the team just crossed 100 people. The extension automatically finds and applies coupons at more than 21,000 stores, and members can earn rewards at more than 3,700 of those.
The Honey browser extension automatically offers up coupon codes and "Honey Gold" deals at checkout. In the failed startups that preceded Honey over the course of Hudson's career, he said, "nothing had ever clicked, but to have something consumers clearly loved that was growing organically by word of mouth because people actually loved the product, I knew that there was something there." Even when I was there, it was gnawing at me that I wasn't trying to figure out to make this Honey thing work."Īs Hudson stepped back and Ruan continued working with a skeleton crew, users continued to gravitate to Honey, based on the recommendations of friends - and a leaked Reddit post from one of its beta testers. "I worked there for a year and learned a lot about the ad tech industry and building products at massive scale," he said, "but I also learned that in my core, I'm still an entrepreneur, and I like to build things. In 2013, Hudson ran out of money, and took a day job as a product manager at an ad tech company to pay the bills.
In October 2012, the MIT-trained entrepreneur, along with co-founder George Ruan, used that prototype to build and launch Honey, a web browser extension that automatically finds and surfaces coupons when a user is online shopping.įor two and a half years, Hudson and his Ruan bootstrapped their app, unable to convince investors to put money into a desktop browser extension as consumer interest moved to mobile. That night, after the kids went to bed, he put together a prototype for a browser extension that could help solve his problem. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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