I like the idea of my coupons coming to me in some other manner than a pile of newspaper shoved into my mail box. I also like the idea of not having that same volume of stuff shoved into my email inbox. Giving me a service that I go to, when I want, and view what I want when it comes to local promotional items seems like an awesome thing.

Sort of like craigslist for coupons.

http://www.citysavers.com/ ?

Thanks for your resonses.

Yes. I'm thinking along the lines of building a network of communities. These various services would be the perks of membership. Imagine: There's a big event, such as a football game, that's in town. Now, instead of our out of town visitor having to waste his time riding around looking for decent restaurants and accomodations he can log into the network and make a simple query.

On the service provider side: Local restaurants and hotels might take advantage of an opportunity to compete, in real time, for the consumer's business. Our system could provide an automated way for a business to bid for the client by presenting the best package based on service and price. A system of rating the services could be implemented.

I'm taking a look at CitySavers vanhees, thanks for the reference.

Stay tuned for more....
Cheers!

More on this network of communities:

At the community level, not only could we provide convenience services such as auctions and coupon distribution but we could also offer human services. We could encourage people to volunteer locally. Our system could give recognition to community members with the giving spirit.

As our network establishes relationships with businesses and our networked communities link together and grow, our members will realize a real buying power. We could negotiate prices on goods such as lumber for network members who are builders.

A project like this would require an extensive range of expertise..

There are a lot of people out there who have done things like restaurant reviews and the like, online, typically they suck, but a few are decent.

I worry that I'm seeing scope bloat at a very fundimental stage of the idea process. My suggestion is to cut down the scope, focus on a tight niche ( like craigslist for coupons ) and develop that out. Later, when you have a foothold, add other things. Or get bought out by AOL.

Thank you daraddishman,

I'm sizing the idea up from 30,000 feet at this point. I want to get a feel for the target infrastructure. I think we could start with any of these features; coupons, auctions, hospitality rating; and build a profitable system but, individually, these things have been done. Do we just look at trying to 'do it better'? It makes sense to zoom in and focus on any one of the features but how do we effectively factor in the long term goal of constructing a cooperative network that easily scales?

I've worked on a quite a number of projects in the hospitality and airline reservations business. Much of the work was patching into or rebuilding infrastructures which were inadequately designed to handle growth. The most successful companies in the business, were the ones that built the strongest networks.

I think you can build a flexible tool and grow out to scale as needed. You usually just need someone with decent systems architecture experience ( like yours! ) to figure out the hardware and growth logistics. I'm big on Agile Development, so I get the need for a 30,000 ft view, but I'm hot on small sprints down at the ground level that get pushed to market fast, and evolve quickly over time to meet the market need.

One thing I can say is this: Most of the hospitality rating sites I've been to are absolutely garbage. I've not seen a good local coupon system either. Auctions on the other had are pretty common, I know dozens that are small scale competition for eBay. I'd focus in on those poorly executed areas...

Whichever features you start with (and I think I'm on the side of daraddishman - start small and grow), I would certainly recommend building one very local community, getting it running and then expanding to add others. You'll find it much easier to generate interest and content if you throw your resources into a single network at first. Once the site is built and has evolved to be stable and popular, it should be easy to duplicate for other networks - the facebook model!

I like this idea...I hate mail coupons as they are pretty useless and good if I run out of tp generally, so for places that I frequent, or that may be of interest would be something that works very well. What could be of some benefit is incorporating something that works very much so like ad-sense so that it will be able to give recommendations based on previous searches. Or give coupons to places that can be reviewed later..

This could also be a fantastic opportunity to push a local economy. Local stores, local products. The locals in a community are far more likely to want to push into a site like this then a chain or megastore.

Good markets for this would be just about any city over 750,000 people. Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, or Chicago seem good candidates as a place to start. SF or NY probably have something already. And, hey, when in doubt, try it out in Calgary Alberta!

You could add cupons, etc. from internet providers like eBay, Amazon, and so on. While this would work for large cities, I think it could also be used by large areas with dispersed populations, like the the Plains States, the southwest. This is what the Net is best designed for, and it is cost prohibitive retailers (except the big boxers) to send junk mail to these places.

Thanks for all the comments!

Love all the great feedback! I've been out of town for a few days and haven't had time to check in. I have very little experience building web sites and I'm just wondering what would be a good tool to use for a proof of concept for this site.

Also, how can I add a little incentive to get these businesses to distribute coupons on this site? Should we allocate a little site real estate toward promoting their services? Additional ads to accompany the coupons?

By the way,

Does anyone use CitySearch?

Been done period.

I think they've done a pretty good job too. I don't see a place where they offer coupons but it wouldn't be a big deal to add that to their offerings. I think I may just move on with something else.

Gracias!