What the website is seeing is a lot of traffic. According to the company’s founder and CEO, Matt Rutledge, Woot gets about 100,000 hits a day and has seen exponential growth since its July launch. The holiday season was good for Woot too, bringing with it a few 200,000-hit days. “We were savvy enough to know people would be doing some holiday shopping,” Rutledge says. To cater to this consumer segment, many of the site’s December offerings were hot or useful gift items, such as Robosapien (”Half my shopping is done, thank you Woot!” posts one of the site’s happy bloggers) and Cuisinart’s brushed stainless power blender (”The wife will love this,” another writes of his purchase). “We’re on pace to do $10 million in revenues this year,” Rutledge says. With just six Dallas-based employees, Woot is even making a little bit of money.The story of Woot begins with just a URL. The term itself — a combination of the words “wow” and “loot” — comes from the gaming community. “I used to play a lot of EverQuest back when I had the time,” Rutledge says. So he bought the URL and then came up with an idea for it. Since Rutledge already owned a consumer electronics wholesaler in Dallas, Woot was a natural fit. “There’s a constant flow of products coming through here on the wholesale level,” he says. “Woot is an extension of that on the retail level.”
It’s also a damn good marketing idea, because it’s so infectious. How hard can you argue with any company that can sell a “Bag o’ Crap”? (For a change of pace, Woot in August offered a $1 mystery gift, which turned out to be a toilet bowl brush, a concrete yard monk, and other “completely randomized items.”) But what’s really cool about Woot is its dedicated community of users who prattle on about each day’s item — the pros, cons, pricing, and just about everything else, including doctored photos of people “using” their products. It’s the kind of brutally honest loyalty that only bloggers can create.
via B2Day.
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