Crowdsavings Website To Add Jobs In Tampa

Crowdsavings.com, a "deal-of-the-day" website based in Tampa, plans to hire as it expands. The website is a competitor of similar sites such as Groupon, where local businesses can advertise deals on Crowdsavings' website in order to attract more customers.

"The social buying model has really taken off in the last year," says Chad Jaquays, CEO of Crowdsavings. "We offer a deal of the day each day, where consumers can get 50 percent off or more at restaurants, spas or health clubs."

The website launched its daily deals in November of 2009, and the concept has taken off. "We launched with less than 1,700 people in our database and now we have more than 100,000," Jaquays says. "We started off with four employees and now we have 18."

Jaquays says that most of the growth has come through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. "When we started, most of the people in our database were friends and family," he says. "Through social media, we were able to reach a large number of consumers in a short period of time."

When the website first went live, Jaquays says that most of the businesses offering deals were in south Tampa neighborhoods. As word spread, businesses in Pinellas County started advertising as well. Now the site has reached markets beyond the Tampa Bay region, including Cleveland, Nashville, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, Albany and Las Vegas.

Continued growth, Jaquays says, means the company will be hiring at the Tampa headquarters. "We will be hiring people to work in customer service, and will probably add another writer in the next four to six months," he says. "In markets outside of Tampa, specifically Nashville and Cleveland, where we just expanded, we will be hiring sales people."

Writer: Kimberly Patterson
Source: Chad Jaquays, Crowdsavings.com