About Town: Living La Vida Local with YubiT.com

Redmond entrepreneur Ivan Joseph says his new venutre YubiT is not just another daily deals website.

Aside from its focus on just Seattle and Eastside businesses, Joseph says YubiT, which he founded in Redmond last year, differs from its competition because it offers a link between businesses and customers that he believes is more sustainable in the long run.

Joseph, who moved here from Chicago as a  in 2002, says he follows his own motto of “living la vida local.” He says he enjoyed his time at the software company, where he was captain of a cricket team that won the Northwest Cricket League championship.

But though he enjoyed his time at Microsoft, Joseph said he wanted to focus on the needs of small businesses. He says a lot of local businesses are very good at what they do, but they lack the technological support needed to market to today’s tech-savvy consumers.

“You want to feel good about what you do," he said, adding that helping small local businesses to thrive fills that desire for him. “We think of ourselves as small business consultants, and local businesses are needing that.”

YubiT's current deal offers 40 percent off at Redmond's Agave Cocina & Cantina, a family-owned Mexican restaurant that and opened in the space formally occupied by Las Margaritas.

There are two primary ways that YubiT differs from other deal sites, Joseph said. When people buy a featured deal through YubiT, they pay for only part of the cost up front, and later pay the business the remaining amount. This allows people to take less monetary risk. Meanwhile, the business keeps a larger proportion of the profit from the transaction because YubiT keeps its commission from the portion paid for through the site, while the business keeps all of the money paid to it when the user redeems the deal.

Additionally, businesses can keep deals on the site for as long as they wish, expanding their ability to attract customers.

“The notion of 24 hours creates artificial scarcity. We believe small businesses need marketing that goes beyond just one day,” Joseph said.

YubiT's unique terms and conditions create a different motivation for the business and a more positive experience for both the business owner and customer, Joseph said.

With most of the currently popular deals sites, he says, the consumer pays 50 percent of the value of the goods or services upfront, and the deals site generally keeps half of that cost. So with money in hand, which for the business is 25 percent of the retail value of the deal, the business naturally hopes the customer won’t redeem the deal.

By contrast, with YubiT, the business gets a larger percentage, and only when the customer redeems the deal, so the business wants the customer to come in and use the deal.

“He hasn’t got this payment in advance, so his incentive is he wants you to come in,” Joseph said. As a further benefit, the deal doesn’t expire, so customers are more likely to use their offers.

With users already numbering in the thousands, Joseph says he hopes the site’s on the verge of expansion as well, as the company has just rolled out an affiliate program that allows bloggers and other websites to put a YubiT deal feed on their own sites and monetize their sites. Each time a user buys a deal that they accessed through the host site, the host web site gets paid between 5 and 20 percent of what the purchaser paid up front.

“Every business needs partnerships to grow,” Joseph said.

YubiT itself is growing, with plans to roll out another location, though Joseph declines to say when or where it will expand to next. So far, YubiT’s four employees individually interview each business that it signs up (more than 100 Seattle-area businesses since its launch in May of 2010), and has occasionally passed on a business that it felt it couldn’t put its own reputation behind.

“We think of ourselves as a recommendation engine,” Joseph says, so working with local businesses that provide quality goods and services is important. People who purchase deals can also post reviews of businesses on the site, and earn "brownie points" for participating, which in turn can get them deeper discounts on YubiT deals.

As for YubiT as a small business, Joseph declines to share the company’s revenues but says progress is encouraging.

“We are doing all the things we need to do,” he says, to keep growing.