Coupon Crazy
Big Savings
Turned into big opportunity
I never saw myself as a coupon guy. Teacher? Yep. Insurance guy? Sure. Football guy? Absolutely. But coupon guy? Not in a million years. And yet, there I was in 2009, standing in front of a room full of people, waving a mile-long grocery receipt like it was a winning lottery ticket.
But let me back up.
The 2008 housing crisis hit, and like a lot of people, we were just trying to keep our heads above water. I was selling insurance, and my wife, Liza, had been working as a counselor for a county program helping young moms. When that position was eliminated, she found herself at home, feeling like she wasn’t contributing. And if you know my wife, you know she’s not the type to sit around twiddling her thumbs.
One day, she got a coupon. And then another. And then, before I knew it, she was waltzing into Publix here in Florida and walking out with $165 worth of groceries for eight bucks. I mean, I thought it was some kind of magic trick. And as soon as her friends caught wind of it, they wanted in. She was spending hours—literally hours—emailing them step-by-step instructions on how to game the grocery store system.
That’s when I had the genius idea.
“Hey,” I said, “instead of writing the same email 20 times, why don’t we just start a blog?”
Now, let’s be clear: we had no clue what we were doing. We didn’t know WordPress from a hole in the wall. We became students of blogging. But we figured it out. She started typing up the entire Publix ad every week, complete with links to every possible coupon, and boom—AddictedtoSaving.com was born.
It started small. We ran the site for six to eight months before we even knew what an affiliate link was (rookie mistake). But then I started bringing it up at networking meetings. Nobody wanted to talk to another insurance guy—big shocker. But when I whipped out that never-ending receipt and told them about how we were saving ridiculous amounts of money, suddenly I had their attention. “Go to the site,” I’d say, and people actually did.
By 2012, things had blown up. We had half a million unique visitors a month. Liza was speaking at seminars and appearing on every local news channel you could name. We hired seven employees. Brands started throwing free stuff at us—furniture, hutches, you name it. And let’s just say, Christmas presents? Taken care of.
And then, in true Facebook fashion, the algorithm changed and so did our relationship with social media.
At first, we were fine. We had 130,000 Facebook fans, posting 30 to 40 deals a day, side by side on the couch, looking like some kind of extreme couponing power couple. Our friends would make fun of us—“You guys are literally sitting next to each other typing, why don’t you just talk?” But hey, it worked.
Until one day, it didn’t.
We went from 40,000 people seeing a post to 187. Overnight. Facebook had decided that organic reach was no longer a thing, and just like that, our traffic tanked. Turns out, the people who actually bought things were the ones coming from Facebook. Without them, our once-thriving business started drying up.
And so, after a solid run, we shifted gears. It was around that time I got deeply involved with Man Up, and while the blog didn’t last forever, the lessons did. I learned the power of the pivot, the importance of community, and most importantly, never underestimate a woman with a coupon.
Even today, I still don’t do much of the gift buying in our house, but I’ll tell you this—if my wife ever hands me a coupon, I don’t ask questions. I just use it.
Be well,
Jeffrey Charles Ford