Trading Love

I love you.... no, not you.... you over there. Ahhhh, what the heck, we should spread the love all around! It's clear there's a lot of networking and business partnerships being formed on our network and we're excited to be a part of it. Business owners continue to use MerchantCircle to recommend their favorite businesses to their customers.

People helping people - it's one of America's most endearing characteristics.

We wanted to show our appreciation for the praise you've heaped on us, (you can read them here), and as part of our ongoing efforts, we're recognizing the business owners who exemplify our network of 170,000 strong.

Read about our latest highlight merchant, Angel's Affordable Web Design, here.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

150K... Yeah, We Passed That

With all the new developments recently, including 3 new employees (we're still hiring), new product features and heavy summer itinerary, we're delayed in announcing our growth past 150 thousand merchants across the country. In fact, we're about to pass 165 thousand merchants, but I thought 150K was a much rounder number for an announcement!

This growth means a stronger network of merchants for you to network with as we continue to be the fastest growing and largest online network of business owners in the country. Many of our merchants are finding new customers by customizing their pages and showing up higher in search engines. Don't forget to keep adding new content, like pictures, building coupons and writing blogs - all of it helps.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

We've Gone Mad From All Our Tinkering!

We have some of the coolest features in the works set to debut this summer, which explains the lack of recent blog posts. It’s super busy and really exciting around the office. Our 3 new employees and intern are now fully in the swing of things and the team gave the okay on releasing some advance buzz on one of our newest features.

You may already know about our MerchantCircle forums, where small business owners across the country are helping each other and trading ideas, but we’re going to take it to the next level - the local local level that is, or hyper local. Now that we have merchants in almost every city in the US, we know that there’s a real need for merchant discussion within cities.

Our city pages to begin with are pretty cool, take for instance this one in Colorado Springs. You can see all of the city's coupons, blog posts, top merchants and ads, but now they'll be even more informative as community members and business owners can post anything going on in the community. Say for instance a street fair, or block party, or maybe a huge sale, you can post whatever you want. Look for this interactive community engagement to be released over the next few weeks.

Let us know what you think as we make your community the strongest it can be.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations

Stanford and Berkeley can Coexist

As the summer heat is making life unbearable in many parts of the nation, we decided to turn up the heat a little in our office. We just welcomed aboard a few new team members this week, including a fresh faced intern from Berkeley and a grad student from Stanford.

As you may know, around here in Silicon Valley, there's a friendly rivalry between the two schools. What's great about adding these two members is that now we can represent more colleges around the nation, including Northwestern, LSU, University of West Florida, UC San Diego, UC Davis and even lowly Santa Clara (just kidding).

Let me take a few moments to introduce Irit Epelbaum who joined us from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where she completed her MBA. She got her Bachelor's in Economics from Yale University. Which translates to - she's much smarter than me. Not that that's any kind of achievement.

Irit will be focused on getting you, our merchants, more customers through our subscription plans. We're proud and excited to have her on board. But we're not done yet, our team is growing to make sure we continue to be the best place for a business to find new customers. Take a look at another of our job openings by clicking here. (If it says 'looking for Community Relations Manager,' I'm in trouble.)

Recently, we've also started to make sure we profile more of our 150,000 merchants. Take a look at this press release to see what I mean.

Sincerely,
Kevin
Community Relations