Jerry’s Deals raises $170k with a fully-automated MVP

Customer: Jerry's Deals Industry: Cannabis Duration: 3 weeks

jerrysdeals.com

$170k

Raised

25000

Dispensary Menus

2000

Organic traffic/month

Discovery

Jerry's Deals is a platform that tracks cannabis prices and deals across the nation and uses AI to find the best deals. They needed an MVP quickly so they could raise a seed round.

The vision was to offer a free service to consumers and charge dispensaries a small subscription fee to run promotions. Consumers would be able to see prices and deals near them. The target audience would be frequent cannabis consumers — they’re most likely to hunt for deals. A critical mass of consumers would make dispensaries want to be on the platform as well.

Challenges

  • Price tracking -- the data is spread across many platforms and websites, and it is wildly inconsistent.
  • Reach users without a huge marketing budget
  • The entire platform needs to be automated to the point that a team of three can scale it nationwide
"We needed to launch within a month to get a funding round of $30k from angel investors. Josh gave us such a great head start that we were able to raise $170k. "
Jerry, CEO, Jerry's Deals

Solution

In order to track price and deal data across all the various API’s and platforms, I created an automated and abstract system to unify the experience. Tracking a new platform is as simple as creating a simple configuration file with some details — no code necessary! Now Jerry’s Deals has over 90% coverage of the entire U.S.

The Jerry’s Deals team had a detailed plan to generate large traffic on a small budget. So I created a system that exposed all of the necessary controls. Their marketing specialists can now operate with full autonomy, running campaigns, tweaking SEO, editing copy, and more, all without needing a developer to intervene.

Automation is critical because they don’t want to raise any follow-up rounds. To keep every aspect as lean as possible, I automated the following using a combination of AI and custom systems:

  • Data entry: every few hours, price and deal data across the country are synced
  • Deal rankings: a custom algorithm determines which deals are the best
  • SEO: programmatic SEO on every page and a self-updating sitemap
  • Content: customizable AI prompts generate SEO-optimized copy
  • Marketing: deep integration with Klaviyo automatically builds and sends personalized newsletters
  • Infrastructure: servers automatically scale up and down (with custom limits) to match traffic

To read more about how I keep costs down and quality up, check out my development philosophies.

Success

Jerry’s Deals’ MVP was such a hit with investors that their initial ask of $30k turned into $170k of funding. They’re now tracking data from over 25,000 dispensaries. Within a few weeks, they were already getting over 2,000 clicks per month from organic Google searches. They are scaling up fast with no signs of even needing to grow the team!