Helena Native Cotter Cunningham Reels In Online Success For RetailMeNot.com

Editor’s note:  This article, written by Casey Penn, appears in the latest magazine edition of Talk Business Arkansas, which you can read here.

The company names he’s kept in the past – Small Ponds, LLC, and WhaleShark Media – might suggest that Cotter Cunningham, CEO of the entity RetailMeNot, Inc., is a key player who has purposefully evolved into a big fish in the business world – on land and online.

After making great strides working for others – when he resigned as chief operating officer of Bankrate, Inc., the company was trading at approximately $45 per share and revenues had grown during his tenure from $13 million to $85 million plus – Cunningham stepped out on his own as an entrepreneur.

First, he founded Small Ponds, LLC, in 2007, with the idea of creating a number of small consumer-service websites.

“I launched a personal finance website targeting men and women who found themselves newly divorced, called Divorce360.com,” recalls Cunningham of his first effort that, though it ultimately failed, served as good practice for several later and profitable startups.

“After looking at a broad range of ideas, I worked to develop a hypothesis and business plan around the online coupon industry,” he explained of his company’s earliest evolution. “I thought the business was really interesting and dominated by a series of small players. The idea was to acquire the best online sites in the United States and focus on growing them.”

Small Ponds began acquiring bigger fish – namely three large online coupon sites – until, evolution being what it is – Small Ponds grew into WhaleShark Media, Inc. in 2009 (fittingly named after the biggest fish in the ocean). In 2010, the larger company acquired RetailMeNot.com, the biggest online coupon site in the United States, as well as VoucherCodes.co.uk in the United Kingdom later in 2011. In 2012, it entered the mobile universe, launching the free RetailMeNot Coupons app for iPhone and Android devices to support increasingly on-the-go customers on a global scale.

This year, WhaleShark Media changed its name to RetailMeNot, Inc., and the company has continued to do what works.

Additional acquisitions have made it the market leader in France and a leader to watch in the Netherlands. It also launched greenfield start-up brands in Germany and in Canada.

And, as if all of this wasn’t keeping him busy enough, Cunningham undertook earlier this year, the grueling process of taking the company public, which seems to have been a smart decision. The company has been publicly traded since July (NASDAQ: SALE), and this past August reported second-quarter revenues of more than $43 million ($13 million more than last year).

STRONG ARKANSAS ROOTS
It’s apparent that Cunningham is bold, accomplished and business-savvy, but in all of his dealings, the CEO seeks also to remain customer-focused and employee-friendly. His business demeanor is something he came by honestly, and right here in Arkansas.

Despite Cunningham’s big-fish, big-city address in trendy Austin, Texas, he grew up in a fairly small pond. A native of Helena, Arkansas, he is the son of Ernest and Cathy Cunningham and Paula Kelly. His father was a former state representative and Speaker of the House.

Growing up in Arkansas, Cunningham remembers how impressed he was with his role models’ way of doing business.

“My father and grandfather both worked in a small business,” he recalled. “I saw them deal with customers and employees on a regular basis. They were quick with a joke or a friendly word, never were short with people (even in difficult situations) and always seemed to make time for anyone. It made an impression on me as a child and I really have never forgotten it,” Cunningham said.

Dealing well with people is something he looks for in his employees too. “Beyond experience and the ability to do the job, I think the values we look for in employees are humility and overall fit,” he said. “I always ask myself are they a nice person? Can I work with her for the next five years? What will he be like when times are tough?”

These impressions in his mind, Cunningham earned an economics degree from the University of Memphis (1985) and then moved back to Little Rock, where he worked for four years for the Arkansas Development Finance Authority.

“I worked as an analyst for a small team. We helped a series of small manufacturers raise money for construction projects,” recalls Cunningham, who later left the state again for more schooling. “After graduating from Vanderbilt with my MBA in 1991, my professional life in two areas really began to take shape: personal finance and technology.”

It was over the next several years, while focusing on these two areas, when this evolving businessman dipped into the business revolution that was about to be unleashed from the Internet. In Kansas City, as part of H&R Block’s corporate development team – H&R Block owned the popular CompuServe service at that time – Cunningham started and then directed the operations of CompuServe Visa, one of the first credit cards with online statements and customer service.

“CompuServe was the first online service to offer Internet access, albeit limited, as early as 1989 when it connected its proprietary dial-up e-mail service to allow incoming and outgoing messages to other Internet e-mail services,” he recalls. “In the early 1990s, CompuServe was very popular, with hundreds of thousands of users visiting its thousands of moderated forums, forerunners to the endless variety of discussion sites on the Web today.”

In addition to his successful run at CompuServe, Cunningham spent fruitful years working first for an advertising firm in Kansas and then following his personal finance roots to a position in Florida, at the aforementioned Bankrate, Inc., a consumer financial services company best known for its personal finance website, Bankrate.com.

“I am especially proud that we developed an excellent array of personal finance lessons, calculators and tutorials,” said Cunningham of his time with the company. During this time period, Cunningham also wrote a self-help book on personal finance, entitled “Your Financial Action Plan: 12 Simple Steps to Achieve Money Success.”

FINE OUTLOOK TODAY AND TOMORROW
RetailMeNot, Inc. has definitely proven itself, as evidenced by its astounding numbers.

In the last 12 months, the company’s sites logged more than 500 million visits globally. By the end of the second quarter this year, its apps had experienced more than 7.1 million downloads. The sites have more than 500,000 coupons and offers from more than 60,000 merchants who helped facilitate more than $2.4 billion in sales in 2012.

In fact, for the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday last year, RetailMeNot.com helped facilitate more than 2% of all e-commerce sales in the U.S.  This year, you’ll see the company’s ads on television throughout the early holiday shopping season.

When the company went public in July, it had raised more than $191 million to support future expansion plans, a feat that will surely help it and its 400 employees worldwide forge ahead. As any online company worth its salt, RetailMeNot’s future will include fighting to keep up with technology and mobile applications.  Right now, it has a free RetailMeNot app as well as ones for VoucherCodes.co.uk and Bons-de-Reduction.com.

It will also strive to maintain relevancy to its customers, an area of passion for Cunningham, who noted, “We will continue to find ways to ensure we have the most valid and relevant coupon and merchant offer content on the Web for consumers looking to access one of our hundreds of thousands of deals or coupons from one of our tens of thousands of merchant partners globally.”

Cunningham not only wants to lead his company to global success, but he also wants to help shoppers save their dollars.

He explains his vision of future expansion and ongoing commitment to helping customers.

“We will continue to look for brand expansion opportunities either through acquisition or through organic growth across the globe. If a consumer is somewhere in the world looking to save money when they shop, be it online, in-store or on their mobile device, we want to be there for them,” he said.