BillShrink.com Goes Primetime
With a one-time tagline that read, “Shrinkage is good,” you know that the company BillShrink wants to stand a part from others, and recently it has had the chance.
For those unfamiliar with BillShrink but familiar with the online lead generation space, you could almost describe the company as LowerMyBills.com 2.0. I’d suspect that all things being equal, BillShrink’s CEO Peter Pham wishes that his board member and the founder of LowerMyBills, Matt Coffin, hadn’t had quite the success he did, because he wouldn’t mind using that name.
Perhaps only one other consumer site in the online customer acquisition arena has received the type of media coverage that BillShrink has, and countless articles and mentions have flown their way from TV news to the Wall Street Journal. As one following the evolution of online customer acquisition, what interests me most are the factors that have allowed BillShrink to fulfill on the promise originated by LowerMyBills. Interestingly, both BillShrink and LowerMyBills (purchased by Experian Interactive in 2004 for roughly $330mm) made their biggest gains during a difficult economic environment, but the means by which they have done so highlight not just the differences between LowerMyBills and BillShrink but many others in the customer acquisition space.
You could say both companies have made a name through themselves via the ads people see, but the strategies for placement couldn’t be more dissimilar. LowerMyBills initially wanted to be all things to all people, a place to save on countless categories of expenditures. But, they couldn’t make money doing that. Coffin’s genius, among other things, was the realization that they could generate high returns on their refinance lead generation business, and while the main LowerMyBills page kept non-financial services, e.g., home services, viewable to visitors for a while, the company focused all of its attention on building out a media business focusing on financial services lead generation. They succeeded for many reasons, but the perfect storm of low rates, high demand, high acceptance, and cheap media among other things, enabled LowerMyBills to become a dominant player not just in online lead generation but all of advertising. The now famous Coffin-”double down” transformed his company and created a brand in the process.
