Daily Deal Busters
Fourteen Years of Friendship, Four Years of Building Something Together
ometimes the most valuable relationships in business have very little to do with money.
I first met Cathy through Daily Deal Busters after a mutual friend recommended her Facebook group to me. I started following along, watching the deals she found and the community she had built. That was fourteen years ago. For most of those years, I was simply one of the people following along. Then, about four years ago, I watched everything begin to fall apart.
When the Rules Changed
Cathy had built a thriving Facebook community around finding and sharing deals. Affiliate marketing was how she supported the enormous amount of work that went into doing it. Then the online world changed. Facebook’s policies surrounding affiliate links and the way they could be shared changed, and the system Cathy had been using was no longer working within the platform’s new requirements. Even though she had been diligent about identifying her affiliate links, the group she had spent years building was eventually taken down.
So she tried to do what everyone tells creators they should do:
Build something you own.
She started a website using a free WordPress service. That disappeared, too. Next came paid hosting, but the site repeatedly exceeded the resources available to it. Between visitors, automated processes, cron jobs, plugins, and everything required to operate a busy affiliate site, she kept running into limitations. I watched all of this unfold. And eventually I watched someone I had followed for years desperately trying to save the business she had spent years building. That was when I stepped up.
Come Treasure Hunting with Cathy
Cathy spends her days hunting down deals, promotions, freebies, coupons, and interesting finds to share with the Daily Deal Busters community. If you enjoy stretching your budget and discovering something new, come join her and see what she finds today.
An Unusual Arrangement
Cathy couldn’t afford to hire me. I knew that. She knew that. What confused her was why I wanted to help anyway.
My answer was simple:
I was being paid in knowledge.
And sometimes knowledge is worth far more than money. I offered to build and manage Daily Deal Busters and help with its social media presence. In exchange, I asked Cathy for something she could actually give me:
Let me learn.
Let me experiment.
Let me try things.
Let me make mistakes and figure out how to fix them. And, perhaps most importantly, be patient with me while I learned. She agreed. That arrangement has taught me things no course or practice website ever could.
My Very Real WordPress Laboratory
Before Daily Deal Busters, I knew how to build websites. Daily Deal Busters helped teach me how to run one. There is an enormous difference. A working affiliate website has constant moving pieces. Products change. Links change. APIs change. Plugins update. Servers complain. Cron jobs run. Traffic fluctuates. Social networks change their rules. Affiliate programs change theirs. Something that worked perfectly yesterday can suddenly decide it has other plans. And through all of it, Cathy let me experiment. I’ve experimented with layouts, graphics, WordPress configurations, plugins, custom code, affiliate tools, optimization, security, publishing systems, and countless little solutions to problems I didn’t know existed until they appeared. Sometimes spectacularly. Daily Deal Busters became one of the places where I learned to stop thinking only like a website designer and start thinking like someone responsible for keeping an active online business functioning.
Three Hosts and a Lot of Lessons
We’ve been through three hosting companies together. Each move taught me something new about hosting, resources, backups, migrations, server limits, WordPress performance, and what actually matters when choosing where a website lives. Eventually, we landed at Hostinger. It turned out to be one of the best moves we’ve made for Daily Deal Busters, and the experience also influenced how I approach hosting and website management elsewhere. There is something particularly educational about moving a real business while trying very hard not to break it.
And Cathy Has Been Teaching Me, Too
The learning has never traveled in only one direction. While I’ve been teaching Cathy about websites, hosting, graphics, and the technical side of managing her online home, she has spent years teaching me about an entirely different world.
Affiliate marketing. ~ Amazon Associates. ~ Deal hunting. ~ Running an affiliate shopping community. ~ Understanding what people actually click. ~Recognizing promotions.
Learning how affiliate businesses function when they’re being operated every single day rather than described in an article about passive income. Cathy has lived that world for years. I haven’t. So I listen. And somewhere along the way, what started as me trying to help save a friend’s business became one of the most valuable hands-on business educations I could have asked for.
Why I’m Sharing Daily Deal Busters Here
Daily Deal Busters isn’t a sponsor of this website. Cathy doesn’t pay me to promote it. In fact, she doesn’t financially compensate me for the work I do for Daily Deal Busters at all. Our arrangement has always been an exchange of time, experience, patience, experimentation, and knowledge. Today, Cathy’s affiliate income is only a fraction of what it once was. Changes to affiliate programs and social platforms, combined with having to rebuild her community, have made recovering extraordinarily difficult. But she’s still there. Still looking. Still posting. Still rebuilding.
And I’m still beside her, tinkering with the machinery. So if you enjoy bargain hunting, finding useful things at good prices, or simply seeing what Cathy has discovered today, I’d love for you to pay her a visit. Not because she’s sponsoring me. Because after fourteen years, I would really like to see my friend succeed.
Visit Daily Deal Busters
Daily Deal Busters searches for sales, discounts, interesting finds, and everyday bargains and shares them with its community.
Daily Deal Busters uses affiliate links on its own website and social media. Cathy may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through those links. I do not receive those commissions and am not compensated for directing you to Daily Deal Busters.
Find Me Around the Grotto
Follow along for art, sewing, reading, and quiet adventures.
