Imagine a friend who always knows where to find the best deal. Now imagine a way to find hundreds of them. Dealplumber came to Monsoon wanting to create a unique social networking site that would offer deals for bargain-hunters, from bargain-hunters. Great deals often get lost on the internet, where the options seem endless and advertisers’ claims can be downright false. In order to cut through the noise, Dealplumber wanted to use the reach and trust-building abilities of a lively social networking site to bring the best true deals – free printers, cheap plane tickets, trial offers, and the like – into the open. In order to get users to trust each other and the site itself, we faced several challenges. First, we had to give users smart feedback mechanisms to be able to trust each other. Second, we had to design an interface that allowed new users to quickly get up to speed and to start uploading their best offers. Monsoon Company worked with DealPlumber to design a clean, intuitive interface that highlights the best deals with a minimum of searching. We streamlined the site’s navigation by diagramming out an easy-to-underand visual flow, and defining natural subcategories for each type of product. On the back-end, Monsoon Company built a powerhouse portal: A reliable compendium of continually updated dynamic information, complete with RSS feeds, a user-driven content management system, and a registration portal. Monsoon streamlined the back-end by building the entire system on Ruby on Rails. To ensure the quality of deals on the site, Monsoon developed several useful feedback mechanisms. Each user can collect points based on the number and popularity of the deals they upload. People can become friends, see each other’s best deals, and ask each other whether they think a particular deal makes sense. And if more than one deal is posted for a single product, users can easily compare prices.