Our History
The company was formed in 2007. Like most successful startups, FMTC kicked off by solving an actual problem that one of our founders was encountering: her staff was spending so much time fixing and categorizing the coupons and deals they were collecting from affiliate programs that they barely had enough time to drive traffic to the site.
So, a system was developed that would collect and scrub the data to a point where humans could easily double-check it, fix anything “weird” and deliver it to her site automatically throughout the day.
The move from an in-house solution for one site to a commercial product available to other sites in the market was a logical next step. Our founders created the product and began marketing it to affiliates.
What’s with the name?
FMTC stands for “For Me To Compete”. It means that with our tools, affiliates of all sizes can compete on the big stage. They have access to accurate, valuable, monetized content – allowing them to focus on what they do best – driving traffic, building loyalty and engaging their audience.
Our company was originally named “For Me To Coupon”. For you Conan O’Brien fans out there, you know the punchline! For those of you that aren’t hearing the little play on words – feel free to research Triumph the Insult Comedy Dog on YouTube (NSFW: watch at your own risk…being “PC” is not his thing!).
The original name worked for us through our early years when we did focus on coupons quite a bit (and people were seeing Triumph on Conan frequently) – but we broadened our horizons to include not only coupons, but deals, special offers, holiday shipping deadlines, links to clearance pages and deep links throughout merchants’ sites.
So – we replaced “coupon” with “compete”. It doesn’t have the same comedic ring to it – so we go by “FMTC”.
Our Product Evolution
The story of our name really follows the story of our product evolution. We began as a company offering a datafeed of coupons and deals and have grown into a provider of all kinds of content for affiliates.
Our “feed” is now several feeds. The Premium subscription includes all of the content we collect and process – and subsets of that are broken out into more products like our UK Mini Feed, the Local Deals Mini Feed and even our “just coupons”, Coupon Mini Feed.
We’ve also begun building a suite of tools, like the Deal Bank, that are designed to help bloggers, content creators and other marketing-minded (errr, less technically-minded) people find and share great content with their readers, subscribers and networks.