Introducing FrugalPanda, a Great Site for Local Deal Addicts

Posted on March 29th, 2011. Written by Rico.

Frequent visitors of local “group-buying” or deal-of-the-day sites like CashCashPinoy and MetroDeal: FrugalPanda is the online service you’ve long waited for.

The premise behind FrugalPanda (frugalpanda.ph) is so simple, you’ll wonder why never thought of it. The service pulls all the local group deals it can find and aggregates them into one list. Visitors can also look for specific kinds of deals, through the search box and the category links (“Travel”, “Food”, “Health & Beauty”) on top.

What we find amazing with the service is not its functional yet beautiful design, nor its user-friendly interface, but the fact FrugalPanda’s first version was developed in less than a day.

An Interview With Rico Sta. Cruz, FrugalPanda’s Developer

You might be familiar with Mr. Sta Cruz. After all, he’s given the best presentation on design ever and made life a little easier for web developers. He’s also the guy who made FrugalPanda possible.

What’s with the name FrugalPanda?
In Sinefunc [a local web development company co-founded by Sta. Cruz], we’d spend hours just trying to come up with names for our various side projects. So for FrugalPanda I honestly attempted to think of the most stupid name possible. You know, names like “Shake’s Sphere!!!” Eventually I settled on the pattern of merging an adjective with the an animal name, similar to the different Ubuntu version codenames.

Who came up with the idea for FrugalPanda?
It was Luis Buenaventura [who last month reviewed a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2]. He had this Facebook update saying someone should make an aggregator for group buying sites. He wanted to pitch the idea, and I was really shameless in saying “Hey can I steal this idea?”

How come Luis didn’t make it? Isn’t he’s also a capable developer?
I don’t know, maybe he was busy? Actually he said on Facebook: “Anyone want to make a startup with me with this idea?” I figured it probably wouldn’t take much to actually accomplish, I could probably do it in three hours. The next day, it was kind of working, a bit shaky, but there. [In a later IM conversation, Rico said that Luis told him "I'm glad you ran with this"]

It was only you who developed FrugalPanda?
Well I was the only one kinda caught up with the idea that I have to make something like this. Ultimately though it’s still owned by Sinefunc, maintained by our team.

You previously told me that you wanted local group-buying sites to create affiliate programs?
Well if these create affiliate programs [rewarding third-parties for every paying customer they refer to a website], it would be easier to monetize FrugalPanda. Affiliate programs are standard practice for retail sites in the US, so why shouldn’t it be done here?

Have you tried approaching any of these group-buying sites?
Not yet actually, although I’m sure two of them already know about FrugalPanda.

Any future plans for FrugalPanda?
Well I’m working on a couple of new features now. Things like categories, so that you can filter down into food deals for instance. We’ll also be rolling out RSS, which is a way for people to “subscribe” to FrugalPanda so that they don’t have to visit our site to see the latest deals. And of course, we can’t forget a search box! [As of this writing, Rico has already implemented categories and search]

Did you create FrugalPanda to showcase Sinefunc’s abilities? Or was this a passion thing?
I suppose it’s also partly that. But a metric for success of FrugalPanda is not how much money it will make. When I started developing the site, that was the last thing in my mind. And yes, hopefully FrugalPanda shows what we’re capable of, but I approached this more as a learning experience. I have to admit, we don’t know how to create web apps for the local community. We’ve always done things for clients in other countries. It’s an exploration sort of thing.

What other projects is Sinefunc working on right now?
We have one product that’s “ours” right now that we’re not really promoting: Bullhorn.it. It’s something meant for developers. Mostly we do client work, and sites like FrugalPanda and Bullhorn are done on the side.

Who’s in Sinefunc?
Sinefunc right now is Michael Galero and I, the managing founders, and four other active guys.

What technologies and tools did you use for FrugalPanda’s development?
I used Ruby and Sinatra.

Ruby?
It’s the best thing in the world, a programming language oriented towards fast development.

Sinatra?
This may sound complicated for non-developers, but Ruby has a default framework [a template web developers and programmers can base all of their work on] called Ruby on Rails. Sinatra on the other hand is a “micro” framework that’s 1/100th the size of Rails but still very much capable.

So Why Ruby and Sinatra?
Lots of reasons. But ultimately it’s more a philosophy thing.