Why the company is called Offerstock
A coupon experiment, a trade show in Vegas, and a name that somehow stuck around
There isn’t a particularly clever story behind the name Offerstock.
Las Vegas, 2019
In 2019, we went to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas with a coupon applier we’d built for iOS. Browser extensions had already been around for years, in our case — but the mobile market was only starting to open up to extensions, add-ons, and browser-based services in a meaningful way.
We had worked on plenty of things before that, but this was an interesting experiment: take something that had worked in the browser world and see what happened when it moved into mobile.
For the show, we decided to give the experiment its own name.
Offerstock.
A play on Overstock
The name was a play on Overstock, the US marketplace that pretty much everyone knew. It was meant for the experiment, so a website was put together and the name went on the booth
COVID, and the second show
Then COVID happened.
In 2021, we went back to Affiliate Summit West. This time there was an actual booth, printed materials, a laptop running the product, and a phone with the app. A few people even remembered the name from 2019.
What it turned into
By 2022, Offerstock had turned into something more substantial. There were products, experiments, customers, and a growing pile of things that had been built under the name.
There was also a slightly embarrassing lack of a place to put any of it.
For a long time, Offerstock was basically three landing pages and a folder full of presentations.
Why we kept the name
Eventually, the name had been around long enough that it seemed silly to replace it. So we kept it, cleaned everything up, and started putting the pieces back together.
The result is what you see here now.
Not everything we do fits neatly into a product page or a technical case study. Some of it is engineering, some of it is experiments, some of it is history, and some of it is just stuff that seemed worth writing down.
Offerstock has been around since 2019.
It just took us a while to figure out what to do with it!