MommySavers.com

Photo by: Kris Kathmann

Baby Bargains

Resourceful North Mankato mother helps millions of other mothers make ends meet while raising children.

At the time, Kimberly Danger, then of St. James, Minnesota, couldn’t completely comprehend the lifelong implications of what was happening around her. Her mother and father were prudent spenders, especially mother Jean, who regularly redeemed grocery store coupons, shopped thrift stores, and hunted garage sale deals like nobody’s business—and brought Kimberly along. Always resourceful with what they had, her parents made cost-cutting their lifestyle. They formed a foundation in their daughter that has led to a rewarding career in which Danger helps form those same thrifty behaviors all over the nation in other mothers with young children.

“We were always looking for ways to save money,” said 41-year-old Danger in a Connect Business Magazine interview.

Now living in North Mankato, Minnesota State graduate Danger (rhymes with hanger) owns four-employee Mommysavers.com, founded in 2000, which has become a popular website, forum, newsletter, and Facebook community doing far more than helping hundreds of thousands of mothers trying to make do with less and teaching coupon clipping and garage sale etiquette. She has helped create a sense of community for members.

Danger has authored three books, regularly appears on television morning shows in Top 30 markets, receives 700,000 unique visitors monthly to her website, and has more than 43,000 Facebook friends. Last November, she appeared before a live studio audience in New York City on Anderson Cooper’s syndicated daytime talk show “Anderson.”

And it all naturally evolved from a thrifty upbringing. You could say her parents taught her well.

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“My mom and I liked going to garage sales,” said Kimberly Danger to Connect Business Magazine from her home office in North Mankato. “I grew up in a frugal household and didn’t know anything else.” In particular, she and her mother especially enjoyed doing Kimberly’s back-to-school shopping at Goodwill Industries and low-cost TJMaxx in order to wring more clothing from a tight family budget. In the ‘80s, they scoured garage sales to furnish a recently purchased up-north cabin with a second-hand bunk bed, a kitchen table, and appliances.

Said Danger of her mother, an elementary schoolteacher, and father, a seed corn sales manager: ”From my mom I learned about day-to-day savings, coupon clipping, and garage sales, and from my dad I got the overall picture in terms of saving, investing, and being frugal. When I was in fifth grade, I wanted a new ten-speed bike. Instead of buying me one like many parents would have done, my dad loaned me the money (I think) to teach me a lesson. After taking nearly a year to pay back the loan, I decided debt wasn’t worth it.” In time, her father left being a seed corn sales manager after a company ownership change and became involved in selling promotional products, such as imprinted calendars and pens.

Perhaps due to inheriting some of her father’s genes, she was interested in the psychology behind selling and graduated with a marketing degree from Minnesota State University in 1993. Immediately after college, she married Scott Danger, who had grown up in a similar household: financially frugal, from St. James, and having a schoolteacher mom. The newlyweds lived in Hudson, Wisconsin for two years before moving to New Ulm, where Scott worked as a certified public accountant. Kimberly found work at the New Ulm Journal in 1995, which began a string of jobs preparing her for starting her own business.

“I worked at the Journal in ad sales and doing ad layouts and copy,” said Danger. “So I took what I learned doing graphics to Sleepy Eye, where I began working at Advertising Unlimited. It was there I started buying photos for calendars. In 1998, I took that experience and used it to buy photos for kids books, as a photo researcher at Capstone Press in North Mankato.” With Kimberly’s job change to Capstone Press and Scott’s hiring at Abdo Eick & Meyers in Mankato in 1998, the couple moved about twenty miles east to Mankato.

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Danger said, “I worked at Capstone Press a couple years. What changed my life was having a daughter in 1999. At that point, I didn’t want to work full-time, but to stay home with her. Capstone Press was really good to me and let me do my job part-time after her birth. I worked at home and went into the office only a few hours a week. But after a year, even that became a lot. I was looking for ways to stay home permanently—and that’s how Mommysavers.com began.”

Though having grown up in southern Minnesota, Danger knew hardly anyone in Mankato and the few friends she had were at Capstone Press. As she spent less time at Capstone Press, those friendships felt more and more distant. While caring for her daughter, she felt a strong need to create a group of online friends sharing her personal interests: being a mother of a small child, spending most her time at home, and saving money.

“And six months into doing (a discussion forum), in 2000, I realized I could make money at it,” she said. “I started the website to share my ideas (of saving money) with others, and in turn, the online community gave back to me. The website just mushroomed from there. The biggest thing in 2000 (and still is today) was the discussion forum part of our website. It’s different from a blog—when I started they didn’t exist. I started with a couple dozen pages of articles I’d written, such as how to clip coupons and shop garage sales. The discussion forum was a way for others to share ideas. Eventually, at times, the forums became impromptu support groups. For example, if a mom had a question like, Why isn’t my baby sleeping at night?, someone would try offering insight or suggestions.”

Over the years since 2000, to a great extent, Danger’s online family has become her offline family. She has met in person perhaps a dozen Mommysavers.com members from all over the nation. Her four part-time employees live in North Carolina, Utah, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.

She said, “The whole forum is a big support group. We act as cheerleaders. If someone pays off a bill of $50, for example, everyone encourages that person. We celebrate the little victories. People also present challenges. For instance, a mom might mention being invited to a wedding that has a $100 gift as an expectation. They want to know what to do. A member might come to their rescue and mention an idea costing only $20 that could mean much more (to the bride). It’s all about providing ideas and inspiration.”

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In 2004, a book publisher read over her website articles and asked Danger to author a how-to book, which she did, 1,000 Best Baby Bargains. (In 2010, she released two more, Instant Bargains, and The Complete Book of Baby Bargains.) The book achieved distribution in Walmart and Target, and opened up doors. It gave her website added credibility. Two years later, a public relations company lined up a media tour on radio stations and morning television shows in larger markets to help her promote her book. As an aside, she also became involved representing certain consumer name brands on morning show television in top markets as a “frugal expert.”

Until Facebook became part of her outreach in 2007, Mommysavers.com marketed almost exclusively through a newsletter and an email list siphoned from discussion forum registrations. “But social media came along and changed everything,” said Danger. “That’s part of working on the web: you roll with the changes. In order to stay relevant, you have to go wherever your fans are. We have more than 42,000 friends on Facebook now.” (The company also has more than 70,000 members on its forums, she said.)

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Today, Mommysavers.com has two primary revenue streams: online ads and affiliate revenue. The ads are sold through an ad broker that also advises Danger on marketing trends; the latter originates from companies like Amazon.com and Target that pay Mommysavers.com a percentage of sales on certain items sold through its website. The company has four part-time employees, including a forum manager and three bloggers, who post hot bargains, and on the forums they encourage topics, help conversations flow, and delete posted spam. All have worked their way up through the Mommysavers.com system, having been members and volunteer moderators over several years before joining as paid staff.

“And I still do book tours in the Top 30 markets,” said Danger, referring to her three books. “I’ve been able to see many cities that way. I’ve been to Chicago, Dallas, Nashville, Tampa, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, and others. And last November I was on Anderson Cooper’s morning show in New York City and did a speed round where I presented ten money saving tips in one minute before a live studio audience on national television.”

In February 2012, the website alone had 700,000 unique visitors and 1.5 million page views. Membership with Mommysavers.com has always been free. Danger said, “We have members all over the U.S., a good cross-section, but seem to have a heavier concentration in the Midwest. For whatever reason, Ohio has always been really big for us. As for Canadians, we haven’t had many members because Canadians don’t have coupons the way we do. However, they will come to our website for money-saving tips, but the deals we post are mainly only available to people in the United States.”

Interest in Mommysavers.com has been split nearly evenly between the website and Facebook page. A lot more interest lately has been coming from Pinterest.com. Said Danger, “Pinterest gets your website out there and people will look at you, but the challenge is getting an engaged reader out of a Pinterest transaction. They are a lot more fickle than forum or Facebook readers. Forum members are our diehard fans and Facebook is next. Pinterest brings us traffic, but not a lot that sticks around. It’s almost like a search engine in the way it works. They might find what they are looking for, but they aren’t as likely to return as a Facebook follower or someone who comes to our forum every day.”

Also, Mommysavers.com promotes itself throughout its website and Facebook pages. On every website page, members have an opportunity to sign up for the newsletter and Facebook page. The company also has links on particular forums that tie in with similar forum topics.

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Mommysavers.com began as a means for Danger to become a full-time, stay-at-home mom to her young children. So has all the traveling, books, and work accomplished the opposite?

She said, “Now that my children (ages 8 and 12) are in school full-time, I have more time during the day. As for being a mother, it’s my personal goal to log off the computer once they come home from school every day at 3:00 p.m. That’s a big challenge and one reason I have my part-time helpers—because I don’t want to work 80 hours a week. Without the part-timers, I would be totally negating the whole purpose of having this business. It was born out of a desire to be home with my kids.” She works about 40 hours a week except during the Christmas season, when she spends extra time finding hot online deals and bargains for members.

The most challenging aspect of her business has been handling her children who sometimes don’t understand why mom sometimes has to be at the computer late afternoon. They might ask her to make them a sandwich, for example. And yet she has hundreds of thousands of people waiting for her work to publish.

As for the business itself, and her company’s future, she said, “I never expected to have it come this far. The key for me is just to keep up with what’s happening on the Internet. It’s changing so rapidly and if you don’t roll with the punches, you’re going to get left behind. It’s impossible to predict what the Internet will be like in a year. For example, Pinterest is such a big part of how we market mommysavers.com now and a year ago I hadn’t even heard of it. My main mission is to keep doing what I’m doing, and get the message out to moms that they can live well for less. That’s always been what it’s about.”

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Frugality Sisters

CONNECT: Are you passing on your frugality to your children, the way your mother did with you?

DANGER: That’s something I’m doing with my own daughter now. She’s getting to be at the age where clothes are more important to her. When you give children money and give them the opportunity to spend it as if it were their own money, they tend to make better decisions. I grew up with that philosophy, and am passing it on to my own kids.”

Anti-Joneses Group

Said Mommysavers.com founder Kimberly Danger, “The most rewarding thing that happens is when I get an email or when someone posts that they have paid off a lot of debt and they couldn’t have done it without our help. The tips we provide are not huge, life-changing tips. For example, I can tell a mom how to make her own baby wipes. That’s great, but it’s not going to change her life. However, if she can put all the pieces together, begin making that decision to live within her family’s means, and realize living on a budget isn’t so bad, then it becomes easy.”

She said the discussion forum on Mommysavers.com acts as a support group for people that have made that decision.

“In today’s culture,” she added, “so many people are wrapped up in keeping up with the Joneses. We’re the anti-Joneses website. Forget the Joneses—that’s actually the name of a project we have members work on. In it, they go through a spending freeze to help them focus on their priorities. You have to be conscious about how you spend your money.”

Debt to Frugality

CONNECT: Are many of your members trying to get out of debt?

DANGER: Being in debt is relative. Ten thousand dollars to one person might be devastating and to another, nothing. The women I’m dealing with usually are young mothers that don’t have a huge net worth or household income. It could take them ten years to dig out of a huge debt hole. Our job is to provide encouragement and create a plan to help them—and getting them into the mindset that living on a budget doesn’t mean you’re giving up or sacrificing. Some of our members are trying to save money out of desperation. They want to save their home or keep their child in a particular school. Frugality is a lifestyle many are having to adopt because of their financial situation, especially because of the economy the last few years.”

THE ESSENTIALS

MommySavers.com
Awarded: CNN/Money Magazine 2010
“Best Online Consumer Expert.”
Founded: 2000
Based: North Mankato
Web: mommysavers.com