At some point last summer or fall, I hit upon the idea of creating a site that published every possible gift card deal I could find. I sometimes covered notable deals over on Frequent Miler, while Doctor of Credit is also a great source of deals, but I’d noticed there were tons of deals that simply never got published, often because most people wouldn’t care about them (I’m looking at you, endless supply of 20% off Fanatics deals).
Over the last 10 years I’ve had dozens of ideas for sites I wanted to create, some of which I made and some which fell by the wayside as it turned out I wasn’t that passionate about the idea. As the weeks and months went on though, I couldn’t shake this gift card website idea from my head. Deciding that it was something I was sufficiently passionate enough about to commit to, I decided to go ahead and get it started.
Choosing the name was the hardest part as I suck when it comes to choosing domain names. It didn’t help that any site with ‘Gift Card’ in the domain name cost thousands of bucks, so in the end I settled for GC Galore. I bought the domain name on December 18, 2018 and two days later published the first deal which, amazingly, wasn’t a Fanatics deal. The second one was though 😉
Before starting the site, I thought that I’d spend an hour – maybe two – publishing deals each day. Little did I know that in reality it’d be much more than that. It’s actually become a bit of an addiction – always seeking out new deals the moment they become available, not so much to buy them to resell (although that’s part of it), but because it’s almost a game. Tapping the right arrow on a 124 page Black Friday ad to see if there were any gift card deals in there (spoiler alert: there weren’t always) was worth it for the times a great deal appeared on the page of another ad.
One year and almost 2,000 posts later, it’s GC Galore’s first birthday.
A Big Thank You
Anyway, the purpose of writing this post was to say a few thank yous. First, thank you to all of you that read the site, whether that’s by visiting the site itself or reading it using a feed reader. I think I’ve ended up spending closer to 3-5 hours per day for the last 365 days working on the site – far more than I’d been expecting – but it’s worth it to know that people are actually reading the content!
Second, thanks to everyone who’s sent in tips about deals. There have been many deals I’d have had no clue about if it weren’t for getting the heads up about them from some of you, so thank you. In particular, EW and someone who wishes to remain anonymous (you know who you are) have sent me loads of tips over the last year, so extra-special thanks to them 🙂
Third, thanks to everyone who’s written words of encouragement. I’ve had a number of people thank me for GC Galore, whether that’s via email, through the contact form on the site or in Slack groups. Words of Affirmation isn’t my love language, but I appreciate them nonetheless and it definitely helps make working on the site even more worthwhile as it helps reaffirm that it’s a useful resource for some people seeing as that’s the entire point of publishing all these deals.
And finally, even though she doesn’t actually read GC Galore, I want to thank my wife for humoring me with how much time I put into the site. There have been many occasions on our road trip where we’ve delayed heading out to do something because PayPal Digital Gifts launched a deal that I just have to publish quickly before we leave the hotel. And wait, there’s another deal. And another. Ooh, and now MyGiftCardsPlus is offering 20% cashback on Cabela’s – give me a few minutes to write that one up. OK, just one more – Kroger has a new 4x fuel point digital coupon. You get the idea.
Finally, thank you for indulging me with this post. Now, back to the deals…
Happy Birthday, GC Galore! And thank you Stephen, for all your hard work finding the deals!
Thank you!
Thanks! I’m glad the tags for each brand on the right side of the page are helpful – I was hoping it would make the site easier to navigate.
And happy birthday to your grandson too 🙂
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