
The next one will just launch at midnight.

We're not going to work hard to put up something else. So we thought: We'll just make our own website, and sell one item a day. The challenge was to get rid of those last 50 or 100 pieces. We would sell through everything, and we would have the last 50 pieces or 100 pieces left. We would buy a pallet load of end-of-life products, or sometimes even a truckload. Woot was born out of a computer distributor. His remarks have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Along the way, Rydl learned how to do deals the right way, figured out how to keep customers engaged and discovered why creating a shopping event out of thin air is not as easy as it might seem.

Two decades ago, he helped launch the ecommerce business of electronics wholesaler Synapse Micro, which soon turned into Woot, one of the internet's first daily deal sites.Īt Woot, he helped create the company's Woot-off shopping events as well as a culture that gave the company a cult following, ultimately resulting in an acquisition by Amazon in 2010. Darold Rydl knows a thing or two about online shopping.
