Matthew Botos

The idea behind Leverage, a site to manage and trade gift cards, didn’t intrigue me so much as how straightforward parts of the their business model are. They acknowledge it costs money to get customers, so they’re just going to pay out that to customers cost as quasi-cash quasi-interest on the cards you register. They’re also advertising-driven (seemingly the only successful Internet business model), so they’re going to target ads based on your demographics, but they’ll actually tell you on which demographics the ads are based. It’s refreshing; hopefully more customer-dependent sites will follow suit!