I have spent more than twenty years on the search and program management side of affiliate marketing. This summer I went back to being a publisher and built a coupon site from zero. It is called FlashCoupons.com, and here is what it is, how it runs, and what it has taught me so far.
What FlashCoupons is
FlashCoupons publishes five limited-time deals a day from brands people already know. Today’s list runs from Bonobos and Shutterfly to iRobot, LG and Dell Refurbished. The site has about 120 live deals right now, sorted by store and across 20 categories.
The site is the newest piece. FlashCoupons started as a Pinterest account, and the public site went live at the end of September. The same five deals go out every day to Pinterest, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, X, Instagram and LinkedIn, with short deal videos headed to TikTok and YouTube.
It runs as a regular affiliate account on Yazing, the platform I founded in 2015. Every deal links to that brand’s deal page on Yazing, the same link any Yazing member could use. Yazing gives its members a deal link for every brand on the platform, and FlashCoupons is built on those links.
How it runs
Most of the work is automated. The daily loop looks like this:
- Find. Each day starts with the current deals and coupons from the brands on Yazing.
- Rank. Deals from brands people recognize, and deals with a working coupon code, go to the top.
- Pick. Five deals make the cut for tomorrow, with a rule that keeps the same brand from showing up again too soon.
- Create. AI generates a deal image for each pick, square for most platforms and tall for Pinterest. Captions are written per platform.
- Check. Every number in a caption has to match the deal. An “up to 40% off” can never turn into “40% off.”
- Publish. Posts go out to each platform, and the deal page goes live on the site.
The part that is not automated is me. I look at every image and every pick before anything is scheduled, and I swap out deals I don’t like.
The AI tools doing the work
None of this would be a one-person project without AI. Four tools carry most of it:
| Tool | What it does for FlashCoupons |
|---|---|
| Claude | My planning partner. It helped write the rules for ranking deals, reviews the results with me, and writes the build instructions I hand off. |
| Lovable | Builds the apps from those instructions: the admin tool where I prepare each day’s posts, and the public site. |
| Make.com and OpenAI | Make.com runs the image workflow, sending each deal to OpenAI and returning a finished deal image. |
| Muse | Produces the short deal videos and handles posting them as Reels, Stories and Shorts. |
The pattern that works for me is one tool per job. I don’t ask one AI to do everything. Each one gets the task it is best at, and I stay in the middle as the editor.
What I’ve learned so far
It is early, so treat this as a build report and not a victory lap. A few things have already surprised me.
Brand matters more than the size of the discount. I put a modest code from a brand people recognize ahead of a huge discount from one they don’t. A coupon affiliate only gets paid on sales, and shoppers buy from names they trust.
Deal titles will fool automation. “50% off standard shipping” is not 50% off the order, but software can read it that way. A Labor Day deal can still be sitting in the data in October. Automated selection needs someone reading the output.
Variety does not happen on its own. Yazing has thousands of brands, yet my early picks kept cycling through the same short list. Now I make a point of rotating brands and categories.
Tracking is messier than the reports suggest. Plenty of places a deal link appears are not clickable, so people copy and paste it and the source disappears. Posting to each platform at a different time of day helps me guess where that traffic came from.
If you manage an affiliate program
Picking five deals a day showed me how much a publisher’s choices depend on the deal data a program sends out. If you want coupon and deal affiliates to pick your offers, this is what I look for:
- Give deals a real end date, with room to run. A deal that expires tomorrow can die before the post goes out.
- Write titles that say exactly what the offer is. Vague “up to” claims and offers that need a membership are harder to promote.
- Retire old codes. A code with last year’s date in it looks dead, even if it still works.
- Keep seasonal deals seasonal. An in-season offer is an easy pick. One left over from the last holiday is not.
- Offer something specific. A deal on a named product or category beats another generic sitewide banner.
Take a look
See today’s five at FlashCoupons.com, or follow along on Pinterest, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok or YouTube. If you spot a deal that looks wrong, I want to hear about it.
If this makes you want to build your own, Yazing is free to join and gives you a deal link for every brand on the platform.
Disclosure: FlashCoupons is my project, operated by ThunkTunk LLC, and it earns a commission when someone shops through its links. I am also the founder of Yazing.
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