The Honey browser extension automatically offers up coupon codes and 'Honey Gold' deals at checkout. In the failed startups that preceded Honey over the course of Hudson's career, he said, 'nothing had ever clicked, but to have something consumers clearly loved that was growing organically by word of mouth because people actually loved the product, I knew that there was something there.'

Even when I was there, it was gnawing at me that I wasn't trying to figure out to make this Honey thing work.'Īs Hudson stepped back and Ruan continued working with a skeleton crew, users continued to gravitate to Honey, based on the recommendations of friends - and a leaked Reddit post from one of its beta testers. 'I worked there for a year and learned a lot about the ad tech industry and building products at massive scale,' he said, 'but I also learned that in my core, I'm still an entrepreneur, and I like to build things. In 2013, Hudson ran out of money, and took a day job as a product manager at an ad tech company to pay the bills. In October 2012, the MIT-trained entrepreneur, along with co-founder George Ruan, used that prototype to build and launch Honey, a web browser extension that automatically finds and surfaces coupons when a user is online shopping.įor two and a half years, Hudson and his Ruan bootstrapped their app, unable to convince investors to put money into a desktop browser extension as consumer interest moved to mobile. That night, after the kids went to bed, he put together a prototype for a browser extension that could help solve his problem.

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