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Giancarlo Massaro is the founder of the daily product giveaway site AnyLuckyDay.  Below he shares the story of how he started anyluckyday, along with how he gained traffic to his site,his future plans and some advice for upcoming entrepreneurs.

Q. First off tell us a bit about yourself. who you are? where your from? etc;

My name is Giancarlo Massaro. I’m a 21 year old entrepreneur and a recent college graduate (May 2011). I’m from Connecticut. I enjoy playing soccer, going to the gym, hanging out with friends, and of course, building websites.

Q. So tell us about anyluckyday.com and how the idea came about?

AnyLuckyDay is an interactive marketing platform that allows businesses to promote their products/services through giveaways. Founded in 2009, AnyLuckyDay was nothing more than a blog giving away prizes. While laying on my girlfriends couch late one night in December 2008 I saw an infomercial on TV that was pitching a product. I was skeptical and thought to myself that it would be cool if I could test out the product before I had to buy it. That’s when an idea for a website came into my head, where I would test out products and give them away. I figured since people could win these products every day, then any day could be a lucky day, hence AnyLuckyDay.

Q. Did you always know that you wanted to own your own business or did it just happen by itself.

I’ve always wanted to work for myself, and I started at the age of 13 making money online. I recognized that there was such a huge potential to make a large amount of money online while being able to do something that I love. I built many small scale businesses when I was younger and sold them off, always looking for the next big thing that I could develop. It wasn’t until I was 19 years old and a sophomore in college that I decided that I was going to stick it out with AnyLuckyDay and grow it to a large business. While I doubted the potential of AnyLuckyDay during the first year, it has evolved into a full time business that I now run from my home office.

Q. I imagine you were quite busy while in college. How did you manage your time and stay focused on everything.

I was a full time student (taking 5 courses), I played division I soccer, I had a girlfriend (and still do have the same girlfriend), I had to maintain a social life, and as always, had to maintain my fitness and exercise in the gym. At first, a few of these things suffered when I started AnyLuckyDay because I put all my focus on the business.

My grades started to slip (as well as my desire to be in school), I stopped going out as much, and I would get into frequent fights with my girlfriend because I didn’t have enough time for her anymore. This went on between Jan-May 2009, and the summer break definitely helped me regroup my thoughts and lay out a manageable schedule for my business. I realized that I was wasting most of my time on email, creating the promotions, and seeking out sponsors for the promotions. Instead, I limited myself to checking email only a few times a day. Instead of searching for new sponsors everyday, I would only search for sponsors for 2-3 hours every Monday.

Finally, I would usually use Tuesdays as my content day where I would put together the upcoming promotions. This schedule allowed me to free up time in my schedule to maintain my old normal lifestyle.

Q. What has been your biggest obstacle that you’ve had to overcome with AnyLuckyDay so far?

The biggest obstacle was going from a free promotion system to a paid system. Back in 2009 it was free for companies to be featured on the site. They simply sent me their product, I wrote a review and gave it away. In 2010 I started charging for this, but I needed to create value that companies were willing to pay for. I was aware that there were thousands of product review sites out there, but I needed to differentiate AnyLuckyDay from everyone else. I did this by re-launching the site with a new, more professional looking design. I added video to my promotions, and I incorporated a social media aspect as well. As soon as I started getting my first paying customers and receiving some initial feedback, I kept creating more value than anyone else would be able to provide so that I could maintain this new business model and still be profitable.

Q. Could you explain what the business/revenue model is ?

Q. Could you tell us how you gained traffic to your site and gained interest from other businesses looking to have their product featured?

I gradually gained traffic from forums and contest directories (yes, there are actual directories out there that list contests from allover the internet). From there it was really just about being able to capture visitor email addresses so that I could build a foundation of people that I could constantly promote to. I also used twitter to really target people who were entering giveaways elsewhere and invited them to come checkout AnyLuckyDay. I did this for months and months and eventually traffic gradually continued to grow and maintain itself.

In order to gain interest from businesses I spent 8-10 hours a day just cold-emailing businesses. I would tell them about AnyLuckyDay, the service I provide, and the cost to them. Even though I would only get about 3-5 responses for every 100 emails sent, I continued to press on and email more and more companies. I eventually stumbled upon HARO (help a reporter out) and they have an audience of business owners. I took a gamble and advertised to them and it worked out great and I have become a constant advertiser ever since which has allowed me to secure many of the businesses that you see on the site today.

Q. Do you tweet about promotions? How does the company know that they are getting exposure by using your service?

The promotions are sent out to our audience in a few different ways. First, people can obviously see the promotion on our homepage when they visit the website. Second, each new promotion is mailed out at midnight to our mailing list. Third, we promote the company to our twitter/facebook audience throughout the day with several posts. Companies also receive a ‘sponsor account’ so they can interact with users on our site who are leaving comments during the promotion.

Q. Do you categorize your giveaways at all? Because everyday it’s a different product and a potentially a different demographic altogether?

The giveaways are not categorized. People can check our calendar to see what is coming up, but the mysterious aspect of never knowing what new product you’ll see featured everyday has helped add to the success of AnyLuckyDay.

Q. I found that you were involved in a business called PriceKnock. What happened to it?

So the idea for PriceKnock came about back in September 2010. Groupon and LivingSocial were doing great and there were only about 50-100 competitors in the daily deal space at the time. The idea was to allow people to choose deals based on their interests rather than their physical location, and to also provide deals to online retailers only instead of brick & mortar places. The goal was to launch November of 2010 but we had some serious delays and ended up launching March 2011. By that time the space was flooded wih 400+ daily deal sites and we found that nearly every company we spoke to already was working with another daily deal site. We decided the space was too flooded and it wasn’t worth pushing forward so we dissolved the business.

Q. What future plans do you have for anyluckyday?

I don’t see much changing at AnyLuckyDay other than being able to provide more and more value to businesses while at the same time being able to provide our audience with the opportunity to win free products. I’m debating whether I want to hire 1 or 2 people (a guy and a girl) to take over the video portion of the site while I maintain all the content. I’ve filmed a little over 500 videos since I started AnyLuckyDay and I’d like to mix it up a bit and have some other people on camera promoting the businesses that we work with.

Q. Do you see yourself starting any other businesses in the future?

Yes. I’m currently a co-founder of another business called Soverinn (soverinn.com). We are pretty hush hush about what we are doing but we are currently building a prototype and hope to launch in private beta around August 2011.

Q. Do you have any advice for budding entrepreneurs?
Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy. It is a physical and emotional roller coaster and there are many going to be many moments when you just want to quit. Be sure to do something you love and that you are passionate about otherwise it will be very tough to have the motivation and desire to succeed.