This past weekend, I bought something online and saved $35 on the purchase using a coupon code I did not know existed 5 seconds earlier. 

That’s the beauty of Honey. Honey is a browser extension, acquired by PayPal in a $4 billion all cash deal back in 2020. 

The story of Honey is one that I absolutely love because of one thing - it shows how the form factor of the solution can make all the difference in success. 

Let me back up. 

The “Adventure” of Discovering Coupons

On every checkout page in the e-commerce world, consumers see a single open text box above the final price “Promo code,” or “Coupon code.” 

For myself, as a consumer, this text box represents more than just a potential discount. It creates a subtle but psychological sense of missing out. It suggests that a small, exclusive group has access to a better price that the rest of us don’t.

Over time in the e-commerce world, coupon code websites began to pop up over time. such as RetailMeNot, Slickdeals, and Rakuten. They became websites that were monetized via advertising because of the incredible internet traffic they took in. 

With every online purchase that I made, it became a habit for me to scour these sites. But it forced me and other consumers into this manual, friction-filled "adventure,” to put it nicely.

 Specifically, I would follow a repeatable several step pattern. 

1. I would Google, “[Company name] coupon code”

2. Click through various links to find a posted code.

3. Copy a code (or several) and manually paste it into the checkout box.

4. Click 'Apply' and hope it worked.

5. If my attempts were unsuccessful, I would Google again, this time, “Company name promo code,” and repeat the process, sometimes for a while, depending on how expensive the product was.

Frankly, I think my success rate getting a code that worked was like 10%. Most codes were expired or invalid for the current purchase. Not only did I waste time continually, but when my search came up fruitless, I felt bummed out that I may not be getting the best price. 

At the time, I even noted the market inefficiency. 

“All of these websites have dummy codes, or expired codes. What if there was a website that could continually validate codes? I could go there and know the codes were legit.” 

But in thinking that I fell into the exact trap that I am calling out in this article. 

Notice what I thought, “What if there was a website.” 

I fell into this trap of assuming the form factor the solution should take - I assumed that the solution to my problem was “a better website.” 

More on that in a minute, but here is my insight around the form factor:

✅ The form factor of the product makes a massive difference in its success. Sometimes you don’t need to change hardly anything, and just change the form factor of the product, and you will unlock massive success. ✅

How do I define form factor? I am using a word that is typically used in hardware but in a broader context. 

✅ I think about the form factor of a product as the experience of how the user interacts with the product, and how the product interacts with the user. ✅

The Job-to-Be-Done was the Same. The Form Factor Completely Different. 

I don’t recall how I stumbled onto Honey. But I decided to give it a go in the mid-2010s. 

Instead of creating another static website, Honey introduced a simple browser extension that embedded itself directly into the user’s workflow when they were shopping online.

Being a browser extension, it broke from the mold of how coupon searching was done previously. But it happened to be just the right form factor for the job. 

Honey as a browser extension did three crazy valuable things: 

1. It crowdsourced coupon codes. It detects and validates coupon codes used by all Honey shoppers.

2. It automatically "plugged and chugged" all known valid codes into the promo code box for you.

3. It determined which code gave the absolute best price and applied it automatically, or confirmed you already had the best price.

I remember the first time I used Honey. I remember seeing it do its magic and then it gave me a coupon code I didn’t know existed. It was a “Did that just happen” feeling. This would change e-commerce. I knew it. 

What’s crazy - the user had to do nothing! Just install Honey and it would prompt you that it has codes to try every time you would get to a checkout page. 

I repeat. The user didn’t have to do anything different. Instead of them looking for codes, codes were being found regularly and automatically applying the best one. 

All because of the different form factor of the solution - a browser extension vs. a website. 

The job-to-be-done of finding a discount was fundamentally the same. The sole difference was the form factor of the solution, how the user interacted with the product and how the product interacted with the user. 

The Inherent Bias of the Current Form Factor

✅ But here is what I have seen - Many founders do not think about a different form factor of their product beyond the current form factor that it exists today. ✅

I’ve found that they typically think without the bounds of the form factor of their current solution, just like I inadvertently imagined with Retail Me Not, “What if there was a website that could continually validate codes?” 

In the case of coupon codes, what the consumer needed was not a different or better website. What they needed was a different form factor for the solution. 

But many founders have mental blockers when they try to think about their product in a different form factor. 

In my FinTech startup, we built a software product for professional bond traders. My father was my co-founder, and he was a subject matter expert in the bond market. He had developed this algorithm that helped bond managers decide which bonds to buy and to sell. There were times in our journey where I would identify problems or different form factors of our solution, but my father couldn’t see a world where the algorithm wasn’t the atomic unit of the product. 

As we were building the company, I continually felt that we had this inherent baggage of needing to tie our solution to the algorithm that he had written. He was tied into a certain form factor of the solution, and there was really no changing that form factor. This mindset dramatically limited our ability to pivot into any other more urgent opportunity along our journey. 

The form factor of the solution 

Founders might read the story of Retail Me Not vs. Honey and think, how do I become Honey and not Retail Me Not? 

Founders might then ask, so what then is the best form factor for my product? 

It’s a good question. One of the beautiful things about the art of the product is that this always can take a different form depending on the context. Markets are dynamic, industries are dynamic, etc. 

But here is the insight

✅ The optimal form factor of the product always is what would be the user's path of least resistance to the outcome. ✅

Here is how I would attack the aspect of form factor -

Strip away any preconceived notions of the current form factor of the solution. 

Ask yourself, what is the singular end outcome that you are trying to achieve for the user? 

With that end outcome in mind, then investigate two things:

• What is the existing workflow of the user —> That’s the baseline. 

• Then, within that workflow, what would be the path of least resistance towards that outcome? - The delta between the two becomes what the product should do. 

Then the question becomes, how do we deliver that path of least resistance? What form should the product take in order to accomplish that? → That’s the form factor

 ✅ Many successful products win in the market because they collapse workflows. ✅ 

Closing Thoughts

✅ The form factor of a product is the experience of how the user interacts with the product, and how the product interacts with the user. ✅

Oftentimes founders do not think about a form factor outside of the current bounds of their solution. 

But Honey proved that looking at the problem in a fresh way without a bias or strings attached allowed the founders to solve the same job to be done with a different form factor that was the user’s path of least resistance. 

Honey sold in 2019 for $4 billion in cash, their largest acquisition at that time to date. In this TechCrunch article, at the time this was announced, Honey had 17 million monthly users. 

In my investigation, I also looked at Retail Me Not. They are part of a publicly traded company called Ziff Davis, which is a media and digital conglomerate that owns brands such as PC Mag, CNET, IGN Entertainment, iContact, and Moz. 

It is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $1.74 billion as of December 11, 2025. 

So let me get this straight. PayPal paid more than 2x the entire market cap of a publicly-traded digital and media conglomerate for Honey, whose product was a highly superior form factor than only one of Ziff Davis’ portfolio company, Retail Me Not. 

Oh yeah, and when I was on Retail Me Not’s website, it turns out that Retail Me Not has a browser extension. 

Of course they do. So does CapitalOne, and a number of others. 

The secret of the the optimal product form factor to solve this problem is out.

But it hardly matters. PayPal bought the winning form factor and its 17 million users long before the form factor became known and widely used.

Who knew coupons could command such a premium. 

But more importantly, who knew the right form factor could be so lucrative?

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