Last week when I wrote about how to see movies for free, a reader hopped on and commented that Volition.com is also a great source of free movie tickets.

Intrigued, I went home that night and perused the site a bit and I have to say, it’s good for a lot more than movie tickets. It also presents mystery shopping opportunities, a guide to travel Web sites and a coupon clipping service, just to touch on a few things. (Although I take exception to its claim that you no longer need to flip through the Sunday paper for coupons! I did print some off the site and I combined them with my usual weekly offering from the Sunday paper. You can never save TOO much money, right?)

After surfing the site a bit, I left a comment that I thought it was pretty neat, and Volition’s founder and president, Ray Sola, wrote back and said he’s actually based in Tucson. So now it’s even more fun to check out the site because we’re also supporting a local guy when we do that.

And it’s in that spirit that I also thought it would be fun to find out a little more about how Volition got started and the overall philosophy behind it. So I did a short e-mail interview with Sola.

Though he’s lived in Tucson for 10 years, Sola began dinking around on the Internet in the mid-1990s while working on his PhD at New York University. He discovered he could build Web pages on his home computer, and he merged that interest with his desire for free things, forming what would become Volition.

Now the site draws about 300,000 visitors a month, and has been called by The New York Times “the de facto water cooler for shoppers who want to compare notes.” Sola says it is “the home of all things frugal.”

What do you consider to be your biggest “competition” and what sets you apart?
Those who think they are our competition are the sites with the fake freebies. The junky sites that want you to sign up for offers and jump through hoops at the chance of getting something for free. The offers we tell people about are not incentivized offers (do not require additional offers to be completed in order to receive the products, do not require a credit card, or take you through a long co-registration path).

In the world of saving money using online resources, what is your view on competition? Do you truly compete with anyone, or do you feel there’s room here for everyone?
In the 13 years Volition has been around, there have been lots of other sites which have listings of freebies or contests or mystery shopping or any of our other areas. Most of them have fallen by the wayside. I have been friends with many of the owners of these sites and still am. The only ones I ever have had a grievance with are the ones who plagiarize my site or other sites.

We also don’t like sites that try and charge people for info. The Internet should be free and some of the “paid” sites actually are only selling info they stole off Volition. There was a guy on eBay selling people a “List of Mystery Shopping Companies” for $10. When they paid the $10, he would mail them a print out of Volition.com. They guy was not lying and he did provide what he said he would.

Where do most of your users come from? Many from Tucson?
We do have a good base of visitors from Tucson as we hold events here such as free movie screenings or free tickets to Sidewinders games. We have also tested advertising on radio, newspapers and TV here in Tucson. However, we get visitors from all over the USA and most countries in the world.