Demand.io is a technology company based in Santa Monica, CA focused on building digital consumer shopping platforms and experiences that help consumers find and acquire the things they’ll love. Our e-commerce services make it easier for shoppers to find the best product for their needs, find the best price, obtain unique deals and discounts, and connect with like-minded people around their passions and interests.
Having been in business since 2009, Demand.io is a small, self-funded company running multiple consumer products at scale. Having reached profitability a decade ago, we’ve always focused on sustainable, organic product growth, operating with a lean startup ethos - we believe much of our success comes from our focus on hiring the industry’s best talent, retaining them for the long-term, and aligning incentives through a unique profit-sharing program that offers employees significant economic exposure to our ability to grow profits.
Demand.io currently runs multiple production consumer services and one service under development, all running on top of our data store and knowledge graph called ShopGraph.
SimplyCodes is our flagship brand, competing in the online coupon codes market against brands including Honey, Retailmenot, and Rakuten. SimplyCodes takes a unique position in the market emphasizing coupon coverage and accuracy, powered by AI and a crowdsourcing platform through which users of the service contribute to the platform’s database of coupons through adds, edits, and verifications. By emphasizing reliability, simplicity, fun, and personalization, our goal is to appeal to the large population of e-commerce shoppers who have yet to exhibit brand loyalty to a coupon service by addressing their unmet needs.
Our AI engineering team has developed proprietary AI technology, including our Coupon Vision System, which enables us to find, verify, and publish highly accurate coupon codes at unprecedented scale. By combining AI with human editors and crowdsourcing, we’ve been able to achieve 10x superior coupon coverage vs the industry’s leading coupon services, per data from Testbirds.
SimplyCodes is pre-marketing as we’ve been developing the core crowdsourcing system and building our core community of coupon editors. We’re launching our full mobile suite across iOS and Android this spring, with our first marketing campaign rolling out in parallel.
Product.ai is currently a major focus of the company and is envisioned to be a conversational, AI assistant for shopping. Aimed at reducing hallucinations, Product.ai will build upon existing foundation LLMs, connecting them to ShopGraph’s real-time knowledge graph so they can offer far more accurate, insightful, and actionable shopping advice related to millions of products and brands.
Product.ai will also explore the frontiers of human-computer interaction where chat-based interfaces meet interactive visual and spatial interfaces enabling product views, comparisons, and interactive manipulation.
Additionally, Product.ai will explore new models for marketing, agent-centric distribution, and personalization. As an agent-centric AI model, Product.ai can be delivered through an agent model via customized distribution partnerships with creators, experts, influencers, and tastemakers, while also providing a highly personalized experience for shoppers.
ShopGraph is Demand.io’s data store and knowledge graph, containing up-to-date information, reviews, and sentiment across millions of products, brands, and offers. ShopGraph is updated through multiple inbound data mechanisms, including UGC crowdsourcing, direct data feeds, web crawlers, and AI-assisted data ingestion systems. ShopGraph leverages the latest database technologies such as vector stores, retrieval augmented generation, and graph databases to enable our AI models to reduce hallucinations and gain greater insight into the shopping context.
Every Demand.io product is built on top of ShopGraph and enjoys a bi-directional relationship with the data system — each product pulls from the entirety of ShopGraph’s real-time database for any e-commerce entity or topic, while also contributing upstream updates to ShopGraph via domain-specific crowdsourcing systems leveraging user inputs and UGC strategies.
In a nutshell, ShopGraph makes each of our properties stronger through differentiated data, and each of our properties makes ShopGraph stronger through crowdsourced inputs of data, updates, and verifications.
We pursue a unique and specific strategy for our consumer-facing products. All of our consumer services are bi-directional and participative in nature, meaning users who join each service are empowered to contribute data and content to our ecosystem, ultimately feeding upstream back into ShopGraph. We view each of our consumer-facing brands as our frontier touchpoint into a specific knowledge domain, interest group, or industry sub-vertical through which we interact with enthusiasts, experts, creators, entrepreneurs, and curators specific to that domain. We intentionally design our products to be participative, building in UGC information flows fueled by gamification, decentralized ownership, and micro-incentives, with the end goal of partnering with our user communities to ensure differentiated, highly accurate, and comprehensive coverage of knowledge relating to e-commerce within that domain.
Demand.io runs on an affiliate business model in which we form revenue-sharing partnerships with thousands of e-commerce retailers. We adopted this business model for its intrinsic partnership alignment — we’re highly aligned with our business partners in the common goal of driving transactions. Alignment is one of Demand.io’s core values, and the revenue-sharing business model has proven to be an effective and successful business model for us.
Within this revenue-sharing business model, our job is very simple. We create digital experiences that aggregate large audiences of shoppers, helping them discover products, make smart decisions, find the best deal, and ultimately assist them in making a purchase through one of our applications. The better job we do at this specific endeavor, the more our business grows and scales over time.
We’ve developed our own proprietary affiliate ad management system in-house, called Nexus. Nexus keeps us connected with our 60,000+ retail partners, ensuring direct data feeds are processed and updated in real-time. Nexus also ensures we’re monetizing efficiently, utilizing machine learning to optimize yields on each click within our network in real-time.
This affiliate-based business model also enables Demand.io to scale operations efficiently, By relying on our advertising partners to handle e-commerce logistics and customer support, we run a pure digital business focused purely on user experience, community engagement, and digital growth.
Specifically, we believe our aligned business model positions us to thrive in the transition to AI. Fundamentally, stakeholder alignment will take greater importance as economics, culture, and business are disrupted and become increasingly fragmented by AI. Increasingly, unaligned, rent-seeking business models will lose traction as technology breaks down information barriers and ubiquitous and instant knowledge permeate daily life.
Demand.io is betting on an alternative organizational and incentives structure based on profit-sharing and headcount minimization.
Due to our self-funded nature, combined with our plans to stay private with no explicit plans to exit the business, Demand.io has developed an alternative incentive structure built on profit-sharing. While employees do receive stock options for exposure to an exit if one occurs, our base strategy is to remain private and continue growing our profit-generating business by way of launching additional e-commerce products and scaling existing ones. In such a scenario, the primary business outcome will be profit growth, so we’ve designed a compensation system in which employees receive bonuses tied to company profits. We’ve designed the economics of this system to be comparable to that of a top-tier equity exit in the 9- to 10-figures range. The primary difference being the economics are paid out as part of cash compensation over time, as opposed to a single liquidity event.
Learn more about our compensation system and philosophy.
Philosophically, we believe a small team comprised of top-tier talent can achieve more than a much larger team of less differentiated staff. Therefore, we seek to keep our leadership team as small as possible, minimizing layers of management, and ensuring all leaders remain close to the on-the-ground content of their work. We espouse an explicit and very clear set of cultural values elevating self-empowerment, decentralized decision making, and rapid action and iteration as our normative operating style.
In part, we view each new leadership hire through the lens of the added burden of communication and coordination required of adding an additional member to the team, so we employ a high bar for talent, capability, and culture fit along with significant justification for adding the new role.
Our founder Michael Quoc plays the role of CEO and head of product, leading overall business and product strategy and execution. He is supported by a talented team of executives and super-ICs who play leading roles for our product lines and key functions spanning marketing, engineering, design, and business operations.
Demand.io conceptualizes, designs, engineers, builds, scales, grows, and operates each of our products and platforms in-house. Generally, we don’t outsource core business and product development functions. We see our core competitive differentiator being our extreme level of talent across engineering, design, operations, and marketing which fuels our ability to execute differentiated product design and innovation.
Over his career leading startups, product teams, and innovation labs at some of the industry’s most renowned internet companies, Michael has established himself as an innovator and product visionary. His insights drive our product roadmap, enabling us to stay ahead of our competition and remain among the most innovative players in e-commerce.
Demand.io’s mission is to help people find and acquire the things they’ll love. We seek to achieve this through our strategy centered on data, supplemented by intuitive consumer touchpoints aiding the shopping journey.
Our vision is to create the leading consumer product in each vertical in which we participate. We seek to help millions, then billions, of consumers connect with the products, services, assets, and people that will bring them joy, enable them to connect with their passions, and achieve their goals.