Introduction to Demand.io: Restoring Humanity to Commerce

Welcome to Demand.io. We are not just building another e-commerce company; we are fundamentally redefining the relationship between technology, knowledge, and commerce. We believe that in an age of overwhelming information and algorithmic noise, the most vital and scarce resource is trustworthy knowledge. This guide will provide a comprehensive overview of who we are, our ambitious vision for the future, and why our principles-driven approach is shaping the next generation of commerce.

Our Mission and Strategic Vision

At Demand.io, our core vision is ambitious and deeply held:

To restore humanity to the heart of commerce.

We see commerce as a fundamentally human endeavor rooted in connection, trust, and mutual benefit. While Web 2.0 brought efficiency, it often dehumanized the experience, creating opaque systems that prioritized engagement over genuine user value. We are at a crossroads where new technology, if guided by the right principles, can reverse this trend.

This vision translates into a clear mission:

To become the world's leading source of commerce knowledge by building and scaling intelligent systems that enable confident decisions, promote fair value exchange, and empower all stakeholders.

Our strategy is built on four key pillars that guide our execution:

• SimplyCodes - Intelligent Savings & Coverage Leadership: Establish SimplyCodes as the industry’s first truly AI-powered, intelligent shopping experience, making it the dominant market leader in assisted checkout, powered by its vibrant user community.
• ShopGraph - Comprehensive Commerce Knowledge & Verification: Achieve comprehensive, verified knowledge for over 400,000 merchants and cultivate a thriving, scalable contributor community, solidifying ShopGraph as the most trusted commerce knowledge graph in the world.
• Product.ai - AI Shopping Guidance Leadership: Position Product.ai as the world's leading AI shopping assistant, renowned for providing deep, genuinely expert, and highly personalized advice that makes complex commerce knowledge accessible and actionable.
• Team & Culture - Next-Generation Operations & Success: Cultivate a core team of highly effective "10x operators" who leverage our AI Operating System (AIOS) to achieve outsized impact, and validate our model by nurturing our first 10 HQ team millionaires.

What Sets Demand.io Apart

Privacy-First Business Model

Our business model is a core differentiator, built on a foundation of privacy and aligned incentives.

• We never sell personal user data for advertising or any other purpose.
• Our affiliate-based revenue model creates a natural win-win: we only succeed when we help users find products and savings they genuinely want.
• We practice rigorous data minimization, collecting only what is essential to improve the shopping experience.
• This approach is not an afterthought; it is engineered into our systems from the ground up.

Unmatched Coverage & Verified Accuracy

Our technical infrastructure and community-powered systems give us a profound competitive advantage.

• Comprehensive Merchant Coverage: SimplyCodes covers over 400,000 stores, a 10x advantage over competitors who typically cover 30,000-40,000.
• Superior Verification: Our unique blend of AI and a large-scale Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) crowdsourcing community delivers verified coupon codes that are approximately 30% more effective than our competitors'.

The Concentric Circles Model

We view our company not as a rigid pyramid, but as expanding circles of value alignment. At the center are our mission and Partners, radiating outwards to our employees, community, users, business partners, and society at large. This model ensures that every action we take is designed to create value that flows across all layers, fostering a sustainable ecosystem where all stakeholders win together.

Self-Funded and Profitable

We have been profitable for over a decade, a strategic choice that gives us the independence to focus on long-term value creation over short-term metrics. This financial discipline allows us to operate with a lean startup ethos while making bold, strategic investments in our people and technology.

ShopGraph: Our Commerce Knowledge Infrastructure

At the foundation of everything we build is ShopGraph, our proprietary e-commerce knowledge graph—the "commerce DNA" that powers all Demand.io products.

Dual-Layer Knowledge Architecture

ShopGraph combines two complementary types of data into a single, intelligent system:

• Knowledge Layer (Stable Information): This includes product specifications, brand relationships, category taxonomies, feature comparisons, and historical trends.
• Real-Time Layer (Dynamic Information): This layer captures constantly changing data like current pricing, inventory status, active promotions, and merchant operational status.

Community + AI Hybrid Verification

What truly makes ShopGraph defensible is our hybrid approach to data verification, which pairs AI efficiency with human expertise.

• AI Verification Systems: We deploy a suite of AI tools, including an Automated Coupon Tester (ACT), a Screenshot Verification System (SVS), and a Coupon Vision System (CVS) to handle the initial, large-scale validation of data.
• Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) Crowdsourcing: Our global community of contributors provides the essential human layer of verification, handling edge cases, providing context, and ensuring our data is grounded in reality. This BFT architecture ensures reliability at scale, even with untrusted individual participants. This system, our strategic "crown jewel," processes over 55 million verifications monthly.

The ShopGraph Ecosystem Vision

ShopGraph is more than an internal tool; it is the foundation for a future ecosystem of platforms designed to scale commerce knowledge. Our vision includes building dedicated interfaces that empower our key partners. We are designing specialized portals for our community of knowledge contributors to collaborate, for merchants to directly manage their brands and offers, and for third-party developers to access our data via APIs, enabling a new wave of innovation built on trusted commerce information.

Our Product Portfolio

Our products are the "tentacles" of the ShopGraph octopus, reading from our central knowledge brain to deliver intelligent services and writing back new insights, creating a powerful, self-reinforcing data flywheel.

SimplyCodes: A Community-First Movement in Savings

SimplyCodes is being transformed from a leading coupon platform into an indispensable intelligent savings assistant and a core infrastructure provider for the entire AI commerce ecosystem.

• Core Philosophy: We are a movement, not just a tool. Where others automate scraping, we empower people. Our mission is to build the world's most trusted savings resource together with our community.
• Intelligent Shopping Experience: We are moving beyond static lists of codes to proactive, intelligent assistance.
  • The Intelligent Checkout Assistant (ICA) provides real-time cart analysis and applies the best savings, transforming checkout from a moment of uncertainty into one of confidence.
  • The SimplyCodes Assistant (SCA) will be a conversational shopping companion for the entire journey, providing personalized recommendations and proactive alerts.
• AI Ecosystem Integration: As AI agents become primary shopping intermediaries, SimplyCodes is positioned to be the essential savings intelligence layer. Our MCP (Model Context Protocol) Connector will provide third-party AI agents with access to our verified promotion data, making us the "Intel Inside" for savings.

Product.ai: Expert AI Shopping Guidance

Product.ai represents our vision for the future of high-consideration purchases.

• Beyond Enhanced Search: Unlike competitors that repackage web content, Product.ai is designed to provide genuinely expert-level guidance. Our UX acid test is that every interaction must feel like consulting a knowledgeable human expert.
• Inside-Out Strategy: We build from a foundation of deep, validated expertise in specific, complex categories first—perfecting the core experience with high-expectation customers (HXCs) before expanding.
• Data Advantage: Product.ai leverages the verified, structured knowledge of ShopGraph to understand product nuances, compatibility, and real-world performance, creating a trusted and unbiased resource for consumers.

Strategic Platform Consolidation

Our portfolio strategy is evolving to maximize our SEO footprint and user experience. We are enhancing SimplyCodes' Merchant Landing Pages (MLPs) to be the definitive resource for savings and strategically redirecting traffic and SEO equity from our legacy platforms, Dealspotr and Knoji, to consolidate our authority and create a streamlined user journey.

Our Culture: The 10x Operator & The AIOS

Our culture is intentionally designed to enable a small, elite team to achieve outsized, compounding impact. We do this through our unique operating model and by hiring a specific type of professional: the "10x operator."

The AI Operating System (AIOS)

We operate on a unique model called the AI Operating System (AIOS). AIOS is the central nervous system of our company, an interconnected model of our entire business that enables both human and AI systems to operate with full context and alignment. It is built on a foundation of best-in-class tools like Notion, which serves as our shared brain, and integrated AI copilots like Claude and Gemini. This system allows for radical transparency and empowers every team member to act as an accountable lead in their domain.

The 10x Operator Mindset

A "10x operator" at Demand.io doesn't work 10x harder; they think systemically to create 10x the impact. They are professionals who:

• Build Systems, Not Just Complete Tasks: They focus on creating frameworks, tools, and automation that multiply their impact and solve entire classes of problems.
• Practice First Principles Thinking: We reason up from fundamental truths, not from analogy or conventional wisdom. This allows us to innovate where others only iterate. Like a master chef who understands ingredients, we can create novel solutions rather than just following recipes.
• Are Deep Generalists: We value individuals with substantial expertise across multiple domains. This enables more creative problem-solving and reduces communication overhead, allowing us to operate like a nimble special forces unit rather than a conventional army.
• Have a Bias Towards Action: In our dynamic environment, learning through rapid action and experimentation is more valuable than prolonged analysis. We believe it's better to be wrong and iterate quickly than to stand still.

Shared Habits Over Rigid Processes

We operate more like a jazz ensemble than an orchestra. Success comes from a shared understanding of principles, mutual trust, and real-time adaptation, not from a rigid playbook. Our AIOS provides the shared context that enables this fluid, high-trust collaboration.

The Partners Program: Alignment Through Ownership

We believe that exceptional talent driving meaningful impact deserves exceptional rewards. We have designed a unique compensation model that creates true alignment between individual and company success.

• Partners, Not Employees: Our goal is to hire individuals with founder potential and provide them a platform to be rewarded like founders. HQ team members are hired with the expectation they will become Partners.
• Profit-Sharing Bonus (PSB) System: The cornerstone of our model is a monthly cash bonus calculated as a percentage of the company's revenue growth. This provides immediate, tangible rewards for impact, unlike relying solely on illiquid equity.
• Two-Tiered Structure: The PSB features a two-tiered system that rewards both near-term and long-term impact, with a higher percentage on the first portion of growth and a secondary percentage on all growth thereafter.
• Merit-Based Advancement: Advancement through our 10 Partner levels is based purely on demonstrated impact, ownership, and cultural alignment—not on tenure. Top performers have the potential to earn from several hundred thousand to over a million dollars in annual cash compensation.

Our Team and Organizational Structure

Leadership

Our leadership team is a collective force, bringing together deep expertise from the world’s most innovative technology companies and high-growth startups. The team’s background includes scaling products and companies at places like Yahoo, LinkedIn, Google, GoDaddy, and Canva, and successfully navigating multi-billion dollar IPOs and strategic acquisitions. This blend of enterprise-scale experience and startup agility gives us a unique perspective on building enduring value.

• Michael Quoc - Founder & CEO: The visionary behind Demand.io, Michael was formerly the Head of Product Innovation at Yahoo, where he led pioneering social platforms like Yahoo Live. He holds multiple patents in social networking and e-commerce and is a recognized thought leader in the AI commerce space.
• Brian Stanback - Chief Architect: The architect of our scalable and robust technology platforms, Brian has been with Demand.io since 2013. He runs all platform, applications, and SimplyCodes engineering, ensuring our systems perform at an elite level.
• Brian Li - VP of Revenue & Strategy: Brian drives our strategic growth and monetization initiatives. His impressive track record includes serving as VP of Finance and Business Operations at Braintrust and VP of Business Operations at both Dave (which he helped lead to a $4.0B IPO) and Mezi (acquired by Amex for $120M). He honed his M&A and strategy skills at LinkedIn and Accenture.
• Elena Madrigal - VP of Product Marketing: Elena leads our product marketing, brand positioning, and go-to-market strategy. She brings extensive experience from leading product marketing teams at Amaze, GoDaddy, and Canva, and has a proven ability to launch and scale AI-powered features to drive massive user adoption.

Organizational Philosophy

We are intentionally lean and agile. Our structure is designed for high-impact innovation.

• Elite HQ Team: We maintain a small, elite HQ team of 30-50 individuals focused on strategic and high-leverage initiatives.
• Global Extended Team: This core team is supported by a global team of specialized remote professionals who execute specific operational functions.
• L1-L10 Framework: Our 10-level framework provides parallel tracks for individual contributors and managers, allowing for deep, "T-shaped" growth in one's craft without being forced into management.

Long-Term Vision and Impact

We are charting a unique path to scale, focused on efficiency, profitability, and profound market impact.

• An Efficient Path to a Billion-Dollar Valuation: Our goal is to achieve a valuation well north of $1 billion with a lean HQ team of under 50 people. Our current valuation is over $100M. This is possible because our business model and AI-driven platforms are designed to scale revenue independent of headcount.
• Wealth Creation for Our Team: We are building a company where every core team member can achieve significant personal wealth. A key strategic outcome is to generate our first 10 HQ team millionaires, validating the power of our Partners Program.
• Pioneering New Commerce Models: Our long-term technology focus includes pioneering programmable digital offers and community co-ownership models through blockchain and utility tokens.

If you are a builder who thinks in systems, a deep generalist who thrives on cross-domain challenges, and an innovator who wants to take extreme ownership in a high-trust environment, you may have found your place. We invite you to join us in restoring humanity to the heart of commerce.