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Startup Snapshots
Jennifer Dulski '93, MBA '99: The Dealmap
Easy access to daily deals
It’s great to find a
good deal. But it can
take hours of looking
through coupon and
daily deal websites, plus
local coupon books and
newspapers, before you
find something promising
in your neighborhood.
The Dealmap, a startup
cofounded by Jennifer
Dulski and recently
acquired by Google, cuts
through this clutter and
saves time by enabling you to
find local deals from hundreds of sources all in one place.
Dulski started the business in early 2008 as Center’d, a search
and discovery site that used sentiment analysis to surface and
summarize detailed insights about local businesses based on what
consumers said about them online. But she and her management team changed direction, and the company name, in response to
market demand. “The idea for the Dealmap came from years of
doing research about what consumers wanted,” says Dulski: an
easier way to find good deals nearby. The Dealmap included offers
from sources including national brands, daily deal websites, local
businesses and consumers, and made them available to consumers
on its website, mobile apps, and daily emails.
Launching the company just before the global economy crashed
made it tough to raise money. “However, we knew that if we could
survive the downturn, we had a good chance of success,” says
Dulski. The company survived, raised money in 2009, and was able
to capitalize on the increasing use of GPS-enabled mobile devices
and the rise of local daily deal companies.
The Dealmap’s valuable content and technology became so appealing
to large publishers that Dulski’s team built DealExchange, a
suite of tools that allows publishers and developers to easily integrate
local deals into their products and applications. Within six months
of launching DealExchange, they powered over 40 major publishers,
including Microsoft and Superpages. In August 2011, Google
acquired the Dealmap and integrated it into Google Offers. “The
acquisition by Google has allowed our product to reach many more
people,” says Dulski.
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