Fresh off the sale of their retail website HauteLook to department store giant Nordstrom, two of the downtown L.A. company’s co-founders have started another Internet venture.
Brett Markinson and Konstantin Glasmacher launched social shopping website TreatFeed last Tuesday.
The Century City company mixes social networking and online deals to reward customers when their friends make purchases.
People often make online shopping recommendations to their friends, said Scott Roback, TreatFeed’s senior vice president of business development. So TreatFeed pays people for spreading the word about online deals.
“We believe that people should be compensated for their word-of-mouth marketing,” he said.
It works like this: TreatFeed compiles online deals from around the web. You join the website and recruit friends into your network. When your friends recruit for their network, those new members default into your network, too. (That membership chain stops after four degrees.) If you or anyone in your network buys a deal, you get a commission from the purchase. The commission comes in the form of points that TreatFeed members can redeem for cash or use on future purchases.
TreatFeed makes money by taking a commission from purchases.
The 18-person company was incubated out of Markinson and Glasmacher’s venture firm, Lagovent Group, and has raised $5.4 million in funding.
Ticket Money
ScoreBig, a Hollywood online ticketing company, announced last week that it has raised $14 million in a funding round.
The financing, led by Menlo Park’s U.S. Venture Partners, brings the company’s total to $22.5 million since it was founded in 2009.
Adam Kanner, co-founder and chief executive of ScoreBig, said the funding will help the company continue to grow.
ScoreBig works with ticket companies, venues or teams to sell unsold seats for concerts or sports events at discounted prices. Visitors to the members-only website choose the event and general area of the seat, and then pick a price they’d be willing to spend on a ticket. ScoreBig then notifies the bidder if it accepts the sale based on its pricing algorithm.
Staff reporter Natalie Jarvey can be reached at [email protected] or at (323) 549-5225, ext. 230.
