John Amato was working as president at New York ad agency Show Media when Groupon and other daily-deals sites started to take off a couple of years ago. Amato’s small agency rang up about $1 million a month in expenses, he says, which included buying iPods and other incentives for top-performing employees, and placing frequent food orders with SeamlessWeb. Amato, who also co-founded Show Media, was the guy who signed all the checks. “I thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a service like Groupon for someone like me?” he recalls.
So Amato sold off his stake in Show Media in 2010, and today he’s launching MarketSharing, a business-to-business site offering discounts on food, products, and services. It works much like Groupon, but with a corporate twist: Office managers and others who are looking to slash their company’s expenses can sign up on MarketSharing’s site, and receive daily offers for discounts from local merchants ranging from 50 to 80 percent.
MarketSharing is currently operating in New York only, with plans to roll out five new markets by the end of the year. Possible cities include Los Angeles, Austin, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Atlanta, Amato says.
Some deals the site offers will be strictly business. For example, one of MarketSharing’s flagship deals is $500 for $1,000 worth of services from TeamWorx, a Sacramento-based company that runs teambuilding programs for companies in several cities. In New York, one of TeamWorx’s most popular programs is the Amazing Adventure Race, which challenges executives to work together to solve riddles or navigate new neighborhoods.
Food delivery will be a big part of MarketSharing’s offerings. The company is launching in New York with a deal from SeamlessWeb, and it has also signed on Dunkin’ Donuts to provide $100 worth of deliveries for $50. Amato is confident entrepreneurs will take advantage of such deals—and he points to his own recent experience as proof. He and several of his developers were in the office all weekend, until 3 a.m. on May 16, testing MarketSharing’s site before the launch. “We ordered food five times that weekend,” he says.
MarketSharing has about 50 deals in the pipeline—way more than Amato expected, he says. With companies like Dunkin’ Donuts already doing a lot of their own couponing, it wasn’t entirely clear whether the business-to-business
