Financing a Second Startup on Cash Flow of Your First

When daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial started to heat up, Kiha Lee took notice. Capitalizing on the success of his online community for bargain shoppers, dealspl.us, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur created DealPulp.com, a startup that offers online shoppers daily deals from national merchants, many of them lesser known and seeking exposure to a wide new audience.
Since DealPulp.com's launch in January, close to 160,000 consumers have joined, snatching up bargains that have saved them nearly $700,000.

We talked with Lee about how he tapped into the success of his parent company to finance a new effort.

How did dealspl.us lead to DealPulp.com?
Dealspl.us is a web community where shoppers can find and share the best deals and coupons. We make money through affiliate relationships with retailers. A lot of merchants included on dealspl.us were telling us, "We'd love to be featured more prominently." But dealspl.us is a user-generated site, so it limited our ability to specifically promote certain merchants.

At the same time, there was all this buzz about daily deal sites. But so many of them were offering only local deals. Launching DealPulp.com seemed like a logical next step in helping online merchants who were getting left out of the local daily deal space. And it was an opportunity for us to better feature the merchants who'd been asking for more visibility on dealspl.us.