A year and a half after he set out to revolutionize the crowd-buying model, Emmanuel Elmajian is now adjusting the focus of his company Spinzo in a bid to ramp up its sales volume.

Elmajian formed the Saint John company in late 2011 in a bid to bring more price flexibility and “virality” (the ability of customers to share a promotion so it can go viral) into the crowd-buying model.

Popularized by companies like Groupon, crowd-buying lets merchants offer deep discounts on their products to anyone who buys an online coupon. The model is successful — Groupon is now worth $3.5 billion — but Elmajian believes it can be improved.

 “We’re not trying to be like the traditional group buying company,” Elmajian said Friday during an interview from Toronto. “We want to borrow on the concept but trend it in a different direction.”

Spinzo’s concept is different because the price of the product being promoted declines as more people sign up. Spinzo lets a company offer a deal on its products or services, then drops the price as more and more people sign up for the deal.

With the prospect of the price dropping, customers are motivated to spread the word among their friends and get more people to sign up.

In late 2011 and early 2012, Spinzo raised more than $600,000 in equity financing, including contributions of $400,000 from GrowthWorks Atlantic Venture Fund Ltd. and $100,000 from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation. That financed the launch of the service in late October, focusing on the more vibrant commercial market in Toronto.

Elmajian said merchants have responded well to the idea because it offers them more control over the pricing model. And feedback from consumers shows they find it fun buying something using Spinzo and often check back to see if the price drops.

But he admitted the promotions have only, so far, been taken up by dozens of consumers, rather than the hundreds or thousands needed to produce profitable campaigns. So he’s changing his model — slightly.

 “It really comes down to partnerships,” he said. “We’d like to partner with some brands that have a big enough mouthpiece to spread the word.”

What Spinzo is now working on is striking partnerships with major, well-known brands, like sports teams or airlines, that already have a customer base. The brand could use the Spinzo platform and pricing model to conduct its own its promotion from its own website. The Spinzo brand name may not even be used in the promotion.

 “Our success may not come from building a million-strong customer base, but from finding partners who can benefit from our pricing model,” he said.

Elmajian, who learned entrepreneurship in his parents’ restaurants in Saint John, N.B., and honed it as a McKinsey & Co. executive in New York, expects to launch these sorts of partnerships in the next few months.

He also hopes to launch a next phase of fundraising in one or two months. He declined to name a target for the round, but did say it would be larger than the last time.