You might be thinking of Groupon, from memory their origin story involves emulating software functionality with spreadsheets/email lists/much manual grunt work.
Groupon began as a collective action site called ThePoint - think love child of Kickstarter and Change.org. It was built out and functional but not getting traction. They shifted to using that platform to market deals at local businesses and it took off from there. It was code from the start. However, as it grew there were thousands of sales and editorial employees turning customer contacts into sales campaigns, but that's not really something that code could replace.