As Groupon headed out on the road show for its public offering, executives faced a tough sell. Fielding questions about the company’s management, accounting and model, Andrew Mason, the founder and chief executive, and others had to convince investors that the daily deals site was not this generation’s equivalent of Pets.com, the online retailer that imploded after the last dot-com boom.

In mid-October at the St. Regis in New York, the usually irreverent Mr. Mason spoke somberly in business school parlance about gross profits, return on investment and other measures of the company’s prospects. Exchanging his usual uniform of jeans and T-shirts for a pressed suit and neat haircut, the chief executive told a packed room of 300 investors that “with a market measured not in billions but trillions of dollars, we’re just getting started.”

His pitch worked.

On Thursday morning, whispers of zealous demand snaked through Wall Street. As investors clamored for shares, Groupon, at the end of the day, priced its initial public offering at $20, above the expected range of $16 to $18. The stock sale values the company at $12.65 billion.

The demand, in part, is driven by a lack of supply. The current owners are holding on to their stakes, and Groupon is initially selling just 35 million shares, roughly 5 percent of its total, according to two people with knowledge of the offering.

While it’s an exceptionally small pot, it’s not a novel template. Groupon is following the lead of several Internet companies this year, which have favored small offerings to help buttress their stock prices.

LinkedIn, which went public in May, initially sold less than 10 percent of its total stock, announcing plans on Thursday to sell additional shares. By comparison, technology companies in the United States have typically offered about a third of pool, according to Thomson Reuters.

Christopher Brainard, the head of Brainard Equities, was waiting to hear from bankers whether the family office got a piece of the I.P.O., which he is looking to buy for the long term. “The negative press has been overdone,” he said “We think there’s a lot of demand.”

The next test for Groupon comes on Friday, when the company is set to start trading on the Nasdaq market. If shares of the technology company experience a significant pop on the first day, it could set the stage for another strong wave of Internet-related I.P.O.’s like Zynga and Facebook, both of which are expected to go public in the next 12 months. Should they fizzle, it could dampen enthusiasm for the broad sector.

David Menlow, the president of the research firm IPOfinancial.com, said that the small size of the offering and high interest in the company was likely to provide a big bump in Groupon’s stock price on Friday.

“I think we’re going to see prices on this that, on a percentage basis, will be more than the market has seen in many years,” he said, adding that “the Internet bubble is being slightly reinflated.”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting

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