The VentureFizz Podcast: Todd Garland - Founder of BuySellAds

For the 111th episode of our podcast, I interviewed Todd Garland, Founder of BuySellAds.

BuySellAds is an AdTech company that builds scalable revenue programs for companies with captive audiences. Todd has built the company by bootstrapping it from day one. There are no tricks to their business model. It is a marketplace that aims to find audiences who are passionate and match up advertisers who are interested in advertising their product or service to these audiences. The goal is to add value to the web with contextually relevant ads for consumers.

Here’s a fun fact about BuySellAds that you might not know. Remember the website Digg, the popular news sharing website from the early Web 2.0 era of user-generated content? The site was founded by Kevin Rose, who infamously appeared on the cover of BusinessWeek representing this new wave of Silicon Valley founders. Well, did you know that Digg was acquired last year buy BuySellAds? It’s true.

I find it fascinating that a Boston company owns this piece of internet history. At the beginning of our podcast, we get into lots of the details behind this acquisition. Although the site is not nearly as popular as it once was, I’m really curious to see what they do with it - stay tuned!

In this episode of our podcast, we cover lots of topics, like:

• Todd’s background growing up in Maine and his experience as an early employee at HubSpot.
• The origin story of BuySellAds. How it went from being a side project generating over a million dollars in revenue to becoming his full-time job, and the challenges of building the first versions of the product.
• How he built out the marketplace in terms of supply and demand.
• Why he decided to bootstrap his company over raising outside capital.
• Speculation on the future of AdTech.
• Advice for founders looking to acquire companies.
• Plus, a lot more.

We just published the July edition of Career Forward. It has over 120 of the hottest jobs across the Boston tech scene. There are positions listed across all levels of experience and all functional areas like sales, product management, software engineering, and more. Go to venturefizz.com/careerforward to start exploring.

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