[Top Tech & Agency Series] Rethinking Digital Advertising With Lucas Béland of Goloot

Lucas Béland is the Founder and CEO of Goloot, a fast-growing ad network startup. Under his direction, Goloot has raised close to $8 million in venture capital and grown its team to nearly 20 industry veterans. The company’s innovative technology is changing digital advertising by offering gamified, user-friendly ad experiences on over 50 premium content sites. Lucas is a 22-year-old Canadian entrepreneur who began his journey as a college student disillusioned with traditional advertising methods. He has since pioneered a dual-market marketplace connecting publishers with top brands like Foot Locker and Microsoft.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [4:21] Lucas Béland discusses how Goloot is reimagining the ad experience to reward user behavior
• [7:55] The strategic decision to prioritize publishers in building a dual marketplace
• [11:37] How Goloot’s tailor-made ad units are designed to mesh seamlessly with content
• [16:54] How Goloot originated with a focus on the gaming industry before pivoting to content publishers
• [20:44] The evolution of Goloot’s services
• [24:39] Lucas explains how Goloot engages with all sizes of agencies to drive performance-based results for advertisers
• [33:23] The invaluable role of industry events in growing a business network
• [38:51] Lucas’ personal fundraising experience leveraging advisor relationships

In this episode…

The digital advertising world is saturated with banners, pop-ups, and other intrusive ads that many users have learned to ignore. But what if there was a way to engage users differently, in a manner that rewards their activity on the web, enhancing their experience rather than disrupting it?

Successful entrepreneur Lucas Béland delves into his journey from a college student disdainful of advertising to the pioneering founder of Goloot.io. He describes how the startup connects publishers and brands, offering a gamified ad experience that rewards users’ web activity with exclusive e-commerce offers. His approach involves integrating ad units with content sites in a non-disruptive manner, ensuring organic engagement for users and higher conversion rates for advertisers like Foot Locker and Uber. Lucas also sheds light on Goloot’s initial focus on the gaming industry and the strategic pivot to partnering with content publishers amidst evolving market dynamics.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Lucas Béland, Founder and CEO of Goloot, about revolutionizing the digital advertising space. Lucas discusses how Goloot is reimagining the ad experience to reward user behavior, how its tailor-made ad units mesh seamlessly with content, and the evolution of its services.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Lucas Béland on LinkedIn
• Goloot

Special Mention(s):

• CJU24 Home

Related episode(s):

• “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Israel Leader Series] Engineering the Autonomous Revolution with Rabbi Mois Navon of Mobileye” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “I wanted to reimagine the advertising industry.” 
• “This gamified ad unit is more interesting and far more likely to get you to interact and convert.”
• “We increase engagement by 1600% compared to standard banners, and increase conversion for advertisers by about 900% compared to standard display.”
• “It’s a no-brainer to keep spending. We were so aggressive in the beginning because we were venture-backed as well.”
• “We’ll guarantee a return on ad spend to you.”

Action Steps:

1. Embrace innovation in a stagnant field: Challenging the norm can lead to impactful, positive change for users and businesses.
2. Prioritize relationships and networking: Networking can be the doorway to partnerships, advisors, and investors.
3. Diversify revenue streams for stability: Goloot’s shift to content publishers showcases the importance of adaptability in ensuring sustainable business growth.
4. Define success metrics for your product: Knowing key performance indicators and being willing to guarantee outcomes can attract and retain clients.
5. Learn from mentors and industry veterans: Seeking advice and mentorship can accelerate learning and help navigate the complexities of scaling a business.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today’s no different. I have Lucas from goloot.io and Lucas before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. Since this is Goloot is a tech company, really, it’s an ad network. Some interesting tech companies that I’ve had on include Pipedrive. Pipedrive was really interesting. When I interviewed them, Lucas, they had 10,000 customers. I think now they have over 100,000 so he talked about the journey. It was really a crazy, amazing journey of pipe drive. Also Zapier, the co-founder of Zapier Wade Foster again, talks about building. Now, I don’t know. Back then, it was maybe a household name in tech companies, but now it’s even bigger. So that was an interesting journey as well.

Another one was Muis Navon of Mobileye, Mobileye journey, they got acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion but what stuck out to me and Lucas kind of what we’re talking about. It wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows, right? And so he talked about the sacrifices they had to make along the way to get to that point, because it wasn’t always clear they were going to have a huge exit. It was tough. It’s a lot of ups and downs. So check out the Mobileye one too. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast.

We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So Lucas, we kind of call ourselves the magic owls that run in the background and make it look easy for the host, so they can create amazing content and amazing relationships, and most importantly, run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you definitely should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce today Lucas Béland. And he’s a 22 year old Canadian founder. He’s leading a fast growing startup, Goloot. You can check them out at goloot.io. They’re an ad network on a mission to reimagine digital advertising for the web, and in less than three years, Goloot has raised close to $8 million in venture capital. He’s assembled a team of nearly 20 industry veterans, and its technology is now available on close to or more than 50 premium content sites, like L Magazine, Benzinga and many more. Also, it’s really tough, Lucas, what you do. It’s like a dual market. Marketplace is dual sided.

So you need to get these content sites, you also need to get customers, and so some of the customers include Foot Locker, Subaru, Microsoft, Uber and many more. And as I mentioned, Goloot is an ad tech company that helps mobile and web publishers diversify the revenue stream. So if you picture these ads, we’re used to interruptive banners and pop ups, which can be annoying sometimes, I guess. Goloot actually provides a gamified and seamless ad experience that actually rewards the user engagement with curated e-commerce offers. So, Lucas, thanks for joining me.

Lucas Béland  4:00 

Well, thank you for having me. Jeremy, it’s a pleasure.

Jeremy Weisz  4:02 

So just walk through a little bit of Goloot and what you do and is you do that. I’m going to share my screen, so if people are listening to the audio, there is a video component to this, and we’re going to poke around to see what they do. So Lucas, tell us more about what you do.

Lucas Béland  4:21 

I’m happy to do so. Thank you for this great introduction. Thank you for pointing out to other episodes as well. For sure, drop in and listen on those amazing founder stories. They’re all more inspirational and super interesting. So in terms of Goloot, as you said, a challenging business, but I don’t know any business that isn’t at this stage, we operate an ad network, meaning that we connect, as you said, now as well, about 50 or so premium content publishers, and it’s growing by the day. We on board, on average, two content partners per month. So about 50 content partners to a demand side. So a network of advertisers who right now we have about 150 global client relationships by most of our businesses in Canada and in the US.

And what sets us apart from traditional advertising networks and platforms, so the entire programmatic industry is, of course, those direct relationships that we foster between publishers and brands. So no programmatic bidding process. It’s really more of a direct network. But also these ad units and these ad products that we like to consider are user friendly and user first in their mindset. I started the company about three years ago, and I’m one of the potentially only founders that walked into their industry by hating their industry. I did not like advertising. I did not like banners and pop ups. I knew nothing about ads. I mean, I was a 19-year-old college student.

You don’t learn anything about advertising in college, but I knew that as a consumer, there was a better way to advertise to users than what was publicly available in the market. And I’m of course, talking about banners and pop ups and all these IB standard ad units that we’ve become so accustomed to that we’ve learned to hate in this sort of toxic relationship we’ve nurtured over the last 20 years as consumers, we’ve learned to hate, we’ve learned to ignore, and I wanted to reimagine that. So what the Goloot ad network does is when we partner up with the content site. We don’t offer them these banners and these pop ups. We offer them these gamified ad units that will reward the traffic for different behaviors on the site. And so if you think of a behavior in content it’s obviously reading an article. It’s creating an account on a content site. It’s subscribing to their news setter. It’s maybe visiting the website two or three days in a row.

So we’re rewarding these behaviors that are super high in engagement, super high in attention, and all these other metrics that are positive for advertisers and when again, users complete the behavior, we come in with our reward, which is traditionally an e-commerce offer. An e-commerce offer means something that we’ve negotiated with a brand like a site wide discount, a contest, a gift card of some sort, a two for one on your purchase, the gift with purchase. Again, we’ve seen so many different offers coming from our advertisers that are presented to the audience in the form of a reward. And as you can imagine, just listening to that story being rewarded by a brand like Foot Locker is far more interesting and far more likely to get you to interact and convert than introducing Footlocker through a banner or a pop up that can be interruptive most of the time will be ignored, provides little to no value to you as a user and also doesn’t make any sense holistically in the content experience.

So that’s what we do as a company, and we are looking to scale that, of course, in the content space. But although also looking at other horizons, think gaming, fitness, productivity, there’s so many other ways we can expand our business, and we’re super excited for that future that we’re building at Goloot. So Jeremy, in a nutshell, that is our small business growing fast.

Jeremy Weisz  4:21 

Yeah. So there’s so much to unpack there, Lucas is one. I mean, we’ll get to you’re 18, you start this, okay, and you raise, at this point, $8 million okay? It’s tremendous for anyone, let alone so I want to know where the idea came from. But before we get to that, it’s really tough a marketplace, because you have to get both the publishers and advertisers. So I want to start with one of them. But, like, where do you start? What’s the ramp up here to you, like, okay, we need to deploy a team on publishers and advertisers. You’re like, we need to get publishers first, because how do you start with this dual-sided marketplace?

Lucas Béland  7:55 

It’s a really good question, and I think it’s the inherent problem of a lot of marketplaces and network dynamics, if you think Uber, Airbnb, even Amazon, this managing supply and demand every day. There’s an incredible book by Andrew Chen that refers to the cold start problem of any network and marketplace, right? And so this cold start problem is the biggest, biggest issue for a marketplace is the initial days of trying to connect the men and supply. But once you achieve that velocity in that scale, the marketplace sort of solve its own equation, and it becomes self-sufficient. But early, early on, at Goloot, we approached publishers who told us, Hey, we would love to work with you. This is a great idea, but you don’t have any advertisers like you have no brands, no budget to spend on our platform. And then the flip side, we went to see brands, and we figured they would tell us, Lucas, you have no publishers, no audiences for me to advertise to, and you have a cold start problem there.

And so, I would say maybe 50% of that is luck and 50% of that is just pure hustle and a bit of talent. We figured that the best approach in any marketplace, and especially in our business, which really creates value, is supply. Everybody has a relationship with brands. Everybody has a relationship with L’Oreal in some capacity, because L’Oreal is always looking to acquire customers. What is truly a gold mine from a value standpoint, is audiences that are looking to buy products. So we prioritize publishers first, knowing that if as soon as we had let alone one publisher on the network, we would find demand side partners who would want to advertise to that audience. So we went the publisher road first, and it was primarily human beings making healthy connections in our local community.

I had a connection that got me to a connection that got me to connection. We could talk about that in a minute as well. And eventually, I sat down in front of this guy called Pierce Born, who used to be the head of sales for a very large media publisher in Canada called Narsity Media Group. Narsity has three major domains in the Canadian market, reaching about 20 million unique a month. The platform is growing and scaling, and Pierce was their head of sales on his way out. He’s been working there for about five or six years. And so Pierce joined my early stage venture as my head of sales and my CMO, and he’s been leading the sales effort on both sides of the marketplace ever since.

And so, of course, with Pierce, we onboard in Narsity first, and with Narsity, we went to get advertisers, and then we had a lock velocity. And from there, the network scaled. And so it came down to human beings. It came down to the local Montreal community supporting each other and understanding that innovation needs, sometimes a bit of a push in the back to get on its two feet. So that’s my story, Jeremy.

Jeremy Weisz  11:20 

So how do you attract Pierce? You’re 18, right? And he’s working for a huge publishing company with multimedia sites. And you come to him.

Lucas Béland  11:37 

I come down with the vision. I came down with an ambition. And I think what peers liked about the journey and the story was this idea that I was sort of giving him the opportunity. And this is, I guess, for a lot of our employees, right, the opportunity to build their own future. There’s something so incredibly thrilling and exciting in the startup journey to think that you can, if you think you have an impact in a corporate job, the startup amplifies that impact by 100,000x so you are your own boss, and I came in with a very hands off leadership approach, where I was like, hey, I need you because you’re a smart guy.

You’re much better than I am at your job, and together, we are going to do something amazing. And there’s a potential here to build a billion dollar plus company that is going to redefine advertising for the open web. And what I always like to connect on with any individual, whether it’s investors or my employees or my talent, whatever, is on the problem that we’re trying to fix. And I think peers as a publisher felt that the advertising industry was failing its publishers by providing them with terrible ad products that were very disruptive and interrupted from a content standpoint, they were a big turning point for audiences, and we were also navigating this weird context from a legislative standpoint, where the US and Canada were cracking down on ads, cracking down on privacy, and programmatic was starting to fall apart, and Safari was taking out cookies.

It was just this storm of a problem that I connected with Pierce on and I told him, look, I think we have an opportunity together to change that, and nothing motivates talent in human beings more than solving a problem. So that’s how we started. And then, of course, I did not want to jeopardize his lifestyle, so we raised money. With that money, I was able to pay him a reasonable salary. I don’t think you can get incredible talent without proper resources as a business, and I didn’t want to get Pierce and his family and whatnot to jump in my venture knowing that he could risk his livelihood. That wasn’t something that I was willing to live with as an entrepreneur. So we raised money early on, which was a whole different story as well, and Pierce was able to get a fair compensation, and together, we scaled, and we’ve been working together for three years.

And this applies to our CTO, this applies to our CPO, to our guys and girls and people that have made the sacrifice of joining an early stage venture and now scaling it into a multi-million dollar company. So, yeah.

Jeremy Weisz  14:02 

We’ll go back Lucas to the fundraising part, because that’s a whole another beast and animal, that’s a full time job in itself, fundraising. So, I know you say kind of a quick aside, yeah, we raise money, but like, and that’s how we attracted it, one of the things that attractive, but that’s not easy to do. And also, we’re talking, put in perspective, you’re 18, okay, anyone listening? I’m thinking myself here, what was I doing when I was 18? We don’t want to know, yeah. I mean, I was a good kid, but, like, you know, sports school, whatever, not like this. So this is really impressive, but let’s go to the publisher side for a second, okay? And we’ll take a look at that so you get so Pierce. Again. It goes back to relationships, right? And people have relationships, and, you know, you kind of shortcut things when some. Has long standing relationships.

They’ve been in the industry a long time, which is smart, but then you have to get more publishers, right? So a little bit of social proof, credibility is good, but it doesn’t always get you in like these relationships. So I’d love to hear and we’ll take a look at right here. We’re looking at Benzinga. We also have another one, Sudbury. What were some of the objections you got, or the company got when you approach, let’s say Benzinga, or you mentioned L. What are some of the objections you get? Because, I’m sure you’re like, listen, we can put these, I don’t know what your pitch is, but, like, we have these brands, what are some of the reasons why people say they’re not sure at first, I don’t know if you want to take L or Benzinga or what were they?

Lucas Béland  15:48 

It’s a really good posing. It’s a really good question. I think what you need to know as well is my business originated in the gaming space, and we wanted to bring those ads to games companies first and foremost, right? So if you think gamification, if you think reward driven advertising or incentive driven advertising, games companies are the first thing that comes to mind, more specifically, mobile games, right? So 70 plus percent of mobile games rely exclusively on ads to monetize their games, and 91% of the apps on the Apple Store are free, and all that stuff like the metrics were there to say, there’s a huge market, and we can disrupt it with this new ad unit. And we got pushback from these original kinds of publishers, right? So publishers, for me, holistically, means supply, and I don’t care if they’re games or content or fitness apps, they all have audiences they’re looking to monetize.

Jeremy Weisz  16:42 

So your original kind of thesis was, we’re going to approach these companies and more in the gaming space. And so it sounds like you somewhat pivoted.

Lucas Béland  16:54  

Correct, and this is where you said, getting pushback from publishers, you’ll see the kind of pushback that we got was like, if you want to work with the games company today, there are millions of people that are looking to get their ads in front of their audiences. Again, the crown jewel of this industry is supply. What really stands out across all the conversations that we have is everybody has a relationship with, for example, L’Oreal, and anybody can get ad budgets from L’Oreal, what L’Oreal is truly looking for its audiences. And so these publishers were sort of wall gardening their audiences and saying, hey, if you want to get your ads on my platform, although you’re cute and these ads are cool, much better than what we’re used to, you need to spend 100,000 a month plus on our platform, which is an unimaginable amount of money for an emerging business.

So we thought, okay, games company might not be the right fit. And I went to this incredible mentor and veteran, which also comes back down to relationships, a guy called Mitch Garber in Montreal, very successful entrepreneur. You might know of him. And Mitch coached me and taught me to like, hey, I’m not sure games company is the right fit for this. You should be looking at publishers that really, really, really need to diversify their revenue stream, and this is where content came to mind. We thought, okay, just take a look at the public earning calls of BuzzFeed and all these companies, it’s clear to everybody that they really need help. And so we pitched these publishers, these new ad units, and they were like, look, whatever you have that gives me incrementally an additional dollar of revenue, we’ll take it. So this is when we knew we had more of a product market fit on the supply side. And we thought to ourselves, once we’re big in the content space and we own a large share of the market, we’ll go back to games company with bigger buying power, and they’ll probably call us.

That was sort of the arrogance that we had. We’ll let them call us, and we’ll get back to it. So we found publishers that were in dire need for new monetization strategies, and there wasn’t a lot of pushback. I think some of the pushback that we got early on, maybe for content, was like, is it going to crash my website. How does it compete against other banners? Do I have to replace this your product with Google? So we built a product and a framework around the existing tech stack. We brought in industry veterans who understood content sites to make this as easy and as seamless, to integrate where, literally, we can get you set up in two weeks, even if you’re a large publisher like Benzinga, and then publishers start seeing real incrementality in revenue, and we pride ourselves as well now in bringing them premium advertisers, right? We have budgets from Subaru, we have budgets from Bank of Montreal, we have budgets from Pool Mine, all these really large advertisers that the publishers really want to work with.

And so that makes sense at scale. It’s harder to start off, right? I talked about the cold start problem that Andrew Chen from Sequoia talks about, a 16 Z story, talks a lot about it was difficult in the beginning, but now, of course, it’s growing fast as a value prop. Does that make sense to Jeremy?

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