commission-based Startups

Todd Garland founded Bysellads in 2008 after experiencing the pain of manually managing ad placements on his own hobby blogs. He spent about a year building a simple marketplace using PHP and MySQL that connected publishers with advertisers, eliminating the need for direct coordination. By bootstrapping the advertiser side with his existing relationships and manually emailing with customers to gather feedback, he grew the company to 32 employees over time while maintaining a slow-and-steady, values-driven approach rather than chasing venture capital.

ShareASale is a performance marketing network founded in 2000 by developer Brian Littleton that connects retailers with publishers (bloggers, podcasters, website owners) for affiliate marketing. The company bootstrapped to profitability from day one, grew to over 5,200 retailers and over a million publisher accounts by 2017, generating approximately $14M in annual revenue with ~$5.8M EBITDA before being acquired by Awin (formerly Affiliate Window/Zanox) in January 2017.