Bysellads

Todd Garland was a front-end developer in 2007-2008 running hobby blogs focused on CSS and web development. Advertisers would reach out wanting to place ads on his sites, and he'd make $100 here or there—eventually totaling $2,000-3,000 per month. But managing these relationships felt absurd: "chasing advertisers down for like $100 here, $100 there, emailing them every month to see if they wanted to renew, coordinating payment, sending the ad assets back and forth." He realized the core problem wasn't the money; it was the friction. He decided to build "a shopping cart that would allow you to purchase advertising on websites without having to talk to the publisher."

Todd spent about a year building Bysellads using Adobe Dreamweaver with an Interact PHP framework plugin—"probably one of the worst built applications in the history of the web," he admits. He used a traditional LAMP stack (PHP, MySQL) and did everything manually: no stats dashboard, no automated withdrawals, no cancellations. Publishers had to email him to withdraw money; advertisers had to email to cancel ads. "Both of those things sound completely ridiculous right now, but back then, for whatever reason that worked out really well, because that forced these people to interact with me."

Before launch, Todd validated the idea by running a landing page for about a year. He bought ads on publisher sites to drive traffic to his signup form, spending roughly $700-800 over eight months to collect emails. By the time he launched, he had gained enough confidence that the idea had legs beyond his own websites.

Todd didn't use his email list. Instead, he bootstrapped both sides of the marketplace by leveraging 8-10 advertisers he'd already worked with on his own sites. He then found other publishers where those advertisers were spending money and convinced both parties to use Bysellads. "When they'd say no, I'd try to convince their advertiser to use buy sell ads to help kind of leverage them into buy sell ads." Once he got both sides on the platform, he "worked my butt off to make sure that they're incredibly happy."

The emotional risk was real: "It's almost like it takes a piece of you to have the courage to actually pull the trigger and launch a business. Everybody is human. You don't want to put your heart and soul into something and then show it to the world and have it rejected." But Todd understood that customers had real problems they needed solved, and they were willing to take the risk of trusting him with their money.

Todd credits much of his approach to what he learned working at HubSpot for two years before launching Bysellads nights and weekends. There, he absorbed lessons about inbound marketing—pulling customers in with authentic value rather than pushing ads. He brought that philosophy to Bysellads: focus on quality publishers and quality advertisers, and avoid the "black hole that is online advertising today."

He was tempted by venture capital early on: "A gentleman took me around to a lot of venture capital companies around Boston and it just didn't feel right to me." Instead, Todd chose a "lemonade stand" approach—slow and steady. This meant ruthlessly prioritizing what mattered: customer value. He avoided building homegrown solutions for things that weren't core, like a support system he once started building just because he wanted to.

On competition, Todd initially worried but learned the lesson: "The second you start following them is the second you've lost." He focused relentlessly on his customers, not his competitors. When competitors copied features, he eventually saw it as "a sign of respect. We've built something here folks. People want to be like us."

By the time of this interview (2017), Bysellads had grown to 32 employees, with five or six open positions and plans to exceed 50 before year-end. Revenue figures weren't disclosed in the interview. Todd remained founder-driven: he hadn't committed code in 18 months (which upset him), but he was deeply involved in culture and vision.

His motivation stayed consistent: financial security, genuine love of building software, and creating a company where people could work their entire careers. He rejected the Silicon Valley obsession with world-changing missions, writing: "Let's be honest, the vast majority of people, you're not changing the world. It's far more rewarding to figure out how to improve the life of the person next to you." That philosophy shaped everything from customer relationships to a new code of conduct as the company scaled.