Announcing the BuySellAds Fund

BuySellAds is a fourteen-year-old business on the internet. It feels like we have been around forever, and I guess we have (in internet years). That’s no small feat, and I am very proud of our team and what we have accomplished. We deliver real results for our partners and we’re still here because of it. Our team puts in the hard work: they monitor the campaigns, they maximize customer performance and happiness, and they write the code. We’re here because our early team members willed us to be here. We’re here because new team members continue to bring the passion and expertise needed to grow. I’m repeating myself when I say it, but we’re here because of them — our team.

We’ve worked with dozens of companies over the last 14 years from Series A to IPO and have evolved the marketing strategies required to meet their advancing needs as growing companies. We helped in the early days of New Relic, Atlassian, Wix, Shutterstock, Slack, and many many more on user acquisition programs to establish product market fit. Then we crushed their acquisition goals. It has been an honor to be a part of that journey and we want to take another step further.

This brings us to today.

Starting today, we will be operating an investment fund alongside our day-to-day operations at BuySellAds. The fund will be built and managed for the benefit of those who work here. It’s nothing super complicated; in fact, our investment approach is simple: we are investing in early stage and later stage companies that we believe in. Our goal is to build a diverse portfolio of investments that will reward our employees financially in both the short and long term.

But here’s where it gets interesting. We’re not investing in any company we find along the way. We are looking to invest directly in our customers and other companies that we see succeeding with their marketing campaigns and gaining product-market fit. We are looking for the next generation of companies who we expect will succeed through our ecosystem based on our experience so far.

We operate with commonsense at BSA and have applied this to our structure: the fund will be investing BSA profits, generally all BSA’ers are eligible to participate in investments once they have been here for 1 year, we have designed the structure to not have any up front tax consequences, and people will still hold onto the investments they participated in while here even after they leave the company.

Out of the gate, we’re proud to announce that we have invested in BlockFi alongside Valar in the latest investment round that you can read about here. We have also invested in Vinyl, a new fund focused on “how people buy stuff”, led by TJ Mahoney (where one of his investments is in our first customer way back in 2008, FreshBooks).

BuySellAds is an old fashioned, lemonade stand, get-shit-done, have fun doing it, live your life, generational business. Many team members have been here for over a decade. We’re a holdover from a bygone era where you just built profitable businesses and I’m really proud of what we’ve built. But, I will admit, the IPOs, the SPACs, and the big ticket M&A activity are hard to ignore. We are going to double down on what’s brought us this far, while now also leveraging our 14 years of experience, connections, and developed intuition to make some great bets — bets that will allow us to also play a bit of the fast game, while we continue to enjoy playing our game.

If you're looking for funding or are interested in learning more about the BSA fund, please email us at fund@buysellads.com.

Want to join the BuySellAds team? Check out our careers page.