On the TechTO stage ×3
Bryan Gold of #Paid presents Give Your Customers Magic Superpowers
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TechTO Raise of The Month: #paid
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Watch on YouTube ↗First seen on the TechTO stage in 2016. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Bryan ↗
In their words
Rather than 'which investor's gonna choose me' — which investor am I gonna choose? So I asked everybody here: how do you evaluate your investors? Do you have a criteria to evaluate which ones are a great fit for you?
Rather than throwing a big party, what we did was we announced it and said: now we have the ingredients, but now we need to make the meal. A fundraise for us was a means to an end.
What superpowers can you give your customers, in your marketing, in your landing page and all your ads? And how can you incorporate myths into your advertising to give your customers the best possible experience?
just because you're a travel company doesn't mean that you need to engage travel specific influencers — in fact we've seen up to three times the amount of engagements when travel companies engage non travel based influencers
Around the web ×2
Quick answers
What is Bryan Gold known for?
Co-founding #paid in 2013 with Adam Rivietz and running it as CEO. The Toronto platform matches brands with social-media creators and works with McDonald's, Sephora, Samsung and Disney. Gold told the TechTO stage in 2018 that #paid was profitable and cash-flow positive in 2017 before closing a $9M Series A led by ScaleUp Ventures that May.
What did Bryan Gold do before #paid?
He was a specialist at Apple. He and Adam Rivietz started #paid after noticing a friend who had built a large Instagram following had no straightforward way to reach marketers.
What did Bryan Gold speak about at TechTO?
Twice. In 2016 he used semiotics and Roland Barthes' 'Mythologies' to argue that advertising sells a myth and an experience rather than a product. In 2018 he shared lessons from raising #paid's $9M Series A: evaluating investors on vision, relationship and helpfulness, sending a deck ahead that pre-answered the two reasons VCs were passing, and treating the raise as a means to an end rather than a win.