Content, cash + consumers: how LinkSmart leads publishers to all of the above

by Carlin Sack
February 5, 2014

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How does the CEO of a popular women’s lifestyle publication based in New York end up as the founder of a Boulder-based tech startup? Ask Pete Sheinbaum. When thinking of Boulder-based audience development platform LinkSmart, no one would necessarily think the company has anything to do with the popular women’s lifestyle site DailyCandy. Well, for one, Pete Sheinbaum served as CEO of both companies throughout his career. But there is one other thing these two businesses have in common: both live by the mantra that content is king.

Back when Sheinbaum was at New York-based DailyCandy from 2000 to 2009, when the company had around four million readers every day “voraciously devouring” the content of its daily emails.

“But they were reading it and disappearing,” Sheinbaum said. “Our website wasn’t constructed very well, it was very siloed with lots of dead ends.”

To Sheinbaum, knowingly allowing users to become unengaged because of dead ends was like leaving money on the table, “and as a CEO of the company, leaving money on the table wasn’t really something I was fond of,” Sheinbaum said. Then when DailyCandy’s editorial team later grew to over 30 writers, it was even more difficult to manage links and keep them relevant. Additionally, readers were still reading thousands of articles from DailyCandy’s earliest years but those articles contained no links at all.

These are exactly the problems Sheinbaum’s current company, LinkSmart, the provider of in-content audience development solutions, solves. After spending much of his final year at DailyCandy, Sheinbaum set up shop in Techstars Boulder (thanks to an invitation from David Cohen), and launched LinkSmart in October 2009. Today, LinkSmart provides publishers like AOL, Gawker and Moviefone a way to increase reader engagement by sending them to exactly the right places.

“You can send tens or hundreds of thousands of people where you want them through a dashboard, just like you are managing throttles and joysticks on your website,” Sheinbaum said. “No one can do this at scale without a service like LinkSmart.”

LinkSmart tells publishers how many links to put in articles, where links should go, where a site’s most popular, money-making sections are and how to satisfy partnerships (just to name a few of the platform’s abilities).

But the aspect of LinkSmart that is at the forefront of Sheinbaum’s mind right now is LinkSmart Marketplace, which just came out of beta at the end of 2013. LinkSmart Marketplace allows publishers to develop their audiences and make more money while doing so - by simply sharing their audiences in real-time with other publishers. So far, this has been a hit because, as Sheinbaum knows from his days at DailyCandy, “publishers have an insatiable appetite for more,” he said.

The addition of LinkSmart Marketplace is another feature that is pushing LinkSmart to hold its own as an industry leader today. Sheinbaum said so much of this growth and success are due to his long-time, reciprocal relationship with the Colorado tech community. Early on, he received advice and funding from Foundry Group, in addition to support from Techstars.

And Sheinbaum has been giving back ever since: he has mentored at Techstars since 2007, and has invested in companies such as BrightNest (which was acquired by Angie’s List) and Techstars alum Shopventory.

“While I had my own companies, it was nice to go back to something that was very early,” Sheinbaum said. “It was very pure and raw versus running a 65 to 70-person company out of New York. The problems that they had, I had eight or 10 years before.”

Even as Sheinbaum keeps his own 20-person LinkSmart team busy setting the pace for the industry with Marketplace, he is always keeping tabs on other teams, too (just take a look at his AngelList activity for proof!). Because, for Sheinbaum, it’s all about creating positive activity in the Colorado tech community: “You get back out of it as much as you give into it.”

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