Pictured: Linkby CEO Chris Wirasinha
Volition Press: Hello Chris! It is great to connect. To start, why don’t you begin by sharing Linkby’s founding story and your vision for the business.
Chris Wirasinha: Great to connect as well. So, Linkby is a performance PR platform. We help brands secure content and editorial placements across publishers, email newsletters, creators, and other platforms that are content-based. And we do it all on a cost-per-click basis, which makes it easy to measure and scalable for the brands that use the platform.
Linkby was founded in 2020. I started the business with our CRO Adrian and CTO Andrew to solve a problem that was very much inspired by my previous startup, which I took to a successful exit. The startup was called Pedestrian.tv and was essentially a sort of halfway point in Australia between a VICE and BuzzFeed.
Interestingly, while building the business, I realized that publications only really had two ways to make money – fixed fee deals, which felt better for us as a publisher, and then affiliate partnerships, which felt like a better deal for the brand. I always thought that there was a real opportunity if we could unlock the huge spend that was going to the “Metas” and “Googles” if we offered a middle ground that was a win for the publisher, but also a win for the brand. And that middle ground felt like the cost-per-click space. So, we set out to create this platform that would help facilitate those PR placements for brands, but to do it on a performance basis.
VP: How do you think about the future of the media space and where Linkby can be a leader within it?
CW: One area that I am currently obsessed with is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which I think we’re in this perfect position to really take a lead on. If you think about how large the broader SEO optimization market has become, it is something that is mission critical to every single brand and an area where they need to allocate resources.
Now, we’ve got this new world where more searches are happening in LLMs. People are jumping into ChatGPT to find out what running shoes they should be buying and what beauty products they should be using. All of that information has been scraped and grabbed from reputable sources of knowledge from all over the web. Suddenly, if you’re a brand that is not being talked about by publishers, in newsletters, by relevant creators on relevant platforms, you’re not being discovered as often. Therefore, this idea of having to be featured by reputable news publications or lifestyle, digital components of their magazines, or in important newsletters is becoming even more valuable.
This is becoming a huge focus for us at Linkby as in the current environment it’s like selling shovels at the start of a gold rush.
VP: Linkby has been a capital efficient company to date. Now, with raising a meaningful capital round, how do you plan on allocating this capital across the business and to fuel growth?
CW: For us, the answer is pretty simple. We launched the business here in Sydney, Australia. We then launched into the UK and the US after about a year of operating purely in Australia. And the US market has just been a rocket ship for us. Last month, the US was up 140% year-on-year – which is five years into a startup that’s generating pretty decent revenues. And it just feels like we’re still scratching the surface of that market opportunity in the US. So, a lot of the resources will be focused on just doubling down, increasing our go-to market in the US, and being the go-to platform for performance PR for brands wanting to amplify their Generative Engine Optimization.
We will also be focused on product and engineering. We strongly believe that there’s this huge opportunity for us to properly integrate and use all the data that we’ve collected to build a very powerful recommendation engine. We envision this recommendation engine utilizing machine learning models and taking our data to help brands be able to choose from what one day will be 30,000 publishers, newsletters, and creators on board and be able to build the best possible campaign that we can for that brand.
VP: Finally, why did you decide to choose Volition Capital as your capital partner?
CW: We loved meeting Jim (Partner), Emily (Sr. Associate), and the rest of the Volition team. Every meeting we had with the team felt like these were partners that we could see ourselves working with over the long term. We loved Jim’s hypothesis around the broader advertising technology sector and that it’s one that is often overlooked by traditional VC – and at the same time you can build phenomenal, highly profitable businesses within it.
And look, we’re a few weeks into the investment and we’ve been super impressed with how much support there is actually in terms of resources and in terms of operationally tapping into a broader network. A lot of VCs talk about it, and you don’t always see the follow-through.
VP: Fantastic. Thanks so much for the time and look forward to talking again soon.
CW: Talk soon!
