Heylist: Democratizing Influencer Marketing and Enabling Economic Opportunities for Creators
Join us in welcoming Heylist to our Fund II portfolio. We met with Co-Founder and CEO Vicky Boudreau to hear their founding story and learn about their SaaS platform transforming the influencer marketing scene.
57% of Gen Zers would like to become an influencer if given the opportunity, compared to 41% of the general adult population. Along those lines, 53% of Gen Zers consider becoming an influencer a respectable career choice, with a similar percentage willing to leave their current jobs if they could sustain an influencer lifestyle.
Credibility has also climbed in the influencer marketing industry, with Gen Zers and millennials’ trust in social media influencers growing from 51% in 2019 to 61% in 2023.
Seeing these rising trends and sensing shifts coming in the industry, Vicky Boudreau, Alex Borgia, and Nico LeBlanc co-founded Heylist to supercharge influencer marketing and create economic opportunities for people to monetize their passion.
“I had a sixth sense telling me that people will want to go back to transparency, authenticity, peer-to-peer recommendation, and so on. I wondered if there was a way to activate regular people with their entourage that trust them.”
Coming from a small, remote village outside Montreal, Vicky always dreamt of big-city living and connecting with as many people as possible. At 17, she moved to Italy to study and later returned to Montreal, armed with a background that flourished from fashion design to marketing, production, and management.
During an internship, Vicky met Marie-Noelle Hamelin, her first business partner and co-founder of their communication and marketing firm, bicom. Running a business innovating how brands get noticed, Vicky recognized marketing approaches were changing—particularly with influencers and small creators.
Within the thriving agency, they launched a pilot project that unlocked the impact of small creators and influencers sharing beautiful content that brands were thrilled to reuse.
As the pilot got off the ground, Vicky knew there had to be a better way to organize the overwhelming amounts of information required to track and manage influencer marketing campaigns. Working with software engineer Alex Borgia and strategy-driven creative Nico LeBlanc, they ditched the spreadsheets and built a custom platform to streamline processes while building a community at the same time.
As testing with creators continued to convert, client excitement gained momentum, and the bespoke platform scaled, Vicky, Alex, and Nico officially launched Heylist.
“I'm a business person, but I'm a people's person—to be able to encourage smaller creators to start their own little businesses is something that is dear to my heart.”
Setting up an influencer marketing campaign requires multiple separate apps for discovery, communication, onboarding, tracking, and analysis—not to mention the time and patience needed to manage questions, negotiate, and countless other tedious tasks.
Heylist makes influencer marketing accessible through its platform, connecting brands with a community of content creators to create, follow, and measure their marketing campaigns.
Operating on a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, Heylist is structured as a double-sided marketplace that bridges brands and agencies with nano-influencers (individuals with 10,000 followers or less). Often overlooked by larger platforms, nano-influencers have much higher engagement rates and followers who trust them more, which aligns well with Helylist’s social mission to empower everyone—whether they are newcomers, students, solo moms, or the like—to earn a second source of income or enhance their revenue as they pursue their passions.
On the brand side, Heylist consolidates the entire campaign process into one platform so companies and agencies can easily reach out to smaller, very niche, and useful influencers to promote their products or services. The platform pre-vets influencers to match individuals to a campaign's unique needs, onboard and automate outreach, centralize campaign management, monitor posts and stories to provide in-depth insights and campaign metrics, and deliver reporting with audience segmentation, engagement data, and comparative analytics.
On the influencer side, the platform is highly tailored to a creator’s unique lifestyle and needs. Filters go above and beyond, ranging from food preferences to skin and hair types to everything in between, creating a personalized and effective marketing approach where they can promote brands that perfectly align with their content.
“That's the hype I wanted to go back to: where people talk about the product if they really love it, and it's not solely transactional.”
Designed to democratize the influencer marketing world and create opportunities within the creator economy, community is at the heart of Heylist. The team is passionate about building not only a strong platform but also an uplifting and supportive community. This commitment is clear in their integrated education center, which provides resources on best practices to empower pathways to becoming an influencer.
Creators in the Heylist community aren’t being paid… yet! Although influencers are thrilled to be sent products tailored to them, Vicky and the team of 12 (75% being women!) are working on setting guidelines for pricing and introducing Stripe to the platform by Fall 2024. A natural evolution from the current model, the payment system will encourage brands to compensate influencers for the quality and time dedicated to content creation that surpasses the value of the promoted products.
Also in the pipeline for the fall, Heylist aims to launch a self-serve option for brands and agencies, allowing them to subscribe and use the platform independently.
The close of their first funding round will support the team’s plans to double down on building the best product and community for their clients—such as the features coming soon—while continuing to grow across Canada and the U.S.
“Competitors seem to see the influencers as an inventory. Whereas for us, they are partners; they are as important as the clients, and we want to serve them well. Because if we have the best influencers, the brands will come.”
Check out the official press release of Heylist’s raise here.
Learn more about Heylist at https://www.heylist.com.