The Story of Aditude: Building the Future of Publisher Monetization

Sometimes the best startups are born from personal breaking points. For Jared Siegal, it was a brutal commute. “I was commuting upwards of five and a half hours a day back and forth to my job,” he shared in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. “I got to the point where I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I’d rather quit my job and try to start something versus continuing to commute like that.”

That decision led to an impromptu resignation that would spark the creation of Aditude. “I walked in one day, I hadn’t even told my wife, went up right to the GM and quit, handed in my laptop and took the train back home,” Jared recalled. “I had no plans on what the company would be or what I would be doing, other than the fact that I knew I was very good at adopts and I could probably make something out of it.”

The early days were purely consultative. “Early on May, June, July, whatever the rest of 2019, I basically just acted as a consultant,” Jared explained. Through connections from his time at Answers.com, he built a steady stream of clients. By early 2020, what started as a one-man consultancy had grown enough to start hiring employees.

But the real turning point came when a VC firm approached with an acquisition offer. Their feedback was direct: “You’re a consultancy, you’re not a tech company, and you kind of have a choice. You can keep going and as a consultant, making good money and running the business this way, or you can try to pivot the business into some sort of SaaS play and go after a much larger amount of money.”

The decision took “all of like 1 hour.” Jared called his friend Eric, now Aditude’s CTO, and said “hey, we’re going to turn this into a tech company. And that was it.”

The transition wasn’t just about technology. Aditude had already built significant trust with publishers by offering their tech for free while charging for support. This created a natural bridge to their SaaS model. As Jared notes, “We had really strong relationships with all of our clients at the time, and a lot of them were just kind of entrusting me and Eric and Corey on the team with their kind of livelihood.”

This focus on relationships has shaped Aditude’s entire approach to the market. “We become very ingrained with these clients day to day businesses and we become almost members of their team as well,” Jared explained. The depth of these connections is remarkable – some publishers have even written Aditude into their wills.

The company’s growth strategy reflects this relationship-first philosophy. Rather than traditional conference presentations, they’re investing $200,000 in creating experiences like multi-day Disney World trips with publishers. It’s an unconventional approach for enterprise sales, but it aligns with their belief that the best partnerships are built on genuine connections.

Looking ahead, Aditude’s vision is bold. “We raise capital for I think two reasons, maybe three,” Jared shared. Beyond marketing and hiring, “the majority of it to make acquisitions. So we want to start acquiring companies that are in our space.” The goal? As their CTO recently stated on TV, “we want to become the largest ad tech company on the planet.”

For Jared, this ambition is paired with a clear exit strategy: “We’re going to grow this thing as fast as we can, as profitably as we can, as big as we can, to the point where we are the big dogs in the space. And hopefully one day, a little selfishly, I can sell the business, make some money, and have a nice life.”

It’s a journey that started with a frustrated commuter and has evolved into a mission to transform how publishers monetize their content. For B2B founders, it’s a reminder that sometimes the biggest opportunities come from taking the road less traveled – even if that road leads away from a five-hour commute.