On May 12th, in New York, Heylist turned heads by winning a prestigious Webby Awards in the “Marketing and Content Management for Applications and Software” category. The proposition of Vicky Boudreau, CEO and co-founder of Heylist, is disarmingly simple: allow brands to create influence campaigns on TikTok and Instagram with a few clicks, by choosing from a pool of nano influencers sorted by an AI-powered search engine. Interview.
The story is incredible. At the beginning of May, Vicky Boudreau discovered she was nominated for the 29th edition of the Webby Awards… while sorting through her spam (!). A few days later, she learned another piece of good news: not only was she selected but she was among the official winners, alongside prestigious competitors like Strava, Duolingo, Apple and… Snoop Dogg (Webby “Entrepreneur of the Year”).
Heylist? The project was launched in 2024, while she was heading her communications agency Bicom.
In my first company, I saw the potential to make a single tool that would help with influencer research, briefing, coordinating campaigns, collecting results, and then analyzing them. There are several tools on the market currently, but we don’t find a single tool that did each step well, she explains.
Heylist first opened its platform to influencers, at the beginning of 2024, then to brands, in July of the same year. Let’s remember that the interest of this type of platform is to offer brands a wide range of local nano influencers, who want to promote products and services.
In a year and a half, Heylist managed to recruit 7,000 nano influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers; these are mainly based in Quebec (36%) and Ontario (30%). The rest are located in other provinces and the United States.
72 hours to accept the proposal
We are in continuous recruitment, based on the needs expressed by our clients, explains the CEO. If a brand wants to develop a local market, we will advertise in that region and solicit our own network of influencers who are our best ambassadors – to attract new influencers, she continues.
Note that a questionnaire is sent to each influencer to know their tastes and interests.
On the brand side, the experience unfolds as follows: the manager fills out a brief, explains their campaign and mentions the compensation (in gifts or money); they are offered a list (generated from an intelligent search engine) of nano influencers who “match” with their marketing targets.
When a brand has selected an influencer, the latter has 72 hours to accept the proposal. One of Heylist’s advantages is that all communications go through the platform:
Managing a campaign with 4 or 5 big influencers by email is possible. However, doing the same campaign with 75 nano influencers can become very complicated, especially when they all start writing to them in their inbox, then in DMs on Instagram, confides the entrepreneur. This is one of the points we wanted to solve as quickly as possible, to allow brands to scale their micro-influence campaign.
Willingness to democratize
When Vicky describes the experience she wants to offer to brands (who can easily see in their dashboard the performance of the best creators) and to micro influencers, who can shop for small influence contracts, the parallel with Uber’s business model enters the conversation. The CEO tells us she’s thinking of including in her roadmap a way to rate nano-influencers.
In the long term, we want to be part of the gig economy, she explains. We want to allow people to have supplementary income through content creation, while educating them to create better content. We want to make influence marketing as accessible as possible, both for brands that want to get started and for creators who would like to start somewhere, she states.
The message is launched.
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