A Chat with Brice Dondelinger, Bob Krier, Dylan Thompson, and Marc Donis, Founders at AI Start Up: Balloonary

Helping side hustlers, solopreneurs and micro businesses conquer the world of online ads to supercharge the earning potential of their small business, Balloonary is an easy-to-use AI-powered tool to create, launch and manage digital ads across Google, Facebook, and Instagram in a matter of minutes.

The brainchild of founders, Brice Dondelinger, Bob Krier, Dylan Thompson, and Marc Donis, Balloonary gives small businesses the power to stand out and get noticed by the right audience by giving them the expertise and tools that larger companies use for sales success.
 

Tell us about Balloonary

 
Bob: Balloonary is an easy-to-use AI-powered tool, designed to create, launch, and manage digital ads across Google, Facebook, and Instagram in a matter of minutes. We’re on a mission to empower small businesses to grow by making the world of online advertising easy and accessible for all.

Through the power of AI, Balloonary makes the process of creating, launching, and analysing online ad campaigns fast and simple, and gives business owners the confidence that their online ads are being taken care of. No design or marketing skills are needed, simply enter a business URL and Balloonary’s Ai will analyse the website and create high quality ads by providing users the best images to choose from and writing all the text for them, that they can tweak as they see fit or simply go with what Balloonary suggests.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the Balloonary ?

 
Brice: Balloonary is the brainchild of Bob, Dylan, Marc and myself. The tool we have created gives small businesses, solopreneurs, and side hustlers the power to stand out and get noticed by the right audience by giving them the expertise and tools that larger companies use for sales success. But, when we met five years ago, we created a trusted travel guides app for the tourism industry called Spoticle. We won the Tourism Innovation Award and got accepted into Fit4Start, Luxembourg’s #1 startup program, but ran into obstacles that led us to pursue opportunities with the marketing funnel builder we had developed for the app weeks before Covid hit and basically shut down the tourism industry. Lucky us, I say in hindsight.

Dylan: When tourism came to a stop, we started thinking about different use cases for our location recommendation app. We came up with a whole bunch of different ideas. But now we had the problem of finding out which of these directions would be worth pursuing. So, we spun up a landing page that was capable of dynamically presenting these very different directions of our app asking users to sign up for a newsletter if they liked what they saw. We then added a way to easily run different Google Ads based on the content for each of our different tests.

Once the traffic started coming in, we could compare performance head on. And indeed, we found a couple of use cases that actually performed well. And quite a few that didn’t. But the most important insight for us was that this process that we had used actually worked well and had helped us to avoid an otherwise very complicated and painful journey. So, instead of pursuing one of the winning directions, we decided to make this testing machine that we had built along the way a new product.

That’s how that first version of Balloonary came to be. From there it took a few more iterations until we couldn’t resist the enormous potential in the rapidly progressing field of AI anymore. We dropped the testing part and decided to focus on using the power of AI to make the whole process of creating, launching and analysing online ad campaigns fast and simple, giving businesses and founders the confidence to try online marketing, get their brand seen my more people, and know their campaign is being taken care of.

No design or marketing skills are needed, a founder just simply enters their business URL and Balloonary’s AI will analyse the website and create high quality ads by providing users the best images to choose from and writing all the text for them. They can also tweak as they see fit or simply go with what Balloonary suggests, before launching on Facebook, Instagram, and Google.

In less than 10 minutes, Balloonary gives these businesses access to the marketing power and the edge usually reserved for big companies who can afford marketing teams and agencies.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
Marc: When Covid-19 disrupted everything, and we had to shut Spoticle down, we tested a few ideas and quickly found that the process itself could be our next product. We developed an app to allow entrepreneurs to test the market viability of their business ideas before investing time and money developing them.

By using Balloonary to create online ads and a website, users could quickly measure demand for their idea. We chose the name Balloonary because we liked the image of floating a test balloon. We soon realised that the real demand was for ad creation, so we discontinued the web page creation tool to focus on that. After many small pivots, we finally settled on the current product and started Balloonary as it is today.
 

What can we hope to see from Balloonary in the future?

 
Dylan: Balloonary is the simplest way to create and manage ads digitally out there. No other platform has the same focus on simplicity as we do. Everything we build has to go through our “is it simple enough” filter first. This can be very hard because even our customers sometimes ask for more complexity that we’re willing to implement. But we’re keen to keep the balance, and we believe strongly that AI powered automation is the right answer to the inherent complexity of online ads.

Bob: Balloonary is powered by advanced AI, and AI will continue to develop and completely disrupt many aspects in the future including marketing and online ads. Balloonary will be part of that transformation, but it does mean our service will keep adapting and evolving to ensure we can offer our customers and small business owners the chance to compete with larger organisations when it comes to digital marketing.

Marc: Lastly, the regulatory environment for online advertisement is in constant flux. Balloonary will need to accommodate new restrictions on ad targeting and tracking. Also, the industry is currently highly fragmented, with many companies competing for similar users. I expect some consolidation to occur soon.