Oli
Gardner

Most founders pick one thing and get good at it. Oli Gardner picked seventeen things first - pizza delivery, beehive factory work, C programming, Expedia photography, interaction design - and then combined them all into something the marketing industry had no name for yet. So he named it himself: Conversion-Centered Design.

That's the trick with Oli. He doesn't arrive with credentials. He arrives with evidence. In 2009, he and five co-founders climbed onto a rooftop in Vancouver and decided to build something the world actually needed: a landing page tool that made marketers look competent without requiring a developer on speed dial. That company was Unbounce. It worked.

What Oli built at Unbounce wasn't just software. It was a philosophy - the discipline of removing everything from a page that isn't in service of a single conversion goal. He called the key metric the "attention ratio": the number of things a visitor can do divided by the number of things they should do. On a perfect landing page, that ratio is always 1:1. Thirteen years of real data from 50,000 pages confirmed it.

His keynote "Frankenpage" - built from one million actual data points - became one of the most-talked-about talks on the European conference circuit. Not because it was provocative. Because it was specific. He didn't tell audiences what landing pages should do. He showed them what 50,000 real ones actually did.

Before he was a co-founder, Oli was an engineer. He studied Electronic and Communications Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland, graduated into the dotcom crash, and spent the next decade taking whatever work was available. He has described this period as "Super Unemployable" - not because he couldn't hold a job, but because every job he held taught him something that no single career path could have.

The clearest example: at Bodog, the online gaming company, he was the usability lead. He ran a study on a million-dollars-a-day user flow that was bleeding money. When he presented the findings to the company President, the executive literally fell off his chair. That's a data point Oli has never forgotten. The gap between what people assume about their products and what users actually experience became the thesis behind everything he built afterward.

The rooftop moment came in 2009. August 14th, to be specific. Oli and five other founders - including CEO Rick Perreault - launched Unbounce from a 500-square-foot room in Vancouver. Six co-founders is an unusual number for a startup. Oli cites research suggesting it's actually optimal. He would know - he spent 13 years proving it works.

Unbounce became one of Canada's most successful SaaS companies. Not because it had the best interface or the most features - but because it gave marketers the ability to build, test, and optimize landing pages without waiting on developers. At its peak, Unbounce had 175+ employees, more than $28M USD in annual recurring revenue, and had powered over 650 million conversions for customers worldwide.

Oli's role was marketing from day one. But his version of marketing was never "let's write a blog post and see what sticks." He ran a 30-day content experiment: 20 posts, 37,000 words, 15-hour days, documented obsessively. The result: posts that converted at 158% above the Unbounce blog average. The lesson, which he turned into a keynote at Turing Fest: content marketing as an industry had confused education with conversion. His talk title says it plainly - "Content Marketing is Broken and Only Your M.O.M. Can Save You."

M.O.M. stands for Marketing Optimization Map. Typical Oli: coin a phrase, build a framework, make it memorable.

Conversion-Centered Design is a methodology Oli developed and formalized during his time at Unbounce. It's built around one core idea: every element on a landing page either supports the conversion goal or it doesn't belong there. The 7 Principles give that idea structure.

Oli left Unbounce after 13 years. Not in defeat - the company he helped build had grown well past the point where it needed its founding marketing voice day-to-day. What comes next for someone whose identity had been tied to a single company for over a decade?

For most founders, the answer is "raise money and do it again, bigger." For Oli, the answer was more interesting: he went smaller, on purpose. Be the Keynote is a coaching platform for public speakers - it's Gig Finder (a database connecting speakers with events), mini-courses, and a Presentation eXperience Design Certification, all bundled into something genuinely useful for people who want to stand on a stage and not embarrass themselves.

Then Outline. Built entirely in Bubble. After spending 13 years at a venture-backed SaaS company with a full engineering team, Oli deliberately chose no-code for his next startup. The product: AI-powered presentation outlines. The philosophy: the best presentation starts before you open PowerPoint. Get the structure right, and the rest follows.