As AI adjustments how folks uncover merchandise on-line, entrepreneurs are rethinking the normal digital promoting playbook. With AI-generated solutions decreasing clicks on search outcomes and show advertisements, manufacturers are searching for new methods to achieve clients.
Seattle startup MediaPact desires to capitalize on that shift.
Based in 2026 by on-line advertising and marketing veteran Lacie Thompson, MediaPact makes discovering and signing advert offers faster, painless, and accountable for each publishers and firms. It has raised $200,000 in a small family and friends spherical, and just lately added corporations like BroBible, Gadget Assessment and Penske Media to the platform.
We caught up with Thompson for GeekWire’s Startup Highlight to be taught extra about her one-person startup, how AI helped her construct the enterprise regardless of having no coding expertise and what stunned her most about launching in a market she thought she already knew.
In 50 phrases or much less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?
MediaPact is a market and workflow for flat-fee direct media. Patrons uncover publishers, newsletters, and creators, then negotiate phrases, signal the IO (insertion order), and pay, multi functional place. Vendor stock is standardized to listing stock in a searchable format. It’s the direct media purchase with out the 40-email thread.
What downside are you obsessive about fixing?
Flat-fee media is an enormous market that also runs on emails, PDFs, calls, bespoke IOs and a Google Sheet named “final_FINAL_v3.”
9 out of ten publishers I’ve interviewed described their flat-fee workflow as precisely that: handbook e mail threads, hand-built IOs, invoices they chase for 60 days. In the meantime, the customer on the opposite aspect of that thread is sitting on funds and can’t discover them.
Programmatic solved this for banner advertisements 15 years in the past. No person has ever solved it for the sort of media: sponsored articles, newsletters, or podcast reads. I’m obsessive about making a direct media purchase as straightforward as reserving a flight.
What stunned you after speaking to clients?
Two issues:
Provide is just not the issue. I’ve spent 15 years on this trade, so I can signal publishers all day. Demand is the exhausting half. Each market founder reads The Chilly Begin Drawback and nonetheless thinks they’re the exception. I used to be not the exception.
The patrons are far more broad than I believed. I come from affiliate and efficiency. These groups reside and die on click-based measurement. Whereas they usually buy flat-fee media, they often keep away from the danger of assured placement due to over-scrutinized click-based attribution (particularly on a final click on).
One hyper-performance-based company advised me flatly that this was not for them. Model entrepreneurs who perceive prime of funnel progress get it. They’re sometimes at a mid-stage client model that has plateaued on Meta and Google and wishes someplace else to go. Shopper entrepreneurs are additionally very centered on working with companions that may attain their viewers, even when they’re influencing in-store habits in methods which might be troublesome to measure. Stated one other manner, MediaPact is for the marketer who makes use of artwork, the marketer who makes use of science and the marketer who makes use of each.
How has AI modified the way in which you construct your organization?
Two methods, and the second is a strategic angle for the platform, not simply an operational effectivity.
The apparent one: I constructed and shipped (and am persevering with to take action) the complete platform with Claude Code. React, TypeScript, Supabase, Stripe Join, the entire thing. I’ve zero expertise writing code, managing dev groups, or product administration. And now I can ship options to manufacturing inside lower than a day. I don’t say this to boast, however slightly to point out that it is a structural change in who will get to begin what sorts of corporations.
AI is consuming the press. When ChatGPT solutions the query, no one clicks. And the content material is so trusted that conversion occurs at 4.4 instances the speed. So manufacturers cease competing for rankings and begin competing to be contained in the supply materials that the fashions cite, which is high-authority editorial. That’s not simply search engine optimisation anymore. It’s Reply Engine Optimization, and the one manner in is to be within the content material. MediaPact permits patrons to do that.
What’s one factor folks misunderstand about your startup?
That it’s for affiliate entrepreneurs. My résumé makes folks assume rev-share, cookies, and last-click attribution.
It’s the reverse. Flat charge, assured placement, signed IO, and automatic cost. Sellers receives a commission for his or her viewers and their authority, not for regardless of the attribution mannequin felt like giving them that month. Publishers have been shortchanged by last-click for many years and everybody in our trade is aware of it.
What’s the hardest determination you’ve made previously yr?
Launching the corporate and figuring out the actual TAM.
My community is affiliate. These are heat calls, quick conferences, and many enthusiastic nodding. It could have been very snug to construct for them. However the buyer discovery information pointed towards model entrepreneurs, shopper entrepreneurs, and media planning and shopping for groups—audiences who don’t know me.
Although I do know this problem, I’m tackling it by figuring issues out as I’m going, in the identical manner I did earlier than: by constructing partnerships and relationships that grant me entry to the best alternatives.
What’s the one piece of recommendation you give to different entrepreneurs?
Ask for assist. The important thing, although, is that it’s a must to give assist, you should be somebody folks need to assist and that isn’t simply granted—it’s earned over years. I naturally consider asking my community for assist: my associates, my household, and my advisors. However now you may as well ask Claude (or your most popular AI) for assist. Whereas it’s positively not the identical, realizing when to ask whom or what for assist might be probably the most highly effective needle-mover.
We’ll know our firm has made it when…
I’m probably the most proud after I know the platform has benefited somebody. Often when that’s the case, they need to inform their associates about it. That a part of the expansion cycle is at all times probably the most enjoyable for me as a result of I’ve the posh of getting out of hustle mode and into innovation mode, pushing past the beta, dreaming massive and taking issues past my present scope.
When sellers inform manufacturers “simply ship it via MediaPact” with out me wherever within the dialog, that can be a milestone. The day {the marketplace} works with out the founder within the center is the day it’s truly a market.
