As AI changes the way people find products online, marketers are rethinking the digital marketing playbook. With AI-generated responses reducing clicks on search results and display ads, brands are looking for new ways to reach customers.
Seattle startup MediaPact wants to capitalize on that change.
Founded in 2026 by Internet marketing veteran Lacie Thompson, MediaPact makes finding and signing ad deals fast, painless, and responsive for both publishers and companies. It raised $200,000 in a small round of friends and family, and recently added companies like BroBible, Gadget Review and Penske Media to the platform.
We caught up with Thompson for GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about his one-man startup, how AI helped him build a business despite no coding experience and what surprised him most about launching a market he thought he knew.
In 50 words or less, give us your first pitch?
MediaPact is a marketplace and workflow for low-cost direct media. Buyers find publishers, newsletters, and creators, then negotiate terms, sign an IO (installation order), and pay, all in one place. Vendor inventory is configured to include inventory in a searchable format. Direct media buying without 40 email strings.
What problem do you like to solve?
Flat-fee media is a large market that still works with emails, PDFs, calls, standard IOs and a Google Sheet called “final_FINAL_v3.”
Nine out of ten publishers I interviewed described their low-income workflow as just that: manual email threads, hand-crafted IOs, 60-day chasing invoices. Meanwhile, the consumer on the other end of that chain is sitting on a budget and can’t afford it.
Programmatic solved this with banner ads 15 years ago. No one has solved it in this type of media: sponsored articles, newsletters, or podcast readings. I’m concerned about making buying direct media as easy as booking a flight.
What surprised you after talking to customers?
Two things:
Supply is not a problem. I spent 15 years in this industry, so I can sign publishers all day long. Demand is the hard part. Every market founder reads The Cold Start Problem and still thinks they’re different. I was no different.
The buyers are much wider than I thought. I come from prayer and work. Those groups live and die on click-based metrics. Although they usually buy low-cost media, they sometimes avoid the risk of guaranteed placement due to click-based attribution (especially the last click).
Another hyper-performance based agency told me flat out that this was not for them. Top of the funnel product marketers get it. They are usually in the middle of the consumer stage that has reached Meta and Google and we need somewhere else to go. Retailers are also more focused on working with partners who can reach their audience, even if they influence in-store behavior in ways that are difficult to measure. Said another way, MediaPact is for the marketer who uses art, the marketer who uses science and the marketer who uses both.
How has AI changed the way you build your company?
Two ways, and the second is the platform’s strategic angle, not just efficiency.
The obvious: I built and deployed (and continue to do so) the entire platform with Claude Code. React, TypeScript, Supabase, Stripe Connect, everything. I have no experience writing code, managing dev teams, or product management. And now I can send features to production in less than a day. I’m not saying this to brag, but rather to show that this is a structural change in who starts these kinds of companies.
AI eats clicks. When ChatGPT answers the question, no one clicks. And the content is so trusted that the conversion happens 4.4 times the rate. So brands stop competing for ranks and start competing to be within the model citation source, which is a high authority editor. That’s not just SEO anymore. It’s an Answer Engine, and the only way to get in is through content. MediaPact allows consumers to do this.
What else do people misunderstand about your startup?
That it is for affiliate marketers. My CV makes people think about rev sharing, cookies, and the last click attribute.
It’s the opposite. Fee paid, guaranteed placement, signed IO, and automatic payment. Marketers are paid for their audience and their authority, not for whatever attribution model they want to give them that month. Publishers have been undercut by last clicks for decades and everyone in our industry knows it.
What was the hardest decision you made in the last year?
Introducing the company and determining the actual TAM.
My network is an affiliate. Those are warm phone calls, quick meetings, and lots of happy nods. It would be great to build them. But customer acquisition data targets brand marketers, retail marketers, and media planning and buying teams—an audience that doesn’t know.
Although I am aware of this challenge, I face it by finding things as I go, the same way I did before: by building partnerships and relationships that give me access to the right opportunities.
What is one piece of advice you would give other entrepreneurs?
Ask for help. The key, however, is that you have to give help, you have to be the person that people want to help and that is not just given – it is acquired for years. Naturally I think of asking my network for help: my friends, my family, and my mentors. But now you can also ask for help from Claude (or your favorite AI). Although not the same, knowing who or what to ask for help is probably the most powerful needle mover.
We’ll know our company has done it when…
I am very proud when I know that the platform has benefited someone. Usually if it is, they want to tell their friends about it. That part of the growth cycle is always the most exciting for me because I have the luxury of going from chaos mode to innovation mode, pushing beyond beta, dreaming bigger and taking on things beyond my current capacity.
When vendors tell brands to “just ship it with MediaPact” without me anywhere in the conversation, that will be epic. The day the market operates without an intraday market is actually a market.
