About two years ago, fresh out of being CEO/founder of venture backed company that built one of the first SaaS ecommerce platforms, I saw a market opportunity I wanted to pursue with the CTO co-founder of my last company, Eric Maas.

I had tried to work with and partner with many SEM companies to help us and our merchants manage their paid search (Google AdWords) in an easy, transparent, and predictable way with really bad results. As I started talking with other companies using paid search I realized it is a universal problem, and the chase to discover and solve the root cause of the problem started.

To make a long story short, our findings were simple: paid search has a creative (ad copy and landing pages) side to it, and it has a quantitative side (campaign structure/data model, and calculating how much to pay for the next click). Very different disciplines, but you absolutely need both. The saying “If all you have is a hammer, the world looks like a nail” was very fitting as we did the competitive analysis; it seemed the vast majority applied creative approaches and manual labor to solve both sides. That was our opportunity; our strength was on the quantitative side.

In an industry with a bad rap for client turnover (churn), upfront fees consummate with the size of the up front promises, two month on ramping, monthly minimum payments and two year contracts, the client took all the risk for a value proposition to make things more efficient? What if we could build an application that would instantly automate campaign performance for a client without needing the client to do any work, make it fully transparent, and purely performance based?

We did, and that is what Finch offers today to over 200 happy clients and counting!

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