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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

819: AdTech: Bake Off Leads to Major Acquisition and $100m+ In Media Spend Under Management

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6683 Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2017

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sandy Lohr. She’s a mother, wife, dog lover and leader of one of the best advertising technology teams in Silicon Beach. Growing up in the industry, she transitioned from client side to tech provider over 2 years ago. Her team strives daily to help local businesses globally find the best customer with her company, MatchCraft.  

Famous Five:

  • Favorite Book? – Jab Jab Jab Right Hook
  • What CEO do you follow? – Susan Wojcicki
  • Favorite online tool? — Accompany
  • How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5.5
  • If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Be humble”

 

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • 01:44 – Nathan introduces Sandy to the show
  • 02:18 – MatchCraft performs well and keeps its customers
  • 02:46 – MatchCraft is a tech company in the adtech space
  • 02:52 – 2018 will be MatchCraft’s 20th year
  • 03:02 – MatchCraft matches buyers and sellers and has mastered the craft for doing so
  • 03:10 – MatchCraft has 2 founders who came up with the strategy in 1998
  • 03:21 – Sandy is the CEO and she joined MatchCraft 2 years ago
  • 03:40 – MatchCraft acquired the client side of the company in 2014
  • 03:50 – MatchCraft has a technology platform that helps run programmatic searches
    • 04:15 – MatchCraft has been doing it a long time with scalability
  • 04:50 – MatchCraft is a managing service and SaaS model
    • 04:59 – The managing service is 70% of the business
    • 05:46 – MatchCraft doesn’t work with any merchants
  • 06:06 – Resellers of MatchCraft have over 6000 sales reps globally
  • 06:23 – Resellers pay MatchCraft their media fee
    • 06:35 – For the managing service, the fee is 17% to 12% depending on the volume
  • 07:08 – MatchCraft has strategy discussions with their resellers
  • 07:27 – The SaaS model varies, too
  • 07:57 – MatchCraft provides ad copy in different languages and formats
  • 08:50 – On the SaaS side, fees can go up to 7% of media spend depending on the volume
  • 09:50 – MatchCraft is a privately held company
  • 10:33 – Prior to MatchCraft, Sandy was on the client side and she was working for Advance Publications Inc.
    • 11:30 – Sandy shares what she was doing prior to MatchCraft
    • 13:15 – Advance Local Inc. bought MatchCraft and Sandy is now the active CEO in MatchCraft
    • 14:08 – Sandy’s background has always been in marketing and she enjoys learning about technology everyday
  • 14:25 – MatchCraft’s team size is nearly 100 and they promote diversity with their global offices
  • 15:13 – MatchCraft doesn’t have to raise capital
  • 15:39 – “We have extremely aggressive goals”
  • 16:19 – MatchCraft has grown 26%, year over year
  • 16:45 – MatchCraft has processed more than $100M ad spend annually
  • 17:03 – Sandy’s opinion on the idea of Time being sold and what she would do if they buy one of Time’s brands
  • 19:43 – The Famous Five

 

3 Key Points:

  1. There’s nothing you cannot learn that you really WANT to learn.
  2. If your product is performing well, people will remain loyal to you and to your product/service.
  3. Acquiring a company requires your due diligence—make sure it’s WORTH it.

 

Resources Mentioned:

  • Simplero – The easiest way to launch your own membership course like the big influencers do but at 1/10th the cost.
  • The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
  • GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more
  • Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
  • Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
  • Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
  • Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
  • Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books
  • Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

She built an amazing career at advance, then went and did basically a bakeoff and ended up saying, you know what?

0:07.2

These match guys, there's something special here.

0:09.7

And the company then acquired Matchcraft, she now has joined the two founders, the two original founders over 20 years ago was when they launched it.

0:17.8

They now run the dev team.

0:19.0

Sandy is running everything else.

0:20.5

They are growing

0:21.0

at usually double what the industry is growing at, which is obviously great. A hundred people.

0:25.6

They've passed a hundred million in total media spend going through their system, growing fast.

0:30.4

This is the top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry

0:36.7

in terms of revenue or customer base.

0:39.8

You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how

0:44.2

many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent

0:50.3

on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 units sold mark.

0:54.3

And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.

0:57.6

Many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every B-to-B SaaS CEO that I've

1:02.1

interviewed.

1:02.7

If you want to get access to the database I've created with year-over-year growth rates,

1:06.4

customer accounts, margins, and many, many other data metrics and data points, you can go to g-et-l-a-tka.com.

1:13.8

Here's the thing, though, this database, I keep it to myself.

1:17.2

It's so freaking valuable.

1:18.9

And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage,

1:24.1

I'm only letting 10 companies on each month.

...

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