People ask why I run both an agency and a software company. The polite assumptio
By Michael Erickson Facchin ยท September 25, 2026 ยท Curated by George's Blog
People ask why I run both an agency and a software company. The polite assumption is that it was a strategy.
It was not a strategy. It was irritation.
I started doing PPC at Search Scientists in 2012. By about 2016 I had a spreadsheet. You know the spreadsheet. It had seven tabs, at least two of which I did not fully understand, and a VLOOKUP I was frankly scared of. Every Monday I'd export the same reports, paste them into the same tabs, and do the same twelve decisions I'd done the previous Monday, with the same information, arriving shockingly at the same answers.
At some point the thought arrives, and once it arrives you can't un-arrive it: ๐ผ ๐๐ ๐กโ๐ ๐ ๐๐๐ค๐๐ ๐ก ๐๐๐๐ก ๐๐ ๐กโ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ .
Ad Badger started in 2017 as an attempt to make that spreadsheet stop existing.
What I didn't anticipate was how much the two businesses would end up teaching each other. The agency is the reason the software is any good you cannot build a bidding tool for a job you don't do. Every feature we've shipped that people love came from someone on the services side saying "I do this by hand forty times a week and I hate it." And the software is the reason the agency scales we're not selling hours we spend clicking.
The strategic lesson, if there is one:
๐๐ก๐ ๐๐๐ฌ๐ญ ๐ฉ๐ซ๐จ๐๐ฎ๐๐ญ ๐ข๐๐๐๐ฌ ๐๐ซ๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ฌ ๐ฒ๐จ๐ฎ'๐ซ๐ ๐๐ฅ๐ซ๐๐๐๐ฒ ๐๐จ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ฎ๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฒ ๐๐ง๐ ๐ซ๐๐ฌ๐๐ง๐ญ๐ข๐ง๐ . Not market gaps. Not a TAM slide. The specific repetitive task that makes you sigh audibly before you start it. That sigh is product-market fit trying to get your attention.
Fourteen years in paid traffic and I still find things I do by hand and resent. The list never runs out. That's either a business model or a personality disorder, and I've stopped trying to establish which.
Both companies still in Austin. The spreadsheet, mercifully, is dead.