{"id":97551,"title":"Laurence - Automated Amazon Advertising","tagline":"We set bids, budgets, and keyword targets like quants trade markets","body":"Hey YC! 👋\n\nWe’re [Matt](https://bookface.ycombinator.com/user/1795983) and [Leo](https://bookface.ycombinator.com/user/3241658) building [Laurence](https://www.trylaurence.com/): automated Amazon pay-per-click (PPC) performance marketing using reinforcement learning and transformer models.\n\n\u003chttps://youtu.be/EAiSUSByF6k\u003e\n\n**TL;DR**\n\n* **Most brands lose money** advertising on Amazon after margin\n  * Agencies outsource **simplistic copy-paste playbooks** to offshore workers\n  * Existing software are rudimentary rules engines that break with any bad variance\n* We drive performance using **reinforcement learning** and training our own conversion-rate-aware transformer models\n* Our quant system is automating **$10 million in live ad spend**, increasing advertising profits by 15-20% while growing total revenue.\n\n**Team**\n\nMatt\n\n* built the Data Science Agent at Google\n* tuned the Facebook friend suggestion model at Meta\n* was the third engineer at a health-tech startup\n\nLeo\n\n* made $250k as a high-stakes poker pro at 17\n* founded a crypto investing startup at 18\n* was a researcher at Jump Trading\n\nWe started off building a horizontal data science agent for enterprise, and from our hundreds of conversations with anyone who had a problem with data, we learned how desperately brands on Amazon needed PPC automation that works.\n\n**Ask**\n\nIf you know any CPG brands or SMBs selling on Amazon, we would love an introduction :)\n\n\\- Matt \u0026 Leo W26\n\n[matthew@trylaurence.com](mailto:matthew@trylaurence.com)\n\n[trylaurence.com](http://trylaurence.com)\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=97551\u0026key=user_uploads/1795983/bb8c6198-ffe9-4166-8f6c-aa27c1205acb)\n\n","slug":"PNP-laurence-automated-amazon-advertising","created_at":"2026-02-05T20:42:06.090Z","updated_at":"2026-05-24T23:11:16.844Z","total_vote_count":12,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/PNP-laurence-automated-amazon-advertising","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=97551\u0026key=user_uploads/1795983/bb8c6198-ffe9-4166-8f6c-aa27c1205acb","company":{"id":31173,"name":"Laurence","slug":"laurence","url":"https://laurence.com","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/853a7c6c871be155796217e789ab83fe95978b02.png","batch":"Winter 2026","industry":"B2B","tags":[],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/31173"}}