What I Learned Spending Thousands on Meta Ads to Launch a New Product

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I used to measure ad spend of tens of millions a month with a large team. Now I do most of that work on my own with AI, and here is what it can't do.

About a year ago, I was working for a global fintech headquartered in London. We had a budget of tens of millions of dollars per month to spend on marketing, so we worked with a fairly large marketing team. As director for growth, I was responsible for all sorts of technical marketing duties, including measurement, signals engineering, analytics and the measurement of performance in general.

We employed a large team of dozens of developers to do this. Now things have completely changed. I can do a lot of the things that I used to do with a team just on my own with AI. I wrote SQL code for years, but I’ve not written any SQL for over a year now. Most of my analyses are not done in dashboards, but via chatbot.

Having spent most of my career advising other people how to grow their business, I put it to work on my own product, RunInk, an app that turns your running routes into posters, and spent about $1,700 on Meta ads in the first month. Sales so far add up to around $200. I understand that there is a testing budget involved in these things. It’s not going to go immediately well. And in fact, it got more profitable once the ads had more to learn from.

There was a team of dozens of designers making different creatives, and many of them got released and tested and measured. Whereas now I can get Claude to make a ton of different ideas, and Meta’s AI can just test them.

It’s also not just a question of speed. Yes, AI’s creatives are often visually unappealing. But I’m not a designer. I can’t make nice things. I don’t know how to make nice things. But with the prompting, I can get AI to do it. I can focus on the winners and on getting lots of different variants out that I think might be useful.

Signals engineering was generally the martech job, and it was not an easy job — both for large companies like the one I worked for, which had a relative dearth of signals compared to ecommerce, and for small brands starting out.

Ad platforms run on machine learning, which requires lots…

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