The Startup Ideas Podcast - Turning Vibe Coding Into Real Money (Google/Meta Ads, HeyGen etc)

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

Join me as I chat with Cody Schneider, where we go through a comprehensive marketing playbook for founders of "vibe-coded" startups, focusing on paid acquisition strategies that deliver immediate results. He walks through the exact process of setting up Google Ads campaigns with proper keyword targeting and conversion tracking, then explains how to create effective Facebook/Instagram ads using AI-generated content. The emphasis throughout is on testing multiple creative variations and optimizing for actual conversions. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 03:29 - Validate Demand 07:00 - Google Ads Overview 11:43 - Finding Keywords 15:59 - Setting Up Google Ads Campaign 17:16 - Landing page best practices 19:25 - Google Tag Manager Tutorial 24:38 - Why RUN Paid Ads 28:29 - How to structure the funnel 31:04 - Meta Ads Overview 33:26 - Finding Pain Points with Perplexity 34:25 - Writing the script for the Ad 40:34 - Creating AI avatar with HeyGen and ElevenLabs 44:01 - Setting Conversion Tracking for Meta Ads 46:04 - Setting Conversion Tracking for Meta Ads Key Points: • Focus on transactional marketing (immediate signups) when starting out rather than long-term strategies like SEO • Google Ads setup with phrase match keywords and conversion tracking is essential for SaaS products • Facebook/Instagram ads work differently than search ads - they disrupt users rather than fulfill search intent • AI avatar videos with compelling hooks perform best for SaaS marketing currently The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com  The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND CODY ON SOCIAL Cody’s startup: https://www.graphed.com  X/Twitter: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx  Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@codyschneiderx

Today's episode is the bootstrappers guide to getting customers with Google ads, with Facebook ads, with perplexity, with HeyGen, with 11 labs, and more. It is easy to vibe code an app. You've done it. I've done it. But it is so hard to actually get customers. Now, there doesn't exist tutorials on YouTube that give the actual sauce with how to do it. And today with Cody Schneider, we just show you how to do it. Step by step, how to get your customers, how to run paid ads.

What does that look like? No gatekeeping, all the sauce. And if you stick to the end of the episode, I think that you're going to be a better founder, a better entrepreneur. And these types of episodes, people, they charge $5,000, $15,000, $25,000 for it. This is absolutely free. I hope this gets your creative juices flowing. And I hope that you build a big business with some of these ideas. Cody Schneider on the pod.

talk about how to grow your vibe-coded startup. You build something. You vibe-coded something, but you need customers. And no one's talking about this. And no one is explaining to you in a simple way how to actually do it with the alpha. So I brought on Cody Schneider. And Cody, by the end of the episode, what are people going to learn? I'm going to give you a step-by-step playbook and, like, the strategy and the actual tactics. And I'll try to show literally as much as I can for like each of the things, whether it's paid ads or cold DMs, like all the automation tools I'm using, is that in the next 24 hours, you can have some type of marketing channel live to start promoting this thing. And everything I'm going to teach you layers together, right? So like,

it all creates the symbiotic relationship that creates like this growth flywheel for you. Let's go. All right. Cool. So let's get into it. And you're going to give all the tools, all the sauce. I need you to promise me. I promise you. I'll show you everything. Okay, cool. All right. So you can start sharing your screen and we'll get into it. Sweet. Okay, cool. So first off, let's talk through paid ads and what like for most, like, especially if you're building an S&B product, like a B2B SaaS, but you're like servicing SMBs. And maybe we should come up with a product that we're trying to sell, Greg. This is actually one we're building right now. So I can just use that and I'll share all the details because I don't care. but it's basically a YouTube channel email scraper.

And this is a like perfect type of product that you'd want to go build. Let me do YouTube channel email extractor. That's actually what it is. By the way, I notice you have, what is that Chrome extension that you're using that shows? Yeah, yeah. It's called keywords everywhere. They owe me so much money for like showing this. I don't know why it doesn't want to open right now.

But basically, it's just a browser extension that modifies Google so that you can see the total volume, the total CPU or the average CPC, the competition. And then also like this is what I use for all those trend graphs that I post. It basically like shows you the search volume over time for this graph. So like this one, there's like not good data. So it doesn't really show anything. But this is it's a great way to do quick validation research. And for anything that you're building, this is actually. where I would start before I'd even build a product is like I would try to figure out like the marketing and the

go to market motion before I even, you know, build anything. Because if you can't validate that people actually want to buy this, like you shouldn't build it. And I think this is like a mistake. I see a lot of first time founders or builders create it. They always, what they do is they build product and then try to figure out marketing and it should be the opposite. It should be like validate people want to buy this thing. See if you can build it and then figure out how to sell it. Right. At its core, like when you look at a business, you know, in its simplest form, it's basically having something that people want to buy and being able to sell it to them. Like, that is a business at its core. And so I think that one of the easiest ways to actually validate that this is something that

people want to buy is you have to, you can just look at like keywords and the keyword volume. Like, are people actually searching for this? Can I find like Reddit threads that this is a problem for? Like I would do also this like YouTube channel, email extractor, Reddit and like see if there's conversations around this. Like literally top result, bro. Like fucking request for SaaS, YouTube email scraper. You're going to make that up. You're going to make that any better, right?

So anyways, once I found that, I would be like, okay, cool. Like, now I'm going to go build a product around this. How would I actually market this? So I'm going to talk through Google Ads first in the actual setup process. I don't know how much I can show. I mean, I could probably show, I guess we, could make up like a separate account and like show you. I'll just show you that kind of the structure that I think that we could do. Actually, I'm not sure on this G. So I'll just kind of play

it. I'll play jazz on it. But so anyways, what I would then do is I'd be like, okay, cool, I'm going to start to set up a campaign. The challenge with this is that like you, you couldn't bid on the keyword phrase YouTube. So what you'd have to do is be like channel email extractor, right? And like that would be the ad that you actually end up running. and the keyword you would bid on is YouTube channel email extractor, but you would have to like basically run an ad to the ad that you're like the ad creative that's in there, it would have to be like only say channel email scraper. And the reason for that is because like they'll flag this.

But it's actually just like I can just go and set up an account. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy. and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup, and if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends

to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built ideabrowser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high-quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search, what are people looking for?

And what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building? And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat gvety for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. and if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. Okay, cool. So this is like a Google Ads account.

And I'm going to show you like step by step out to actually set up like the paid ad strategy here. So to begin with, you're going to go do new campaign. And what I typically do is I start with a click campaign. And the reason for that is because I'm just trying to see the actual keywords that people are searching. All of these keyword research tools, they're going to give you like what they, you know, it's an estimate, you know, of what they think that people are searching.

based on the data that they're aggregating from like all the clickstream data, et cetera. But what I actually want to figure out is the actual search terms that people are searching from the beginning. So I'm going to do website traffic. I'm going to do search. Another campaign type is performance max. I'll talk about that in a second. We're seeing that actually be really effective right now.

So I can talk to that in a moment. But then what I'll do is we'll like throw up a website. We'll just say like YouTube scraper, right? That's like a placeholder. And then just to get us to like move forward. I'm just going to try to pull information from this, but it doesn't exist, so there won't be anything to do there. So from here, we're just going to do page view as the events, and then I'm going to talk through how to actually set up events in the future for the actual sign-up that you're trying to get to happen. You can set up events for sign-up or also a payment conversion.

It's the same exact, like technical deployment to do both of those things. But again, I'm focusing on the clicks to begin with. And the reason for that is, again, I'm just trying to understand like the actual like things that people are searching and clicking on. It's like a fast way for me to get initial data. I can always change back to a conversion once I have the conversion event set up on my website. But in the beginning, what you need to do is basically just like get data so you can understand how people like are trying to actually find this solution. So there's a great way to actually test a product too. Like throw up a landing page and lovable.

Put a tally form on it. send some Google ads traffic to it. I just talked to a founder who's building an app for like, it's like a landing page building software. Like I was like, this is your literal strategy. Just like bid on this keyword and see if you can get signups. And like if you can,

then build the thing. So like before you even build the product, right? So anyway, so I'm going to do clicks. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to target only the United States. And then I'm going to update for people that are only present in that location. You don't want to do people that are traveling in that location. I just see worse results with that.

Sometimes as well, you can see like it's, this is the devil in the details. It's shown interest in your location. A lot of people, they will get trapped in like, like you'll see this where the ads do really well for the first like 14 days. And then suddenly they start getting all this cheap traffic from like the Philippines or India. And they're like, I don't even know how that's happening.

We're not even bidding on it. This is a lot of the times the reason that that's happening. So you're trying to have people that are in that location physically. They're actually like, you know, pinging that IP when they're there. We'll do English. You know, we don't have to set up any of the like political ad stuff. And then from here, we're going to actually go and set up the actual ad. So we'll have that be the final landing page.

But then what I would do is I would go and then start bidding on those keywords that are related to the product that I'm trying to sell. So I'm going to talk through this in a second. But what I just did there, so if I do this keyword like this, that's technically a broad match keyword. So what would happen is it's probably going to go and bid on anything that's email extractor, whatever the biggest keyword phrase is that's within this like long tail phrase, it's going to like basically level up into that. And I don't want that to happen. I want it to only bid on a fan, like the family of keywords that are related to the,

like to that keyword phrase. So YouTube channel email extractor, when I put those quotations around that, that's what I is called a phrase match search. And I typically start with phrase match and then I'll go either do a negative keyword elimination, like if I don't want certain phrases to show up within the phrase match, or I will do an exact match. Exact match isn't actually exact match, though, on Google anymore.

It used to be in the past, I could be like, anytime somebody searches this keyword show my ad, they now technically expand the audience and it's total bullshit. I hate it, but it's something that you have to deal with. And there's ways around it sort of, but they don't actually work. So anyways, you have to basically make the late. landing page, have the language that you actually want them to convert for. And then when you do the exact match, like say you want them to like only, you know, only show for whenever there's YouTube channel email extractor, you have to make the landing

page, have that as the H1. That would be the only way that you could kind of like make it learn down into like only bidding on that exact match keyword. But anyway, so I'm going to do that broad match. What I'm going to go do now to is I'm going to use keywords everywhere again. And I'm going to go and expand, find all of the keywords that people, are searching that are related to YouTube channel email extractor. So what I'm doing here is, again, I just search this, and then I can find all the long-tail

keyword. So I'm just going to click that button. And basically what's happening in the background is it's going to go and scrape all of the other keyword phrases that people are searching along with the phrase that I provided as the source phrase. We'll see if this wants to actually work. This app can't, or this Chrome extension can be buggy. So it is one of those things.

It's probably a team. And like I actually don't know. I need to meet them at some point. But anyway, so how to find YouTube channel by email, email address extractor. So what I would be looking for is like all the ones that are YouTube. So go down that list. So like YouTube channel email address finder, that's a great one. Right.

So I would include that in there as well as a phrase match and basically add that into. Sorry. Let me just actually get this. I think it's like loading, so it's technically not actually a static piece of content. It's like actively moving. But anyways, I would pull all of these out. Let me just stop it and I can like actually do this for you. All of these ones that have YouTube, I would take these.

I would pull these out that have the search intent that I'm looking for. So like email extractor for YouTube channel, that's a great one as well. Again, I'm putting these in as a phrase match. And I would just do like probably 10 of these. That's all you'd really need to get started. So then at that point, once you've had the keywords that you're bidding on, on you would then go and you'd actually have a quick question on that so if you go back to keyword the keyword tool I notice like a lot of the search volume is in the yeah for 30 to 170 couple

hundred some people are going to look at that and they're going to be like how is that enough volume this is literally like apps that have 100 search volume a month I've paid my rent for the last 10 years like I will never talk about these in public I will never share what they are The only reason I'm sharing this one because it's like, whatever, you know, we're going to give the sauce away to for free today because I'm feeling, I'm feeling like, I'm feeling like Chris Kringle and I want to, I want to be Santa to you in the middle of summer and this hot July heat, this hot August heat. So the, I wouldn't even think about the search volume.

What I would think about is like, are there people that have this pain point that I can get to pay me $29 a month, $49 a month, $99 a month? And, you know, I mean, we can just do that math real quick, right? Like, if you have whatever, like, say 49, say you have 100 people paying you 49 a month. Like, that ends up being $4,900, right? And like, this is a margin business where it's like, your margin is going to be like 95%. And a lot of the times you don't need customer service. It's just like set up a crisp chat, let this thing run in the background.

And it's just going to like, it's a little tool. It doesn't really break. It just does this very small thing. I think a lot of the times, like this is what I see, a lot of these, codeers, they try to make these massive platforms. It's like, yo, take a step back, find one killer feature, have off payment and email. So we're like password reset. That is your first app that you should build. If you can't get that to work, you shouldn't level up into like a platform that has this multi-feature product scope that's super complicated and super interactive. It's just start with

the smallest thing. But anyway, yeah, does that answer the question on that? Absolutely. I was hoping you were going to say that. Yeah, man. It's, dude, the riches are in. the niches. And like now it's it's easier than ever to build these and you just stack them together, right? Like everybody wants to be Peter Levels, but nobody actually wants to do what Peter levels does, which is like fucking build a hundred different products and five of them that actually make money. And that's like the game here. It's like you find a bunch of these small like scraper extractor like tools, right? Like research tools. Dude, there's so much money in data extraction tools, it's crazy. Like, there's huge companies that all they do is just like data extraction

from government documents. And like, they get absolutely paid. Like, and nobody wants to, like, they just think it's on sexy or like not interesting. But this is what people actually want. They want this information. So anyway, okay, cool. So you've got the keywords in there. Now you're going to set up the ads. This is where I was talking about. You won't be able to have YouTube in the name. So what you can potentially do is do like something like YT. I probably, I don't think that would work. I think they would probably, still flag it. You're not going to be able to have YouTube in the actual name the URL that you're sending to. So, like, don't name it this, name it something else. But what you'll do is have it be like,

I would probably do something like channel email extractor, right? So like still talk to that specific keyword email extractor. And then the reason for this is I'm trying to have the, the I'm trying to have the keyword that I'm bidding on, the ad that I'm showing, and then the landing page that I'm sending them to all have the same keyword phrase throughout the whole funnel. And the purpose is because you see a higher conversion rate when you do this, right? The strategy here in the beginning is like, I'm just going to bid on everything. That's why I'm doing the click campaign rather than a conversion campaign. And then once I start to see, okay, cool, like I'm seeing a lot of click volume, like more click volume than I thought for email extractor from YouTube channel, then YouTube channel email extractor.

I'm going to go and build landing pages for each of these keywords. And when I say a landing page, like literally all I'm talking about is like, you know, it's straight up just like the hero section of your website has that exact keyword. So like an example of this, I mean, we can do this in Lovable right now, right? Like build a landing page for this target keyword. I mean, it should have the best practices of a landing page, which is, for example, you probably don't want to have any nav bar. You probably want high crap contrast.

You probably want juicy buttons. 100%. So look at people need to look at, you know, best squeeze pages, best landing pages and use that as a reference. You want them to do one action. I think this is the thing that people always get fucked up on is they're like, they're trying to get them to watch a demo and also like download this ebook. And it's like, no, this person is coming in on an ad.

I want to only show them one thing that is the most high value thing that I can get them to do. And you don't know what that is. You don't even know, like, is it an e-book? Is it a thing? But it's one thing that you're trying to get them. You can get them deeper into the funnel later on, but like just doing that one thing is going to be the most effective. And you made a great point.

Greg, I've just like, follow best practices. Like, you can literally go to perplexity and be like, what should the structure of this landing page be for this keyword, right? And it's like, here's the keyword. And then it's just going to give you the structure. and you take that over to Loveable and you build that landing page out. That's like literally. It's so easy.

It's so easy. Like this used to take me again like I'm going to do this 15 years, right? Like this used to take me weeks, Greg. And now I just did this live on a video call with you. Like it's the most insane thing ever. I geek out about this because it is actually so crazy. I'm also realizing we're going probably way like way long on time too. So maybe we can do the transactional today.

And then we can come back and I'll do. all the like, you know, the part two of this later on. So, okay, anyways. Okay, cool. So you built that landing page. We'll let that like just vibe in the background while we move forward on this. And then what you're going to do next is set up this conversion event. So how are you going to do that?

You're going to use Google Tag Manager to set this up. Google Tag Manager is basically a container that allows for you to deploy both scripts, which are scripts in pixels are interchangeable in their, in their voice. But then what it allows for you to do as well is you can actually set up events that basically wait, they set up a listener for an event that gets pushed to the data layer so that you can then have a trigger so that when that action happens by the user, I can send that information back to Google ads.

And the reason that you're doing all of this is you're basically trying to say, hey, Google, you know, when people search this keyword, there's a cohort that will actually make the action that I want them to do. I want them to do this action, which is a sign up or a payment. So optimize the ad, basically, of the people that are searching that keyword for the cohort of people that are most likely to do that action. And it's so smart that they can actually train itself into understanding. These people are most likely to sign up. These people are most likely to actually turn into a paid conversion, et cetera.

Okay, so this is what an actual like Google Tag Manager account looks like. This is some random project that I've been working on that's just in the background, right? So how you actually set these up is you're going to go and create. So what you'll search on perplexity is like write event code for Google Tag Manager for signup conversion. And so what this is going to do is basically write the code, which is just a JavaScript code that you want to fire when the user does the action that you're looking for. So this is like when they do that form submission, I want this. code to fire and it's going to send this event to the data layer. And the data layer is basically just like this observable place that like we can see information. So it's going to push this code,

sign up success. And I can literally go into, you know, my vibe code and be like, add this, add this event for when somebody completes the form submission. And it adds that there, right? Whatever that, you know, it's super easy to implement this now. This used to take again. Like, I would spend two hours with an engineer to get this deployed. You can now do it in like minutes. And then once I have that, what I can do is I can set up a event trigger within Google Tag Manager that actually allows for me to observe that event firing. So let me show you what I mean by that.

I can go trigger new and then I will select custom events. And then within custom events, I'm going to paste that sign-up success. and we'll just name that something like, you know, event, sign up. And then once I've set that up and I have this code firing at the data layer level, I now can observe that. I can actually see that. And that trigger is listening for any time that event gets submitted. And once that event is submitted, I can then send that data back to Google Ads.

So I can say, okay, and what I'm doing here is I'm now making a new tag. So to just take a step back to what I've done is I've deployed. I've deployed this Google Tag Manager code on my website. So I've added this to the head of the website and the body of the website all over the entire website so that I can send all, like basically all this data and information and tracking back to it. And then I'm set up that trigger that is listening for that event. And then I also have this event that's firing now from within the application, pushing that information to the data layer. And once I have all of this set up, I can now deploy something like, okay, I'm going to say this sign-up event. I want Google ads.

I want you to do conversion tracking for when somebody completes that sign-up. So within Google ads, what I can then go do, let me exit out of this. I'll go to conversions. I can create a conversion for that event called sign-up. And we'll try to actually do this live. I don't know what it's going to allow me to because this is like an old account. Set conversions on the website.

Get rid of that. Yeah, it's going to force me to have an actual website. If you just go in YouTube, like how to connect Google Tag Manager, connect Google Tag Manager to Google Ads. Analytics Mania. Loves data. and then measure school are the three best on this.

They do great content. If you do any of those, this one probably would give you the exact walkthrough on how to do this, this conversion linker. But this will have the tutorial on how to set this up. Basically, what it ends up happening is I can set up this conversion ad and what ends up what this ends up looking like is I can have an event that fires.

That data gets sent back to Google Ads. And then within Google Ads, I can actually see the exact keyword, that is making signups. And then I can see the cost for the exact keyword that is making signups. And this is what always kills me with indie hackers. It drives me fucking insane is they are like, oh, we're anti-paid ads. I'm like, my God. Like if you had an ATM where you put a dollar in and $4 came out, what would you do?

What is their answer? It's like, well, I would put as much money into the ATM as I could. That is all ads are when you set it upright. It's like that is literally the game here. And maybe this doesn't work for your industry because it's too competitive. Like for lawyers, right? If you do like truck accident lawyer, you know, Dallas, right? Yeah, impossible, right?

Like literally impossible. Like $13 per CPC. Like you're going to be, you're playing big. You're playing pro ball at that point. You're bidding on some like little ass tool or something like that. Like you can make this work. You can totally 100% make this work, man. It drives me absolutely crazy that they like say that this doesn't work.

It 100% can work. Like if search, if organic search is working for you, paid search will work for you. I guarantee it. Most like nine out of 10 times. Like very rarely, 99 out of 100 times it will work. Very rarely doesn't not work. It's a skill issue. It's not that you're actually like, like, it's not a channel that's going to function for you.

So what do they say that? Is it a badge of honor to not do paid ads? Is that why they say that? I think that's a part of it. I think it's also like ego. and they think like products should distribute itself and like all this. And I'm like, dude, like if you're getting organic traction naturally on YouTube, why wouldn't you go and pay more creators to make videos just like the ones that are getting

organic traction? Like it's so funny to me, like you talk to startup founders. And I would see this when I was in the valley where they're like, yeah, like we're growing entirely organically like 3% compounding month over month. And I'm like, cool, like what is actually happening? All right. You're getting talked about in Facebook groups to a cohort of three. people. So let's just turn on ads and see what happens. Seven days later, they have triple the

leads that they like had ever before. And they're like, yeah, like our investors are like go blow the seed money as fast as you can. I'm like, yeah, I know. Like this is this is like, I think they just like, they don't think in the economics of this. And the economics are very simple. It's like I pay a dollar and then that turns into $5 a customer lifetime value. But let's actually break down what that means. right so when i put a dollar in or say let's say i spend a hundred dollars right and my cost per new customer is 80 so that i spend 100 dollars i get one new customer that cost me 80 and this is like actual data this is from a company that i ran previously that was like an smb this this this tile right so the average customer life or the average revenue per customer

was 39 so i was technically losing money on getting that customer i would pay 80 dollars to make 30 But the customer lifetime value of that person was about $5.50. So I'm paying $80 to make $550 in customer lifetime value. So when these absolute just like chuds are like, oh, it doesn't work. Like the ROAS doesn't make sense. It's like, no, it's a skill issue. Look at the math. Like what is your average customer lifetime value?

If they're staying for six months and paying you $100, right? That means that you're making $600 per person. okay so you can afford to pay literally probably like 150 to 200 dollars to get that customer and you're going to still make enough money and make this make this make this make this make this make it just doesn't make any sense to me but again it's just different ways to run businesses it's not the way that I would run it I would I would layer all of this I would do paid ads I would do organic I would do all of these things but that's just you know two different ways to approach this So anyway, that's my tirade.

Thank you for coming. Let's get back to the actual scheduled programming. So I've set up that conversion event now. And that conversion events is I would do that for a signup and I would do it for paid. So you're probably asking now, why wouldn't you just go immediately to payment? Well, let me tell you, why did we start at clicks? And then we work down to signups and then we work down to paid. It's because I need enough conversion actions to actually have enough data to be able to make smart decisions.

So I start clicks because if I start immediately with signups, I'm not going to have enough data to understand what are the landing pages I should build that are most likely to make signups. So once I have enough signups, then I can like understand, okay, cool. Another way to think about this is like, if I just turn on ads straight to payment,

I'm going to have not enough conversion events for it to train into that payment action. And so I have to focus on the thing that's more up funnel and train it into that. because that is a leading indicator for this like, you know, this more deeper funnel action. And so it's basically like if you have enough money, though, you can go day one, right? If you have 100 grand, like, you're going to go straight to conversion, turn that shit on. And within seven days, like you're going to be optimized into it.

But it just depends on like the resources that you have, the money that's available for most people that are bootstrapping or like setting up, you know, they're self-funding it. They're starting with a smaller budget. And so that's why I suggest the sign up conversion to start with. Once you have enough payment conversion events, though, you can always swap that. You can say, hey, I want you to optimize for the payment conversion. And Google ads actually allows for this. You can set the value of the conversion to be different numbers. So I can say, hey, the sign up's worth a dollar and the payment is worth $10 or $20.

And so then it will start to have that dollar amount that's attached to the user action and will optimize for that dollar amounts. Like basically, like whatever budget you give it, it will optimize itself into creating the most like ROI from the dollar amount that you've designated each of those conversions. So that's Google ads in a nutshell, very high level. There's way more tactical stuff you could go into. But like, you know, we don't have time for a masterclass. Like we could do it one day.

But like if you just do that, like it's going to work. Like you're going to get, you're going to get something at least to start happening. Like some new DNA entering the ecosystem that you're siloed in after you built this app that nobody is like signing up for. Peter Levels is silently silently shaking his fist right now. Whatever, man. Like, you know how I feel. We all do.

We all do. Okay. Anyways. Is there, do we have time to go over? I do Facebook ads real quick because it's very related to this and just like run through kind of the whole strategy. I think that's probably a good like stop point. And then we can come back and we can turn this into a series where I like, we'll do a series on cold DM and cold email those can be paired and then we do the next piece

which is like okay here's how to make a content engine for your business right um comment comment if you want to see that if you want to see that you better comment i swear to god you better run up gregg's comments right now i will respond to every comment that says let me like show me the money show me the goods show me the sauce i will go through every single one of them i want a thousand comments in the comment section, all right? Okay, so Facebook ads. Very different in how you're like structuring the campaigns and also like the philosophical, kind of like the framework behind it. So search ads, when somebody searches a search ad, so when they search this keyword phrase, YouTube channel email extractor, they're signaling exactly what they're looking for. They are looking for a YouTube channel

email extractor, right? So you have the search intent built into the, like you understand what you need to show them to create the outcome that you're looking for. Like they're giving you that search intent. Paid ads is different. The reason for that is because you're actually disrupting them. So this person is actively in a mindset right now. They're like, okay, I'm looking for this thing. So if I get in front of them and give them that thing, they're already in that mindset.

Paid ads is different. I have to disrupt what they're doing. I have to get their attention. And then I have to like tell a story that gets them into the mindset where they're malleable that I can present a new. solution that gets like that convinces them to basically buy a thing this is why like you see all this like bullshit on youtube where they're like study psychology bro like you're going to become like the best drop shipper ever and it's like bullshit and it's like very simple it's like talk about people's pain

points cast a vision of a future that they can potentially have and then your product is the bridge to get them to the future okay you just do those things like you're your top one percent of ads like that's all it's all everything is you want to what an argument like you want to convince the world to not go to war or go to war. Like that is the angle to do this. You might have to beep that out, Greg. I apologize. But it's just storytelling.

That's all you're trying to do here. And it's way less transactional than the paid search side. You have to think about that component. So let's actually do this. Let's do this process. So I would go and I'd look like, we'd go back to perplexity. And I'd be like, give me paying points around. YouTube channel, email extractor, Reddit.

And I'd just be like, okay, like, how are people talking about it? What are the pain points with this? Like technical barriers, users face issues with YouTube recapture. Awesome. That's sweet. All right, cool. I got like a specific thing I can talk to. API and scraper limitations.

They're limited by API requests. Ethical and legal risks. Okay, cool. We don't care about that. We're living in the gray area in our life. The scam and security risks, this is, I mean, that's just point. from Reddit. So this is a pretty simple product. So like technical barriers, it looks like to the main thing that you're solving. It's pretty simple what this would probably be,

it would be like, you know, the ad that I would probably write is like, if you do create, if you do influencer marketing, listen to this. Like, that's the hook. And like, let's actually write this out. Let's write this out, like step by step. So if you do influencer marketing, listen to this. By the way, there's only like a hundred hooks that exist. Oh, yeah. In short form video. Especially for sex.

Yeah. Absolutely. SaaS, it's even smaller. I would say there's probably like 25 good ones and like maybe 50 that sometimes work, you know, but like it's all the same. But this is really easy. It's like call out a thing that somebody does and then present the pain point. If you do influencer marketing, listen to this.

finding YouTube creator emails is a huge pain. Or sorry, we'll just say like takes hours. Finding YouTube. Actually, let's do this. Wait, by the way, is this like a video that you're writing the script for? Yeah, this is a video. This is an AI avatar video. And the reason I'm suggesting this is because AI avatar videos,

we see those perform best for SaaS right now. Those in comics for some reason. I'm like obsessed with the comics ones, like four panel comics where it's like you're like telling a little story, but it looks like native content. So people are like, oh, this is just a meme. And then like, fuck, it's an ad. They're now in a funnel. It's amazing.

It works so well. I love it. It's so good. Before and after comics work really well too. Like here's where you are. Here's where you can be if you do this thing. Dude, they just rip anyways. But all right.

So find me quotes about like technical barriers. See what it says. And I'm looking for like. actual quotes of people saying this. Like, I worked on comparable prime. Email extraided the challenge. So I'm sorry, sir, bypass the recapture. So bypass the recapture.

Perfect, right? There's a limit. So we're going to say finding or getting YouTube creator emails. Couldn't you say? Super hard. Because bypassing the recapture, you know, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, like, to take this even a step further, instead of saying get YouTube creator email super hard because bypassing the recapture and provide me, like, making it more personal and being like, I almost blew my brains out after trying to get a thousand YouTube creators emails because of bypassing the recapture or something like that. Maybe not blow your brains up, but something like visual, right? I wanted to un-life myself because I had to get emails behind recaptias and build like 10 Google accounts to get 100 emails.

I have done this manually in the past. It's terrible. Don't ever do this. Please, I beg you. But yes, talking exactly to that pain point, like speaking to that, that's all we're trying to do here. And like what I'm going to be able to do live is going to be way shittier than what I would actually be able to do if we sat down and did this. But, I mean, let's just take yours. I think that's actually like it's a better ad.

So like, if you're an influencer marker or if you do influencer marketing, listen to this, like, like, what did you say, Greg? I mean, I said blow my brains out, but that's a bit too extreme. So maybe like, I don't know, what's a bit more, okay, we can just for the sake of this. Yeah, I want to blow. I want to blow my brains. my brain's out trying to get

a YouTube influencer or the YouTube creator emails because the caption because the capture because the capture is hard to bypass right and I told my friend this friend this

who's a little bit shady who does a little bit shady internet marketing and he told me I should I should check out this tool called out this tool called X. X does Y thing. So like X scrapes YouTube channel emails at scale. you just give it a list and it returns the emails

it bypasses the capture for you and it's saved me from my hemorrhoids and shitty joke anyways

so like I got this ad and now what I wouldn't need I don't even know if I'd mention the ad name as well. Like I found that like sometimes just like calling it the app. I like check out this tool, this tool that scrapes emails. Scrapes emails.

I upload a list of YouTube channels, URLs, URLs. And it returns the emails by bypassing the CAPTCHA, you know, for me. whatever, right? And then like, click the link, like click the link to learn more. Like, you don't even like say the app

because then it like creates like this like, well, I want to know what this is now, right? And then like you'll just see like, sometimes you'll see higher CTR. All of this is anecdotal. This is not have data. Like this is anecdotal data to support this.

Every industry is different. Take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt. But this is like, something in this vicinity will work. Okay. So I take that. And then I would go and I would go to Hey, Jen.

And I would use an 11 Labs voice. I don't know if I want to give away this sauce, but I'm going to do it. Because again, I'm feeling generous today. Natasha Valley Girl on 11 Labs absolutely crushes it. The voice is unbelievable. It is so good. It is so good. So you do that.

And then the avatar, you just like, honestly, hot girls work the best. So that's like what I would suggest. You do UGC. And like these are ripping right now. when it's kind of this like podcast style or like car ones where it's like casual again use something like this I'd like test all of them honestly but then you go in you select one of these we'll just do her to begin with four no I don't want it oh shit they changed everything oh they suck all right I'm going to change it from Izzy I want my voices Natasha Valley

girl baby marry me So then I would go and listen through this and you would generate that video, download it. And at that point, you take it into like cap cut or descript. And you're going to remove the silence so that it has like fast pacing, add captions. And then for like the hook section, you want to add like a title that is at the top of it. And you might be able to do this in here now. Actually, hold on. Let me just do this.

I'll like add these. Well, shit. All right. I'll change this. I don't know. Something that makes sense. You're trying to make it look as platform native as possible. So that's the thing to remember with this.

And then I would add text. Is that a title? I don't know if it's going to allow you to do this. But you'd do basically that title would you'd have it, want to appear just for that section. So actually, I'm not just, I don't know how good this is. This is like literally. they launched this today, which is crazy because I was just in here this morning and it didn't have this.

Yeah. But anyways. It just launched this today, like a few hours ago. Interesting. Interesting. Anyway, so what you're doing there basically is you are building out this ad within the application. We're going to run through this. So you have to generate the AI avatar.

You then shorten the word gaps so that it's like faster pacing. Add captions, add a title that's like. some type of hooky title where it's like influencer marketing easy mode, right? Just some, I don't know, whatever. Test a bunch of different ones. And have that be for the hook section of the ad. And then you go make 10 different variations of that. So you're going to take this ad and I would go to Claude because Claude's got the vibes.

He's just, I mean, Claude, is that what you call him, right? That's what I call him, yeah, Claude. Nice. Be like big dog. rewrite this ad script five times right and then just look at the variations the one you like just kind of reiterate like over and over on top of these right and you can build like automations for this like you use like you know whatever gum loop or lindy to like automate this whole process i would suggest that probably give it good examples of like here's ad structures hook examples all that

you can make this way more advanced but this is the simple version but once i have that i then go and to do Facebook ads. You're going to target all of Facebook. So Facebook has gotten so good at understanding the person that's most likely to sign up for the thing that you're trying to promote. All that matters is you make good creative now. But how do you make good creative? You test a bunch of creative. So go test 40 different ads a month. And what you're going to find is like two to three of those are just going to crush the rest of them. Those two to three, you're going to do a conversion campaign. So that event that we just set up for within Google Tag Manager, I can use that. that same event, but I can do that event as a HTML custom conversion. So I would deploy the

Facebook ads pixel and then I would deploy the custom event for that sign up conversion. So let me show you what that actually looks like. We'll say write a Facebook ad event for a signup. It's going to like write this script. And so like this script right here is all you need. and what that's basically doing is it's sending a event back to Facebook for when that user action is occurring. So our user action is the sign-up event. We're now sending that back to Facebook so that I can track that user action. And you can do this also for like, if you want them to schedule a demo or stuff, you know, whatever. You can do this for, you know, kind of any user action that you want within the application.

But then all you're doing is you're basically testing all this ad creative, letting them compete again. against each other. And then when you find a winner, all the budget goes there. But what you'll see is that that ad will get what's called ad fatigue. So if a person sees an ad so much, you know when you watch TV, Greg, and you're like, I've seen this fucking Doritos commercial, you know, 20 times, man. Like, I just tune it out. So people do that with, you know, social media ads as well. And so the strategy here is you're constantly refreshing the ads so that it's set, that none of them goes stale. And you take the winners and you remix those over and over again. You change hook variations, but maybe you find these pain points work.

You just look for the common threads for what's most successful. That's it, man. That's paid ads for SaaS. That is like the vibe code thing. We could go into details on like how to actually track this. You can get all this data into like a data analytics platform. Like Looker Studio is often what's used. It's a pain in the ass to learn.

Or you can use my app. This is the shill. You just sat here for an hour. So we're now going to shill it. You can use graph.com. It'll one-shot dashboards for you. You don't have to learn how to use the tool. I can say, you know, show me clicks week over week for my Facebook ads.

And it goes and builds that. Does that for Google ads. Does that for my Google Analytics, et cetera. Go sign up for free. It's a free 14-day trial. Yeah. That's it, man. Any questions I can try to answer before you cut me off and get me out of here?

Cut me loose, Greg. Thank you, Cody. I want to give one quick little piece of sauce. I'm sure you know about, but I'm not sure everyone knows about it. Or maybe you don't know about this one. So did you know on Instagram you can do trial reels? Have you heard about this? Yes, I have heard about this.

I've never ran them. I heard they can, they like ripped though because it like test it to a huge wide audience for free, right? Yeah. So basically if you go and create like as as you're saying basically go and create 10, 15, 20 different pieces of creative. And you can, I think you might need to be a creator account or professional account

on Instagram, but there's a setting in there that says enable trial reels. Enable that trial reels thing. And then upload one of your videos, which is a reel. Yeah, exactly. And it'll literally share the reel with non-followers for free so you can see if it's going to resonate with people. So it's basically, it turns it into TikTok mode. and they're giving you this for free.

So some degenerate out there, listen to me, all right? You're going to go make like 100 Instagram accounts, okay? And you're going to trial reels all of the 100 Instagram account. You're never going to actually post anything on any of these things, right? And that's a way for you to go get free reach at scale probably. There's something in there that you can probably game. But anyway, gee, that's such a good idea too because then you don't have to do any ad spend on the testing. So you skip that step, right?

You get to go right to the conversion event rather than having to do like the, you know, the click events or, you know, whatever else that you need for the testing. It's a super good insight. Cody, it was an absolute honor having you on today. Thank you for sharing. We'll include links to follow Cody and his products. And, you know, hopefully come on again for another little tutorial like this. Whenever you have me back, Poppy, I'm still shocked that you have me here after I rock.

you i mean it's crazy to me i was down in miami i learned his address we came in we took the good art no i'm just playing thank you g for host me as always man it's it's always a pleasure so that that's a story for another day that's a story yeah yeah we'll keep that we'll keep that in the keep that in the in the holster so all right catch you later man later man