How do I get started selling ad services? Should I focus only on ads or build a fuller agency system with funnels, email campaigns, etc.?
Very straightforward. Basically you find winning advertisements out there — ads that are currently on Meta Ads Library or Google Ads Transparency Center. You find the best ads you can, then you rip them, parasite them, feed them into something like GPT-4.5, and replace it with your own brand. You want a big library of winning ad templates, also known as a swipe file. Feed that into AI, have it reproduce it with your own brand, and you'll do pretty good. You can parasite your way to success for the most part, because there's a sequence of mimetic templates out there — mimetic forms of things that are highly viral, highly attention-grabbing and scroll-stopping — that if you just duplicate for your own product, it'll work really well. People have been doing this since the beginning of time, but AI allows you to automate it to the point where you could build a system that does this completely automatically for a brand and then win. They do this for organic as well — my stuff gets ripped all the time, and I've done some ripping of other people as well. That's just kind of how it is.
I don’t know the specifics of your product, but mimicking what’s working for others is a reasonable first step. The tactics I use in my own social‑media advertising involve spending a lot of money for time, which isn’t ideal for you because you have plenty of time but limited cash. Instead of giving you a detailed walk‑through of my exact methods, let’s look at your situation more generally.
You’ve spent a lot of time building a tool that helps people go viral. The usual approach is to keep investing time and money into the product and then hope marketing will magically work later. That’s the opposite of what you should do. It’s far more effective to start by marketing and selling, then build the product only after you’ve validated demand. If you begin with demand, you’ll already have customers and a clear idea of what they actually want when you finally create the tool.
Rather than building a big inbound funnel for a product that might become obsolete, reach out directly to potential users. Pitch hypothetical offers or tools you could build if they show interest. For example, you could say, “Hey, I’m transitioning to software and think I could save you $10‑15k a month with a tool that does X, Y, Z. Would you be interested in a free version?” If they say yes, you have validation without even having a finished product. Modern AI lets you build functional tools quickly, so you can test ideas fast.
My recommendation: focus all your time and energy on marketing first. Validate the product through outbound outreach. If validation fails, iterate and try a new idea. This outbound‑first approach is the 80/20 play many high‑growth agencies use today, especially with AI accelerating development.
In practice, avoid inbound because it’s undirected and slow to show ROI. Set a target number of outreach contacts and define clear exit conditions—e.g., at least five booked meetings from a thousand messages. If you hit those metrics, then you proceed to build the product. Remember, you can market and sell an idea without a finished product; you just need a compelling concept and a way to communicate it.
You find clients in fashion much like in any other niche. Assuming you're going DTC or retail brands, you could target online businesses with terms like fashion on their Shopify stores, or scrape Shopify DNS ranges. You could also look at all the retailers in a certain geography, not the Macy's but smaller retailers, find out what brands they stock, and reach out directly to the smaller brands offering fully automated AI-synthesized UGC-style creator videos for their ads. Another way is to go bottom up from the ads: see which companies are running non-AI UGC ads right now on the Meta ads library, Google Ads Transparency Center, or even Pinterest since it's so visual. Make a giant list of advertisers, apply your human judgment or standardize it into a skill, and have AI pull out the ones likely performing well. Then enrich them, reach out directly, and offer a free AI UGC video, which costs you somewhere around 10 to 20 cents. Your total addressable market isn't very big, so giving value up front makes sense. Once you've made it, maximize the view rate: reach out over email, LinkedIn to everyone in the company, X, Instagram and so on, because most emails don't get viewed and you've already sunk the cost. As for packaging, you could sell a minimum number of videos per month, but videos per month don't really matter to them; what matters is the money they make on the ads. A simple way to align incentives is to focus on revenue, for instance: "I'll guarantee you an additional $20,000 a month, and if I don't hit it I'll keep working for free until I do." If a company already makes $150,000 to $160,000 a month through that funnel, adding $20,000 over two months is a tiny proportional improvement. If you can't improve a business's ad effectiveness by that much after 60 days of pouring over it with AI skills, you're probably not good enough for this game; a 16-year-old with no experience could find a 4 or 5% improvement by staring at it long enough. Then just rinse and repeat.
Yes, I've done lots of consulting with e-commerce brands. A common AI-driven easy win is generating virtually infinite ad creative—using video models, you can feed your product and have it do anything, like a giant bottle falling from the sky crushing buildings. It's entirely up to your imagination. I value ad creative because removing that bottleneck unlocks reach, which is a core pillar of growth. While some organic-only brands are impressive, creating high-quality content, copy, and creative remains a bottleneck that limits reach.
Very interesting question. I think your issue is you are attempting to find leverage where it probably doesn't make sense. Why not just record your ads yourself? If you're going to go through the process of scripting them and stuff like that, just record a video of you saying it. You're trying to make your team seem larger. Actually, there's a tremendous amount of value in consolidating that team into one public-facing person. If they like, you know, a piece of content that they watch with you, then when they see an ad of you in their feed, you'll get significantly lower CPMs. So, I think you're just trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. What are you planning on doing? Spinning up 4,000 AI avatars talking about all different types of of services and whatnot? No, I mean, if you're here on my channel asking me that question, you probably don't have the ad budget. So, don't worry about that at all. Just do it yourself. I don't know if you've noticed, but I do all my videos entirely myself. I also do all my ads entirely myself. And the reason why is because this is the most important part of my business. It is the top of my funnel. It is the step that every single person that ever gives me any money needs to go through before they eventually get to the point where they transform into a paying customer or client. If you think about it that way, you'll realize that there is no point in trying to save money at this stage. You should focus entirely on growing, not saving. And all AI agents or AI ad avatars and UGCs things can do for you at that stage is typically save.