Turning Vibe Coding Into Real Money (Google/Meta Ads, HeyGen etc)

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Today's episode is the bootstrapper's 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.

• 0:41Greg Isenberg?

  And these types of episodes, people, they charge $5, $10, $15, $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.

• 1:04Greg Isenberg?

  Cody Schneider on the pod. We're going to talk about how to grow your vibe-coded startup. You built 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 in Cody Schneider. And Cody, by the end of the episode, what are people going to learn?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  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 as 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. So 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 this symbiotic relationship that creates like this growth flywheel for you.

• 1:54Greg Isenberg?

  Let's go. All right, cool. So let's, let's get into it. And you're gonna give all the tools, all the talk, all the sauce.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 2:01Greg Isenberg?

  I need you to promise me.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  I promise you, I'll show you everything.

• 2:05Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, cool. All right. So you can start sharing your screen and we'll get into it.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Sweet. Okay, cool. So first off, let's talk through paid ads and what like for most, like especially if you're building an SMB 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.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:50Greg Isenberg?

  By the way, I noticed, I noticed you have, what is that Chrome extension that you're using that shows?

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's called Keywords Everywhere. They should, 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 CP 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's 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 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.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  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 or like, you know, 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, when it's 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, 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?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Couldn't make that up. You couldn't make that any better, right?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  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 and the actual like setup process. I don't know how much I can show. I mean, I could probably show, um, I guess we could make up like a separate account and like show you, I'll just show you the, the kind of the, the structure that I think that we could do. And actually I'm not sure on this G, so I'll just kind of play it. I'll play, 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?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  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, the ad that you're like the, the ad creative that's in there, it would have to be, um, uh, like only say channel email scraper. And the reason for that is because like they'll flag this, but let's actually just like, I can just go and set up an account.

• 5:53Greg Isenberg?

  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 idea browser.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?

• 6:38Greg Isenberg?

  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 GPT for ideas with it, but you can start for free idea browser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Okay, cool. So this is like a Google Ads account and I'm going to show you like step by step how 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 click stream 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.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  But then what I'll do is we'll like throw up a website, we'll just say like YouTube scraper, right? As like a placeholder and then just to get us to like move forward. I'm just gonna 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 gonna do page view as the events, and then I'm gonna talk through how to actually set up events in the future for the actual signup that you're trying to get to happen. You can set up events for signup, or also a payment conversion. It's the same exact

• 8:16Speaker 01

  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 the, 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, this is a great way to actually test a product, too. Like, throw up a landing page in Lovable, put a tally form on it, send some Google Ads traffic to it. I just talked to a founder, he's building an app for like,

• 8:57Speaker 01

  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 gonna do clicks, and then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna target only the United States. And then I'm gonna update for people that are only present in that location. You don't wanna 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 showing interesting 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.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  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, none of it, 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.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  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 a, 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.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  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 it, they don't actually work. So anyways, you have to basically make the 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 too, 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

• 11:52Speaker 01

  that are related to YouTube channel email extractor. So what I'm doing here is again, I just searched this and then I can find all the long tail keywords. 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 that, the phrase that I provided as the source phrase. We'll see if this wants to actually work.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  This app can't, or this Chrome extension can be buggy. So it is, it's one of those, one of those things. There's probably a team and like, I actually don't know. I need to meet them at some point, but um. 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 um, sorry, it's, 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.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  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, you would then go and you'd actually.

• 13:22Greg Isenberg?

  I have a quick question on that. So if you, if you go back to keyword, uh, the keyword tool. I noticed 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?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  The only reason I'm sharing this one, because it's like, whatever. You know, we're going to give the sauce a waiter for free today because I'm feeling, I'm feeling like, uh, I'm feeling like Kris Kringle. And I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be Santa to you in the middle of summer in this hot July heat, this hot August heat. So. The, I wouldn't even think about the search volume, but 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 a hundred 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's gonna be like 95%.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  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 gonna like, it's a little tool. It doesn't really break. It doesn't, it just does this very small thing. I think a lot of the times, like, this is what I see a lot of these vibe coders. They try to make these massive platforms. It's like, yo, take a step back, find one killer feature, have off-payment and email, sort of like password reset. Like, 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, it, it, start with the smallest thing. But, anyway, yeah, does that answer the question on that? Absolutely. I was hoping you were gonna say that. Yeah, man, it's, dude, the riches are in the niches.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  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, right? It's like, you find a bunch of these small, like, scraper, extractor, uh, 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 unsexy, 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. Um, now you're gonna set up the ads.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  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. Um, you're not gonna be able to have YouTube in the actual name of the URL that you're sending to. So like, don't name it this, name it something else. Um, but what you'll do is have it be like, uh, I would probably do something like, uh, channel email extractor, right? So like, still talk to that specific keyword, email extractor.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  And then the reason for this is I'm trying to have the the uh 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 the strategy here in the beginning is like, I'm just gonna bid on everything. That's why I'm doing the click campaign rather than the 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 than YouTube channel email extractor, I'm gonna go and build landing pages for each of these

• 17:19Speaker 01

  keywords. And when I say a landing page, like, literally, all I'm talking about is like, you know, it's 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 could do this in lovable right now, right? Like, build a landing page for this target keyword.

• 17:36Greg Isenberg?

  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 contrast. You probably want juicy buttons, you know, all so look at people need to look at, you know, best squeeze pages, best landing pages, and use that as a reference.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  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 like, 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 ebook? Is it a 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, of just like, follow best practices. Like, you literally go to perplexity and be like, what what should the structure of this landing page be?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Uh, for this keyword, right? And it's like, here's the keyword. And then it's just gonna give you the structure and you take that over to lovable and you build that landing page out. Right? Like, that's like, literally. It's so easy. It's so easy. Like, this used to take me, again, like, I, I, I'm gonna 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, the, the part two of this later on. So, okay, anyways. Um, okay, cool. So you built that landing page.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Uh, 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 gonna do that? You're gonna use Google Tag Manager to set this up. Google Tag Manager is basically a container that allows for you to deploy, uh, both scripts, um, which are scripts in pixels are interchangeable, uh, in their, in their, uh, in their voice. Um, but then, uh, what it allows for you to do as well is you can actually set up, uh, 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, uh, trying to say, hey, Google,

• 20:08Speaker 01

  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 signup 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 it can actually, like, train itself into understanding. These people are most likely to sign up. These people are most likely to, you know, actually turn into a paid conversion, et cetera. Um, 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, um, is you're going to go and create, uh,

• 20:48Speaker 01

  so what you'll search on perplexity is like, write, um, event code, uh, for Google Tag Manager, uh, for, uh, signup conversion.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  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 like observable place that like we can see information. So it's going to push this code signup 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, you can, 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. I can now do it in like minutes.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  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, 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 signup success. And we'll just name that something like, you know, events signup. And then, once I've, 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.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  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 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, like, 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 this set up, I can now deploy something like, okay, I'm going to say

• 23:10Speaker 01

  this signup event, I want Google Ads, I want you to do conversion tracking for when somebody completes that signup. 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 signup. And we'll try to actually do this live. I don't know like what it's going to allow me to because this is like an old account.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  So conversions on the website, get rid of that.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Connect Google Tag Manager.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  To Google Ads. Analytics Mania.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Loves Data and then Measure School are the two, the three best on this. They do great content. If you do any of those, like this one probably would. Give you the exact like 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's what. Ends up, look at what this ends up looking like is I can have an event that fires.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  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 up right. 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?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, impossible, right? Like literally impossible, like $13 per CPC, like you're going to be, you're playing big, you're playing, you're playing pro ball at that point. But you're bidding on some like little ass tool or something like that, like. You can make this work. You can totally a hundred percent make this work, man. It drives me absolutely crazy that they like say that this it doesn't work. It it it hundred percent can work. Like if 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 does it not work. It's it's a 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.

• 25:51Greg Isenberg?

  So why do they say that? Is it a badge of honor to not do paid ads? Is that why they say that?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  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 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 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 our investors are like, go blow the seed money as fast as you can.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  I'm like, yeah, I know, like this is, this is like, I I I think they just like, they 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 a hundred 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 a SMB 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.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  I would pay $80 to make $39. But the customer lifetime value of that person was about 550. 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 to get that customer. And you're gonna still make enough money and make this make sense. But they're like, "No, I wanna, like, stay core and do this."

• 28:10Speaker 01

  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 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. Um, let's get back to the actual scheduled programming. The, uh, so, I've set up that conversion event now. And that conversion event is, uh, 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 worked down to signups, and then we worked down to paid. It's because I need enough conversion actions to actually have enough data to be able to make smart decisions.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  So, I started clicks because if I start with, immediately with signups, I'm not gonna have enough data to understand, like, what are the landing pages I should build that are most likely to make signups? So, once I have enough signups, um, then I can, like, understand, "Okay, cool." Like, another way to think about this is, like, if I just turn on ads straight to payment, I'm gonna have, uh, 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 a hundred grand, like, you're gonna go straight to conversion, turn that

• 29:36Speaker 01

  shit on, and within seven days, like, you're gonna 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, yeah, they're self-funding it, they're starting with a smaller budget, and so that's why I suggested Just the signup 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 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.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Like basically like how 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, I, 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, it's gonna work. Like you're gonna get, you're gonna get something at least to start happening, like some, some new DNA entering the, the ecosystem that you're, you're siloed in after you built this app that nobody is like signing up for.

• 30:50Greg Isenberg?

  Peter Levels is silently, silently shaking his fist right now.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Whatever, man. Like I, you know how I feel.

• 31:00Greg Isenberg?

  We all do. We all do. Okay.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Anyways.

• 31:04Greg Isenberg?

  Is there, do we have time to go over?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  I'll 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 that's probably a good like stop point and then we can come back and we can do, 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 can do the next piece, which is like, okay, here's how to make a content engine for your business, right?

• 31:27Greg Isenberg?

  Comment, comment if you want to see that.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  If you want to see that, you better comment. I swear to God, you better run up Greg'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 YouTube channel email extractor, right? So you have the search intent built into the, like you understand what you need to show

• 32:15Speaker 01

  them to create the outcome that you're looking for. Like you, 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 gonna become like the best drop shipper ever. And it's like bullshit, man. It's like very simple.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  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 1% of ads. Like that's all, it's all, everything is. You wanna, wanna argument, like you wanna, you wanna 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 the, the, it's just storytelling. That's all you're trying to do here. And it's very, it's way less transactional than the paid search side. You have to think about that, that component. So let's actually do this. Let's do this process. So I would go and I'd look like, we'll go back to perplexity and I'd be like, uh, give

• 33:41Speaker 01

  me pain points around, uh, you know, YouTube channel email extractor, Reddit.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  And I'd just be like, okay, like, how are people talking about it? What are the pain points with this? Like, um, technical barriers, users face issues with YouTube. Recapture, awesome, this is 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. Um, the scam and security risks. Uh, this is, I mean, that's just pulling from Reddit. So this is a pretty simple product. So like technical barriers looks like the main thing that you're solving. It's pretty simple what this will probably be, probably be. Um, it would be like, uh, you know, the ad that I would probably write is like, if you do create, if you do influencer marking, marketing, listen to this. Like, that's the hook. And like, let's actually write this out.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Let's write this out like step by step.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  So if you do influencer marketing, listen to this.

• 34:43Greg Isenberg?

  By the way, there's only like a hundred hooks that exist.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:47Greg Isenberg?

  For in short form.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Especially for SaaS.

• 34:50Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. SaaS is even smaller. I would say there's probably like 25 good ones and like maybe 50 that sometimes work. I, 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, take, you know, we'll just say like takes hours. Finding YouTube, actually, let's, let's do this.

• 35:23Greg Isenberg?

  Wait, by the way, is this like a video that you're, you're writing the script for?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  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, so good. Uh, 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, uh, like technical barriers.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  See what it says. And I'm looking for like, actual quotes of people saying this. Like, I worked on comparable prime, you know, extracting the challenge. So I'm sorry, bypass the recaptcha. So bypass the recaptcha. Perfect, right? There's a limit. So we're gonna say, finding or getting YouTube creator emails.

• 36:29Greg Isenberg?

  Couldn't you say-

• 36:30Speaker 01

  It's super hard. Because bypassing the recaptcha.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  You know, we're sorry, go ahead.

• 36:37Greg Isenberg?

  I was gonna say, like, to take this even a step further. Instead of saying get YouTube creator email super hard because bypassing the recaptcha and provide me blah blah blah. 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 recaptcha, or something like that. Maybe not blow your brains out, but something like visual, right? I almost-

• 37:06Speaker 01

  I wanted to unlife myself because I had to get emails behind recaptchas. And build like 10 Google accounts to get 100 emails. I've 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 gonna be able to do live is gonna be way shittier than what I would actually be able to do if we like, 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,

• 37:36Speaker 01

  like if you're an influencer marketer, or if you do influencer marketing, listen to this.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Like, like, what did you say, Greg?

• 37:47Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I said blew, blow my brains out, but that's a bit too extreme. So maybe like, I don't know, what's, what's a bit more, okay, we can just, for the sake of this.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wanna blow, I want like, uh, yeah, I wanna blow my brains.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  I wanna blow my brains out trying to get YouTube influencer, or YouTube creator emails.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Because the captcha.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Because the captcha. Because the captcha is hard to bypass.

• 38:27Greg Isenberg?

  Right.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  And I told my friend this.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Friend this, who's a little bit shady, who does a little bit shady internet marketing.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  And he told me I should. I should.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  I should check out this tool. Called X.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  X does Y thing.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  So like X. X scrapes YouTube channel emails. At scale. You just give it a list. And it returns the emails. It bypasses the captcha for you. And it's saved me from my hemorrhoids. And.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Shitty joke. Anyways. So like, I got this ad. And now, I, what I wouldn't even, 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, like, check out this tool, this, this tool that scrapes emails. Scrapes emails.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  I upload.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  A list of YouTube channels. 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. Um, and then like you'll just see like, sometimes you'll see higher CTR than all of this is anecdotal. This is not have data. This is 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 a, it, it, something in this vicinity will work.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  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 make, test all of them, honestly. But then you go in, you select one of these. We'll just do her to begin with. For no, I don't want it. Oh shit. They changed everything. Ah, they suck. All right. I'm going to change it from Izzy. I want my voices Natasha Valley Girl, baby. Marry me. Um, so then I would go and I would listen through this and you would generate that video. Download it. And then at that point, you take it into like Cap Cutter to script.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  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 a, 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, let me just do this a little like, add these. Oh shit. All right. Um, I'll change this. White or whatever. I don't know. It's something, 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 do basically the title. Would you'd have it want to appear just for that section. So actually I'm going to just.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  I don't know how good this is. This is like literally, I think they launched this today, which is crazy because I was just in here this morning and it didn't have this. So.

• 42:43Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  But anyways.

• 42:43Greg Isenberg?

  They just launched it today, like a few.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Interesting. Interesting. Um, but anyway, so what you're doing there basically is you are building out this ad within the application. You're, we're going to run through this. So, uh, you have to generate the avatar. You then shorten the word gaps so that it's like faster pacing. Ad captions, add a title. That's like some type of hooky title. Where it's like influencer marketing easy mode, right? Some, whatever. Test a bunch of different ones. And have that be for the hook section of the, 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?

• 43:30Greg Isenberg?

  That's what I call him. Yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Nice. Be like, be like big dog. Rewrite this. Ad script, uh, five times, right?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And then just look at the variations, the one you like, just kind of reiterate like over and over on top of these, right? Um, and you're going to build like automations for this, like you use like, you know, whatever Gumloop 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 I 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 this 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.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Those two to three, you're going to do a conversion campaign. So that, that event that we just set up for, uh, within Google Tag Manager, I can use 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 signup conversion. So let me show you what that actually looks like. We'll say, write a Facebook ad event for signup. It's gonna like write this script.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  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 signup 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, 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 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 too much, you know, when you watch

• 45:40Speaker 01

  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 go 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 like what's most successful. That's it, man. That's paid ads for SaaS. That is the, that is like the vibe code thing that 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

• 46:25Speaker 01

  we're now going to shill it. You can use graphed.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, etc. 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.

• 46:51Greg Isenberg?

  Uh, thank you, Cody. I want to give one quick little, little piece of sauce. I'm sure you know about, but I'm not sure everyone knows about, 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?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I have heard about this. I've never ran them. I heard they can, uh, they like rip though. Cause it like tests it to a huge wide audience for free, right?

• 47:14Greg Isenberg?

  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. Uh, 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, uh, one, one of your videos, which is a reel. Yeah, exactly. Um, and it'll literally share the reel with non-followers for free. So you can see if it's going to resonate with people.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  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 a hundred, uh, Instagram accounts. Okay. And you're going to trial reels, all of the hundred Instagram accounts. 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, that's such a good idea too. Cause like, 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.

• 48:35Greg Isenberg?

  Cody, it was an absolute honor having you on today. Thank you for sharing. We'll include links to follow Cody, uh, and his products. And, uh, you know, hopefully come, come on again for another little tutorial like this.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Whenever you have me back, Poppy, I'm still shocked that you have me here after I robbed 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 hosting me as always, man. It's, it's always a pleasure. So.

• 49:07Greg Isenberg?

  That, that's a story for another day. That's a story.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We'll keep that, we'll keep that in the, keep that in the, in the holster. So.

• 49:14Greg Isenberg?

  All right. Catch you later, man.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Later, man.