Go back

How I use Claude Code + MCPs to run my marketing

37m 51s

How I use Claude Code + MCPs to run my marketing

The transcript discusses the challenge of customer acquisition for startups and introduces the concept of marketing agents as a solution. A marketing agent is defined by three criteria: it must have access to unified business data through a data pipeline and warehouse, it must make autonomous decisions based on that data, and it must be able to improve its performance over time using feedback loops. The speaker, Cody Schneider, emphasizes that these agents are not simple Zapier automations but rather code hosted in the cloud that interacts with live data. He proposes a concrete startup idea: an AI-first, all-in-one plugin for WordPress that bundles essential plugins (like forms, SEO, and security) with a vibe-coding interface for design, sold via a token-based subscription. This idea leverages WordPress’s 43% market share and the lack of AI-native competitors. To market such a product, Schneider explains how to build a marketing agent that automates Facebook ad campaigns. The agent scrapes Reddit for customer pain points, uses AI tools (like Kling AI and Hedra) to generate branded static images and AI avatar videos, and publishes them via the Facebook Marketing API. Crucially, the agent must avoid API spam to prevent account bans. A data warehouse (built with open-source tools like Airbyte and Clickhouse) unifies data from Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Stripe, enabling the agent to optimize ads based on full-funnel performance. The goal is to create a system that autonomously manages the entire ad lifecycle from creative generation to budget allocation.

Transcription

7092 Words, 37677 Characters

English
Let's be real. The hardest part about building a startup today is getting customers to the startup. You can vibe code stuff now, super easily. We all know that, but getting customers to drive revenue is hard. So how can you actually set up marketing agents that help you do this? I feel like a bunch of people have talked about this, but no one's really gone in depth, and clearly explain what a marketing agent is, and how you can use it to go and get you customers. In today's episode, it's two parts. We give you a startup idea that I really love, and then we also explain what marketing agents are, how you can set them up, what are the tools you need to understand if you actually want to be a marketing agent manager, and Cody Schneider just does an incredible job on this episode of explaining everything and to end. So enjoy the episode, and I'll see you at the end. Thank the good Lord that Cody Schneider is back on the podcast. Cody, by the end of the episode, what are people going to get out of this? Yeah, I'm going to show you and tell, like share everything that you need to actually deploy real marketing agents, and I'm not talking about some, like, Zapier automation workflow that's linear, I'm talking about like code in the cloud that's making decisions off of your live business data, and then I'm also going to give you three businesses that are concrete, so you can basically feel like, okay, what these agents actually look like for a specific company type. So you're going to walk away with three business ideas, and also the agents that you should potentially deploy for them, how to actually deploy them for them, so you can grow the company autonomously. As you say, may the MRR gods be with us. Blessed be thy name. Let's go. Awesome, man. Cool. So I think just to start out, like, what is a marketing agent, right? Like, I see this thrown around so much, and it drives me nuts, and I've talked to so many people, and that I, you know, talk huge game on the internet, and then you actually get down to the brass tax with them on a conversation, and you're like, you're so full of shit just to be blunt. So to me, like, what is it, what is a marketing agent? It has to be three things. It's like, you have to solve the data problem to like, give the agent unified data clarity of like the whole pipeline. And then you have to be able to have the agent autonomous, like, autonomously making decisions, you know, on some type of cadence, like with like a thinking loop in it, right? So in practice, like the infrastructure that's necessary for that, you got to build a data pipeline, a data warehouse, and then have like the ability to host these agents in the cloud. And when I say an agent, like, it doesn't have to be this like, AGI, Hermes thing, right? It like, or can think on its own, I actually don't want that. Like, I want something that is like doing a process for me, and then looking at the data, and then basically like improving based off the data that's getting back from it. So I just want to like, define that really quickly for the audience, because I think that there's so much out there that's like, this is a totally autonomous agent that's like running your entire marketing stack, and it's like, no, it's not. Like this NADN workflow I guarantee you is not entirely running your marketing stack, but in contrast, like I can, and we will, like, we'll talk about this day, like you can make an agent entirely around Facebook ads now. And I'm talking about like, it is researching the pain points, it is researching the outcomes of your target customer. It's making creative that's on brand both statics, and also like, AI avatar, UGC, it's publishing that content into your Facebook ads account. It's turning off the losers, it's promoting the winners, and then it's going in a feedback loop where it's like, okay, what is actually working. And how do I go and basically make more content like the best performance? And I'll talk to all of that today and try to show you as much as I can. It's not really easy to show, because it's just like code. But anyway, we'll go through that. So yeah, and then just to jump into that, the first business that I want to talk about to use is kind of like a, just a sandbox for like, how would you actually build and deploy these agents for this, like this company type is AI for WordPress. I've talked about this before online, but like, I've actually pitched like three startup founders this that are like, we got into YC, we don't know what to pivot into. And I just, they always just like are like, no, I don't want to do this. So I just want to hit on this idea. So let me just screen share real quick and kind of show you the data for this, because I think it's just fascinating. I think it's such a huge category that like nobody is talking about right now. Yeah, like nobody's really executing on. And before people's like eyes glaze over in there and they tune this out WordPress is bigger than you think. So WordPress powers like 50% plus of the internet, right? I detect 43% of the internet websites that are in the expiring your WordPress. No one's building stuff for WordPress is insane. Man, it's insane. And it's like, it's such an easy space to compete in. It's kind of blue ocean for this. And all I'm going to pitch to you today is like, literally it's just lovable or anything.com, but for WordPress, right? So you're just all you're doing is you're making it so that people can like vibe code their website. But like on top of the WordPress platform. And then the business structure super simple. It's like, hey, you get all this stack like you get forms solved, you get like, you know, maybe a CRM you like all of these plugins that people would go and like Hodgepodge together. You just bundle that up into a single package. And then you sell tokens. So it's like whatever, you know, base tears $29 a month that gets you X amount of tokens. And then that makes you so that you can go and basically like, you know, build out design the site with this like pre built in like, you know, get forms these pre built features. So you got me thinking that I actually think that there's a bigger opportunity here than just the lovable for WordPress because and you don't know this about me, but back when I was 19 years old. 2000 and I don't know, I'm bad with math. He doesn't like 11 or something. I was a partner in an agency and the agency's job was basically to get people off their existing CMS and move it to WordPress. And we were officially partnered with WordPress on doing that. So if you called WordPress and you're like time.com time magazine, you're on some custom CMS. They would they would be like work with Greg and team to move and do the migration to WordPress. WordPress is happy because they want more people, right. And and time.com is happy because they basically need some of the handhold through the process. So it was a great business. We did like time.com tech crunch.com bunch of big websites. The amount of money I saw that in the in the WordPress automatic ecosystem and plugins was absolutely absurd. So what you got me thinking about is you know the play is basically how do you find plugins that have validated demand that don't have an AI component and building the AI first version of each because you already know that you know there's proven demand people are paying for it. And then you just make them 10x better with agent. So I'll give you a couple of examples. The Yost SEO tool. Do you know about that one? No, yes, I've used it forever ago. Forever go, right. I think it was I think it's a guy name. Yost I could be wrong. I think it's a guy named. There is no way that they you know that they have an AI first version of that. So you know instead of showing you writing green dots and telling you to fix things yourself just have an agent do it. It writes the meta. It restructures the content. It adds the internal links like make it AI first. And I'll give you a couple more WP forms. That was a huge plug in back of the day, make an AI form that talks back. So instead of doing like a static form, you do like a conversational agent that qualifies the lead and answers questions. Woo commerce, one of the most popular, you know, WordPress plugins. You know, do like an AI storekeeper. So it automatically writes product descriptions, abandon cart flows. You know, it can go on and on another another one is a kismet, which is the spam plugin. Like there's just so many. So all you have to do for vent security, like there's just endless right. It's so many about these. There's so many. And people are paying for it. 43% of the internet is is is powered by it. The hard part is is obviously building the product, you know, making it good, making it work. And then finding, you know, a distribution channel that you can actually get customers. Totally. And I think that again, the bundling of all this is where the opportunity is. It's like, okay, I'm going to give you all like all the plugins that you normally be paying for instead of the aggregate of those 10 that are necessary. Now you pay a 10th of the cost, you know, or fifth of the cost. And I'm going to give you everything and you're going to also be able to like vibe code to the design of this, right. Like that is the business opportunity here. And then to your point, like how do you market this right. And this is worth this gets so fun. Like I'm having the most fun of my entire career right now with what we're doing. And so I can't really share this with you guys. But anyway, so the app, like how when I think of this company, like where do you meet the people that are like trying to learn, like how do I do this or how do I, you know, maybe do this work with my WordPress site. So like Facebook ads and Google ads are gonna be the first two places that you can go to. I'm gonna talk through a bunch of different things, different opportunities, but this is just like, we're gonna just run down the list of all the things that you could do and here's how to deploy agents for them. So on the Facebook ad side, so for targeting on Facebook anymore, after a drama, you don't do interest-based targeting. Historically, how I would probably do this is I would actually go and I would target people who have a WordPress interest on Facebook ads. Now, you don't need to do that. You just basically have to make ad creative that it's talking to the pain points or the outcomes of the person that you're trying to sell to and then send them to a landing page that like describes what the product is. So what is in drama, what how does it work and like what do you need to know about this? So in drama, Facebook's new ad algorithm, right? It basically, it decides what ads get shown to what people and how it functions is the AI is basically looking at the ad creative and it's understanding, okay, like what is in this static ad? What is the image, what is the text? What is the video, what's in the video? What's the script of the video? And then it also understands the landing page that it's sending the people to. And then from that, it basically uses that information to decide what ad gets shown to what person on the platform. So jokingly on Twitter, I've been saying this a lot and I mean this though from like the bottom of my heart. Facebook has turned into the best B2B ads channel and that exists right now. And the reason for this is like we'll make these ads that are so obscure, like it's like maybe there's like 10 people in the US, right? That like would be having this problem right now. And Facebook will find those people and show that ad to it and we'll get that lead like a qualified lead for a B2B business, it's ridiculous. So anyway, to take a step back to the WordPress side, like to say I for WordPress thing, what you end up doing and like I can already see what the creative looks like. Like the script ends up being like something like this. Like oh, this is kind of crazy. I used to be paying my agency $1,000 a month to maintain my WordPress site. And they were not responsive and they never like actually could do the designs that I wanted. But I just found this plugin for WordPress that makes it so that I can chat with AI to change my website. And it concludes all these plugins that I used to have to pay extra money for. It's just a part of it for free. Click the link to learn more. If you run an ad like that, Facebook is gonna automatically identify, okay, these people are WordPress website. Owners, they have this problem. It's gonna show that to them. And then you basically set up a conversion event for the sign up action, for the payment action that's deeper within the funnel. So how do you actually do all of that? Like I'm just talking through all this. That's just like go into this deep and break down like what this actually looks like from an Amazon perspective. So okay, so the first thing is researching the pain points of your target customer. I'm just gonna use perplexity for this 'cause I've just found that it's easy to do live like sharing this. Actually let me stop this. And I'll screen share a different way just so that you can just see the window. And for this, we're just gonna do like scrape Reddit. Pain points and outcomes that people that run WordPress websites have. For like why would they buy an AI WordPress tool that basically like solves all the plug-in problems and makes it so that they can vibe code the design of the website? - The reason you're doing Reddit by the way is because those are real people just complaining basically. - Exactly. - That's exactly why it is. It's basically dialogue and again a lot, like Reddit is being eroded right now by people manipulating it for like LLMs to rank on them. But this is a way. - I'm like you. - By people like me that are basically creating the dead internet. Let's be real. It's already happening. I am the problem. But with this though, what it enables is you basically can identify like what are the problems that they're facing. And then from this, this basically seeds the creative that I want that I go and make. So I found these pain points. Let's like pull out one of these that makes sense. So content workflows, customization requires development skills. This is one that you could talk to. What I would then go do is like once I found this information, I'd be like rank stack based off of the most referenced. Just to give us like what are the top three? And then once I've identified that, so the plug and layer, most reference, this is the biggest pain point for people. Awesome. That is what ads are going to be about. Performance and speed. Cool. Can we make this super lightweight? Can we use something like Astro to actually like serve it so the content's really fast. Security and maintenance. Okay, how do I make it so they never have to think about plug and security again, so that their site doesn't randomly get gambling ads on it and then get de-indexed by Google for their pest control business, right? So with this, what I then go do is I'm going to use KIAI is what we're using right now for all of our image generation. Basically, it's just all of the image models and video models in the same place. And so with this, I can then go and bulk generate static creative. And the way that we found to do this is you basically give it an example of an ad that is already being ran by either a competitor or by somebody like somebody in a tangentially related industry. And we're just using Google Man of Banana for this. So the agent then, again, is generating this creative using the static. You can make this as advances you want. This is what we're doing a lot now so that it always hits brand style guides and what do I mean by brand style guides? That's like what are the fonts that need to be used? What are the colors that need to be used? All of these specifics about the company, about the brand, right? So with this, you basically can put a vision model over the outputs and be like, hey, does this match brand style guides? So what I'm getting back from Google Man of Banana, I can be, I can basically qualify the, like is the text all readable? You know, does the fonts that are being used actually on brand, et cetera? And then from that, you basically have this way to make statics and then on the video side, what we are still using and still seeing great results with, which is crazy to me, 'cause it's not even the best is agent. But we're starting to experience more and more with seed dance and this is like where this is all going to go. It's just hard to do the stitching across, like seed dance, like for longer, you know, 30 second videos. You can only do up to, I believe it's nine seconds, don't quote me on that, but it's less than that. You basically have to like stitch these frames together is the challenge, but this is where this will end up going. And then it's just like AI avatar UGC that's talking about the pain points or outcomes that you just extracted from what people are saying online. And everything that I'm describing here, this is just an agent that's done this work, right? It is an agent that's done this research. It's an agent that is calling, doing the API calls to actually build out the creative. And then from there, how do we actually get it into Facebook ads, right? So to get it into Facebook ads, then what we're going and doing is we need to use what's called the Facebook marketing API. And you probably, if you're online at all and not living under a rock, you probably seen tons of people where it's like, I got my Facebook ads account banned, right? Because I was using an agent with it. The agent is not the reason it got banned, all right? The reason it got banned is because they violated TOS. And they spam the API because they were trying to pull in hundreds of millions of rows of data from their Facebook ads account. And that is not the way that you can't use the API in that capacity. It's literally like that's against Facebook's COS. That is the problem. So how you actually use the Facebook ads API is you use the API only for rights, like only to publish content to the Facebook ads account or to turn off or to basically promote ads. And I'll talk about that more in a second. And I'm realizing just based on time, this whole video is just going to be like, how do you build an actual marketing agent? Like we're going to only probably get through one of these. If you want more content like this, this is all I talk about on the internet. So just go follow me across channels. And this is what I share. But anyway, with this, so to solve the data analytics problem, you have to build a data pipeline and a warehouse. So the open source way to do this is using a tool called AirBite. You can host this anywhere. You can literally have Cloud Code go and do this for you, set this up. And then you can use a data warehouse called Clickhouse. These are both the open source solutions that you can self-host. And I'm just giving you those as the way that is totally accessible to anybody. And Cody, can you explain what is the data warehouse? Like what are you saying? Yeah, absolutely. So a data warehouse is a way to unify all of your data sources into a single location so that your agent has the ability to understand all of the data in context with all channels and data sources and contexts with all the other data sources. So I'll give you specifics. That was a very broad way to explain it. So, say for example, I'm running Facebook ads. How do I actually run effective Facebook ads? I need to do probably four things. I need to have my Facebook ads data. I need to have my Google Analytics data. I need to have probably my post-talk data. Maybe my CRM data, so like my HubSpot data. And then I also need to probably have like my Stripe data to understand the entire stack of like, I ran ads and did customers come out the other side, right? And then how do I actually tie the literal specific ad that is driving revenue for the company, right? This is how you do that. It's by having this data warehouse that has all of the data in a single place. Now, to get all of that data into a single place, you have to build a data pipeline. And so, everybody is a data pipeline solution. It's self-hosted and it enables you. Basically, they have all these pre-built connectors that enable you to pipe all of your data into a data warehouse. So, when you think about like, you know, visually how this is happening, and we can just like teal draw this real quick to actually show you, it's basically what I am doing is I am giving my agents. So, say I have, you know, these like five different data sources that I'm pulling from, we'll just do three for the sake of time. And I'm putting them all into a data warehouse. And that data warehouse, I'm then giving my agents access to it. So, imagine I have this agent here that can read this information. It's back and forth, right? And this is the Facebook ads agent. And this Facebook ads agents, how it works, is it basically is looking at that data string. And then it is making updates within Facebook ads, right? And then that Facebook ads data is going back to like where we're pulling from, which goes back and basically back into the data warehouse. Actually, this is probably more like this, like back into the data warehouse, right? And so, this is how I'm creating this like loop that is basically learning, right? I'm giving the agent access to the live business data, access to the live stream. Also, what this enables for you as a business owner is you can also interact with this within your cloud code, within your codex, whatever that is, right? And whatever your daily driver is. And the reason that you want this is you can have conversational analytics and also build like custom dashboards with this data, right? So you can literally ask like, okay, like we're like, we're having trouble, like say you're again, Pascochal control control company, or we'll say, I don't know something, like your commercial HFAC, like we're having trouble hitting payroll this month, like what is going wrong? It's like, oh, your accounts receivables are like all. You can literally have those conversations with remarketing data with your business data. This is the way that you can enable both yourself and your team to be able to do this, right? So how do you actually, so, how do you actually set this up? So we've got the data pipeline in the warehouse solution. Now for hosting the agents, everybody is doing this already, like locally with like their cloud code and they like, I mean, I've seen these crazy setups where it's like, yeah, I'm deploying these solutions onto my Mac mini that I bought for open claw, but now it's actually just like working as a server. Like you don't have to use a Mac mini locally as a server to do this, right? You can just deploy this into the any cloud and be into a Roku, it can be into Railway, it can be into like any of these solutions. And again, I'm just giving options that are available. But basically an agent is just code under the hood, right? It's just a decision tree. That's like, cool, here's a live data stream. I have some like decision loop that's happening where an LLM is thinking and then I'm basically having an optimized for an outcome. Which for most companies is like, how do I make the business more revenue, right? So anyway, that is kind of the infrastructure that's necessary to actually make these agents function. Once you've got this whole thing set up, what is possible just to give you like a scope of this? And we're doing this for companies right now is you can actually like create, so for example, like for one company, we're doing two different assets per day, five ads per ad set, they automatically get uploaded in the Facebook ads, based off of all the research that we've done. And also the data that exists within the data warehouse, like of what has worked, right? And we are based, so there's like a learning loop that's happening on top of this. The agent is looking at, okay, I publish these 10 ads, and let's it run for like a two to three day window for like it to get initial signal. It turns off the worst performing ads. And again, how is it getting that information? It's pulling that information from the data warehouse, right? It's pulling, okay, what is the worst performing ads? Let's turn those off, the winners live on, and then the winning ad sets, they go into a winners pool, and they're competing against each other for the ad budget that's available. And then over the top of that, you can have a vision model, or honestly, like how we're doing this more and more, is we build a database of all the ads that we have created. And it's literally like the JSON props that we're sending to nano banana, or the ad scripts that we're using, and we're sending the agent or seed dance. And that is what we are letting the agent analyze, of like, okay, what is actually working, so that it can go and basically become more effective at making creative that creates outcomes. So the problem that happens with this year, and again, I'm gonna get into the weeds and talk through a lot of this in detail, just to share the issues that come up, is you have to solve for entropy, so like what is entropy? It's like basically the agent gets stuck thinking in the same way. So how do you solve for that? The two ways that we've found that we can solve for it is you can use the Facebook ads library to pull ads from competitors' libraries, and that basically puts new DNA into the system. So you're basically feeding that source text that you did that research on. And then the other thing that we found to work is taking YouTube transcripts, and also podcast transcripts. And basically pulling out the insights from those, there's like hundreds of YouTube channels that are just designated to like, you know, for example, WordPress, you can pull out the insights from those, and then run ads basically off of those insights that you aggregate. So this is a way to solve that kind of an entry problem. But what this ends up looking like in the final form is like, it's like a virtual employee, Greg, is the best way to describe it. This virtual employee, all it's doing is focusing on Facebook ads as the channel, and how it can actually operate and function is because it has all the necessary data it needs to think through what is actually driving outcomes that we are, like that drive business revenue, right? And this is where all this is going. Like, it's so funny, I talked to like so many marketers on a weekly basis and they're like, "Way is my job secure?" And I'm like, "Oh, no, like can you do this?" Like this is what this turns into is like, your job now becomes like, I'm an agent jockey, you're taking your domain knowledge that you have, and you're basically like building this into code. And like, I'm not technical, right? Like, I can set this up now. Like the models are smart enough now. We're like, "Assemble my technical person or just if you have access to the cloud code and literally just give it the transcript that I just like, you know, we just created on this call." You be like, "Okay, I want to set this up, walk me through this process." Like, you can go and build out this solution. Like, that is the possibility here. So, anyway, but yeah, happy to answer questions about that, that was one agent. I can go down into a deeper one as well. So. - Okay, yeah, and I think taking a step back, it's like, "Well, why are, I know it's crazy to say this, but why are Facebook ads important?" Well, okay, if you're gonna steal an idea from this podcast or come up with an idea on your own, you're gonna vibe code something that you think has value in the world. The biggest question I get is, how do I actually get customers to this thing? And the truth is, Facebook is the most cost-efficient way to do it. If you don't wanna go and create content, which takes time to actually build an audience. I still think that people should create content, but at the same time, be thinking about how can I create an ad set that is gonna perform. Now, what people, the mistake that people make is, they try a few ads, it doesn't work, so they give up. And they don't realize that you actually should be taking the same ad and just changing the positioning a little bit. Because, and changing it a little bit, like 10 times or 15 times or 20 times, right? And what happens is, I'm shocked sometimes with some of the Facebook ads that I do, and I'm like, wow, I didn't think that this ad set was actually gonna work, this positioning was gonna work. Like, for example, let's say we wanna do that word plus plug and idea, and let's say we wanted to compete with Yost, the SEO plug-in. Like, maybe the positioning is Yost is bad. And it's just like an anti-Yost. And you never would have thought that. - At least you do work rather than doing work for you, right? There's so many angles that you can pull out of that. To your point, see what I just wanna piggyback off of this? Like, I think a lot of people come into marketing and advertising and they're like, I know what the market wants, I'm gonna impose this idea on the screen. the market. That is not how this works, right? We're not Don Draper. We are like putting creative into the mark. Like, why is, why is paid ads the most, like, why is Facebook ads, why is Google, why are they the most powerful assets? Like, why the most powerful marketing channels that have ever existed? I can go and test the thousand different ad creatives and like, I'm going to have clear delineation on like, what is winning and what is being the most, what is the market most receptive to? Right? And you're going to know that within 48 hours. And I see this all the time where like, oh, they're like, oh, I don't want to go run ads. I don't want to like, I only want to do organic, right? Or like, how do you grow? It's only by word of mouth. I'm like, this is such a, that's such a rookie way to look at the market. Like, you should be doing all of it. Number one, number two, like, you need to think about how does this, like, this is the only system where I put a dollar in and like five dollars can potentially come out the other side. And I can just keep feeding that ATM where it's like, I just keep putting money in and that same, you know, volume of will come, like that same multiplier will come out the other end. So anyway, just and and so what's changed? Like, why I now I'm into Facebook ads, honestly, is because of the systems that you're describing. So like, in the past, if you were a founder and you wanted to do what you're talking about, you had to hire an agency that would cost you tens of thousands of dollars a month to go and run this at scale. Now, you just need to set up the system that you talked about. And of course, it needs to be fine-tuned. Of course, there needs to be, it needs to work, right? Of course, you need to solve for entropy, which I'm happy you spoke about because no one speaks about that. People are like, Oh, yeah, you set it up and then it's just good. It's good. Like, no, dude, that's lit. The people that have the people that say that have never set up anything, right? Because as soon as you, it might feel good, like, on day one, but on day two, it gets a little worse and they three and four and five until you get this point where you're like, lifestyle choice, man. I think that's the thing that people like have the hardest. Like, when you think about marketing, like people think about it in campaigns, like I start a thing and then I stop a thing. And that is not how this works anymore. Like how marketing actually functions now is like, you're continuously doing this. And because the feedback loops are so fast, like, I mean, when you look at a great example of this is if you just look at like the fashion industry, like how quick the trends occur down, it's like 10x faster than what it was 20 years ago, right? Then what it was in like the early 2000s. And so when you think about that and apply that to everything, like how quick the market moves, you have to basically have like, you know, some type of observability of what's happening. So that you are adjusting your, you know, ads, your positioning, all the strategy that you have across your your your go to market based off of those trends that are basically like evolving. And where does all this happening, right? It's all on store form social. Like that is where all this kind of originates from and then trickles down and everything else. So you can actually do this, right? There's another way to solve this entry problem. You can use tools like viral low. They have an API. Basically is like, it scrapes like all of TikTok. And I think they're doing Instagram Reels now to quote me on that. But basically I can be like, Hey, show me all of the most viral, like posts that are in the beauty category from the last week. Cool. What are there? Are there trends that are happening here? Are there like certain content formats that are happening here? And can I use that information to basically influence the creative output that I'm doing 100%. You can do that. This is again, like how you can, it's this push and pull with the market that you're doing constantly, right? And like agents for the first time can enable you to do that. Like what I just just, if I wanted to go and create a hundred ads, right? And get that into Facebook ads. Like that is probably like two weeks of work, right? Historically. And now you as a founder, like literally in the next hour and a half, you're going to have this whole system that I just described set up and be able to actually go and publish this content, like at scale with the understanding of what's actually working. And maybe there's a human in the loop to begin with. But like what this gets to is like you're going to understand like this is what's actually functioning. Cool. I now want an agent to go and run this. I deploy an agent into the cloud with the necessary data stream that it needs so that it can actually make these decisions. So Cody, what else did you want to cover? Dude, I've so much I have to jump in two minutes. So it's kind of bummed. So I think so folks comment if you want more marketing. I'll come back and just do a whole series on this. Like here is literal like agent by agent, like descriptions, like showing the actual like structures talking through the actual campaign structures. If that is what people want, like this is again, all I'm thinking about right now. This is all I do from when I wake up to when I go to bed at the moment because I'm obsessed with it. That is uncomfortable. How like it's a compulsion. And this is not really a choice. So anyways, yeah Greg, didn't mean to cut you off. No, no, no, let us know. I think like it, you know, people like I said, people want to figure out ways how they can use AI agents to get them customers. So I think marrying like here's a couple ideas with here. Some here's some agents is going to be helpful for folks. Let me rattle off some and then you comment what you want and we'll come back and we'll do this, right? So I can we can do Google ads agents that are entirely running your Google ads accounts. We can do influencer out outreach agents that are researching influencers within your category, called emailing them and then negotiating the pricing with them and hand raising for one, you know, they think it's a good person. We can do cold email of like how do I go and find all of the customers, you know, that I'm trying to sell to find their email addresses, hot, like cold email them and then have an agent managing that inbox, like responding to them to book meetings. We can do TikTok real farms where we're basically like making 10 TikTok accounts in the cloud and then at scale making slideshows that are related to your product, scheduling those and posting and aggregating all the views across that. We can do what are some of the other things we can do SEO agents that are doing keyword research, researching the article, writing the article, having the article beyond brand for your voice, like how do you actually give it a unique perspective or point of view so that it has that like, you know, basically personality to it so that I actually ranks well and it's like good to read. We can talk about AI search and how do you build citations? How do you actually do cold outreach to get your brand listed on the citations that are already being shown in the category that you're in? We can talk about social media management and like how do you get an agent to run your LinkedIn account, to run Twitter accounts. We can talk about how do you get agents to build email newsletters that are related to podcasts and actually research the podcasts, write the podcast script, use 11 labs voices to read the podcast script and then build lead magnets to build an email list on the top of that podcast for an industry like e-commerce. So you comment what you want to learn. I'll come back. I'll share all the things that we're seeing and all the things that we're deploying. I'd love to do that. I think it'd be awesome. So God bless you, Cody Schneider. I appreciate you. We'll see you next time and I'm curious to see your work. We'll think. Yeah, if people have questions, let me know too. I'm active on Twitter and LinkedIn. Those are the biggest places. Companiesgraph.com. All this work that I just talked about. That's what we're doing. Thanks for having me, G later.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The hardest part of building a startup is acquiring customers, not building the product, especially with tools like vibe coding.
  2. A true marketing agent must have unified data (via a data pipeline and warehouse), autonomous decision-making (with a thinking loop), and the ability to improve based on live business data.
  3. A promising startup idea is an AI-first, all-in-one plugin for WordPress that bundles features like forms, CRM, and design tools, sold via a token-based subscription.
  4. Facebook ads, using Meta’s Advantage+ algorithm, are now highly effective for B2B because the AI matches ad creative to the right audience without manual targeting.
  5. Building a marketing agent involves scraping Reddit for pain points, generating branded static and AI avatar video ads via APIs (e.g., Kling AI, Hedra), and using the Facebook Marketing API for publishing and optimization.
  6. A data warehouse (e.g., using Airbyte and Clickhouse) is essential for unifying data from sources like Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Stripe so the agent can make informed decisions.

Summary:

The transcript discusses the challenge of customer acquisition for startups and introduces the concept of marketing agents as a solution. A marketing agent is defined by three criteria: it must have access to unified business data through a data pipeline and warehouse, it must make autonomous decisions based on that data, and it must be able to improve its performance over time using feedback loops. The speaker, Cody Schneider, emphasizes that these agents are not simple Zapier automations but rather code hosted in the cloud that interacts with live data.

He proposes a concrete startup idea: an AI-first, all-in-one plugin for WordPress that bundles essential plugins (like forms, SEO, and security) with a vibe-coding interface for design, sold via a token-based subscription. This idea leverages WordPress’s 43% market share and the lack of AI-native competitors. To market such a product, Schneider explains how to build a marketing agent that automates Facebook ad campaigns.

The agent scrapes Reddit for customer pain points, uses AI tools (like Kling AI and Hedra) to generate branded static images and AI avatar videos, and publishes them via the Facebook Marketing API. Crucially, the agent must avoid API spam to prevent account bans. A data warehouse (built with open-source tools like Airbyte and Clickhouse) unifies data from Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Stripe, enabling the agent to optimize ads based on full-funnel performance.

The goal is to create a system that autonomously manages the entire ad lifecycle from creative generation to budget allocation.

FAQs

A marketing agent must solve the data problem for unified pipeline clarity, operate autonomously with a thinking loop, and be hosted in the cloud with a data pipeline and warehouse. It performs processes, analyzes data, and improves based on feedback.

The idea is a 'Lovable for WordPress' platform that lets users vibe code their WordPress sites, bundling essential plugins and features into one package with a token-based pricing model, targeting the underserved WordPress ecosystem.

Agents research pain points via Reddit, generate static and video ad creatives using AI tools like KIAI and HeyGen, and publish them via the Facebook Marketing API. They also turn off underperforming ads and promote winners based on data feedback.

A data warehouse unifies all data sources (e.g., Facebook ads, Google Analytics, CRM, Stripe) into one location, enabling the agent to understand the full customer journey from ads to revenue for better decision-making.

The open-source tools Airbyte for the data pipeline and Clickhouse for the data warehouse are recommended, both self-hostable for accessibility.

The episode details one idea: an AI-first WordPress platform. It also mentions building AI versions of proven WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO, WP Forms, and WooCommerce, turning them into agents that automate tasks.

Chat with AI

Loading...

Pro features

Go deeper with this episode

Unlock creator-grade tools that turn any transcript into show notes and subtitle files.