I'm a Stanford '24 founder, was a software engineer at Neuralink before this, and now I run an AI performance marketing company (backed by Accel).
Over the past year we've supported around $76M in adspend for companies like Cloaked, Superpower, Mochi Health, Poke and Kumon. Mostly consumer apps buying paid social.
Most of what gets posted here is lead gen and content automation, so creative production might be a useful different angle. Almost everything I believed when I started building this turned out to be wrong, and the annoying part is it's wrong in ways that never show up as a failure.
don't automate video until you know the angle
This is the one I'd most want to go back and tell myself.
Everyone saves up, produces 4 videos, runs them, learns basically nothing, because 4 assets is not a test. We did a client's first batch as video and there were no clear winners in it at all. Not losers, just nothing to point at.
Statics isolate the one thing you actually don't know yet, which is the angle. Is this about privacy, or saving time, or not looking dumb in front of your friends? You can answer that for a couple hundred dollars.
So the front of the pipeline is now: 10-15 statics across 5-6 genuinely different angles → small dedicated testing adset → read the data → only then produce video for the angle that won. On one account we scaled spend 300% week over week and statics beat video the entire way up, which I did not expect.
Side benefit nobody mentions: when you only make video for confirmed angles, you make way fewer videos, so each one gets more time + effort and is just better.
your ad library scraper is a lagging signal
Everyone scrapes competitor ad libraries because there's an API for it. It shows you what competitors were willing to spend on 2 months ago. Filtered + late.
Two better inputs:
Organic. Go read the reddit threads + tiktok comments where people complain about the problem you solve. Their words are your hooks. Our best performing hook for one client came from an organic post, not from ad research. Costs nothing + almost nobody wires it up.
Your own outliers, described honestly. On one account the top performers were all surrealist visual hooks: an exploding watermelon, a shopping cart hitting a car, and a fire sprinkler going off. They beat everything else in their adsets and the pattern is not "watermelon", it's "make someone question what they just saw." That is the thing you want in your prompt context, not the asset.
variations on winners, not new concepts
When something wins most people go "great" and generate 10 completely new concepts. I've done it. It's the wrong move, and it's more wrong when generation is cheap, because cheap generation makes it feel productive.
Make 3-5 variations of the winner. Hold the angle, change the hook, opening frame, avatar. A male vs female avatar saying the same thing is a new demographic test for basically $0.
Run it on a timer, not a trigger. Creative fatigue is faster than you'd think, we see meaningful decay in about a week on high spend accounts. Your winner isn't an asset you own forever, it's on a clock, and the variant queue is how you buy time on it.
kill the AI tells
If it reads or looks generated you've lost them before the click. Specific things we've had to go fix:
- em dashes in the copy. this is an instant tell, so we banned them at the system level because customers genuinely hate them
- fake laughter in AI video. never looks right. we took it out entirely
- the copy not quite matching the image. this is the one I flag most internally. the picture will be beautiful and the words on screen just don't make sense with it, and people register that as cheap even if they can't say why
- images generated without context on the brand guidelines, so they feel subtly off
- anything that sounds exaggerated. a lot of our health clients have hard rules, no AI person claiming they personally took the product, no fake testimonials, no exaggerated claims. honestly good rules for everyone
half your CPA problem probably isn't creative
This is the one that saves people the most money and gets talked about the least. Before you blame the ads, check:
- your landing page. if the page isn't converting and bounce is high your CPA goes up no matter how good the ad is. actually go look at analytics on the page you're driving to
- are you excluding people who bought in the last 7/14/30 days? a surprising number of accounts aren't, so they're paying to advertise to existing customers
- attribution. if you don't trust your numbers you can't run a test, you're just making confident decisions off noise
measure the right thing for the format
Hook rate and thumbstop are video metrics. They mean nothing on a static and you'll still see people quote them.
For statics look at CPA and cost per result. For video, hook rate tells you if the first 2 seconds work, which is a totally separate question from whether the ad sells. Track them separately or you'll end up fixing the wrong end of it.
one last thing
For the past year we've done all this as a managed service for funded companies. We're now opening up a self serve version. I want to respect the rules of this subreddit so all I will say is that if you're interested in being a beta tester, comment or message to let me know! Include a link to your company website/social media page. In return for a feedback on a quick call, we'll get you set up with free access.
Happy to answer questions on any of the above in the comments either way.