Start of my journey of building a $1B product - adlibrary.com
This is my first ever blog post. And I will start it by telling you about a crazy idea I had a few months ago and my even crazier goals. That's why there is a Ferrari 812 Superfast as cover image - I want to own this car before I turn 25. And I believe adlibrary.com might actually be the vehicle that could get me there.
Murat
Page owner and Fullstack Dev
TL;DR
Hacked together a Meta-ad scraper, then spent three months and 51 emails to land the 29-year-old domain adlibrary.com for €12 k, turning the quick MVP into a cross-platform ad-intel play that could outclass every existing “ad library.” Next up: ship Google/YT, TikTok, X & Snapchat modules, flip a freemium leads API into revenue, and race toward a €1 bn valuation (and that Ferrari 812 Superfast) before I hit 25.
What is the idea behind adlibrary.com?
Every good marketer or marketing agency on this planet used Meta's Ad Library. But to be honest, it's not really actionable. You have some filters, but you need to play around a lot and need another tool until to get what you need.
It wasn't even my idea (partly at least)
I do have crazy ideas - I wanted to create all kinds of software/apps. All you can imagine -Dating/Fitness/Finance/Crypto.
But there is not much time. I spend most of my time working to be honest.
I got 2 relatively big clients I do freelancing for and then I work mostly with marketing agencies.
Idea was born
My clients know that I am quite capable of the web development stuff - so they can always ask me when they have funny ideas. And one day a marketing agency owner asked me if it were possible to scrape the Meta ad library. He said it takes about 4 hours for him to browse through the creatives and find a potential client.
I told him that it's not even necessary, there is an API. Then after getting approved by Meta (they didn't approve because I had no profile pic on Facebook lol). I got to work.
One quick weekend later I had an MVP that aggregates the data for him and does his job, but instead of taking 4 hours it takes about 10 seconds.
Cross-platform
Now my part of the idea: just do the same for all platforms. Google, X, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Meta of course. All combined in one application. And the EU makes it possible because of transparency regulations.
Competition
And the funny thing: there is no competition! All these pseudo agencies are hopping onto AI, every big company does AI - but they can't see the forest with all the trees standing in their sight.
Skill is declining more and more - no one wants to get shit done anymore. Even developers, like myself want to automate it all. But you need to get into the weeds.
MVP
After months of trying to be a leadgen agency myself - scraping leads from everywhere and then even automating email outreach. But that job is dreadful. You just become a slave to the agencies you work with. And what nobody tells you: most agencies are broke as fuck and have not a single skilled person. They outsource it all and live like that. That's also why they all hop onto doing a coaching business. It's easier playing the expert than putting 10000 hours in and actually being an expert.
Self discovery journey
I went on a little journey trying all sorts of things, posting videos covering various topics on LinkedIn. Producing content, posting weekly and actually valuable content. Literally throwing it all against a wall and hoping that something sticks. But nothing did.
I went so far to build complete projects or MVPs to just show something on LinkedIn.
But these fuckers are not entertained - they don't care one little bit. The only things they do on LinkedIn is about sucking each others balls and care about fake successes.
But in the mean time I built the MVP for adlibrary.com - an ad exploration tool. As usual, the audience is not entertained - so the project just sat there and I asked some people and clients if they wanted to try it.
leave a like on LinkedIn: video on LinkedIn
Okay, but now I need a domain - and I don't even have a name.
Domain
It's basically a better adlibrary, so I looked up the domain adlibrary.com, thinking it would definitely be taken. And it was, of course - what did you think?
But I did a whois check and wrote them a message that I want to buy the domain. Because I found out, that they are not a domain broker.
Here is a screenshot of our first back and forth with JM (a wonderful person!):
I got adlibrary.eu and some other variations just for some brand safety and deployed the MVP there.
3 Months of negotiation
Let me spare you all the messages, but it is definitely my longest ever email thread. (51 Messages sent between each other and the CEO of the company who owned the domain at the time)
Sale and Price
You probably picked it up, right - OWNED - with ED, say hello to the new owner!
I don't want to brag, but I got a great deal, at least in my eyes.
I negotiated down from €20k to €12k and PR assistance when I launch a ready enough version.
PR assistance means, blog posts, interview and newsletter posts - all for their partner network, which consists of mainly marketing agencies.
Also it's a really good domain, that is older than me! It's almost 30 years old!
Payment and Domain Transfer
For me at this time, 12k in one shot is the most expensive payment I ever made.
So I was a little bit cautious, because I could still get scammed and legal stuff is not fun.
Then I looked up escrow services, which is a third party that takes care that both sides are protected - they take a lot of money - so I just went without them.
Contract
JM got all the Paperwork done, we agreed easily on the terms.
This is also the first really good indicator that your counterpart is trustworthy.
I felt unsure and communicated it openly.
I told him how I would like to have this procedure of payment and domain transfer to take place and we wrote it in the contract, without any argument or disagreement.
Then I knew it can not go wrong.
But the next best indicator was, that they had an idea which even makes more sense for both sides. (half payment upfront -> domain transfer -> second half of payment)
Transfer
The final meeting. JM and I sit in a call after all the contracts are signed.
I was a bit nervous, but I always say that I am just excited (which I was of course).
I wanted it to go right - because I never experienced such moment.
And with every new experience, come many unknown unknowns.
1{2 "unknown unknown":3 "A moment, a situation, a circumstance, a problem, an opportunity,4 which surfaces only when learning something new or unknown before.5 It means, you don't know what you don't know.6 You are not aware of any up or downsides, because you are so out of touch."7}
And for me it was, that I couldn't send more than 10k for a realtime payment.
Thank god it was only that, because in terms of domain transfer - I just had a client a week before whose domain I transferred to my hosting, so I knew exactly what to do there.
So I just paid 6k upfront realtime, 4k realtime after domain transfer and 2k in regular bank transfer.
The whole meeting took 24 minutes and an hour later the domain was in my hosting.
I just deployed my project and shared with close friends.
Next Milestones
I talked about wanting a Ferrari but not how I would accomplish that.
Stealing from competition
Currently it's only possible to search Meta's adlibrary - which is already a win for most people, because the real one sucks.
And funny enough, I saw 2 different LinkedIn Posts that went viral with just a similar product to adlibrary.com.
At least the idea is similar and even though theirs looks 100 times better and they each have a landing page - their product sucks.
They offer to spy on competitors' ads, but first you need to know your competitor on your own.
But who knows the competitors when entering a new market? What if the competitor works with an agency and they do it all from their account. Yeah motherfucker - it sucks. And funny enough - IT COSTS MONEY TO USE THEIR SHIT TOOL - this feature is fucking implemented already in the Meta ad library.
BUT I found that only when I tested their tool and checked the adlibrary again, and I think that would be great feature for my product.
Quick tutorial:
How to spy on your competitor's ads with the Meta adlibrary (for free)
Step 1.: Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/library
Step 2: Select 'all types of ads' and the country you want to check in
Step 3: Type in your competitors name (might be instagram handle) and hope they show up
Step 4: voila! here you get all the ads, and you can even filter a few relevant things on the right side (where it says filter)
Step 5: To get valuable insights click on a specific ad and see how many people it reached and what their settings are
Yes, if nike is actually your competitor - then this is not the way - how should you know which ads work and which do not. Exactly - go to adlibrary.com and use it, it's much easier - you just have more oversight, can sort and all.
Other ad libraries like Google, X, TikTok, Snapchat
The core feature of my product, combining all ad libraries into one. Next stop is Google (which includes Youtube), you can only view the ads insights when you know database queries - lol
I already started the implementation, but it's a little tricky laying it all out with the schema I created with the Meta ad library in mind.
The other ones will come later - I think when Meta and Google are covered, most people will be happy and I can actually get customers.
Marketing strategy
I will first get it into the hands of my existing agency clients and create some posts like this one. Then I extend the outreach to forums and niche sites. Last step in the outreach phase would be to find affiliate partners or even direct clients.
In the meantime I would focus heavily on SEO and maybe even Google Ads, so I can grab some traffic from Meta.
The next content strategy would be a TikTok/Reels/Shorts strategy targeting marketing agencies and inhouse marketers of bigger firms.
Also I might host some in-person events focused on AI in marketing.
How do we make money
Monetization is the most important of all and I think the basic search and maybe saving leads/prospects to the database will always stay free.
Other features like:
- enriching leads with actionable data (phone, email)
- exporting mass prospect data via CSV
- advanced/semantic search with ai (so you don't have to know the exact words to find something or someone, the goal is that you can just type in what you are looking for and the ai sets the search query and filters to match what you are looking for)
Maybe I will also implement a hard limit for searches when you are non-paying client.
Conclusion
You have reached the end of my first ever blog post and the start of hopefully an amazing journey.
I have not implemented a comment option on this CMS yet, but feel free to reach out to me with valuable insight/interest/suggestions/feedback/critique at me@muratbock.com