Logline
We started as a UGC + influencer marketplace. While helping both brands and agencies ship creator content, we ran into the same hard truth everywhere: performance lives (and dies) inside ad platforms—and running those campaigns is slow, manual, and expensive.
So we scrapped the marketplace, extracted the part that actually moved revenue—the ads brain—rebuilt it as an AI operator for paid media, and turned it into Adle AI: your own AI media buyer that creates, launches, and optimizes campaigns on Meta, Google, TikTok, and LinkedIn Ads from a single prompt.
For agencies and for in-house teams, from a solo founder to a $100K+/mo spender.
⸻
Act I — The Marketplace That Taught Us the Real Problem
We launched as a UGC/micro-influencer marketplace. Brands needed authentic content. Agencies needed throughput. Creators needed deals. We built onboarding, briefs, payouts—the whole thing.
But every time we chased ROI with clients—from indie DTC brands to larger marketing teams—the lever that mattered most wasn't the marketplace. It was the media buying. Campaign creation, targeting, budgeting, optimization, reporting—that's where money was made or burned.
⸻
Act II — The Bottleneck Was Universal
Whether it was:
- A startup founder running Meta + TikTok on weekends,
- An e-commerce team juggling Google + Meta with thin bandwidth,
- A corporate marketing department spending six figures a month, or
- An agency trying to scale clients without more payroll,
…the pain was identical: paid media ops were painfully manual, repetitive, error-prone, and slow to learn.
We realized we weren't a marketplace company anymore. We were building the operating system for performance marketing.
⸻
Act III — The Pivot: Build the AI Media Operator
We killed the marketplace and rebuilt the core: an AI agent that runs paid media. From a single prompt, Adle AI:
- Creates multi-platform campaigns (Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn Ads),
- Launches with the right structures, audiences, budgets, and events,
- Optimizes continuously (kill waste, reallocate, scale winners),
- Surfaces insights before the dashboard even loads.
No "AI theater." No fake magic. Execution speed, ruthless iteration, and fewer human errors.
⸻
Act IV — Built for Two Worlds (But One Mission)
For in-house teams & founders
- Ship campaigns in seconds, not hours.
- Standardize best practices without hiring a full media team.
- Let AI watch your spend 24/7 and adjust faster than humans can.
For agencies
- Scale accounts without scaling payroll.
- White-label the platform (logo, colors, your URL).
- Keep your margin structure intact (we don't force % on top of your fee unless it makes sense for massive spends).
Pricing that matches reality
- SaaS plans for startups, SMBs, and growth teams.
- % of ad spend / licensing for high-budget teams and enterprises.
- Full white-label for partners who want to own the client experience.
⸻
Act V — Scrappy, Focused, and Working
- Lean burn early on, founders doing high-touch sales.
- 19 paying customers, $7k MRR after month one of launch, 1 churn in 4 months, ~88% gross margin.
- Parallel18 in Puerto Rico, real-world validation, customer interviews, and pilots across markets.
- We even had a company try to buy our ads module outright—we offered a $10k setup + $5k/mo license instead. Recurring > one-off. We're building compounding value.
⸻
Act VI — What We're Building Toward
Short term: 100 recurring customers in 13 weeks.
Mid term: More channels (WhatsApp, LinkedIn), tighter CRM + CDP pipes, auto-budgeting, attribution you can trust.
Long term: The single-prompt growth OS—an AI that runs your paid media stack end-to-end, regardless of whether you're an agency, a DTC brand, or an enterprise marketing org.
⸻
Culture & Principles
- Tiny, deadly team (max ~20 people). Talent density > vanity headcount.
- Speed is a feature. Ship, measure, talk to users, repeat.
- No fluff. If it doesn't improve ROAS or cut time-to-launch, it's a distraction.
- Own the stack. If we build it, we can integrate it, license it, and move faster than anyone.