How I use Claude Code + MCPs to run my marketing

0:00Let'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 explained 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.

0:37What 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 end to end. So enjoy the episode and I'll see you at the end.

1:00Thank 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 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, OK, 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.

1:46As 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 like actually get down to the brass tacks with them on a conversation. 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.

2:25And 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? Or it can think on its own. I actually don't want that. I want something that is doing a process for me and then looking at the data and then basically improving based off the data that's getting back from it.

2:58So I just want to 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 running your entire marketing stack. And it's like, no, it's not. This N8N workflow, I guarantee you is not entirely running your marketing stack. But in contrast, like I can, and we like, we'll talk about this today. Like you can make an agent entirely run 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.

3:37It'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 through all 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 it, the first business that I want to talk about to use is kind of like just a sandbox for like how would you actually build and deploy these agents for this company type is AI for WordPress.

4:13I've talked about this before online, but like I have 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. And I think it's such a huge category that like nobody is talking about right now. 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 40 like it's i just checked 43 percent of the internet websites that are like websites that are indexed by google or wordpress no one's building stuff for wordpress it's 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 gonna pitch to you today is like literally it's just lovable or anything.com, but for WordPress, right?

5:11So 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, the business structure is 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 tier is 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 and like uh 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.

6:04Because, 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 was in 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 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 time.com is happy because they basically need someone to handhold through the process.

6:54so it was a great business we did like time.com techcrunch.com a bunch of big websites the amount of money I saw in the WordPress automatic ecosystem and plugins was absolutely absurd so what you got me thinking about is 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 there's proven demand, people are paying for it, and then you just make them 10x better with agents. So I'll give you a couple of examples. The Yoast SEO tool. Do you know about that one? Yes, I've used it forever ago.

7:43Forever ago, right? I think it's a guy named Yoast. I could be wrong, but I think it's a guy named Yoast. There is no way that they have an AI-first version of that. So instead of showing you red and 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, make it AI-first. I'll give you a couple more. WP Forms, that was a huge plug-in back in the day. Make an AI form that talks back. So instead of doing a static form, you do a conversational agent that qualifies a lead and answers questions. WooCommerce, one of the most popular WordPress plugins.

8:28Do an AI storekeeper. So it automatically writes product descriptions, abandoned cart flows. It can go on and on. Another one is Akismet, which is the spam plugin. There's just so many. So all you have to do... then security like there's yeah it's just endless right it's endless so many of these there's so many and people are paying for it 43 of the internet is is uh is powered by it the hard part is is obviously building the product you know making it good making it work um 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 hey i'm going to give you all like all the plugins that you would normally be paying for instead of the aggregate of those 10 that are necessary now you pay a tenth of the cost you know or a 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?

9:35Like that is the business opportunity here. And then to your point, like how do you market this? Right. And this is where this gets so fun. Like I'm having the most fun in my entire career right now with what we're doing. And so I can't wait to share this with you guys. But anyway, so like how, when I think, look at 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, do this work with my WordPress site. So like Facebook ads and Google ads are going to be the first two places that you can go to. And I'm going to talk through a bunch of different things, different opportunities.

10:09But this is just like, we're going to 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 Andromeda, 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 is 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.

10:41So what is Andromeda? How does it work? And like, what do you need to know about this? So Andromeda is Facebook's new like 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.

11:21So jokingly on Twitter, I've been saying this a lot. And I mean, 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, in the U S right. That like would, would, would be having this problem right now. Um, 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, the WordPress side, like this AI for WordPress thing, what you end up doing.

11:57And like, I can already see what the creative looks like. Like the script ends up being like something like this, like, Oh, uh, this is kind of crazy. I used to be paying my agency a thousand dollars a month to maintain my WordPress site. And they were not responsive and they never, uh, like actually could do the designs that I wanted. But I just found this, uh, uh, this, uh, this plugin for WordPress that makes it so that I can chat with AI to change my website. And it includes 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.

12:29If you run an ad like that, Facebook is going to automatically identify, okay, these people are WordPress website owners. They have this problem. It's going to show that to them. And then you basically set up a conversion event for the signup action, for the payment action that's deeper within the funnel. So how do you actually do all of that? Like I'm just, I'm talking through all this. Let's just like go into this deep and break down like what this actually looks like from an agent perspective. So, okay. So the first thing is researching the pain points of your target customer. I'm just going to use perplexity for this because I've just found that it's easy to do live, like sharing this.

13:11Actually, 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 going to 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 plugin 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 um but this is a way like you by people like me that are basically creating the dead internet let's be real.

14:06It'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, that I go and make. Right. So I found these pain points, right. Let's like pull out, you know, one of these that makes sense. so content workflows customization requires development skills right like this is one that you could talk to um what i would then go do it's like once i found this information i'd be like rank stack um based off of uh the most referenced just to give us like what are the top three and then once i've identified that So the plugin layer, most referenced, this is the biggest pain point for people.

14:59Awesome. 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 plugin security again, so that their site doesn't, you know, 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 Kai AI is what we're using right now for all of our image generation. Basically, just all of the image models and video models in the same place.

15:38And 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, you know, somebody in a tangentially related industry. And we're just using Google Nana banana for this. So the agent then, again, is generating this creative using the static. You can make this as advanced as 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 um so with this uh 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 nano banana i can be i can you know basically qualify the like is is the text all readable um you know does the fonts that are being used actually on brand etc etc.

16:41And then from that, you basically have this way to make statics. And then on the video side, what we're still using and still seeing great results with, which is crazy to me, because it's not even the best is Hey Jen. 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. So you basically We have to like stitch these frames together is the challenge.

17:13But 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.

17:50And you probably, if you're online at all and not living under a rock, you've 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 spammed the API because they were trying to pull in like, you know, 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. Like it's literally like that's against Facebook's TOS. That is the problem.

18:24So 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 like promote ads. And I'll talk about that more in a second. And this I'm realizing just based on time, this whole video is just going to be like, how do you build like an actual like 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 like go follow me across channels. And this is what I share. But anyway, with this, so the to solve the data analytics problem, you have to build a data pipeline and a warehouse.

19:10So the open source way to do this is using a tool called Airbyte. You can host this like anywhere. You can literally have cloud code go and do this for you. Right. Set this up. And then you can use a data warehouse called ClickHouse. These are both 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 a data warehouse? Like what are these things? 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 like all channels in context or all data sources in context with all the other data sources.

19:56So I'll give you specifics. That was a very like, you know, 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 hoc 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?

20:30This 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 AirBite 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 visually how this is happening, we can just TL 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 these like five different data sources that I'm pulling from.

21:14We'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 agent, how it works is it basically is looking at that data stream. And then it is making updates within Facebook ads, right? And then that Facebook ads data is going back to where we're pulling from, which goes basically back into the data warehouse. Actually, this is probably more like this, back into the data warehouse.

22:09And so this is how I'm creating this loop that is basically learning. 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 having trouble, like say you're again, pest control company or we'll say, I don't know, something like your commercial HVAC.

22:53Like we're having trouble hitting payroll this month. Like what is going wrong? It's like, oh, your accounts receivables are like off. You can literally have those conversations with your marketing 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's 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 OpenClaw.

23:28But 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. So, right. You can just deploy this into any cloud. It can be into Heroku. It can be into Railway. It can be into like any of these solutions. And again, I'm just giving options that are railable. 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?

24:02Right. 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 ad sets per day, five ads per ad set. They automatically get uploaded into 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.

24:48The agent is looking at, OK, I published these 10 ads and lets 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 winner's 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.

25:30And it's literally like the JSON prompts that we're sending to Nano Banana or the ad scripts that we're using and we're sending to Hey, Jenner 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 going to 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.

26:05So how do you solve for that? The two ways that we found that you 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.

26:46So this is a way to solve that, you know, kind of like 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 like operate and function is because it has all the necessary data it needs to think through what is actually driving like 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 all like, is my job secure?

27:22And I'm like, I don't know. 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 a semi-technical person or just if you have access to cloud code and literally just give it the transcript that i just like you know we just created on this call 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.