Turning Vibe Coding Into Real Money (Google/Meta Ads, HeyGen etc)

0:00Today's episode is the bootstrapper's guide to getting customers with Google ads, with Facebook ads, with perplexity, with HeyGen, with 11 Labs, and more. It is easy to vibe code an app. You've done it, I've done it, but it is so hard to actually get customers. Now, there doesn't exist tutorials on YouTube that give the actual sauce with how to do it. And today with Cody Schneider, we just show you how to do it step by step, how to get your customers, how to run paid ads. What does that look like? No gatekeeping, all the sauce. And if you stick to the end of the episode, I think that you're going to be a better founder, a better entrepreneur.

0:41And these types of episodes, people, they charge five, 10, 15,$25 ,000 for it. This is absolutely free. I hope this gets your creative juices flowing. and I hope that you build a big business with some of these ideas.

1:04Cody Schneider on the pod. We're going to talk about how to grow your vibe-coded startup. You built something, you vibe-coded something, but you need customers. And no one's talking about this and no one is explaining to you in a simple way how to actually do it with the alpha. So I brought in Cody Schneider. And Cody, by the end of the episode, what are people going to learn? I'm going to give you a step-by-step playbook and the strategy and the actual tactics. And I'll try to show literally as much as I can for each of the things, whether it's paid ads or cold DMs, all the automation tools I'm using.

1:38So that in the next 24 hours, you can have some type of marketing channel live to start promoting this thing. And everything I'm going to teach you layers together. right so like it all creates the symbiotic relationship that creates like this growth flywheel for you let's go all right cool so let's let's get into it i know and you're gonna give all the tools all the top all the sauce everything i need you to promise me i promise you i'll show you everything okay cool all right so you can start sharing your screen and we'll get into it sweet okay cool so first off um let's talk through uh paid ads and what like for most like especially if you're building an SMB product, like a B2B SaaS, but you're servicing SMBs.

2:22And maybe we should come up with a product that we're trying to sell, Greg. This is actually one we're building right now. So I can just use that and I'll share all the details because I don't care. But it's basically a YouTube channel email scraper. And this is a perfect type of product that you'd want to go build. let me do channel email extractor that's actually what it is by the way i noticed i noticed you have what is that chrome extension that you're using that shows yeah yeah it's called keywords everywhere they should they owe me so much money for like showing this i don't know why it doesn't want to open right now but basically it's just a browser extension that modifies google so that you can see uh the total volume uh the total cp or the average cpc the competition um and then also So like this is what I use for all those trend graphs that I post.

3:15It basically like shows you the search volume over time for this graph. So like this one, there's like not good data. So it doesn't really show anything. But this is it. It's a great way to do quick validation research. And for anything that you're building, it is actually where I would start before I even build a product. It's like I would try to figure out like the marketing and the go to market motion before I even build anything. because if you can't validate that people actually want to buy this, like you shouldn't build it. And I think this is like a mistake. I see a lot of first time founders or builders create it or like, you know, they always, what they do is they build product and then try to figure out marketing.

3:52And it should be the opposite. It should be like validate. People want to buy this thing. See if you can build it and then figure out how to sell it. Right. At its core, like when you look at a business, you know, when it's in its simplest form, it's basically having something that people want to buy and being able to sell it to them. Like that is a business at its core. And so I think that one of the easiest ways to actually validate that this is something that people want to buy is you have to you can just look at like keywords and the keyword volume. Like, are people actually searching for this?

4:21Can I find like Reddit threads that this is a problem for? Like I would do also this like YouTube channel, email extractor, Reddit, and like see if there's conversations around this. Like literally top result, bro. Like fucking request for SaaS, YouTube email scraper. I couldn't make that up. I couldn't make that any better, right? So anyways, once I found that, I would be like, okay, cool. Like now I'm going to go build a product around this. How would I actually market this? So I'm going to talk through Google Ads first and the actual like setup process. I don't know how much I can show. I mean, I could probably show, I guess we could make up like a separate account and like show you.

5:02I'll just show you the kind of the structure that I think that we could do. and actually I'm not sure on this G so I'll just kind of play it I'll play I'll play jazz on it um but so anyways what uh I would then do is I'd be like okay cool I'm gonna start to set up a campaign the challenge with this is that like you you couldn't bid on the keyword phrase YouTube so what you'd have to do is be like channel email extractor right and like that would be the ad that you actually end up running and uh the uh keyword you would bid on is YouTube channel email extractor, but you would have to like basically run an ad to the ad that you're like the ad creative that's in there.

5:42It would have to be like only say channel email scraper. And the reason for that is because like they'll flag this, but let's actually just like, I can just go and set up an account. Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built idea browser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by high quality data trends.

6:28How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building. And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GPT for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. Okay, cool. So this is like a Google Ads account. And I'm going to show you like step by step how to actually set up like the paid ad strategy here.

7:08So to begin with, you're going to go do new campaign. And what I typically do is I start with a click campaign. And the reason for that is because I'm just trying to see the actual keywords that people are searching. All of these keyword research tools, they're going to give you like what they, you know, it's an estimate, you know, of what they think that people are searching based on the data that they're aggregating from like all the clickstream data, etc. But what I actually want to figure out is the actual search terms that people are searching from the beginning. So I'm going to do website traffic.

7:37I'm going to do search. Another campaign type is performance max. I'll talk about that in a second. We're seeing that actually be really effective right now. So I can talk to that in a moment. But then what I'll do is we'll like throw up a website. We'll just say like YouTube scraper, right? As like a placeholder. And then just to get us to like move forward. It's going to try to pull information from this, but it doesn't exist. So there won't be anything to do there. So from here, we're just going to do page view as the events. And then I'm going to talk through how to actually set up events in the future for the actual signup that you're trying to get to happen.

8:10You can set up events for signup or also a payment conversion. It's the same exact technical deployment to do both of those things. But again, I'm focusing on the clicks to begin with. And the reason for that is, again, I'm just trying to understand the actual things that people are searching and clicking on. It's like a fast way for me to get initial data. I can always change back to a conversion once I have the conversion event set up on my website. but the in the beginning what you need to do is basically just like get data so you can understand how people like are trying to actually find this solution so this is a great way to actually test a product to like throw up a landing page and lovable put a tally form on it send some google ads traffic to it i just talked to a founder who's building an app for like uh it's like a landing page building software like i was like this is your literal strategy just like bid on this keyword and see if you can get signups and like if you can then build the thing um so like before you even build the product, right?

9:08So anyway, so I'm going to do clicks. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to target only the United States. And then I'm going to update for people that are only present in that location. You don't want to do people that are traveling in that location. I just see worse results with that. Sometimes as well, you can see like it's, this is the devil in the details is shown interest in your location. A lot of people, they will get trapped in like, like, you'll see this where the ads do really well for the first like 14 days. And then suddenly they start getting all this cheap traffic from like the Philippines or India.

9:37And they're like, I don't even know how that's happening. We're not even bidding on it. This is a lot of the times, the reason that that's happening. So you're trying to have people that are in that location physically. They're actually like, you know, pinging that IP when they're there. We'll do English. You know, none of it, we don't have to set up any of the like political ad stuff. And then from here, we're going to actually go and set up the actual ad. So we'll have that be the final landing page. But then what I would do is I would go and then start bidding on those keywords that are related to the product that I'm trying to sell.

10:09So I'm going to talk through this in a second. But what I just did there, so if I do this keyword like this, that's technically a broad match keyword. So what would happen is it's probably going to go and bid on anything that's email extractor, whatever the biggest keyword phrase is that's within this long tail phrase, It's going to like basically level up into that. And I don't want that to happen. I want it to only bid on a fan, like the family of keywords that are related to the, like to that keyword phrase. So YouTube channel email extractor, when I put those quotations around that, that's what is called a phrase match search.

10:46And I typically start with phrase match and then I'll go either do a negative keyword elimination. Like if I don't want certain phrases to show up within the phrase match, or I will do an exact match. Exact match isn't actually exact match though on Google anymore. It used to be in the past. I could be like anytime somebody searches this keyword, show my ad. They now technically expand the audience and it's total bullshit. I hate it, but it's something that you have to deal with. And there's ways around it sort of, but they don't actually work. So anyways, you have to basically make the landing page, have the language that you actually want them to convert for.

11:25And then when you do the exact match, like say you want them to like only, you know, only show for whenever there's YouTube channel email extractor. You have to make the landing page, have that as the H1. That would be the only way that you could kind of like make it learn down into like only bidding on that exact match keyword. But anyway, so I'm going to do that broad match. What I'm going to go do now, too, is I'm going to use keywords everywhere again. and I'm going to go and expand, find all of the keywords that people are searching that are related to YouTube channel email extractor. So what I'm doing here is again, I just search this and then I can find all the long tail keywords.

12:00So I'm just gonna click that button. And basically what's happening in the background is it's gonna go and scrape all of the other keyword phrases that people are searching along with the phrase that I provided as the source phrase. We'll see if this wants to actually work. this app can't or this Chrome extension can be buggy. So it is, it's one of those, one of those things, or it's probably a team. And like, I actually don't know, I need to meet them at some point, but anyway, so how to find YouTube channel by email, email address extractor. So what I would be looking for is like all the ones that are YouTube.

12:36So go down that list. So like YouTube channel, email address finder, that's a great one, right? So I would include that in there as well as a phrase match and basically add that into. Sorry, let me just actually get this. I think it's like loading. So it's technically not actually a static piece of content. It's like actively moving. But anyways, I would pull all of these out. Let me just stop it and I can actually do this for you. All of these ones that have YouTube, I would take these. I would pull these out that have the search intent that I'm looking for. So like email extractor for YouTube channel.

13:09That's a great one as well. again i'm putting these in as a phrase match and i would just do like probably 10 of these that's all you'd really need to get started so then at that point once you've had the keywords that you're bidding on you would then go and you'd actually have a quick question on that so if you go back to keyword uh the keyword tool i noticed like a lot of the search volume is in the yeah for 30 to 170 couple hundred some people are going to look at that and they're going to be like how was that enough volume this is literally like apps that have a hundred search volume a month i've paid my rent for the last 10 years like i will never talk about these in public i will never share what they are the only reason i'm sharing this one because it's like whatever you know we're gonna give the sauce away to for free today because i'm feeling i'm feeling like uh i'm feeling like chris kringle and i want to i want to i want to be santa to you in the middle of summer in this hot July heat, this hot August heat.

14:06So I wouldn't even think about the search volume. What I would think about is like, are there people that have this pain point that I can get to pay me$29 a month,$49 a month,$99 a month? And we can just do that math real quick, right? If you have whatever, say you have 100 people paying you$49 a month, that ends up being $4 ,900, right? And like, this is a margin business where it's like, your margin is going to be like 95%. And a lot of the times you don't need customer service, just like set up a crisp chat, let this thing run in the background. And it's just gonna like, it's a little tool, it doesn't really break, it doesn't it just does this very small thing.

14:46I think a lot of the times like this is what I see a lot of these vibe coders, they try to make these massive platforms like, yo, take a step back, find one killer feature, have off payment and email. So we're like password reset, like that is your first app that you should build. If you can't get that to work, you shouldn't level up into like a platform that has this multi-feature product scope. That's super complicated and super interactive. It's just start with the smallest thing. But anyway, yeah, does that answer the question on that? Absolutely. I was hoping you were going to say that. Yeah, man.

15:18It's dude, the riches are in the niches. And like now it's, it's easier than ever to build these and you just stack them together, right? Like everybody wants to be Peter Levels does, which is like fucking build a hundred different products and five of them actually make money. And that's like the game here. It's like you find a bunch of these small like scraper extractor like tools, right? Like research tools. Dude, there's so much money in data extraction tools. It's crazy. Like there's huge companies that all they do is just like data extraction from government documents. And like they get absolutely paid.

15:52Like, and nobody wants to like, they just think it's on sexy or like not interesting. But this is what people actually want. They want this information. So anyway, okay, cool. So you've got the keywords in there. Now you're going to set up the ads. This is where I was talking about, you won't be able to have YouTube in the name. So what you can potentially do is do like something like YT. I probably, I don't think that would work. I think they would probably still flag it. You're not going to be able to have YouTube in the actual name of the URL that you're sending to. So like, don't name it this, name it something else.

16:21But what you'll do is have it be like, I would probably do something like channel email extractor, right? So like still talk to that specific keyword, email extractor.

16:37And then the reason for this is I'm trying to have the, the, I'm trying to have the keyword that I'm bidding on, the ad that I'm showing, and then the landing page that I'm sending them to all have the same keyword phrase throughout the whole funnel. And the purpose is because you see a higher conversion rate when you do this. Right. The the strategy here in the beginning is like, I'm just going to bid on everything. That's why I'm doing the click campaign rather than conversion campaign. And then once I start to see, OK, cool, like I'm seeing a lot of click volume, like more click volume than I thought for email extractor from YouTube channel, then YouTube channel email extractor.

17:16I'm going to go and build landing pages for each of these keywords. And when I say a landing page, like literally all I'm talking about is like, you know, it's straight up just like the hero section of your website has that exact keyword. So like an example of this, I mean, we could do this in lovable right now, right? Like build a landing page for this target keyword. I mean, it should have the best practices of a landing page, which is, for example, you probably don't want to have any nav bar. You probably want high contrast. You probably want juicy buttons. you know so look at people need to look at you know best squeeze pages best landing pages and use that as a reference you want them to do one action i think this is the thing that people always get fucked up on is they're like they're trying to like get them to watch a demo and also like download this ebook and it's like no this person is coming in on an ad i want to only show them one thing that is the most high value thing that i can get them to do and you don't know what that is.

18:15You don't even know, like, is it an ebook? Is it? But it's one thing that you're trying to get them. You can get them deeper into the funnel later on. But like just doing that one thing is going to be the most effective. And you made a great point, Greg, just like follow best practices. Like you can literally go to perplexity and be like, what should the structure of this landing page be for this keyword? Right. And it's like, here's the keyword. And then it's just going to give you the structure and you take that over to lovable and you build that landing page out. Right. Like that's like literally.

18:48It's so easy. It's so easy. Like this used to take me again, like I'm going to do this 15 years, right? Like this used to take me weeks, Greg. And now I just did this live on a video call with you. Like it's the most insane thing ever. I geek out about this because it is actually so crazy. I'm also realizing we're going probably way, like way long on time too. So maybe we can do the transactional today and then we can come back and I'll do all the like, you know, the part two of this later on. So anyways. OK, cool. So you built that landing page. We'll let that like just vibe in the background while we move forward on this.

19:26And then what you're going to do next is set up this conversion event. So how are you going to do that? You're going to use Google Tag Manager to set this up. Google Tag Manager is basically a container that allows for you to deploy both scripts, which are scripts and pixels are interchangeable in their voice. But then what it allows for you to do as well is you can actually set up events that basically wait. They set up a listener for an event that gets pushed to the data layer so that you can then have a trigger so that when that action happens by the user, I can send that information back to Google Ads.

20:02And the reason that you're doing all of this is you're basically trying to say, hey, Google, you know, when people search this keyword, there's a cohort that will actually make the action that I want them to do. I want them to do this action, which is a sign up or a payment. So optimize the ad, basically, of the people that are searching that keyword for the cohort of people that are most likely to do that action. And it's so smart that it can actually train itself into understanding these people are most likely to sign up. these people are most likely to, you know, actually turn into a paid conversion, etc.

20:34Okay, so this is what an actual like Google Tag Manager account looks like. This is some random project that I've been working on that's just in the background, right? So how you actually set these up is you're going to go and create. So what you'll search on perplexity is like write event code for Google Tag Manager for signup conversion. And so what this is going to do is basically write the code, which is just a JavaScript code that you want to fire when the user does the action that you're looking for. So this is like when they do that form submission, I want this code to fire and it's going to send this event to the data layer.

21:16And the data layer is basically just like this, like observable place that like we can see information. So it's going to push this code, sign up success. And I can literally go into, you know, my vibe code and be like, add this, add this event for when somebody completes the form submission. And it adds that there, right? Whatever that, you know, you can, it's super easy to implement this. Now this needs to take again, like I would spend two hours with an engineer to get this deployed. I can now do it in like minutes. And then once I have that, what I can do is I can set up an event trigger within Google Tag Manager that actually allows for me to observe that event firing.

21:58So let me show you what I mean by that. I can go trigger new and then I will select custom event. And then within custom events, I'm going to paste that signup success. and we'll just name that something like, you know, events sign up. And then once I've set that up and I have this code firing at the data layer level, I now can observe that. I can actually see that. And that trigger is listening for any time that event gets submitted. And once that event is submitted, I can then send that data back to Google Ads. So I can say, okay, and what I'm doing here is I'm now making a new tag. So to just take a step back to what I've done is I've deployed this Google Tag Manager code on my website.

22:43So I've added this to the head of the website and the body of the website all over the entire website so that I can send all like basically all this like data and information and tracking back to it. And then I'm set up that trigger that is listening for that event. And then I also have this event that's firing now from within the application, pushing that information to the data layer. And once I have all this set up, I can now deploy something like, okay, I'm going to say this signup event. I want Google ads, I want you to do conversion tracking for when somebody completes that signup. So within Google ads, what I can then go do, let me exit out of this.

23:22I'll go conversions. I can create a conversion for that event called sign up. And we'll try to actually do this live. I don't know like what it's going to allow me to, because this is like an old account. So conversions on the website, get rid of that. Yeah, it's going to force me to have an actual website. If you just go in YouTube, like how to connect Google Tag Manager, connect Google Tag Manager. uh, to Google ads, um, analytics mania, um, loves data. And then measure school are the two, the three best on this. They, they do great content. If you do any of those, like this one probably would give you the exact like walkthrough on how to do this, this conversion linker.

24:13Um, but this will have a tutorial on how to set this up. Basically what it ends up happening is I can set up this conversion ad and what's what ends up look at what this ends up looking like is I can have an event that fires that data gets sent back to Google ads. And then within Google ads, I can actually see the exact keyword that is making signups. And then I can see the cost for the exact keyword that is making signups. And this is what always kills me with indie hackers. It drives me fucking insane is they are like, oh, we're anti paid ads. I'm like, my God, like if you had an ATM where you put a dollar in and$4 came out, what would you do?

24:51What is their answer? It's like, well, I would put as much money into the ATM as I could. That is all ads are when you set it up right. It's like, that is literally the game here. And maybe this doesn't work for your industry because it's too competitive. Like for lawyers, right? If you do like truck accident lawyer, you know, Dallas, right? Yeah. Impossible, right? Like literally impossible, like$13 per CPC. like you're gonna be you're playing big you're playing you're playing pro ball at that point but you're bidding on some like little ass tool or something like that like you can make this work you can totally 100 make this work man it drives me absolutely crazy that they like say that this it doesn't work it 100 can work like if search if organic search is working for you paid search will work for you i guarantee it most like nine out of ten times like very rarely 99 out of 100 times it will work.