Early Exit #45: I'm Starting A Software Company

And you can join the waitlist right now!

Sep 24, 2024

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build ~~a $20k/month solo business~~ your dream life by Nick Lafferty.

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It’s been a while. How have you been? Good?

Real talk: I have been thriving over the last few months. The weather is starting to dip here in New York and hoodie season is in full swing.

But I’ve also been obsessively building my next thing, and I’m excited to finally talk about it.

Introducing AdAcadabra 🪄

AdAcadabra will be the easiest way to monitor, manage, and optimize your paid ad campaigns.

When it launches later this year, the first version of AdAcadabra will have two core features:

Budget tracking and forecasting for Google, LinkedIn, Bing, and Meta Ads
Proactive alerting when you’re over or underspending according to your budget

But that’s only the beginning.

The ultimate vision for AdAcadabra will not only help optimize your campaigns and catch issues before you do, it’ll magically surface revenue-driving insights direct from your CRM like:

Which keywords are great at opening opportunities but terrible at closing them into deals?
Where should you spend extra budget to drive the most pipeline?

I am really excited to bring this to life and I’d love for you to join the waitlist so you’ll be the first to know when we launch.

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But why am I building this thing at all?

The Backstory

Many of you will remember my original 3-part plan after quitting my job last year.

Drive short-term revenue from consulting
Grow recurring revenue streams from digital products, courses, and affiliate programs
Start a software company or build a community

Great plan that I absolutely failed at.

I abandoned my first idea to build a software company because learning to code is hard.

But over the last 16 months, generative AI has lowered the barrier of entry for people like me. I don’t need to spend years learning how to code anymore, I can build useful apps in weeks(if not days) instead.

I’ll write more in upcoming newsletters about how I’m actually building my idea, what tools I’m using, and the mistakes I’ve already made.

I am so bullish on how AI can empower individual people to go from ideas to execution. It’s never been easier to build tools that solve unique problems to you.

And after the last year and a half of slinging millions of dollars of ads for kick-ass software companies, I kept noticing the same problem over and over again.

The problem of misaligned incentives

Every ad platform is incentivized to take as much of your money as possible. In return you get access to their userbase, but only on their terms.

However, if you’ve created a new Google Ads account recently then you’ve seen all of the landmines that Google puts in their product that will devour your budget.

Or if you’ve launched a new LinkedIn Ads campaign and noticed how they hid the option to turn off Audience Expansion behind another toggle, making it easier to miss.

Google and LinkedIn aren’t the only bad guys here. Every ad platform is adding more dark patterns into their UI because they want you to spend more.

And they’re not incentivized to protect you when things go wrong.

One thing the ad platforms don’t do? Send you a nice email when your spend skyrockets overnight.

Why would they do that? The longer you don’t notice that your spend is out of control the more money they make.

This is just one of the problems AdAdacabra will solve.

How you can help

If you’re actively managing paid ad campaigns, please sign up for the waitlist. I’d love to give you early access and get your feedback!

If you’re just here for the vibes, can you like and comment on my LinkedIn post today? And if you know anyone who runs paid ads please introduce us, I’d love to meet them.

Over the next few weeks you’ll get more details about how I’m building the first version of AdAcadabra and how I’m partnering with someone with way more experience building software to help me build this right.

See you soon,

Nick