Wilow

Highlights

• After seeing the limits and inefficiency of manual reporting and the new opportunities created by AI, turned years of Meta ads experience into a Meta-approved creative analytics tool.
• Built a more advanced version of Meta's official Ad Library on Meta's API. It showed each advertiser's ads, landing pages, creator partnerships and more, in a clearer interface than Meta's own.
• Collected data from Meta's Ad Library and turned it into free benchmarks by industry, so advertisers could compare their ad volume, landing page use, creator strategy and mix of video and image ads with their industry's.
• Used Claude to build a programmatic SEO strategy that updated Meta ad benchmarks for each industry automatically every week and created a web page for each brand that was searched, so each one could rank on Google.
• Created an "AI ad studio" that used OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5, the leading image generation model at the time, so advertisers could make Meta ads easily.
• After becoming an approved "Meta tech partner", enabled advertisers to connect their Meta ad account and see each ad's performance in a simple interface.
• Offered automated creative strategy audits that used Google's multimodal Gemini 2.5 Flash AI model to label each ad by persona, offer, surface, type, emotion and buyer readiness.
• Grew the platform from 0 to 173 sign-ups without outside funding, with users from DTC brands including Huel and David's Protein.
• Automated outbound with a system of AI agents that analyzed and labelled a brand's Meta ads and 3 competitors, found the point of contact person and drafted the email.
• Ran an AI model stack matched to each job: Claude Opus 5.5 as the daily driver and Claude Fable 5.1 as the coding agent, both in VS Code, Gemini 2.5 Flash for multimodal tasks, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash in Hermes Agent for non-sensitive tasks.
• Set up a team of 29 AI agents across four businesses that posted fixes to their own instructions in Slack, where a lead agent reviewed and applied them.
• Shipped the backend for the free Meta Ad Library on Vercel, which runs a cached, rate-limited search API, scheduled jobs that refresh every brand daily and rebuild industry benchmarks weekly, and a page for every brand searched.
• Developed an AI search (AEO) audit system that ran 19 buyer queries through Gemini, Claude and Exa each week, measuring how often the answers named the brand against its competitors
• Doubled presence in Gemini answers from 11% to 22% between June and September 2026
• Increased AI search traffic, resulting in ChatGPT becoming the largest referring website after Google search

The company

Wilow is creative analytics for Meta ads. It ranks the ads in an account by performance, shows what is working in competitors' accounts too, and its AI ad maker turns an ad worth learning from into your own version of it. It sells self-serve plans and enterprise deals, and Meta has approved it as a tech partner.

My remit

I founded Wilow and run product and growth. On the product side that means mockups, feature scoping and product reviews, and I write the backlog as PBIs in ClickUp and manage them with the two developers who write the code. On the growth side I own enterprise deals end to end.

Channels and budget

The growth plan has five pillars: organic social, long-form video on YouTube, SEO and AEO, lead magnets led by the free Ad Library tool, and owned media through The Keyword.

What I built or changed

I designed the product and launched three tools around it: a free Meta Ad Library search tool as a lead magnet; a free report of Meta ads benchmarks by industry, rebuilt each week from live ads, to drive search traffic; and an AI ad maker that turns another company's ad worth learning from into the user's own image ad. I integrated Claude for analysis, Gemini to label ads and OpenAI to create image ads, and built an agentic outbound email system that sends prospects a report on their competitors' ads. I set up conversion tracking myself in Google Tag Manager for Wilow and The Keyword.

Results

In the 30 days to 5 October 2026, 88 people did more than load a page in Wilow, with internal accounts filtered out. The free benchmark report tracks 30,000+ live ads.