I built and launched a Google Ads audit tool in 48 hours and here's exactly what I did!
Last weekend I shipped AdSiftly from zero to live in 48 hours. Here's the honest breakdown.
THE PROBLEM I NOTICED
Small businesses waste 25–40% of their Google Ads budget every month on keywords that never convert, broken conversion tracking, and campaigns with zero ROI. Every existing tool (WordStream, Opteo, TrueClicks) is built for agencies charging $2K/month. Nobody built one for the plumber spending $500/month.
WHAT I BUILT
AdSiftly connects to your Google Ads account via OAuth (read-only), scans 12 audit areas, and returns:
→ A Waste Score out of 100
→ Exact dollars being wasted monthly
→ Top 3 plain-English fixes
→ Negative keyword CSV ready to import
THE STACK
Next.js 14, Supabase, Google Ads API,
Claude AI (for plain-English fix generation),
Stripe, Vercel
CURRENT STATUS
Live at adsiftly.com. Waitlist open. Google Ads API developer token pending approval (the one thing you genuinely cannot rush).
WHAT I'D DO DIFFERENTLY
Apply for the Google Ads developer token before writing a single line of code. It's the critical path nobody warns you about.Would love brutal feedback from anyone who's run Google Ads or built B2B SaaS tools before.
48 hours is solid. The thing I'd watch though - small biz Google Ads is a tough customer to reach. The plumber spending $500/month isn't browsing Product Hunt. How are you planning to get in front of them?
Totally fair. thinking B2B channel, reach them through their agency or Google Ads rep, not direct. that's the real distribution play here.
rep channel is the move. they're already on the account talking performance - way easier entry than going cold to an agency.
Launching a Google Ads audit tool in 48 hours shows smart planning, fast execution, keyword focused analysis, performance tracking, and practical automation for better campaign optimization.
Thanks! kept the scope tight on purpose, that was the only way to ship in 48hrs honestly.
48 hours is impressive. What was the hardest part to build in such a short time?
The waste-score-as-snapshot part is the bit I'd think hardest about. I run monitoring on the Meta side, and the waste a one-time audit finds tends to come back within a few weeks as new search terms surface and auto-applied changes drift the account, so the plumber fixes it once, feels good, then quietly bleeds again by next month. The negative-keyword CSV is a great wedge, but the real job to be done might be "tell me when it breaks again," which is a different product than a 48-hour audit.
This is the most useful reframe i've gotten. "tell me when it breaks again" is a different product, and honestly a better one. moving toward monitoring, not just one-time audit.
the plumber spending $500 a month positioning is the right ICP frame but that person almost never self-audits their Google Ads. they set it up once, probably with help from a local agency, and check their phone calls. the path to that user is probably through the local agency or the Google Ads rep who set it up rather than through inbound discovery. curious whether you've thought about distribution to that specific buyer
You're right and this one kept me up. agency channel is probably the move, partner with the person who set up their ads, not the plumber directly.
Great launch! How did you get your first users?
IndieHackers, ProductHunt, and honestly just posting everywhere and seeing what stuck 😅
Great read!
Thank you! 🙏
This really resonates — I ran into the same "ship fast, learn faster" lesson when I built my own AI tool. The 48-hour constraint actually forces you to cut scope to only what matters. One question: did you validate the niche (small businesses vs agencies) before building, or did you discover it after shipping?
Good question! no, I didn't talk to small business owners beforehand. It was inferred, not validated: I looked at what existing tools like XYZ ($208+) and ABC ($99+, coz I cant mention their names) charge and how they're built, and they're clearly priced/designed for agencies juggling multiple accounts. That left an obvious gap for someone running their own ads who just wants "am I wasting money, and where" without the agency-grade complexity. So I built on that bet rather than a researched one, and the 48-hour cap helped by forcing me to ship the one core job instead of hedging across audiences.
About 2 hours of research before touching any code. looked at what the expensive tools flagged and picked the 12 that actually moved the needle for small budgets.
Great execution. I'm currently building an AI Visibility platform and one thing I've learned is that shipping quickly provides better feedback than months of planning.
100%, the feedback I got in 48hrs of being live told me more than a week of planning would have.
Great to see poeple are using the ai in a right way, to build cool things, solving pain problems. I'm also trying to get in that
That's exactly the goal, AI doing the analysis, humans getting plain English back. good luck with yours!
"Great tool! Google Ads can be a black hole for budget if not optimized. Do you focus mostly on search campaigns, or does your audit cover display/YouTube as well? Excited to see how this scales!"
Search only for now, that's where most small business waste lives.
Congratulations!
Thank you :)
The developer token lesson generalizes way past Google. I ran a Microsoft MSP for almost 20 years, and the bottleneck was never the build, it was always the approval or access gate sitting outside our control. We learned to file for those on day one and treat the waiting as the critical path, not the surprise at the end.
On the read-only trust point: this is the exact hurdle we hit asking clients to grant tenant access. Reassurance never moved anyone. What worked was showing them precisely what we could see, plus one-click revoke. Make the permission boundary visible and the "do I trust this brand new tool" question mostly answers itself.
That "treat the waiting as critical path, not the surprise at the end" line hits hard we filed for Google Ads API Basic Access early and it's still sitting in review days later, exactly the kind of external clock you can't compress no matter how fast you build. Lesson learned for the next gate: file on day one, always.
The revoke point is the one I want to steal. Right now we lean on "it's read-only" copy to build trust, and you're right that reassurance alone doesn't really land, nobody believes a brand new tool just because it says so. Showing exactly what scopes/data we can see plus a visible one-click revoke is a much better answer than more words on a landing page.
Adding that to the list.
The "nobody built one for the plumber spending $500/month" framing hit close to home — I'm doing something similar with a language-learning tool. Every existing app is either built for total beginners (Duolingo) or assumes you'll pay agency-level prices for depth. The underserved middle is usually bigger than it looks from inside a crowded market.
Also running basically your exact stack (Next.js, Supabase, Vercel), so this part stood out: you went with Stripe, I specifically couldn't — building from Cuba means no compatible legal entity, so I had to go with Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record instead. Worth flagging for anyone outside the US/EU reading this: payment processor choice isn't just a preference, check eligibility before you architect around it.
The "critical path you can't rush" lesson resonates too. Mine was Supabase's direct connection port being unreachable from where I'm building — every schema change is a manual SQL migration through their editor now. Different bottleneck, same lesson: find the thing outside your control early, not after you've built around assuming it'll just work.
Curious how you're thinking about the Waste Score methodology — is it weighted the same across industries, or does a plumber's "wasted" keyword look different from, say, a SaaS company's?
Currently weighted the same across industries which is the first thing i'd fix. a plumber's wasted keyword looks very different from a SaaS company's and the score should reflect that. also the Lemon Squeezy flag is genuinely useful, worth a standalone post for non-US builders.
the positioning is smart — every existing tool prices out the exact people who need it most.
the API token thing is painful. found out the hard way on a different project that anything requiring external approval should be day one, not day last.
what are you doing with waitlist signups while you wait — keeping them warm somehow or just hoping they stick around?
Honestly? not doing enough. sending a welcome email and that's it. need to fix this week, weekly update at minimum.
The developer token point is actually the most useful lesson here. A lot of founders underestimate the “boring approval dependency” until it becomes the whole launch bottleneck.
The plumber angle makes sense too. The hard part might be proving trust fast, because if you’re connecting to someone’s Google Ads account, even read-only, they need to believe the audit won’t just be generic AI advice.
Incredible hustle, Priyanka! Building a B2B SaaS in 48 hours is no small feat, especially handling the Google Ads API complexity. That 'Waste Score' is a brilliant hook for small business owners who feel overwhelmed by platform data
Congratulations! That's a great idea. I think we could use AI to provide appropriate suggestions.
A common issue we encounter is that while keywords may be sufficiently precise, the quality of the traffic they actually drive does not match that precision. If we can combine this with ad data for further analysis to identify and compile a list of negative keywords—which can be used to continuously filter out irrelevant traffic—we can significantly improve overall conversion quality.
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Congratulations, this is a great launch. Two days from zero to live is impressive on its own, but what really stood out is how clean the homepage is. Most launches I see quietly fail the basics. Yours doesn't. Accessibility, best practices and SEO all score a perfect 100, and the page paints in under half a second. That's rare, and rarer still for something shipped this fast.
The positioning is the part I like most. "Nobody built one for the plumber spending $500 a month" is a sharp wedge. The big tools are priced for agencies and leave a huge group underserved, and slipping in under them is exactly the right move. The output is concrete too: a waste score, the real dollars being lost, three plain fixes, and a negative keyword CSV ready to import. That CSV is a lovely touch, because it makes the audit something you act on in one click, not a report you have to decode.
You asked for brutal feedback, so here are three honest things, mostly from the demo report.
The contrast on the report page. A lot of the text there is grey on dark blue and genuinely hard to read: the card sub-labels, the "out of 100" line, the chart's axis numbers and dates. Here's the catch. Lighthouse passes it, which is misleading. Automated contrast checkers don't read text drawn inside charts and graphs, and things like your trend chart's axis and date labels are exactly that, so they get a pass they don't deserve. The muted grey labels on the cards also sit right at the edge of the limit, technically passing but still a squint. This is the page where people read their waste score and their wasted dollars, so it's the worst possible place to make them strain. I'd push that grey a few steps brighter across the board.
The back button is broken. From the demo report I couldn't use the browser back button to get home, it just doesn't return. Lighthouse separately flags that this page blocks the browser's back/forward cache, so two different signals point the same way: going back is broken. On a tool people click into and out of, that's worth fixing early.
Trust and permissions. This is the big one for your audience. Even with read-only access, you're asking a small business to let a brand new tool see their ad spend, budgets and conversion data, which is some of the most sensitive stuff they have. Rather than just reassure people, I think you can make this a feature: give them real control over what the tool can touch. Let them connect, but choose whether it reads budget and financial figures, show clearly what you store and for how long, and offer one-click disconnect and delete. For the "$500 plumber" who is naturally wary, visible control over their financial data could be the exact thing that makes them say yes. It also pairs well with showing the why behind each flagged dollar, so the number feels earned rather than asserted.
None of this takes away from a really strong start. The homepage is excellent, the idea is right, and these are the kinds of things you can fix in an afternoon.
This is the most thorough feedback I've received and I'm grateful for every point.
1. Contrast — fixing today. You're right that Lighthouse misses chart labels. Pushing all grey text brighter across the report page.
2. Back button — on the list. Classic SPA gotcha I should have caught.
3. Trust and permissions — this one hit hardest. "Visible control over financial data" reframes the whole onboarding. Adding explicit data controls, retention policy, and one-click disconnect before I launch to real users. This should be a feature, not a footnote.
Really strong feedback. Thank you for taking the time to go this deep on a weekend launch.
This is the right call, and doing it before real users arrive is exactly the moment for it. Data controls, retention, one-click disconnect: for the wary "$500 plumber" that isn't a footnote, it's the reason they say yes. You clearly get it. Go well with the launch, rooting for you.
The positioning is the strongest part of this. "Built for the plumber spending $500/month" is a clear, specific customer and the existing tools really do ignore that segment entirely. WordStream et al. have priced themselves out of SMBs and nobody has seriously gone after the gap.
The Waste Score out of 100 is smart UX — gives the user an immediate emotional hook before they even read the recommendations. That number will drive shares ("my score is 34, what's yours") in a way a list of issues wouldn't.
The Google Ads API token bottleneck is brutal and your warning is genuinely useful. I've seen people build entire products around APIs that took 6–8 weeks to approve and killed their momentum completely. Worth pinning that lesson more visibly for other builders.
One thing I'd push on: the negative keyword CSV export is a great feature but it assumes the user knows how to import and apply it correctly. For a plumber managing their own ads, that last step might be where they drop off. Have you considered a one-pager or short video that walks them through the import? Could meaningfully improve activation rate from audit to actual value delivered.
Good luck with the token approval — that's the only thing standing between you and real traction right now.
The CSV point is the most useful thing anyone has said to me about this product.
You're right — a plumber getting a CSV file has no idea what to do next. That's a dead end disguised as a feature.
Fixing it this week:
→ 3-step one-pager that downloads with the CSV
→ 60-second Loom walkthrough of the import flow
→ Direct API import eventually so they never touch a CSV at all
The Waste Score share angle I hadn't considered, making that number bigger and more screenshot-worthy on the report page now.
Thanks for this. Genuinely useful. :)
One thing I'd be careful with:
The interesting question may not be whether small businesses are wasting ad spend.
It may be what decision they're actually trying to make when they run an audit in the first place.
Those sound similar, but they can lead to very different conclusions about positioning, proof, and what deserves emphasis.
I wouldn't make that call casually from the current signals.
This is the most useful comment I've gotten since launching. You're right, I've been assuming the decision is "where is my money going" but the actual trigger might be something more specific:"My agency just sent me a report and I don't understand it"or "I'm about to increase my budget and want to know if it's worth it" or "I've been running ads for 3 months and have nothing to show for it"
Each of those is a different person, different moment, different thing they need to hear. I've been building around the output (waste score) when I should probably be building around the trigger (what made them search for an audit in the first place).
Going to talk to 10 small business owners this week specifically about this before I write another line of code. Thanks for the push. :)
Honestly, this is exactly what would make me hesitate.
The examples you listed all sound reasonable on their own, but I've seen founders talk to 10 people, hear 10 sensible stories, and end up more confused than when they started.
Not because the conversations were bad.
Because the hard part is figuring out what deserves confidence afterward.
That's why I'd be careful before building too much around any one interpretation.
Hard to do that properly in a thread though.
If you're interested, drop your email and I'll send you the longer version.
Interesting niche.
Curious if the biggest challenge has been finding people with the problem or convincing them the problem is worth solving.
I’ve noticed a lot of founders can build the solution faster than they can communicate why someone should care.