Building AdBrownie 0 → 1 as a fun side project
I figured this is a great time to write about AdBrownie, a performance ad library I built last year.
Since launching, I’ve learned quite a bit about scaling a SaaS platform and community. There’s definitely the good, the bad, and the ugly. Let me spill.
I underestimated the time to scale a cr*p ton
First, you’re probably wondering—where the heck are we at with the user base?
Simply put, I wish it were larger, but we’re at a whopping 831 users. That’s the ugly. However, I’ve spent zero on ads, and everything has grown by word of mouth. Not so ugly, I guess.
In fact, some incredible companies have signed up like the growth teams at Delta Airlines, Curology, Uber, Edible Arrangements, and BIRKENSTOCK.
The nitty-gritty costs to run the site (hosting, storage, etc.) are only ~$45/month—easily covered by paid subscribers.
What I really underestimated was how long it would take to build a platform reputation and community around one topic: the best performance ads.
Network effects are very real
We’re steadily growing though and starting to see network effects kick in–meaning people are starting to spread the word and growth is snowballing.
This is a look at our Beehiv newsletter growth over the last 4 weeks:
We’ve gained 120 subscribers in the last month, compared to our previous average of 58 subscribers/month. Nice little snowball.
We also just crossed 5,000 followers on X which is our main user acquisition channel.
How do I run this as a full-time founder of another biz?
If you peek at the top-right corner of the X screenshot, yes—we’ve posted over 1,000 tweets. Some have gone mini-viral, hitting 20–30k impressions.
How? I don’t run the day-to-day social or website curation. Just wouldn’t be possible while scaling another company (GrowthPair), going to the gym 4x/week, and maintaining a semi-social life.
This is where Ana comes in. She’s a top 1% offshore marketer based in the Philippines who runs all our social, community engagement, and daily site ops. Here’s a sample of how she plans our content:
As she curates the best ads and writes the posts/newsletters, all I do is drop feedback in the “Notes” column.
5–10 minutes, and the whole month is planned out.
Some other SaaS learnings
Most paid users go for the yearly plan—not a shocker, since it’s 60% cheaper than monthly, but worth noting.
Things break. All the time. I’ve had to keep a dev on retainer to fix broken APIs and bugs as they pop up. I was naïve thinking I’d just build once and be done. That’ll probably shift as AI coding tools like Vercel evolve.
What’s next for AdBrownie
The plan is to keep riding the network effect tailwinds and scale this into the best performance ad library on the internet—all while keeping it open source.
I’m not planning to build a bunch of new features, but we’ll keep curating and adding the best ads we can find online.
With Ana leading marketing from the Philippines, I’m confident we’ll hit 10,000 followers on X and more than 2x our user base this year.
Subtle plug while we’re here—if you’re looking to build your startup with minimal costs (a.k.a. your full-time Ana), GrowthPair is your spot for top offshore marketers.