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John’s Substack · Jul 17, 2026

The Toolbox: Everything I Open-Sourced After 15 Years and $350M in Ad Spend

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John Williams · John’s Substack

Hey — John here.

If you’re new: I’ve spent 15+ years in enterprise paid media. Farmers Insurance, Prudential, Eventbrite, GM, Columbia, Harvard, NortonLifeLock (192% YoY paid search growth), with agency years at Seer Interactive and Brainlabs. I speak at Hero Conf about AI in advertising and write for Search Engine Land.

The entire time, I kept a private list titled “tools that should exist.”

Over the past couple of years, I built that list. Today’s issue is the guided tour — every link is free, and almost everything is open source.

Buddy is my AI advertising agent. In the demo above, watch the full loop:

Step 1 — Ask in plain English. “Write 3 Google Ads headlines and 2 descriptions for a Phoenix garage door repair company.”

Step 2 — Grounded in live data. Buddy pulls real Phoenix SERP data and writes copy inside Google’s character limits — headlines ≤30, descriptions ≤90.

Step 3 — The “why,” not just the what. Search intent, Quality Score mirroring, and the policy gotcha most advertisers miss (no phone numbers in headlines — use a call asset).

Step 4 — Validate creative. Upload an asset, check it against 50+ platform specs.

Buddy ships as an iOS/Android app, a Claude Code plugin (6 sub-agents, 77 skills), and a Gemini CLI extension.

Try Buddy Free

Everything I build connects across three homes:

  1. ahmeego.com — AI-powered Google Ads management and consulting. The business.

  2. googleadsagent.ai — free AI advertising tools, no login. The playground.

  3. itallstartedwithaidea.com — where it all started. The story.

MiniAgent is, as far as I know, the world’s first trainable open-source advertising AI — 26M parameters, trains from zero in 2 hours on one GPU, ships with 14 platform MCP servers.

The supporting cast:

Free Google Ads Scripts, battle-tested on enterprise accounts. Copy, paste, run:

I built a fully playable Bejeweled match-3 game through pure AI vibe coding — one HTML file, zero frameworks. Play it in your browser.

It’s the same build process behind everything above. Want to learn it? My free 42-page AI Agents Crash Course has 6 playable games, quizzes, and XP.

Start the Free Course

  • $350M+ managed ad spend

  • 15+ years across Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon

  • 57 repos, open source

  • 73+ agent skills, 14 platforms, 28 API actions

  • 192% YoY paid search growth at NortonLifeLock

Every tool came from a real problem in a real account. I coach high school football in Arizona with the same philosophy: show up, do the reps, help others level up.

— John

Read the original on itallstartedwithaidea.substack.com

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