The problem every developer knows
You build something cool. Clean code, great architecture, solid product. Then you realize: people need to actually know it exists.
So you open Canva. Stare at blank templates. Spend 3 hours making something that looks... fine. Maybe. Your designer friend politely says "it's a good start" (translation: it sucks).
Or you post on Upwork: "Need simple Facebook ad, $50 budget." Get 47 responses. Pick someone. Wait 5 days. Get something generic that could be advertising literally any SaaS.
The "aha" moment
I was procrastinating on creating ads (again) when I realized: My website already has my brand. The colors, fonts, logo, even the way I write.
What if AI could just... extract all that and create the ads for me?
Not generic AI templates. Actually good ads that understand MY specific brand.
So I built it
The concept is simple:
- Paste your website URL
- AI extracts your brand identity (colors, fonts, logos, voice)
- Generates ads optimized for different platforms
- Download and use
No brand guidelines needed. No "make the logo bigger" iterations. Just ads that actually look like they belong to your brand.
The technical interesting bits
Brand extraction was harder than expected:
- Parsing CSS to identify primary/secondary colors
- Finding actual logos vs random images
- Understanding brand voice from homepage copy
- Handling weird website structures
Stack I ended up with:
- Next.js for the frontend
- Custom vision models for logo detection
- GPT-4 for understanding brand voice
- Image processing pipeline for different ad formats
The trickiest part was teaching AI to distinguish between "brand colors" and random website colors. A lot of websites have blue links - that doesn't mean blue is their brand color.
What I learned
Developers are terrible at marketing (myself included). We overthink it. We want everything perfect before we start. But honestly? An "okay" ad that ships is better than a perfect ad that never gets made.
AI is really good at pattern recognition. Once I figured out how to feed it the right context about a brand, it started generating surprisingly good stuff.
Solving your own problem works. I built this because I personally hate creating ads. Turns out other developers/founders feel the same way.
Current status
It's live at board.ad. Still working on improving the brand extraction (some websites are just... chaotic). But it already saves me hours of Canva frustration.
If you're a developer who also hates creating marketing materials, might be worth checking out.
Always down to chat about AI, SaaS building, or why CSS grid still confuses me. Find me wherever developers complain about things.
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