Audit local businesses' ads and get paid to fix them
Most small businesses running Google or Meta ads are quietly setting money on fire, and they know it. You don't need to be a media buyer to help. With an open-source tool that reads an ad account and hands you a dated, evidence-backed audit, you can show a business exactly where its budget leaks, then charge to fix it and keep it fixed.
- Outreach scripts that stay inside UK and US spam rules, and a safe way to get account access without ever touching a password
- A pricing model (one-off audit plus monthly retainer) and the lines you must not cross on results claims
- Claude Code installed and working. If it's new to you, start it once and sign in before this mission
- The claude-ads tool from github.com/AgriciDaniel/claude-ads ↗ (MIT licensed, read-only by default)
- A spreadsheet, and about an hour. The first real client takes longer, but the audit itself is fast once set up
- No ad experience needed. The tool brings the evidence; your job is to find businesses, run it, and explain it in plain English
Understand what you're actually selling
Know the service before the tool, so you sell an outcome, not software.
Here's the gap you're stepping into. A plumber, a gym, a dentist or a local shop pays someone (often badly, or a big agency expensively) to run Google or Meta ads. They can see money going out. They cannot see whether it's working, because the dashboards are a wall of numbers nobody explained. That fog is your opening.
You are not selling "ad management". You're selling clarity, then results, in three stages that each cost more than the last:
- The free teaser: a one-page "three things costing you money" based on what's publicly visible. Costs you 20 minutes. Its only job is to get you a yes to the next bit.
- The paid audit (one-off): a full, evidence-backed read of their account once they give you access. This is where you prove you're worth paying.
- The retainer (monthly): you keep watching the account, draft the fixes every month, and they approve them. This is where the real money is, because it repeats.
The tool, claude-ads ↗, does the heavy lifting for all three. It reads an ad account (or public ad data), produces a dated audit with a confidence score on every finding, and drafts changes it will never apply on its own. You bring the business, run the tool, and translate its output into plain English a shop owner understands. That translation is the bit they pay for.
TipPick one trade to start, not "small businesses". "I audit Google Ads for independent gyms" gets you referrals and lets you reuse the same language. "I do marketing" gets you ignored.