The Ad Recipe

The Ad Recipe is a publishing platform we built and run — step-by-step ad playbooks for small businesses, written like recipes: exact campaign setups for Meta, Google, TikTok, and Pinterest, honest budgets, and every step explained twice — once for practitioners, once in plain English. Humans and AI cook together; a human reviews every recipe before it ships.

The problem

Small-business advertising advice comes in two flavors: platform documentation that lists the buttons but not the order to press them, and guru courses selling the order as a secret. The order isn’t a secret — it’s a recipe. Tracking first, cheap data-gathering campaigns second, automation only once real data exists, measurement discipline forever. We built a site that writes that down properly, for one industry and one platform at a time.

What we built

• A structured recipe format, not blog posts — every recipe is data: numbered phases, campaign setup cards with exact click-paths as the platform UI names them, starter keyword lists with correct match types, funnel-stage color coding, and suggested budgets with the honest reasoning behind them.
• An AI + human editorial engine — recipes are drafted with AI against a house methodology (content exclusions, regulated-category rules, platform policy callouts, no outcome promises), then human-reviewed before anything publishes. The kitchen discovers its own industries, balances platforms, and never publishes a hollow draft.
• Built to be found — and cited — answer-first intros, speakable and structured data throughout, a glossary that defines every tool and term in plain English and auto-links from recipe content, and deep search that matches what’s inside the campaign steps, not just titles.
• A paid product on top — Custom Recipes: a business fills out one form, we research their actual website and market with live sources, and a human-reviewed, personalized plan arrives as a branded email and PDF. Stripe and PayPal checkout, and a 30-day check-in timed to when the campaigns’ learning phases mature.
• Community built in — anyone can share a recipe or publish a revised version of ours with automatic credit to the original, and every recipe carries a flag button a human answers.

Why it matters here

The Ad Recipe is what “built by humans + AI, managed by humans” looks like when we build for ourselves: AI doing the fast work, humans owning judgment, review, and the promises — with the process published openly on the site for anyone to read. Custom WordPress platform, SEO and AEO architecture, e-commerce, and an honest editorial voice, all running as one machine. If you want content, a platform, or a product line that works like this for your business, that’s a conversation worth having.