Built an AI ad generator and ran $9K of FB ads with it

Been in the AI image gen space since 2023, before even GPT image gen was a thing, and after spending ~9K on Facebook ads for my own projects (made a video about that actually) I realized the thing I kept getting stuck on was the creatives themselves. I'm horrible at making reels-type video ads and Canva even with templates is surprisingly complicated for ad-specific stuff, plus everything ends up looking the same as everyone else using the same templates.Made a video going into detail about the full FB ads journey if anyone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoe_l67ZReUMost of the existing AI ad tools (Predis, AdCreative, etc.) give you these generic template outputs that look like stock photo collages, or they're enterprise-priced and overkill if you're just a solo founder trying to test 10-20 ad variations quickly. I wanted something where I could throw in product images, describe what I wanted, and get back actual usable creatives, static ads, before/after formats, UGC-style videos, the stuff that actually converts on FB.Some things I learned building this: the competitor research part ended up being way more useful than I expected. Being able to see what ads competitors are running, how long they've been live (which usually means they're working) and then generating variations off that is a much better workflow than starting from scratch and hoping the AI makes something good. Same lesson as with Framecall, if you just say "make me a nice ad" the output is a gamble. The more specific you are about the hook, the pain point, the format, the better the result. I don't think people talk about this enough with AI creative tools.UGC video ads are where most of the value is but also hardest to get right. Still iterating on that part.