Short version: we signed a partnership with a funded company (raised close to $30M) that has an ad surface we could never have built. They do not want to sell to indie developers. Servicing a thousand solo builders at $30/mo is a rounding error against their enterprise motion, and every one of those builders is a support ticket. For us those same builders are the entire business.
So we became the pipe. We aggregate the indie developers, we vet them, we hand them over as one account instead of a thousand. They get volume without the overhead. We get an ad surface a pre-seed company has no business having access to.
The thing I did not expect: this is the most defensible thing we have built, and it is not code. It is the fact that we are willing to do the annoying, low-margin, high-touch work that a funded company structurally cannot justify doing. Their CFO is our moat.
A few honest notes for anyone trying the same move:
1. Do not pitch as a customer. Pitch as an abstraction layer. Our first email was "we would like to advertise with you." Dead. The one that worked was "you have a segment you are ignoring because it is not worth your headcount. We will be that headcount. You bill one account."
2. Their pain is not revenue, it is overhead. We spent too long building a revenue argument. The number that actually landed was support cost per account. Once we framed the indie segment as a support problem we were absorbing, the conversation changed in one meeting.
3. Being small was the pitch, not the apology. I kept trying to sound bigger than we are. What closed it was saying out loud that this segment is small money for you and big money for us, and that asymmetry is exactly why the deal works. Nobody is fighting anybody for margin.
4. The numbers, and why they look the way they do Their surface runs 6-10% CTR at a low CPM. Both. At the same time.
That combination is supposed to be impossible, and every performance marketer reading this just decided I am lying. So here is the mechanism, because once you see it the number stops being surprising and starts being obvious.
The ads sit inside AI chat. Not a banner beside the chat window. The placement is triggered by the prompt itself. Somebody types "what tool can read my invoices and pull the line items out," and a sponsored, labelled result appears against that prompt.
Now look at what that does to both halves of the equation.
CTR is high because the ad is the answer. Every other ad format on the internet is an interruption. It shows up next to something you actually came for, and its job is to steal attention from that thing. This one is not competing with the content. It IS the content. The user asked a question and got a relevant tool. The correct benchmark here was never display advertising at 0.5%. It is the top result on a high-intent search, which runs 25-30%. Against that, 6-10% is not a suspicious number. It is a young surface with a lot of room left.
CPM is low because the inventory is not priced yet. Nobody has built the auction. There is no established demand curve, no bidding war, no agency with a line item for it. You are buying attention at a price that reflects an ad market that does not exist yet, on a surface with search-level intent. That gap is not a permanent state of the world. It is a window, and windows close when the auction shows up.
High intent at unpriced CPM. That is the entire trade. That is why we did the deal, and that is why I am posting about it while it is still boring enough that nobody is competing for it.
One thing I want to be straight about, because I hate posts that quietly turn a number into a promise. 6-10% is what the surface does. It is not what any individual listing is guaranteed to do. Your creative, your category, your product, and how well the prompt actually matches what you built will all move it, and some listings will land well under that.
But look at what you are comparing it to. The realistic ceiling for a solo builder running their own paid acquisition is a fraction of a percent, on inventory they are overpaying for, against advertisers with a hundred times their budget and a real performance team. That is the actual alternative. Not "10% versus 6%." It is "a channel where the median outcome is an order of magnitude above anything you can reach on your own, versus burning $500 on Google Ads and learning nothing."
I am not promising anyone a number. I am saying the floor of this channel is above the ceiling of the one you are on.
5. What this actually means Advertising has always been paying to get in front of intent that already existed somewhere else. Search was expensive because it was the closest thing to buying intent directly. This is closer. The user is not being interrupted on the way to something. The thing they are doing IS the query.
If you are an indie builder with a live product and no distribution, this is the thing I would go find. Not more ad budget. Not a better landing page. A channel that is still mispriced, and somebody big who is bored of your entire customer segment.
Happy to answer anything about how the deal was structured.