Nick Lafferty
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nicklafferty.com
Nick Lafferty
@nicklafferty.com
Paid Ads Consultant for B2B SaaS
Building Adacadabra (adacadabra.ai) → monitor, manage, optimize ad campaigns.
Writing Early Exit Club (earlyexit.club) → transparently writing about my freelance journey.
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My PPC budget tracking startup, adacadabra.ai, is now in early beta!

I built this to get out of Google Sheet hell when managing cost and budget pacing for the ~18 different ad accounts I manage as a full-time PPC freelancer.

The beta is 100% free as I work out the last few kinks :)
Adacadabra | Budget Tracking For Paid Ads
A budget tracker for the most popular paid ad platforms: Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Bing.
adacadabra.ai
I'm going on a side quest that involves using AI and it's getting a little unhinged. i will give no further context
February 16, 2025 at 8:30 PM
The day I never have to login to LinkedIn again will be one of the top 3 best days of my life.

It's so crucial to my career + future income growth right now and I cannot wait to give absolutely no fucks about it.
February 5, 2025 at 9:05 PM
if you're not building SOMETHING with AI right now then you're falling behind. it's never been easier and marketers have a huge advantage.
January 22, 2025 at 6:19 PM
My PPC budget tracking startup, adacadabra.ai, is now in early beta!

I built this to get out of Google Sheet hell when managing cost and budget pacing for the ~18 different ad accounts I manage as a full-time PPC freelancer.

The beta is 100% free as I work out the last few kinks :)
Adacadabra | Budget Tracking For Paid Ads
A budget tracker for the most popular paid ad platforms: Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Bing.
adacadabra.ai
January 7, 2025 at 6:39 PM
You can set custom fiscal years in Adacadabra.

Many of my clients have different fiscal years, so I needed a way to differentiate and track pacing.

Now it's just a dropdown you select and we just recalculate based on fiscal year.

Screenshot from Feb fiscal year start (Q4 = Nov, Dec, Jan)
December 18, 2024 at 3:10 PM
I borrowed thees line progress bars from another UI I found and really like how they visually indicate progress (in this case, monthly spend and projected spend)

FYI I've built all of this myself, with v0 and Cursor / Windsurf. Full frontend, backend, authentication, and database setup.
December 17, 2024 at 4:13 PM
I love proactive tools. Don't make me login and dig for information.

That's why I spent an obscene amount of time on the design of my emails for Adacadabra. I wanted them to be beautiful, responsive, and proactively helpful.

This is a weekly email that shows budget pacing for all clients.
December 16, 2024 at 4:25 PM
When you let the intrusive thoughts win on your account deletion flow.

#buildinpublic
December 15, 2024 at 4:51 AM
As someone who manages multiple clients, each with their own ad channels, I needed a place to monitor performance across my entire portfolio.

This is the dashboard page of Adacadabra, all with real data. I added the ability to anonymize the names so I could do demos and take screenshots 😎
December 12, 2024 at 3:11 PM
The hardest part of building my app was managing all the different authentication flows.

Unsurprisingly, the Microsoft authentication flow, API, and documentation is horrendous. LinkedIn was the easiest, Google was complicated but not hard, Microsoft was a nightmare.
December 11, 2024 at 6:55 PM
I always struggled with tracking how my ad campaigns were pacing to a monthly budget. This gets especially hard across multiple channels (Google, LinkedIn, etc) and multiple clients.

Here's a quick snapshot of my tool, Adacadabra, that helps me visually track ad spend vs budget by day.
December 9, 2024 at 6:59 PM
👋 Sup, Bluesky. I'm Nick and I'm building my first SaaS called Adacadabra → adacadabra.ai

I was most recently head of growth marketing at Loom. I quit my job almost 2 years ago to start a full-time consulting biz helping other b2b saas co's run Google and LinkedIn Ads.
Adacadabra | Budget Tracking For Paid Ads
A budget tracker for the most popular paid ad platforms: Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Bing.
adacadabra.ai
November 29, 2024 at 3:43 PM