In-context checklists for ad campaign setup

The specific moment: someone opens AdRoll or Adzooma for the first time after signing up, sees a dashboard full of tabs, and has no idea what order to do things in. They don't know if they should create an audience before a campaign, whether the pixel needs to be verified first, or what they're missing. They feel, as one user put it, 'daunted to get started' — and they stay that way for days.

The reason this isn't fixed inside the tools themselves is that the vendors have prioritized feature development over new-user experience, and the users with the most pull (agencies, large spenders) already know the workflow. So the in-app guidance stays shallow — a tooltip here, a help link there — while the real complexity of getting a campaign live correctly goes undocumented in sequence form.

What's absent is a step-by-step, opinionated launch checklist that's specific to each platform: not 'create a campaign' but 'in AdScale, go to Audiences first, create a website visitor segment, verify it fires before touching campaign structure.' Nobody has done this at the specificity level users actually need, anchored to real task sequences rather than feature descriptions.

This is a business because every company that brings on a new ad tool, hires a new junior marketer, or adds a new ad channel goes through this exact pain again. It doesn't get easier with experience because each platform is different. The cost of getting it wrong is real — wasted ad spend on misconfigured campaigns, delayed launches, and the staff time of someone senior having to intervene. The buyer is anyone responsible for getting new hires or clients up to speed on a specific ad tool.

What to build

Build a browser extension that detects which ad platform a user is on and surfaces an interactive, ordered setup checklist in a side panel — tracking which steps are complete, linking directly to the right screen in the platform, and flagging common mistakes at each step (like skipping pixel verification before launching).

Where to start

Target freelancers who manage ad accounts across multiple platforms for clients — they hit this onboarding wall on every new client engagement and are motivated enough to install a tool that saves them setup time; reach them through paid media freelancer communities and subreddits where these complaints surface.

The hard part

Getting users to install a browser extension before they've felt the pain enough to seek help — distribution is the hard problem, because the person who needs this most doesn't yet know it exists and isn't searching for it by the right terms.

How it makes money

Free for one platform checklist, then $12/month for access to all supported platforms; team licenses for agencies at $49/month for up to five users.