NEWMarketing

Hand Claude Code a website and an ad budget to run on its own

A web developer gave Claude Code a baseline site, ad accounts with a budget, and scraping tools, and lets it make marketing decisions every four hours.

By HamadMalikKhan on Hacker News · Posted · Added Oct 15, 2026

Difficulty
AdvancedOur rating
Time to build
Not reportedOur estimate
Monthly cost
Not reported (ad budget + API usage)
Revenue
Not reportedWe only show revenue the source states

What they did

HamadMalikKhan gave Claude Code a baseline website, access to Google, X, LinkedIn and Reddit Ads with a budget, Apify, and OpenRouter. The site is personalized per visitor on the client side using DeepSeek and many device, context and behavior signals.

How it went

So far, he says, it mostly does 'tomfoolery': spinning up lots of SEO pages and adding share buttons to try to go viral. He finds it fun to watch it decide every 4 hours.

Worth knowing

An experiment, not a success story. Cap ad spend at the account level. Heavy visitor fingerprinting raises privacy and consent issues in many regions, so check the rules where your visitors are.

Builder recipe

Our own starting point, written from the source. Adapt it to your setup.

Stack

  • Claude Code on a schedule
  • Ad platform APIs with hard spend caps
  • Apify
  • Analytics

Steps

  1. Set hard daily spend caps in each ad account first.
  2. Give the agent read access to analytics and write access to the site repo.
  3. Run it on a schedule (e.g. every 4 hours) with a log of every decision.
  4. Review the log daily and roll back bad changes.

Starter prompt

You run growth for this site. Every run: read the last 24h of analytics and ad results, choose ONE change (copy, page, or ad tweak) with the best expected impact, make it, and append your reasoning and the expected result to DECISIONS.md. Never raise spend above the caps.

Tags

Industry Marketing

Read the original

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