Subscribe here | Unsubscribe here | Nov 6 2025 | FIV #101

✅ Today's Checklist:

6 razor-sharp AI observations
Break this rule to avoid burnout and increase revenue
How to make $1 million ads on startup budgets
Move over META, Applovin's new ad platform has arrived

QUICK LINKS

🤖 AI. 36 razor-sharp AI observations from Greg Isenberg.

📈 Entrepreneurship. Break this rule to avoid burnout and increase revenue.

🎨 Personal brand building. He got internet famous. If he started from scratch again, this is what he'd do.

💡Foresight. The future of the web is the history of YouTube.

🚀 Startups. What I've learned from users. A Paul Graham essay.

How Founders Are Making Million-Dollar Ads on Startup Budgets

Here's a fun paradox: the most powerful creative teams in 2025 aren't made of more people—they're made of more loops.

You've heard of "flywheels" in business—how compounding momentum creates exponential returns. But there's a creative version emerging right now, powered by AI tools, that's flipping how startups think about storytelling and scale. I call it the AI-Creative Flywheel—and it's quietly becoming one of the biggest growth multipliers of the year.

Let me break it down.

⚙️ The Old Model: Expensive Guesswork

Traditional creative production was linear:

Brainstorm idea.
Spend weeks (or months) producing it.
Test it once.
Pray it converts.

You had one shot—maybe two—before the budget dried up. And even if you did find a winner, it took forever to reproduce it.

But with AI video tools, image generators, and rapid testing platforms like AppLovin's new Axon ad engine, that model is dead. Founders are learning to spin ideas into creative experiments daily, not quarterly. They're replacing the "campaign" mindset with a "loop" mindset, **where creative, data, and distribution feed each other continuously.

🚀 The New Model: Infinite Testing Velocity

Here's what it looks like in practice:

A founder creates an AI-generated concept ad—let's say a 20-second lifestyle spot for a new DTC brand.

Within hours, they use variations of script, tone, visuals, or voiceover (all AI-generated) to make 50 different versions.

Those versions go live in controlled tests across multiple segments. Data comes back instantly. The system learns which hooks, visuals, or calls-to-action resonate. Then the next batch is generated—this time informed by what worked.

This cycle repeats—fast.

That's the flywheel.

And when you combine this with a massive testing engine like AppLovin, which reaches over a billion daily active users, your creative velocity compounds like crazy. The insight loop shortens from months to hours.

The result: founders are producing million-dollar ads on startup budgets—because the testing loop, not the budget, is doing the heavy lifting.

🧠 The Creative AI Stack Behind It

The founders doing this best have stopped treating AI as a "tool" and started treating it like an ensemble. Each part plays a role in the flywheel:

AI Ideation Models (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity): brainstorm 50 new ad angles in 10 minutes.
Video Generation Engines (Veo 3.1, Sora 2): bring those concepts to life visually—no film crew required.
Voice + Sound Tools (ElevenLabs is king here): make your ads sound professional in minutes.
Testing + Optimization Platforms (AppLovin Axon, Meta Advantage+, TikTok Ads Manager): feed back what's working.

Put them together, and you've got a creative machine that never sleeps.

The Founder Mindset Shift

This approach forces a different kind of discipline. You stop asking, "What's our big campaign idea this quarter?" and start asking, "What can we learn from today's data loop?"

Founders who embrace this mindset don't fall in love with any single piece of creative—they fall in love with iteration itself. The process becomes more scientific, but paradoxically, more human too. You're not guessing what your audience wants; you're listening at scale.

However, AI can't do the listening. It can generate 100 hooks, but it takes a founder's intuition to see which one holds truth—which line taps into your customer's emotional reality.

The best AI-creative flywheels are built by founders who understand this dance between art and data.

🔁 How to Build Your Own AI-Creative Flywheel

Here's a practical framework you can try this week:

Define the Loop, Not the Ad.
Don't obsess over the perfect idea. Build a system that creates, tests, and learns daily. Your first ad is just a seed.
Start with Modular Scripts.
Write your ad in flexible sections—hook, story, offer, CTA. Then use AI to remix those parts endlessly.
Generate, Don't Polish.
The goal isn't perfection. It's variation. Use AI tools to generate fast, rough versions. Momentum beats refinement early on.
Distribute with Volume.
Platforms like AppLovin let you deploy dozens of creatives across targeted segments. Run them small, fail fast, and learn.
Feed the Data Back.
Track which emotional drivers perform best (curiosity, relief, FOMO, aspiration, etc.). Then tell AI to generate more around that theme.
Scale What Resonates.
When you hit a winner, reinvest the learnings. Build spin-offs, not replicas. Keep the loop moving.

🧩 Why This Works: Compounding Creative Intelligence

AI is a tool to wield and accelerate your learning. But the real power here is compounding intelligence.

Every loop improves your understanding of what your audience actually cares about. You're building creative intuition that scales faster than any single human could.

And once you layer distribution on top—like AppLovin's Axon, which lets you test at machine speed across mobile audiences—the economics start to flip. You can outlearn bigger competitors with smaller budgets, because your feedback loop is tighter.

Think about it this way:

In traditional advertising, money buys impressions.

In AI-creative loops, learning velocity buys advantage.

That's the arbitrage opportunity right now. It's cheaper creative and faster truth discovery.

🔮 The Future of Founders as Creative Directors

AI has made it possible for founders to reclaim the creative process instead of handing it to agencies.

In a world where ideas can go from prompt → video → test → insight → iteration in 24 hours, the bottleneck is no longer tools. It's curiosity.

The founders who win are the ones asking:

"What if we could test 100 emotions this week?"

"What if our best ad comes from something we almost deleted?"

"What if creative itself becomes our growth engine?"

Because it already is.

The AI-Creative Flywheel is about accelerating your intuition.

It's what happens when you combine human insight, machine speed, and infinite testing velocity on one platform.

The next era of advertising won't belong to those who spend the most. It'll belong to those who learn the fastest.

While Everyone Fights on Meta and TikTok, the Smart Money's Moving Here

If the first half of this issue was about working smarter, this part is about spending smarter.

AppLovin just rebranded its ad platform as Axon, and it quietly reopened to new advertisers on October 1st after being completely closed since June.

Access is referral-only and we were given a small batch of invites—perfectly timed for Q4.

👉 Sign up here using referral code TJMMCI1HJG for an AppLovin demo**.**

If you run ads, this is worth paying attention to: AppLovin reaches over 1B daily active users across mobile gaming, yet fewer than 1% of advertisers are on the platform—meaning there's still major arbitrage potential.

Early eCommerce brands are already seeing META-level performance and up to 20–30% incremental growth.

Plus, new advertisers who spend $5K get $5K in ad credits, and if you use our Founder IV referral code (see below), you'll unlock an extra $2.5K (that's $7.5K total in ad credits).

👉 Schedule your personalized walkthrough.