Why we built BrandMov

The Meta Ads Library is free. So I tried that first.

It's painfully slow. Filters break half the time. There's no way to save an ad, no way to get notified when a brand launches something new, no way to pick up where you left off. Every session starts from scratch. You scroll, you screenshot, you paste into a doc nobody else can use.

It's a compliance tool dressed up as a research tool. Meta built it because regulators told them to which means it's designed around auditability, not workflow.

The serious tools are real products. Foreplay especially.

By the time I started building, the space had moved on from the old discovery databases. Foreplay had built toward a full creative workflow: swipe files, competitor tracking, briefs, analytics, team collaboration, multi-channel support. If you’re coordinating a performance team and a creative team at a growing agency, that platform makes sense.

But most of the people I talked to weren’t running that operation. They were solo media buyers, small DTC operators, freelancers managing a handful of client accounts. They didn’t need briefs, analytics, or a mobile app. They needed to know what the three or four brands they cared about shipped this week on Meta and to save the ads worth saving.

For that job, those tools are either more platform than you need or more expensive than the job justifies. So people end up solving it themselves.

Everyone has some version of the same system.

Talk to any media buyer doing this seriously and they have a Notion doc or a Google Sheet. Brand names in one column, ad library URLs in another, a “last checked” date, maybe a few screenshots pasted in. They open each URL manually, scroll, screenshot anything interesting, close the tab, repeat.

It takes an hour or two, a few times a week. It works until it doesn’t. Until the brand you weren’t watching this week ran a new creative test, found a winner, and scaled it while you were looking elsewhere.

A curated swipe feed of 500 hand-picked B2C and DTC brands.

Not a database of every ad ever run. Not a scraper that indexes volume for the sake of volume. A clean feed of the brands actually worth watching, refreshed every night from Meta’s own public data.

Browse a curated swipe feed across categories. Pull up any brand’s live ads in seconds. Save what’s worth saving into swipe files you can share with a client or a team. Follow a brand and get an email when they launch new creative. Find what you saved six weeks later without scrolling through a dead Notion doc.

That’s the wedge. The same data is also exposed through an MCP server so the agencies and power users who want to plug brandmov into Claude, Cursor, or their own agents can do that too.

Small, bootstrapped, growing one paying customer at a time.

I’m building brandmov solo, nights and weekends, on a deliberately tight budget. No VC, no growth team, no big launch. The first paying customers came in over the last few weeks one through organic Google, one through a deal marketplace, one through a Facebook group, one through Reddit.

That’s the rhythm right now: ship something useful, talk to whoever shows up, fix what they hit, repeat. If you try it and something’s off, my email’s on the site. I read every reply.