I built 'Cursor for Ad Creatives' - Reverse-engineering ads using LLMs
My journey from building tools for structured data in banking to creating a collaborative workspace that helps marketing teams capture, analyze, and reverse-engineer ad creatives using AI.
I've spent my career as an engineer, operating inside the rigid, high-stakes structures of big banks and global consulting firms. In that world, data is sacred. It is structured, immutable, and persistent. If a row of data disappears in a banking ledger, it's a catastrophe.
I never thought I'd build a product for marketers until I sat down with a friend who was the CMO of a fast-growing wellness startup.
The Entropy of Inspiration
He showed me his workflow for "Creative Research," and to my engineering brain, it looked like pure entropy.
He was scrolling through social media, hunting for sparks of inspiration. When he found a winning ad, he would copy the URL into a spreadsheet. He did this hundreds of times, building a library of what he thought was solid ground.
But the internet is volatile. It is a stream, not a vault.
When he went back a week later to show his team a specific reference, the link was dead. The campaign had paused. The asset was gone.
He wasn't just losing a link; he was losing intellectual property. He was trying to build a library of knowledge on quicksand.
The MVP and The Illusion of Success
My co-founder and I decided to apply engineering principles to this chaos. We treated ads as data packets that needed to be captured before they evaporated. We built a tool to scrape, ingest, and permanently archive these assets.
We launched the MVP in March 2025 in Brazil. We quickly signed up 30 companies. We thought we had cracked the code.
We were wrong.
After the initial excitement, usage dropped. Churn spiked. The retention metrics were bleeding, and I couldn't understand why. The utility was there—the data was saved.
We spoke to every user who left, and we uncovered a profound truth about the nature of creative work: It is not a solitary act.
We had built a tool for a "lonely researcher" in a silo. But marketing is a multiplayer game. They told us:
"I don't just need to save this; I need to debate this with my designer."
"A saved video is just a file. I need to understand the logic behind the emotion."
We had built a vault when they actually needed a conference room.
The Pivot: The Syntax of Emotion
We went back to the drawing board to build what is now Magic Mango. We realized we weren't just solving for "storage"; we were solving for "understanding."
To fix the isolation, we rebuilt the architecture to support Workspaces (inspired by Notion), acknowledging that the value of an idea multiplies when it is shared.
To fix the analysis, I looked at my own workflow. As a developer, I use Cursor. I don't just write code; I chat with it. I ask it to explain functions and refactor logic.
I realized that a video ad has a structure, just like code. Pacing is syntax. Hooks are functions. Music is the framework.
We implemented an AI Agent where you can drag-and-drop any video creative into a chat. The AI ingests the frames, the audio, and the pacing. Suddenly, marketers could "talk" to their media. They could ask: "Deconstruct this narrative" or "Generate a script based on this visual pacing."
The Universal Pain
We translated the platform and launched globally on Product Hunt, hitting #8. Signups flooded in from the USA, China, India, and Denmark.
This was the final validation. The chaos of the "creative process" isn't a local inefficiency; it is a universal human struggle. The anxiety of the blank page and the frustration of lost ideas are the same in São Paulo as they are in New York.
The Engineering Conclusion
I used to think that engineering was about constraining chaos - building walls to keep the entropy out.
Through this journey with Magic Mango, I've realized that building for creators is different. It's not about removing the chaos, because chaos is where creativity comes from. It's about building a scaffold strong enough so that teams can climb it, see further, and turn that chaos into strategy.
We didn't just build an archive; we engineered a way to make inspiration tangible.
Want to experience "Cursor for Ad Creatives" yourself? Try Magic Mango with a 7-day free trial at magicmango.ai and start reverse-engineering the best ads in your industry.