Nico Jeannen

Nico Jeannen is an entrepreneur and software maker known for building and selling a series of small software products. He currently runs AdKit, an advertising research and campaign platform.

Before working in software, Jeannen worked in advertising. He has said he left school early and resigned from his first job after three days. He went on to work as a media buyer, managing more than $1 million in ad spend, and between 2017 and 2022 built eCommerce sites and ran a freelance advertising and marketing business.

He taught himself to code in two months in 2022, an experience he wrote about in May of that year. His first releases followed in July: Ice Breaker, a questions game, and Augmented Reader, a text reading app. Neither survived.

He has since shipped around thirty products, most built alone and most now retired. He publishes a running list of them marking which are dead, dormant or sold, and has written openly about the failures, among them MyAIPainting.com in 2022. He has described himself as someone who “sucks with code” but compensates by being “decent at marketing”.

Three of his products have been sold, for a combined $290,000. MakeLogo.ai, an AI logo generator launched in December 2022, sold for $65,000 the following March. TalkNotes, a voice-to-content app released in August 2023, sold for $200,000 in June 2024. ScribVet, an AI scribe that turns a veterinarian’s spoken exam notes into SOAP notes and client emails, launched in April 2024 and sold for $25,000 a year later.

His current focus is AdKit, launched in 2025 and positioned as “Ahrefs for advertising”: it lets marketers and AI agents search a library of more than 500,000 ads, track competitors across Meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, X and Microsoft, and generate and launch campaigns, with drafts requiring human approval before going live. It draws directly on his earlier work as a media buyer. He also maintains Heyo Livechat, a live chat widget released the same year.

Alongside the products, Jeannen writes about building and selling them. He has published essays at jeannen.com since 2022, sends a newsletter, and runs a YouTube channel about entrepreneurship, startups and advertising. The Maker Ads Guide, his guide to Meta advertising for SaaS founders, has reached more than 1,000 makers by his account.

Other projects include Galeby, an AI customer service app; the online learning site Kursus.io; the scraping tool Scrap.so; the coworking directory CoworkMaps; the advertiser matchmaking service Open For Ads; the social proof widget Sales Popup; and the A/B testing tool Test It.

He posts as @nico_jeannen on X.