I run ads for a bakery. Would ads even work for an AI dev tool?

Ok, honest question from the "wrong" side of this board.

My day job is running Meta and Google ads for small businesses. A bakery, an online shop, that kind of stuff. For them it's pretty simple: nice photo of bread, people get hungry, people come in.

Then I scroll this site and it's all AI agents, MCP servers and memory layers for other AIs 😅 I genuinely can't picture what ad would make a dev stop scrolling and actually sign up. My gut says most of you never touched paid at all.

So tell me how it really went:

• Did anyone here try ads early? Did it work, or did you just burn money?
• If not, where did your first 50 users actually come from?

Even a one-liner helps. And if someone wants a second pair of eyes on their ad idea, drop it below and I'll tell you honestly if I'd click.