The AI-powered creative engine turning customer reviews into performance ads - and betting a scraper can outwork the creative brief.
SelfMade’s creative wall - the branded engine set against a grid of the ads it produces. Skipper, in the wild.
SelfMade builds ad creative the way a data team builds an email flow: from evidence, not instinct. Its platform, Skipper, reads the language customers already use online and turns it into on-brand ads.
The premise is almost stubbornly simple. The reasons people buy a product are written down somewhere - in Amazon reviews, Reddit threads, Facebook comments and testimonials scattered across the web. Most brands never read them at scale. SelfMade built roughly 25 scrapers to do exactly that, then tags what they find by persona, angle and emotional trigger.
From those tags, Skipper generates static ads that match a brand’s look and voice, along with competitive intelligence pulled from Meta’s public ad library and a canvas-style editor for refining the output. The result is a pipeline that treats paid creative as a repeatable, measurable process rather than a blank page.
The company frames its offer in three tiers: AI-only creative for teams that want raw volume, AI creative blended with user-generated content, and full-service media buying for brands that want the whole campaign run for them.
“If email is entirely data-driven, why are we still brainstorming paid creative?”
Will Sartorius, CEO of SelfMadeFigures compiled from public reporting and company statements; funding and revenue figures are approximate.
Four steps from raw customer language to a finished, on-brand ad.
~25 scrapers pull reviews and comments from Reddit, Amazon, TikTok, X, Facebook and brand sites.
Each mention is labeled by persona, marketing angle and emotional trigger.
Skipper produces on-brand static ads matched to voice, style and audience.
A canvas editor, brief export and Meta ad-library intel sharpen the final set.
AI creative intelligence platform: scrapers, persona tagging, on-brand ad generation, competitive intel and canvas editing.
Automated dissection of reviews and social chatter into brand-specific personas and audience insights.
Data-driven static and UGC-supported ads built for paid social, with rapid iteration and turnaround.
Top-tier offering combining AI creative and UGC with managed paid advertising.
Direct-to-consumer and e-commerce teams running high-volume paid social - plus performance marketers who need on-brand creative fast.
Meta’s Andromeda shift raised required creative from ~5 formats to 10-20 per campaign. Manual brainstorming can’t keep pace.
Where rivals start from a prompt, SelfMade starts from real customer language tagged by persona, angle and emotion.
Let AI produce routine volume; keep humans on strategic, long-form work. Sartorius’s honest take on AI creative.
SelfMade sits at the intersection of the AI creative wave and the performance-marketing agency world - closer to the data than a traditional shop, closer to the craft than a generic ad generator.
The competitive set is crowded and getting more so: AI ad-creative tools like AdCreative.ai, Pencil, Creatify, Icon, Arcads and Foreplay all promise to speed up production. SelfMade’s wager is that the differentiator is not generation speed but the quality and provenance of the insight feeding it.
Its answer - scrape the customer’s own words, tag them, and build from there - is a concrete claim in a category full of vague ones. Whether a scraper can truly replace the century-old creative brief is the open question. But the data it reads was always there, mostly unread.
Founder Brian Schechter launches SelfMade as an Instagram posting app, wagering that shopping would move onto the platform.
The company raises a $5M Series A as part of roughly $16-19M in lifetime funding.
Sartorius comes on as an integrated marketing associate while SelfMade operates as a conventional agency.
After a failed acquisition and revenue collapse to ~$3M, Sartorius becomes CEO and begins the turn toward AI creative.
SelfMade rolls out its AI creative intelligence platform with scrapers, persona tagging and on-brand ad generation.
“The data brands need to make better creative decisions already exists - in reviews, threads and comment sections.”
Will Sartorius, on the thesis behind SkipperSelfMade is an AI creative company. Its platform, Skipper, scrapes customer reviews and social conversation to build audience personas and generate on-brand performance ads for e-commerce brands.
Skipper is SelfMade’s AI creative intelligence platform. It runs about 25 scrapers across Reddit, Amazon, TikTok, X, Facebook and brand websites, tags reviews by persona, angle and emotion, and produces static ads plus competitive intelligence from Meta’s ad library.
SelfMade was founded in 2015 by Brian Schechter. Will Sartorius, who joined in 2021, became CEO in early 2023 and led the pivot to AI creative.
Direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands running high-volume paid social advertising, along with performance marketers who need large quantities of on-brand creative.
SelfMade raised a $5M Series A and roughly $16-19M in total across its earlier rounds, before rebuilding around its current AI platform.
Sources: selfmade.co, NetInfluencer, LinkedIn, public funding records. Figures approximate where noted.