Building an AI businesss as a non-technical entrepreneur
In the early stages of building Adbuy.ai, Devyn faced significant challenges. Initially, he hired a developer to build the SaaS platform, but after three years with no tangible product, he decided to take matters into his own hands. With no traditional technical background, Devyn explored no-code and low-code solutions to accelerate development.
Problem
Traditionally, launching a Facebook ad campaign requires navigating multiple tools—landing page builders, design platforms like Canva or Figma, AI tools for copywriting, and the Facebook Ads Manager itself. This fragmented process is time-consuming and prone to human error.
AdBuy.ai eleminates these pain points by centralizing the entire workflow into one intuitive platform. Within 60 seconds, businesses can have a fully optimized campaign ready to go.
The product: AdBuy.ai
- Scan their website or describe their product to generate a conversion-optimized landing page.
- Create engaging ad creatives and ad copy using AI.
- Seamlessly integrate with Facebook’s API to launch campaigns instantly.
- Manage and optimize ad campaigns through an interface designed to simplify the complex Facebook Ads Manager workflow.
Why Plasmic, and how did you discover it?
"I signed up for Plasmic in August of 2023. It's a while and I'm personally building in Plasmic every day since that moment. I used to say I wasn't technical at all, but now I feel that i've become Plasmic-technical and can hold my ground with other engineers."
Devyn Green
How Plasmic fits in
Plasmic plays a cruial role in AdBuy.ai's front-end development because of the following key points:
1
Streamlined design process
The entire UI is built within Plasmic, allowing Devyn to design and iterate on the platform’s interface efficiently.
2
Flexible navigation system
He uses Plasmic’s dynamic slug feature to generate personalized landing pages, eliminating the need for custom-coded Next.js pages.
3
Seamless integrations
The integration with Supabase enables real-time user authentication, and Make.com helps automate backend workflows.
4
Owning your codebase
While make.com is gradually being replaced with a dedicated Node.js backend for scalability, Plasmic remains the cornerstone of Adbuy.ai’s user-facing experience.
What was the easiest part of building with Plasmic?
For Devyn, Plasmic’s biggest advantage was its ability to turn his vision into a functional product without requiring deep technical expertise. He describes his design approach as a combination of inspiration from multiple sources, assembling UI components intuitively within Plasmic’s drag-and-drop environment.
Plasmic also allowed him to skip the Figma design step entirely—he could conceptualize and build directly within the platform. The ability to connect UI elements to Supabase data queries in real time further streamlined the development process.
The most challenging parts of the Plasmic experience
While Plasmic provided an intuitive development environment, Devyn faced challenges when debugging complex data interactions. Occasionally there might be some issues related to the data loading flows, where you might try to access data before it was loaded — in such cases, it was pretty time-consuming to identify the root cause. He noted that improved debugging tools, such as clearer error messages and visual indicators for failing queries, would greatly enhance the developer experience.
Another minor limitation was the user search functionality within Plasmic’s authentication system. While not a major issue, the inability to search for users beyond the most recent signups added friction to user management.
What can be improved in Plasmic?
If Devyn could enhance Plasmic, his top request would be improved debugging tools to simplify troubleshooting. He also suggested a more intuitive approach to handling async data queries to prevent page crashes. However, overall, he feels that Plasmic provides a strong foundation for building scalable applications and sees no immediate need to transition to hand-coded Next.js pages.
Future plans for Adbuy.ai
The next evolution of Adbuy.ai includes expanding beyond ad creation to lead management. Devyn plans to introduce CRM functionalities within the platform, allowing businesses to:
- Store lead information directly in Adbuy.ai.
- Automate email and SMS follow-ups.
- Implement an AI-powered dialer to initiate calls with potential customers.
These additions will provide businesses with an end-to-end solution for not only generating leads but also converting them into customers seamlessly.
Conclusion
Adbuy.ai’s story is a great example of how low-code tools like Plasmic can bridge the gap between an idea and a working product—even for someone without a technical background. When Devyn started, he wasn’t a developer. But by using Plasmic, he not only created his platform, but he also gained valuable engineering skills along the way.
Plasmic wasn’t just a tool for launching Adbuy.ai; it was a starting point that helped him understand key development concepts like state variables, data queries, and interactive components. Over time, what started as a no-code experiment turned into real technical knowledge, giving him the confidence to handle complex product decisions without relying entirely on engineers. At this point, he considers himself “Plasmic-technical” — someone who can build and iterate on a product with confidence using Plasmic as his foundation.
For anyone who’s ever wanted to build something but felt intimidated by the technical side of things, Devyn’s experience proves that the learning curve isn’t as steep as it seems. Low-code platforms aren’t just about skipping code—they’re about making software development more approachable. If you’re willing to dive in, you might surprise yourself with how much you can build—and learn—along the way.