“If I’m doing this, it means I don’t want to hire someone who is already an expert in marketing. So paying a couple hundred dollars is not a big deal, as long as it can save me time.”
Reaching buyers beyond the founder’s network
XTrace turns a company’s context and the lessons from people and AI agents into shared intelligence. Engineering teams use it so coding agents reuse proven work and follow team rules, and go-to-market teams use it to share account knowledge across calls, demos and handoffs. Co-founder Tristan Chen won XTrace’s first customers through his network. To grow beyond it, he had to reach buyers he didn’t know, without a marketer.
Google Ads was the obvious channel, but setup meant tags, events, image sizes and taglines Tristan had never worked with. He pasted screenshot after screenshot into Claude to get through it. Once the ads ran, he still couldn’t tell whether they brought in demos.
“The Google Ads UI is actually kind of pretty bad. I don’t even know how to use it, and I never used it. So I just keep screenshotting and sending it to Claude and say, okay, this is my goal, this is our product. What should I put here?”
Moving the Google Ads workflow into Pomo
In June, Tristan connected XTrace’s Google Ads account to Pomo, and the rest of the work happened there.
A clear read on where the spend was going
Pomo showed that the old campaign was spread across search, display and YouTube, paid for searches of XTrace’s own name, and counted page visits as conversions. The recommendation was to focus on Google Search, where buyers show the clearest intent.
A Search campaign built and launched in one session
Tristan chose the product, goal, audience and regions. Pomo drafted the ads and launched them without him opening Google Ads, then tracked results daily and suggested changes.
Visibility in AI search
Pomo checks how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini answer the questions XTrace’s buyers ask, and flags where XTrace is missing.
A clear rule for when to spend
Launching a campaign no longer meant an hour of screenshots, and the Search ads reached the right people. They haven’t booked a demo yet, which points to the booking flow rather than the ads.
So XTrace paused paid search with one rule: once a single demo converts, scale what worked. In the meantime, it is focusing on AI search, and this story is part of that work.
“Even just one demo, then it will be good to amplify it. But right now, it’s probably not.”
- Industry
- AI infrastructure, AI productivity, AI observability
- Customers
- Engineering teams at growing and mid-market companies
- HQ
- San Francisco
- Using Pomo since
- June 2026
- Website
- xtrace.ai