I Started a Tent Rental Business at 17. Then I Built an AI for Google Ads.

2 pole tents. 60 white folding chairs. 10 round tables. A handful of banquet tables. Some lights.

That was the entire inventory I had when I started Rent-A-Tent at 17.

The goal that first year was simple: do 15 parties. Just enough to break even on the equipment I'd bought.

We did 140.

"How can we put Google on steroids?"

By the time I was wrapping up that first season, I'd started to notice a pattern. A lot of the bookings were coming from Google. People were typing things like "tent rental near me" or "wedding tent Long Island," finding my site, and calling.

I asked the guy who built my website how to get more of that traffic.

I said: "How can we put Google on steroids?"

He said: "Try Google Ads."

The cockpit

I logged into Google Ads for the first time and the interface looked like an airplane cockpit.

Settings I'd never seen. Bid strategies I didn't understand. Match types. Quality Scores. Search themes. Smart Bidding. Performance Max. A button labeled "Apply Recommendation" that, when I clicked it, immediately raised my daily budget without warning.

I remember thinking exactly one thing in that moment:

I would genuinely pay someone to do this for me.

Then I looked up what that cost. The going rate for a Google Ads agency was between $500 and $1,500 a month — more than I could afford at that time.

So I watched 5 YouTube videos. I figured it out. Sort of.

The phone started ringing

The phone started ringing. Not a flood. But enough that I gradually increased the budget over the next few months. By the middle of the next season, I was booking more parties than I had crew to staff.

The whole time, I was logging in every morning to check what was working. Reading the search term report. Pausing keywords that weren't converting. Adding new ones from the searches that were. That was the routine.

One day in July

A thought hit me:

I'm pretty good at this. Most small business owners aren't doing Google Ads at all. The ones who are mostly do it wrong. I should run Google Ads for other people.

Then I caught myself. How was I going to manage someone else's Google Ads? I barely had time to manage my own. It was peak tent rental season.

But then I had a different thought:

What if I didn't have to?

The things I was doing manually every morning — reading the search term report, pausing dead keywords, adding new ones from converting searches — what if a piece of software could just do those things? Automatically. For any business owner.

The beginning of the end

It started as an after-work project. Whenever there was time. Whenever the tents were down.

Eventually I hit the limits of what I could teach myself. I hired a developer. Rent-A-Tent paid for him.

By November, the money was gone. The build sat there, half-finished. A dream with no funding behind it.

I stopped working on it for a while.

The voice

One day in February, there was a voice in my head that wouldn't quit: You can't stop now. Keep going.

So I sat down at my computer. I stared at the files knowing if I started this again I'd be opening up a can of worms that God only knows where it would go.

Then I just began. I worked on it all day every day until I finally had a working MVP (minimal viable product).

What the engine actually does

Every morning and every evening, the system runs the routine I used to do by hand.

It catches the searches Google quietly bills you for that have nothing to do with your business and blocks them. It pauses keywords that have been spending your money but aren't bringing in calls. That's money you stop spending.

Then it goes the other direction. It finds the searches that are turning into calls and adds them to your account so Google goes after more of them. More high-intent leads in the door. That's money you start making.

To put it simply: it gets you more customers while reducing your costs.

Twice a day. Every day. While you sleep. While you're loading the truck. While you're on a job site.

Built for the little guy

There are other Google Ads tools out there. I know — I tried most of them as I started building mine. Every single one is built for agencies and marketing companies. Dashboards full of acronyms. Onboarding that assumes you have an in-house marketing team. Pricing that assumes you bill clients.

The JSR Engine is built for the version of me who logged into Google Ads and didn't understand the interface.

Small business owners are the ones who need this the most. We don't have a Google Ads agency on retainer. We don't have a junior account manager. We don't have a Tuesday afternoon to figure out why "patio furniture rentals" is showing our tent rental ads to the wrong customer.

We need software that does the work we don't have time to do, in language we actually speak.

Built by an operator. For operators.

That's why I built this. That's why I finished it. That's what The JSR Engine is.