Case Study - Booking software, AI-produced ads, and Meta campaigns that turned $140 of spend into $1,500 of new revenue in two weeks.

Overview

A private chauffeured transportation service was operating without any digital presence — no website, no branded email, no professional stationery. All bookings came through word of mouth and a personal phone number. For a service selling premium rides, that gap was leaving money on the table.

Cedar Labs was first engaged to build the public face of the business: a website, print, domain, and email. The engagement then grew into the operating software the owner actually runs on, plus an AI creative and paid social program that started bringing in riders who had never heard of the company.

The work covered three layers:

• a professional digital presence (site, domain, email, and print) that made the business look like the premium service it already was
• booking and dispatch software: conversational intake on the website, themed landing pages, a serverless backend, a driver app, and passenger confirmations
• AI-generated photo and video ads, produced at campaign volume, then run on Facebook and Instagram against those landing pages

In a two-week paid social window, $140 of Facebook and Instagram spend produced $1,500 of net new revenue — roughly 10.7× return on ad spend — on top of the referral business the owner already had.

Digital presence

The first delivery was the public brand. Cedar Labs designed a mobile-first landing page for local trips, airport transfers, and events; print-ready business cards that matched the site; custom domain and DNS; and branded email so every client-facing message came from the company, not a personal inbox.

That gave the business a place to send people. It did not yet take a booking, notify the driver, or pay for itself in ads.

Booking software

Once visitors had somewhere to land, the company needed a way to turn a conversation into a scheduled ride without a dispatcher on staff.

Cedar Labs built a conversational booking assistant into the website. It collects trip details — date, time, pickup, destination, passenger count, and contact — checks the calendar for conflicts, and opens a booking request. Themed landing pages for airport transfers, student travel, and evening events carry the same chat, so ad traffic does not dump onto a generic homepage.

Behind the pages is a serverless stack: a booking API, a database of leads, requests, rides, and invoices, distance-based pricing with known-route overrides, and schedule overlap checks so two trips cannot be sold on top of each other.

The owner runs the day from two surfaces. A Telegram bot pings new requests, upcoming rides, and reminder cards. An installable driver PWA is the system of record: approve or decline, set a final price, add walk-in trips, mark complete or no-show, generate invoices, and pull directions. Passengers get email confirmation, with SMS as fallback. Morning summaries and pre-pickup reminders go out on a schedule so the chauffeur is not babysitting a calendar.

The software replaced the personal-phone-and-memory workflow with a loop the owner can run from the road: ad or search, chat, request, approve, ride, invoice.

Creative and paid social

Software without demand still leaves a chauffeur waiting. Cedar Labs added an AI photo and video pipeline so the company could advertise like a brand, not a one-off poster.

We produced stills and multi-scene video ads — lifestyle cuts for campus and events, price-contrast spots for airport runs, and end cards that send people to the matching landing page. Generation, quality control, captions, music, and assembly run as a repeatable production line, so creative can be revised and shipped without a traditional shoot for every concept.

Those ads ran on Facebook and Instagram, pointed at the themed pages with the booking chat already on them. Conversion tracking on the site closed the loop from impression to request.

The first measured window was two weeks. Ad spend was $140. Net new revenue attributed to those campaigns was $1,500. That is a 10.7× return on ad spend, and it is revenue the referral network would not have produced on its own.

What we did

For privacy reasons, the client requested anonymizing both their name and the company name in this portfolio profile.