Lookalike audience
A lookalike audience is a group of new prospects an ad platform builds by finding people who statistically resemble your existing customers. You upload a source list (your best customers, recent buyers, high-value leads), and the platform's algorithm scans its users for shared traits, behaviours, and signals, then assembles a fresh audience that looks like your source.
For a founder, this is how you scale beyond retargeting into cold acquisition without guessing at targeting from scratch. Instead of hand-picking job titles and interests, you let the platform infer what your good customers have in common, often patterns you'd never spot yourself. The quality of the output depends entirely on the quality of your seed list: feed it your highest-value, best-fit customers, not every email you've ever collected. Lookalikes work best once you have enough customers to form a meaningful source (a few hundred at minimum) and pair naturally with strong creative and a clear offer.