For Auto Activa, we developed an AI-powered landing page builder that can create complete vehicle and offer pages with just a few clicks.
Led by Daniel Bonds, Auto Activa is an automotive-focused advertising agency based in Hano, Germany, serving major car dealerships across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The company provides specialized marketing and development solutions designed specifically for the automotive industry.
Auto Activa needed a landing page builder built specifically for the automotive industry. Their goal was to give dealerships a faster way to create landing pages, newsletters, branded images, and videos without relying on long agency cycles or technical teams. Just as important, the platform needed to bring AI into that workflow in a practical way - helping users generate campaign content and media faster, without making the process feel technical or difficult to use.
To turn Autohaus.ai into a working product, Auto Activa needed a developer who could do more than just build pages. The platform involved Laravel development, template logic, subscription handling, SMTP integration, and AI-powered image and video workflows. Daniel Bonds hired Maneesh Tiwari from Virtual Employee to develop the platform, manage the backend and frontend work, integrate AI and SMTP features, and turn daily feedback into live product updates.
For many car dealerships, creating marketing assets was still slower than it should be. A simple landing page could take too many rounds of coordination; newsletters often depended on manual design work, and even basic campaign visuals could require outside support. That slowed down launches, added cost, and made it harder to react quickly when stock, offers, or priorities changed.
Auto Activa wanted to solve that with a platform built specifically for the automotive industry - one place where users could create landing pages, newsletters, images, and videos much faster. The idea was not just to make page building easier, but to reduce the manual effort behind campaign content by bringing AI-assisted content and media generation into the same workflow.
Virtual Employee became part of the solution because Auto Activa did not just need a developer who could code. Daniel Bonds needed someone who could quickly understand how automotive businesses market vehicles online and how dealership campaigns actually move.
During the interview, Maneesh Tiwari already showed familiarity with earlier VE work in the automotive space, including projects like Carcity and Markosian Auto. That gave the client confidence that he would not be starting from zero. Maneesh was then brought in to build Autohaus.ai as a self-serve, AI-powered product - one that could help automotive teams create landing pages, newsletters, images, and videos faster, with less dependence on long agency-style production cycles.
The Solution
Virtual Employee became part of the solution because Auto Activa did not just need a developer who could code. Daniel Bonds needed someone who could quickly understand how automotive businesses market vehicles online and how dealership campaigns actually move. During the interview, Maneesh Tiwari already showed familiarity with earlier VE work in the automotive space, including projects like Carcity and Markosian Auto. That gave the client confidence that he would not be starting from zero. Maneesh was then brought in to build Autohaus.ai as a self-serve product—one that could help automotive teams create landing pages, newsletters, images, and videos faster, with less dependence on long agency-style production cycles.
Search by
Vehicle Details
At the heart of Autohaus.ai was a landing page builder designed specifically for automotive campaigns. Users could begin by searching through brand, model, and variant, which made the builder feel more relevant to dealership marketing than a generic page tool. Instead of starting from a blank canvas, the build was shaped around how automotive campaigns are actually created.
Template-Based
Page Creation
The platform included eight ready-made templates so users could generate pages faster without depending on design teams for every campaign. This mattered because the goal was not just to let users build pages, but to help them launch professional-looking automotive landing pages quickly and consistently.
Section
Level Editing
Once a template was selected, users could edit sections individually and shape the page around a specific campaign. This gave the builder a balance between speed and flexibility: fast enough to launch quickly, but open enough to avoid a one-size-fits-all feel.
Download and
Deployment Flexibility
The builder also gave users the ability to download their landing page templates or upload them to another server if needed. That made the platform more practical for businesses that wanted control over where and how their final landing pages were hosted or reused.
Built for Server
Rendered Speed
This part of the platform was built using Laravel with Blade templates supported by Tailwind CSS and Bootstrap 4.1.3 That stack made sense because it allowed the team to move quickly, keep the UI responsive, and render dynamic page content without the added complexity of a heavier front-end framework.
Fast Newsletter
Creation
Autohaus.ai was also built to help users create newsletters in under two minutes. The process was designed to feel simple: users selected details like brand, model, color, and car position, and the system generated the content structure much faster than a manual campaign workflow usually would.
Automotive-Specific
Content Inputs
The newsletter builder was not treated as a generic email editor. It was shaped around automotive content variables, which helped make the output feel more aligned with dealership promotions and vehicle-led marketing rather than broad, non-specific email design tools.
SMTP
Based Sending
One of the more practical parts of the build was support for user-specific SMTP settings. Instead of forcing everyone through one common sending setup, the platform allowed users to send newsletters through their own SMTP server credentials, giving them more control over email delivery.
Flexible but
Controlled Sending Logic
Supporting user SMTP settings brought its own complexity, because different servers, authentication setups, and sending rules had to be handled safely. The system had to be flexible enough for users, while still keeping the sending flow reliable from the backend side.
PHPMailer
Integration
The newsletter module was built using PHPMailer for email delivery. This gave the team a stable way to manage SMTP-based sending while keeping the newsletter system connected to the rest of the application’s logic and subscription controls.
Prompt-Based
Visual Creation
The platform also included an image generation flow where users could create brand-specific visuals based on details such as brand, model, color, and positioning. This made the image tool feel connected to dealership use cases rather than like a separate AI experiment added on top.
Built for
Marketing Use
The image generation feature supported the wider goal of helping users produce campaign assets without waiting on a designer for every small variation. For automotive businesses, that matters because visual assets often need to change quickly based on offers, inventory focus, or campaign timing.
AI API
Integration
To make this work, Autohaus.ai integrated external AI services such as Ideogram and related media-generation APIs. This allowed the platform to turn structured user inputs into usable visual content inside the same product experience.
Connected to the
Platform Workflow
Importantly, image generation was not built as a standalone tool. It sat inside the wider flow of landing page and newsletter creation, so generated media could support the same campaign journey rather than forcing users to switch between disconnected tools.
Simple Input,
Richer Output
The video generation feature allowed users to create 3D vehicle videos by uploading two images and entering a simple prompt. This made a technically advanced workflow feel approachable for users who did not have video-production skills or editing software.
Built Around
RunwayML
This module was powered through RunwayML APIs, including Gen-3 and Gen-4 models, which were used to generate videos based on the user’s uploaded inputs. That gave the platform a more advanced media layer than a typical landing page builder.
Asynchronous
Processing
Unlike normal page or text actions, video generation was not instant. That made this part of the build more complex, because the system had to handle delayed responses from the API without breaking the user experience or overloading the server.
Smart
Polling Logic
To solve that, the team built a timed polling mechanism that checked video status at intervals instead of firing constant requests. If a video was not ready, the system retried automatically after a delay. This made the workflow more stable and helped keep server usage under control.
AI Without
Exposing the Complexity
One of the real build challenges here was hiding the technical awkwardness of asynchronous AI generation from the end user. The product had to feel smooth even when the underlying video service was taking time to respond.
Eight Ready
Made Templates
Templates were a major part of the product because they made content generation faster and more repeatable. Instead of asking users to design from scratch, the platform gave them eight structured templates that could be reused across different campaigns.
Dynamic
Template Switching
The system was built so users could switch templates dynamically without damaging the underlying page content. That may sound simple on the surface, but it required careful backend and frontend handling to make sure changing the presentation did not break the page structure.
Master Prompts
and User Prompts
A particularly important part of the build was prompt management. The platform separated admin-controlled master prompts from user-editable prompts, which gave the client a way to maintain baseline content logic while still allowing flexibility at the user level.
Safe
Fallback Logic
If a user left a prompt blank or entered something invalid, the system could fall back to the admin master prompt. This helped keep the content-generation flow usable and prevented user-side edits from breaking the overall experience.
Section-Level
Prompt Control
Prompt handling was not limited to one area. Admins could adjust section prompts as well as user-specific prompts, which gave the platform a more granular content engine behind the scenes.
Self-Serve
Onboarding
The platform was built so users could register, choose a subscription plan, and start building right away. This mattered because Autohaus.ai was meant to work as a scalable product, not just as an internal tool used with manual setup.
Subscription
Based Access
Autohaus.ai ran on a subscription model, allowing users to select the plan that matched their needs. This made the product commercially usable while also letting the team control which features were available at each level.
Feature
Locking by Plan
Not every user was meant to see every feature. Access to things like advanced generation tools, multiple templates, and other capabilities had to be controlled at the plan level. That meant permissions could not be loosely managed—they had to be built directly into the product logic.
Centralized
Permission Checks
To avoid feature leaks or inconsistent access, subscription checks were handled centrally in the application. This reduced the risk of users seeing tools they had not paid for and made access control easier to manage across the platform.
Authentication
and Session Security
User access was secured using Laravel Sanctum which handled API tokens, sessions, and CSRF protection. This was a practical choice because it worked naturally with the Laravel stack and kept authentication management relatively clean.
Template
Management
The admin side of the platform allowed the client to manage templates which was essential because new campaign types and content structures would need to be added over time. This helped make the product expandable rather than locked into its first version.
Prompt and
Content Governance
Admins could create and adjust default prompts, giving them control over how content was generated across the platform. This was especially useful in a tool where AI-assisted output had to remain structured and brand-aware.
User and Subscription
Management
The admin panel also allowed the client to manage users subscription access, and plan-level permissions. That made it easier to operate Autohaus.ai as a commercial product instead of managing accounts manually outside the system.
Control Over
What Users See
Another important part of the build was giving admins control over what users could access and interact with. This helped shape the platform experience based on plan level, product evolution, or changing business priorities.
Built for Ongoing
Product Growth
Because the platform was expected to keep evolving, the admin side was not treated as a basic dashboard. It was built as an active control layer that would support future templates, prompts, plans, and user workflows.
Monolithic
but Modular
Autohaus.ai was built on amonolithic core architecture, with all major functions—landing pages, newsletters, media generation, users, subscriptions, and admin controls—living inside one system. That choice made sense for the phase the product was in, because it reduced overhead and allowed the team to move faster.
Structured for
Future Separation
Even though the platform was monolithic, the backend was kept modular in structure so that heavier components, such as video generation, could be separated later if scaling required it. This gave the product room to grow without forcing early complexity.
Laravel as the
Product Backbone
The backend was built in PHP using Laravel, which handled business logic, APIs, authentication, templates, user management, and subscription workflows. Laravel was a sensible choice because it offered speed, stability, and built-in tools that suited a fast-moving product build.
MySQL
for Core Data
The platform used MySQL for storing users, templates, newsletter content, landing page sections, subscription records, and SMTP settings. This kept data handling practical and well aligned with Laravel.
VPS and
Nginx Hosting
The system ran on a Linux VPS with Nginx, which gave the product a stable hosting environment while keeping infrastructure relatively straightforward at its current stage.
The Result
Autohaus.ai went live as a working platform where users could create landing pages, newsletters, branded images, and 3D videos without needing technical skills.
Because the product was built in a highly agile way, new features, updates, and changes could be turned around quickly based on daily client feedback.
The platform gave automotive teams one place to create campaign content faster, reducing the usual back-and-forth involved in building pages, newsletters, and media assets separately.
From WordPress to Laravel to AI – VE experts helped us build complex web development projects faster.”
Daniel Bonds
Head of Development, Auto Activa
