u/Overall_Sherbet_6135

I am from this world and I still feel that I am being left behind.

For context, I am a pretty good vibe-coder. I have built 20+ projects and I am very well versed in what is happening in AI around me. I have been a founder too so I know how to sell the products.

But despite that I have been feeling like OpenAI and Anthropic will just eat everything up. I mean I love Claude. But I still feel there is so much to catch up on.

Sorry about the rant but just wanted to start this conversation in case someone else is feeling like this too 😅

I've been vibe coding small tools for myself for a while now (somewhere north of 20 projects at this point), mostly to solve little daily annoyances. The latest one I actually use every single day, so I wanted to share it here.

It's a Morning Brief. Every morning it pulls together:

• News from the last 24 hours on the topics I follow
• Social sentiment around those topics
• Substack posts from writers in my world
• Relevant podcast episodes that dropped overnight

All laid out like a curated newspaper. I open it with coffee and I'm done in 10 minutes instead of bouncing between five apps for an hour.

The thing I want to share is that I am not an engineer. I built this in Claude Code by describing what I wanted, and I've started writing up the exact playbooks on my Substack so other non-technical founders can copy them. Paste the prompt, answer a couple questions, done. The bar to building anything is so low that it is criminal.

Happy to answer questions about the build, what broke, or how I'm thinking about the series. And if anyone wants the actual playbook for this one, I'll drop the link in the comments.

Not the product. Not the pricing.

Distribution.

I raised, built, hit $25K in GMV, and wound down my startup earlier this year when the runway ran out. I had a working product, real revenue, validated unit economics, even a shortlist spot in the eBay Circular Fashion Fund. What I didn’t have was a demand engine I controlled. I was chasing brands one by one when I should have been building an audience that pulled them in.

Since then I’ve been consulting solo founders and embedded operators at early-stage startups, and I see the same pattern almost every time:

- Building the second feature before anyone’s used the first
- “Launching” on Product Hunt with no warm list
- Cold outbound as a strategy instead of building a warm base
- Treating content as marketing instead of as distribution infrastructure
- Waiting for the product to launch to think about who actually buys

I write about this stuff (and the weirder parts of being a solo founder) every week. Link in comments.

But right now I want to answer as many questions as you have. What are you stuck on right now? Distribution, validation, scoping an MVP, knowing when to kill something? Drop it below, I’ll answer.