I fell for the vibe coding hype. Here’s what actually happened
There’s lots of AI slop out there about vibe coding making you rich fast. I fell for it.
So far I’ve officially made $20 helping someone fix their app. I used Claude to do it.
However, I’ve spent 4.5 months building a niche CRM for a D2D sales company I had some connections to, and we’re haggling over price right now. It’s not life changing, but it’ll at least be 5 figures.
Im a CNA and before that a service writer. Zero coding background.
So I’m not going to tell you “use this prompt and you’ll retire your mother.” But I have learned a couple things in the process of actually making some money with this very hyped up tool.
- AI won’t save you from understanding what you’re building.
Claude Code and Cursor are incredible, but if you don’t understand what the code is doing, you’ll spend 3 days debugging something a 10 minute read could have prevented. Learn enough to read what the AI gives you and ask the right follow-up questions.
- Start with the boring stuff: auth, database, payments.
My first instinct was to build the cool features. The dashboard. The animations. Wrong. If you nail auth, a real database, and payments, you have a real product. If you skip them, you have a demo.
- Deploying is where 90% of people quit.
Building locally feels great. Then you try to deploy and nothing works. Environment variables are wrong. CORS errors everywhere. Push through it. The first deploy is the hardest.
- Ship ugly, then improve.
My CRM looked terrible for a long time. But it worked. Real users were using it. Nobody cares about your gradient if the app doesn’t solve their problem.
- The money part is a separate skill.
Building the product is maybe 40% of the work. Finding users, getting feedback, closing deals, pricing correctly. That’s the other 60% nobody talks about.
The biggest mistake I made was building too many things at once. When you can build near anything into your app why say no. And soon you have a bloated mess that doesn’t work but it’s just integrated enough to make deleting it a pain
If you’re starting from zero, the path is real. It’s not the overnight success story Twitter wants you to believe. But $20 and hopefully turning into a $25-35k contract , and I started from literally nothing.
I started a community called Vibe Coding: Zero to Revenue on Skool where I’m documenting the whole journey and teaching what I’ve learned. Even if you never join, everything above is the core of it. Happy to answer questions.
TLDR: guy chased hype, put a whole $20 in his pocket. Spent more an AI than $20.

