9 Do's and Don'ts for Vibe Coders Just Starting Out
If you're a vibe coder who's just starting out, this one's for you. AI tools have made it possible to go from an idea to a working product in days. That's genuinely exciting. But getting something built and turning it into a business are two very different things.
I recently posted a short video answering nine questions I keep hearing from people building with AI. The answers in the video are quick. Here's the thinking behind each one.
1. Niche down first
Should you build for a niche audience first, or go broad right away? Niche.
When you're starting out, you don't have a marketing budget, a sales team or a brand anyone recognizes. Going broad means competing for everyone's attention with nothing to stand out. A niche flips that. When you build for a specific group of people with a specific problem, your product feels like it was made for them, because it was.
A niche is also much easier to reach. You know where those people hang out, what they read and what language they use. Your first customers are easier to find, easier to talk to, and more likely to tell others like them. Once you own a small corner of the market, you can expand from a position of strength instead of starting from zero everywhere at once.
2. Grow organically first
Is it worth spending money on paid ads early, or should you rely on organic growth first? Organic growth first.
I've been involved in more than $60 million of SaaS advertising, so I'm not against ads. But ads amplify what's already working. If you don't yet know who your customer is, what message makes them click, or whether they stick around after signing up, ads just help you lose money faster.
Organic growth forces you to learn those things. Posting, talking to people in communities, getting referrals and answering questions teaches you what resonates. Once you know that, paid ads become a tool for scaling something proven instead of an expensive experiment.
3. Offer it free
Should you charge from day one, or offer it free to build an audience? I'd offer it free.
Let me be clear about what I mean. If you can charge, charge. Someone paying you is the strongest signal there is that you're solving a real problem. Never turn down a paying customer just because you planned to start free.
But if you can't land a paid client right away, don't sit and wait for one. Give it away. Real people using your product, even for free, will teach you more than months of building on your own. You'll see where they get stuck, which features they actually use, what they ignore, and what they ask for that you never thought of.
Those early free users become your feedback loop, your first testimonials and often your first paying customers once the product earns it.
4. Learn to code, or hire
Should you learn to code properly eventually, or is prompting enough to run a business? You're going to have to learn to code eventually, or hire somebody to code for you once you've built a business out of it.
Prompting is a fantastic way to get started. It gets you to a working product faster than ever. But once real customers depend on your software, the stakes change. Bugs cost you money and trust. Security issues can put your users' data at risk. Performance problems show up as you grow, and the AI won't always know why.
At that point, someone needs to truly understand the code: how it's structured, why it breaks and how to fix it safely. That can be you, if you invest in learning. Or it can be a developer you hire once the business can support it. Either way, plan for it. Prompting alone isn't a long-term strategy for running a software business.
5. Publish your journey
Should you post your building journey publicly on social media, or keep it quiet until it's polished? Publish. Publishing builds accountability.
When you tell people what you're building and when you plan to ship it, you've made a promise in public. That's a powerful motivator on the days you'd rather quit or keep tinkering. It's much harder to quietly abandon a project when people are following along and asking how it's going.
There's a second benefit too. Sharing the journey builds an audience before you launch. The people who watched you build it are often the first ones to try it, give feedback and share it. Waiting until everything is polished usually means launching to nobody.
6. Handle it personally
Should you automate customer support with AI from the start, or handle it personally while the user base is small? Handle it personally. You'll learn a lot more from your clients.
Every support message is a free lesson about your product. It tells you where your onboarding is confusing, which features are broken, and what people are actually trying to do. If an AI bot answers all of that for you, those lessons never reach you.
Talking to customers directly also builds relationships you can't automate. Early users who get a real reply from the founder tend to stay longer, forgive more and recommend you to others. Automate later, once you've seen the same questions so many times that you know exactly what the answers should be.
7. Validate with ads running
Should you validate the idea with fake landing pages before writing any code? If you're running ads, it makes sense. If you're not, it doesn't.
A landing page for a product that doesn't exist yet only tells you something if people actually see it. Paid ads let you put that page in front of a targeted audience quickly and measure what happens: how many click, how many sign up, what each signup costs. That's real data you can make a decision on before you build.
Without ads, the page just sits there. A handful of visits from friends and your own social posts won't tell you whether strangers would care. In that case, your time is better spent building a simple version and putting it in front of real users directly.
8. Ship faster
Should you worry about competitors copying your idea, or just ship faster than everyone else? It doesn't matter. Just do your thing.
Ideas are rarely the hard part. Execution is. Even if someone copies what you're doing, they don't have your understanding of the customer, your relationships with early users or your reasons for every decision you've made. Copying the surface of a product is easy. Copying everything underneath it isn't.
Worrying about competitors also pulls your attention away from the only thing you control: building something your customers love. Focus on your users, keep improving and keep shipping. That's what actually puts distance between you and anyone else.
9. Say yes more early on
Should you chase every feature request, or stick to your original vision? This is a hard one. In the beginning, you may have to do a lot more.
Your original vision is a starting point, not a contract. Early on, you don't have many customers, and each one matters a lot. Saying yes to their requests is often how you keep them, and how you discover what the product really needs to be. Some of your most important features will come from requests you never would have planned.
That doesn't mean saying yes forever. As you grow, you'll start to see which requests come up again and again and which are one-offs. That's when you get more selective. But at the very start, being flexible and responsive is usually worth more than sticking rigidly to the plan.
The short version
- Niche down first
- Grow organically first
- Offer it free (but charge if you can)
- Learn to code, or hire
- Publish your journey
- Handle support personally
- Validate with ads running
- Ship faster
- Say yes more early on
None of these are hard rules. They're what I've learned from building software, running SaaS businesses and spending real money trying to get customers. If you're vibe coding your first product, I hope a few of them save you some time and money.
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