Why vibe coding won't save you

A year ago I opened Cursor with a clear plan: ship an MVP in 2 weeks, launch, hustle MRR.

Assembled a crew: me, Nikita (love this guy, separate post incoming), and 2 others. 4 people, 2 sprints, one product. Zero barrier to entry. Everyone's doing it, right? Success stories in the feed, some guy built a SaaS in 48 hours, $30K MRR a month later. We're at least as good. Probably better.

2 weeks later we had a working product with onboarding. We even did what 90% of vibe-coders skip: built a proper eval, measured quality, beat the competition on it. Proud of ourselves.

Then I sat there thinking: okay, product exists. Quality is solid. Team is strong. How does anyone find out we exist?

Peter Thiel wrote this in 2014 and nothing has changed:

"Superior distribution can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure."

I'd read this before. Nodded. Filed it away. Only truly understood it when it happened to me. In today's world, a great product is 20% of the equation. Distribution is the other 80%. Everything bottlenecks there.

A few months later I came across Tyler Denk.

Tyler launched beehiiv, an email newsletter platform. Crowded market: Substack, Mailchimp, and twenty other similar products. No killer features. No product that's 10x better than competitors.

But Tyler did one thing from day one: he wrote. Every week, a post about building the company. Unfiltered. How he broke production. Why he fired a contractor. How much he spent on a feature that went nowhere.

2 years. Post after post. No hockey sticks, no viral spikes.

Then he decided to raise a round. Closed it in one day.

Not because the product was better than Substack. Because thousands of people already knew him. They'd been reading his thinking for 2 years. They saw how he made decisions under pressure. They trusted the person, not the product.

You can copy a product. You can vibe-code it in a weekend. You can't copy a reputation.

A personal audience is the only distribution channel you never have to pay for — and the only one that compounds with time instead of with budget. The first months feel like writing into a void. Then it accumulates. Then it matters. Not a growth hack. An investment with a 5+ year horizon.

P.S.

The MVP is still sitting there. "We'll relaunch," Nikita says. "First let me write 50 posts," I say.

Stay tuned

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