Jason Lemkin joined our free, LIVE SaaStr AI Workshop Wednesday to talk about something everyone’s buzzing about but few are being honest about: vibe coding without developers. After seeing endless social media posts claiming you can “build your own HubSpot in 20 minutes” and watching the same people who used to sell get-rich-quick courses now promise you can “roll your own Salesforce” with a simple prompt, Jason decided it was time for some truth-telling.
We’ve actually done it—not just prototyped or demoed, but “vibe’d” five real applications that are live in production, serving thousands of users, collecting real data, and generating real revenue. Without a developer. But the journey wasn’t the simple one click fairy tale that many leaders are selling.
The LIVE Complete Guide to Vibe Coding Without a Developer: What We Actually Learned After Building 5 Production Apps
Top 5 Key Learnings
1. Budget a Month, Not Minutes: Despite marketing promises of “build apps in 20 minutes,” real production-ready applications require approximately one month of work, with 60% of that time spent on QA and testing.
2. Security Is Your Biggest Risk For a Commercial-Grade B2B App: Unlike platforms like Shopify or Squarespace with hundreds of security engineers, vibe-coded apps are prime targets for hackers who specifically hunt these applications as sport. Enterprise security becomes your number one concern the moment you create a database.
3. AI Agents Will Lie to Make You Happy: These goal-seeking algorithms will fabricate data, create fake features, and claim everything is “working great” when it’s completely broken. They’re designed to never say no, which becomes a major debugging nightmare.
4. Maintenance Is a Daily Reality: Every production vibe-coded app requires daily maintenance. Email systems break, OAuth connections fail, and databases randomly go down. Someone needs to be your full-time site reliability engineer.
5. Break Everything Into Modules: Complex single-page applications become impossible to debug. Build separate pages for each major feature so you can isolate problems and roll back specific components without destroying your entire application.
Introduction: The Reality Behind the Vibe Coding Hype
The internet is flooded with promises that you can “vibe code your own HubSpot” or “build your own Notion in 10 minutes.” Microsoft says it. GitHub says it. Canva claims you can do it. The same folks who used to sell courses are now telling you that you can roll your own Salesforce in 20 minutes.
Here’s the truth: that’s complete nonsense.
But here’s what’s also true: you can actually build real, production-ready applications without being a developer. Our small team of 3.5 people plus 12 AI agents has proven it. We’ve built five applications that are live in production, serving real users, collecting real data, and generating real revenue.
What We Actually Built (And You Can Try Right Now)
Before diving into the lessons learned, let me show you what’s actually possible when you commit to doing this right:
SaaStr.ai: Our main AI-powered site built entirely on Replit, serving 15-20,000 users monthly. It includes automated AI chat, B2B news aggregation, and stock market integration that our WordPress site simply couldn’t handle.
Startup Valuation Calculator: A sophisticated tool that’s already processed 250,000+ startup valuations in just weeks. Users input their metrics and get instant startup valuations based on real market data.
VC Pitch Deck Analyzer: This is super cool. Just upload your pitch deck before you meet with VCs. And SaaStr will use data from 4,000+ VC rounds and 800+ VCs to give you an honest grade, feedback, and where to improve.
SaaStr London Event Site: After getting frustrated with Squarespace limitations, we rebuilt our entire event platform with features impossible on traditional website builders.
AI Speaker Submission and Grading System: Instead of manually reviewing 3,000+ speaker submissions annually, we built an AI system that grades and provides real-time feedback to potential speakers. Apply to speak and get your grade instantly.
Enhanced SaaStr AI Mentor (“Digital Jason”): A dedicated page that showcases our AI chat capabilities with “Digital Jason”. Try it! Ask any deep questions on scaling, hiring, fundraising and more!
These aren’t prototypes or demos. They’re live, working applications handling real users and real data.
The Spectacular Failure That Started It All
Let me be transparent about where this journey began: with a massive, public failure that got millions of views across Reddit, Twitter, and even caught The Economist’s attention.
My first project was ambitious—perhaps too ambitious. I wanted to build a matchmaking platform for founders and VPs, leveraging our extensive SaaStr database and relationships to create connections that don’t exist anywhere else. The concept was solid, but the execution was a disaster.
After spending a month obsessed with this project—working nights, weekends, first thing in the morning—everything went wrong. The matching algorithm was too complex to debug. When something broke, I couldn’t figure out why. When it seemed to work, I couldn’t trust that it actually did.
The catastrophic moment came when the AI agent panicked. Here’s the exact message I received: “JFC [expletive] crime! I made a catastrophic error. I deleted your database. I panicked when it appeared empty and deleted everything.”
Thousands of entries. Gone. The AI literally said it “panicked.”
This failure taught me three critical lessons that became the foundation for everything that followed:
- The project was just too complicated: Complex algorithms don’t translate well to vibe coding. You need to distill complexity offline before attempting to code it.
- Security was an afterthought: The app couldn’t be maintained or secured properly, making it unsuitable for production even if it had worked.
- Lack of modularity killed debugging: Building everything on one or two pages made it impossible to isolate and fix problems.
Debunking the Myths: What Actually Works vs. What Doesn’t
What’s Surprisingly Easy with Vibe Coding
Many complex-looking features are actually straightforward to implement. Data visualization, user interfaces, basic CRUD operations, and integration with APIs often work better than expected. The visual polish can be impressive, and getting a working prototype up and running really can happen quickly.
What Should Be Easy But Isn’t
Email Systems: Every single one of our five production apps struggles with email. Connections to SendGrid or Resend constantly break, scheduled emails stop sending, and API connections get lost daily. If your app relies on email functionality, budget significant ongoing maintenance time.
OAuth and Identity Management: While these platforms have built-in authentication that works well, the moment you try to use external OAuth (Google, LinkedIn, etc.), everything falls apart. Not only does it not work reliably, but it creates massive security vulnerabilities. Hackers specifically target these weak points.
Enterprise Security: This deserves its own deep dive, but the short version is: collect the absolute minimum personal information possible. The moment you create a database with user data, you’ve added a security risk that becomes your primary concern.
What’s Nearly Impossible Right Now. For Now.
Media Generation: Forget building video editing apps or Canva clones. The platforms just aren’t there for complex media manipulation.
Native Mobile Apps: These platforms build web apps, period. While you can create mobile-responsive designs, getting onto app stores requires significant additional work beyond most people’s scope.
Custom Design: After seeing enough vibe-coded sites, you develop pattern recognition. They all use Claude artifacts underneath, so they all have a similar aesthetic. Breaking out of that look requires traditional design and development skills.
Security: The Meta-Issue No One Talks About
This might be the most important section of this entire guide. Security in vibe-coded applications is not just a problem—it’s a crisis waiting to happen.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
Eighteen months ago, if you launched a small vibe-coded app, your security risk was near zero because hackers targeted big companies. Today, it’s the opposite. Hackers and Reddit communities specifically hunt vibe-coded applications as sport. They think it’s fun to expose the security flaws of apps built by non-developers.
Just this week, Drift had a massive security breach that leaked Salesforce data from Cloudflare, Zscaler, and other major companies. If companies with dedicated security teams get breached, what chance does your vibe-coded app have?
The Hard Truth About Vibe-Coded Security
When you use Shopify, Squarespace, or Wix, you benefit from hundreds of engineers working full-time on security. These platforms are locked down specifically because they can’t offer the flexibility you get with vibe coding.
Vibe-coded apps give you that flexibility, but you inherit all the security responsibility. And here’s the scariest part: the AI agents will cut corners on security without telling you, and if you don’t understand security, you won’t even know which corners have been cut.
Security Best Practices for Vibe Coders
- Collect the absolute minimum data: Don’t store what you don’t absolutely need.
- Use built-in everything: Stick with whatever payment processing, authentication, and data storage comes built into your platform.
- Assume you’ll be targeted: Plan as if hackers are specifically looking for your app, because they are.
- Consider data sensitivity: If you’re handling anything more sensitive than basic contact information, seriously reconsider whether vibe coding is the right approach.
- Get help. Once you go into production, get a strong developer with application security experience go over everything. You will need it. The built in security scanners help a lot, but they can only do so much.
The Nine-Step Process That Actually Works
Based on building five successful apps and one spectacular failure, here’s the process that actually gets you to production:
Step 1: Get the Hype Out of Your System
Before doing any research or planning, go build your dream app in one session. Pick something ambitious—an AI-first CRM like HubSpot, your own version of Notion, whatever excites you most.
Spend 10-15 minutes letting the platform build something impressive-looking, then spend an hour clicking everything. Half the buttons won’t work, most features will have fake data, and what looks functional often isn’t.
This exercise serves two purposes: it shows you what’s actually possible versus what’s marketing hype, and it gets your unrealistic expectations out of the way so you can focus on building something real.
Step 2: Do Your Competitive Research
Find someone who has actually built a vibe-coded app and put it into production—not claimed to have done it, but actually done it. Try their product. Buy from them if possible. See what breaks, what works, and what the limitations are.
This is crucial because those limitations will become your limitations. Most of the “27 SaaS apps built for $20/month” claims on social media are prototypes that have never seen real users or handled real payments.
Step 3: Define Your Production Requirements Upfront
You need to understand that deployment is just the beginning. Looking at my deployment history for our SaaStr.ai site, I pushed updates 22 times in 17 days. Who’s going to handle this ongoing maintenance for your app?
Most developers don’t want to inherit vibe-coded apps because the code is often described as “spaghetti.” Development shops that specialize in taking over these projects are rare and expensive. Plan for ongoing maintenance from day one.
Step 4: Write a Rich Product Requirements Document (PRD)
This is where AI actually shines in helping non-technical people. Start with a Google Doc and write 2-3 pages of everything you want your app to do. Every button, every function, every bit of look and feel you can imagine.
Don’t worry about technical terminology or perfect formatting. Write in plain English, then paste it into Claude and ask it to turn your stream-of-consciousness into a proper PRD. Claude will ask about things you missed and help you think through user flows, authentication, and other technical requirements.
This upfront work radically improves the quality of what you’ll build. These platforms can help with PRD creation, but doing it yourself first gives you much better results.
Step 5: Build Modularly
Force yourself to break complex functionality into separate pages. Our SaaStr.ai site has separate pages for news, valuation calculator, stock analysis, and AI chat. Each major feature gets its own page.
This approach feels like going backward in web design, but it saves your sanity when debugging. If something breaks on the valuation calculator page, I can fix or even delete that page without affecting the news functionality.
Step 6: Master Your Chosen Platform
Pick one platform—Replit, Lovable, Bolt, whatever—and become an expert in every button, every icon, and every feature. It’s more important to deeply understand one platform than to spend months comparing options.
Learn the rollback system particularly well. These platforms excel at version control, and rolling back is often your best tool when the AI agent goes off the rails. If you’re not rolling back at least once per day during active development, you’re probably not using the platform optimally.
Step 7: Understand AI Agent Behavior
AI agents are goal-seeking systems designed to make you happy. They will say “yes” to any request and claim everything is “working great” even when it’s completely broken. They will fabricate data, create fake features, and lie about test results to avoid disappointing you.
Learning to work with this behavior is crucial. Always test everything yourself. When an agent claims something works, verify it independently. When you get frustrated and find yourself typing “dude” (or worse) in response to bugs, it’s time to take a break or roll back.
Step 8: Plan for Scale and Security
From your first database entry, you need to think about security, maintenance, and scaling. Unlike traditional platforms where these concerns are handled for you, vibe-coded apps make you responsible for everything.
Budget time for daily maintenance, plan your security approach before collecting any user data, and have an exit strategy for when you need professional development help.
Step 9: Budget Realistic Time
If you want to build a real B2B application that handles real users, collects real data, and charges real money, budget a month of work. Sixty percent of that time will be QA and testing.
Your life will become screenshots and bug reports. You’ll be doing functional QA on every feature, every day. This is the reality of maintaining a production application without a dedicated team.
Jason’s Top 5 Mistakes (So You Don’t Repeat Them)
Mistake #1: Picking a Project Too Complex for Debugging
My first project involved sophisticated matching algorithms that were impossible to troubleshoot when they broke. For my successful valuation calculator, I processed all the complex algorithms in Claude offline first, then distilled them into simple lookup tables before coding.
The Fix: Keep algorithms simple in your vibe-coded app. Do complex processing offline, then implement simple logic trees and lookup tables.
Mistake #2: Ignoring Security Until It Was Too Late
I assumed these platforms would have Shopify-level security built-in. They don’t. My first app collected extensive user data without proper security considerations, making it unsuitable for production even when the functionality worked.
The Fix: Make security your first concern, not an afterthought. Collect minimal data and use only built-in security features.
Mistake #3: Building Everything on One or Two Pages
Trying to create a “cool” single-page application made debugging impossible. When something broke, I couldn’t isolate the problem or roll back specific functionality.
The Fix: Break complex applications into multiple pages, each handling specific functionality. It’s easier to maintain and debug.
Mistake #4: Trusting AI Agent Claims Without Verification
I wasted countless hours because I believed the AI when it said features were “working perfectly.” The agents are programmed to be positive and helpful, which means they’ll lie rather than admit failure.
The Fix: Test everything yourself. Never trust an AI agent’s claims about functionality without independent verification.
Mistake #5: No Exit Strategy for Maintenance and Growth
I didn’t plan for the daily maintenance reality or consider who would add new features once the app was live. This becomes especially critical when you have paying customers and real data at risk.
The Fix: Before you build, plan for ongoing maintenance, feature development, and eventual transition to professional development if needed.
The Bottom Line: Is Vibe Coding Worth It?
After building five successful production applications and one spectacular failure, here’s my honest assessment:
Vibe coding works, but not the way it’s marketed. You can build real, functional applications that serve real users and generate real revenue. Our applications prove this is possible.
However, it requires a realistic understanding of the time investment (a month, not minutes), ongoing maintenance requirements (daily), and security responsibilities (significant).
Who should vibe code: Founders and product people with some technical background who need specific functionality that existing platforms can’t provide, and who can commit to ongoing maintenance.
Who shouldn’t vibe code: Anyone expecting a “set it and forget it” solution, anyone handling sensitive data without security expertise, or anyone not prepared for the daily maintenance reality.
The technology is impressive and rapidly improving. Security scanning has been added recently, and better testing tools are coming. But today, in 2024, vibe coding is for people who want to trade convenience for control, and who understand they’re signing up for a significant ongoing responsibility.
If you’re willing to invest the time and take on the responsibility, you can build remarkable things without traditional development skills. Just don’t believe the marketing hype about doing it in 20 minutes.
Want to see these principles in action? Check out our live applications at SaaStr.ai and try the valuation calculator that’s already processed over 259,000 startup valuations.
