# I vibe-coded $300,000 in 9 months

Channel: Marc Lou
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdjyZmbOENY
Duration: 13 min
Language: English
Words: 2800
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/EdjyZmbOENY

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[0:00] Eight months ago, I vibe-coded this leaderboard in six hours. Three months later, I got an offer for $1 million that I rejected because I thought I could grow this project so much more. Now, it has hits $44,000 per month, and 90% of that is profit. This is just me working solo, and yet I have not touched a single line of code. AI has changed everything on how we build startups to how we market startups. So, I'm going to use this little video to show you the past eight months how I was able to turn this little vibe-coded project into an actual business, how I did all my

[0:35] marketing and everything, how I'm able to now get 200,000 monthly unique visitors, how do I choose what to work on, how do I choose what to build. I'm going to try to explain everything. So, this little project started because I saw a tweet from Peter Levels that say there are so many people who fake MRR screenshots. Uh for the record, it took him years to get to 10K per revenue 10K monthly revenue, which is exactly the same story as me. Uh the tweet went viral. Um and I thought like why not I build a simple leaderboard of verified revenue by just asking for a Stripe API

[1:07] key and just display that on the public page. The tweet also went viral, and it brought a lot of visitors to the site. Initially, I monetize with sponsor sponsorships. So, those are the little card that are displayed on the site at the moment. Um back when I started, it was like around $200 a month to get a sponsorship spot, and then because the traffic grew, then I increased the price up to around 1.5 $5,000 per month, which has brought around $20,000 per month steadily since the launch. Now, I want to pause a minute here because um I think this is important. Um I did not build a

[1:41] leaderboard out of the blue. I built it because I saw this tweet. Uh recently, actually a couple days ago, a friend of mine, Rob, saw something similar. So, he was having a conversation with the same person, actually, Peter Levels, who mentioned that uh a lot of the current startups are being like vibe-coded by other people cuz you can just ask, you know, Codex to replicate a startup. And he said like, "Oh, maybe you could, you know, like I could make a a platform where you can see all those SaaS that you could replace yourself with AI, that you could vibe-code yourself." And this is exactly what he did. Like a few hours or days

[2:13] later, it was live with a site called Vibe Coded. And within 4 days, he made $9,000. So, this is something here that I play a lot with is I try to follow trends. There's a There's so much thing now that we can build. It's so much easier if you build something that is relevant right now. A trend doesn't have to be like a new tech startup going up. Could be just, you know, this little story where someone Someone said, "I have this problem." And then within an hour later, you build a solution to the problem. And for that, all you have to do is you basically go

[2:43] to Twitter and you brain rot yourself with intents. You just go and you see like people experiencing problems, people sharing their concerns, or whatever. And you use that as a way to leverage the current trend, the current topic. See if you can go viral with this. It's so much easier than starting from scratch. From time to time, a new tech is released. For those who remember earlier this year, Open Claw was released. And it was crazy. Like

[3:06] everybody was talking about Open Claw. And then suddenly, you would see those people on Twitter releasing like a little Open Claw wrapper that would let people set up their own Open Claw on a computer. And this guy was killing it. Within a span of 2 weeks, he made He went from literally zero to $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue. And it's all because he was leveraging a trend. And I was also leveraging the exact same trend with Trust MRR because then I built a directory of all those Open Claw

[3:31] startups using Stripe verified revenue. And then out of the blue, there would be a lot of bunch of startups popping up that had verified revenue on the platform, which would grow the traffic to my own websites. Now, another rule that I have for myself is to learn how to quit super fast. This is extremely important even though it's really hard. Among all the startups that I've launched, most of them never took off. I think my hit rate is around like 5% to 10%, which means like 90% of what I work on is basically going to end up nowhere because nobody wants to use them. It's very hard to

[4:01] process as a person cuz it hurts, but this is very important because this is how you give you buy yourself time to make more bets. The more bets you make, the more you have a chance that one of them goes viral. So, that brings us to early January where basically since the launch that went pretty well at the beginning with a bunch of visitors, you could see the blue line keeps decreasing over and over and over until it like reaching all-time low at the end of

[4:25] January 2026. Same for the revenue, nothing was going up and this make a lot of sense because this was like a trendy project, so it went viral at the beginning and then everything that comes up must come down and so it became flat. But unlike a project where I would hear cricket and nothing would happen, this one had some kind of virology. People would mention my website all the time. There'll be a lot of noise on social media about it. I would see some people making alternatives to my website and that is a really good sign. Because of that, I knew I was onto something. It's hard to describe what

[4:56] product market fit is, but these are those are signs of hitting product market fit. I knew I couldn't just keep this as a leaderboard of verified startup revenue. I had to come up with something that would make the business not just a little spike launch, but more something that would be growing steadily over time. So, I tried a bunch of

[5:13] verticals. I did Tinder MRR just for fun. I made a game where you play with Warren Warren Buffett and you have to guess which startup is making the most revenue. And I also built features that people actually requested on social media. So, I would just look at when people mention my brand like Trust MR and I would just build a feature for them. I think I have shipped like maybe 50 tiny features like this trying a bunch of different stuff hoping that one would stick. And the one that actually ended up working is because someone mentioned that they had their startup listing on the platform and they wanted to sell it, so I created

[5:47] this new vertical marketplace, which is now available at the {slash} acquire URL on the site. So, basically, it's the same, you get a startup page, but now it is visible to people who are looking to buy a startup. So, now anyone can contact the seller and make an offer to buy the startup. When I saw that people started liking this feature, I immediately built an entire dashboard where people could process the acquisition directly on site. So, you could list your startup for sale right here, it would appear in the marketplace, and then in your inbox, all the people who are interested in buying your startup will end up here. You could chat

[6:22] with them, you can send them files, you can initiate legal documents, NDA, letter of intent. Everything will be handled directly on the platform, and the final step would be to create an escrow account transaction, where the funds would be securely transferred by the buyer, the seller would transfer the assets, and escrow would handle the legal stage of this. Honestly, when I launched it, I thought this would never work, cuz, you know, like, there's some legal stuff involved. Transferring money to a stranger on the internet is not something that is done overnight. And then, out of the blue, I started people getting acquired. Like, this guy has

[6:56] been acquired for like $85,000. And because I earn a 3% finder fee on all the transactions, I started to have a new income fee income stream on this project, which is now making around $5,000 per month. People started sharing this on social media, which created a snowball effect, where more people wanted to sell their startups, so more acquisitions happened, and now we are in August 2026, 144 founders have already been acquired. Around the time I received an offer from someone who wanted to acquire Trust MMR for a million dollar, I realized that I would have to stay on board for a month to ensure that the transition happened

[7:31] correctly, and I felt weird knowing that I would get rid of my baby, but at the same time being employed for my baby. So, I don't know, just messed up with my head. and like, you know what? No, I'm not going to do this. Instead, I'm going to focus on that thing and I think I can make more than $1 million with it." And around the same time, I also realized one thing is that now that AI makes it easy for just anyone to replicate a product, we need to find products that have a moat. Something that prevents us

[7:59] from being copy-pasted overnight by AI. So, for instance, it's very easy for me to copy-paste a note app or a habit tracker app. But, now replicating the 6 months of trust and the portfolio of like 20,000 buyers on Trust MRR is not possible with AI. Now that AI has created a bunch of new opportunities, it has also created a bunch of risk. And I've realized that if I focus on something like this that cannot be copy-pasted by AI, in 5 years from now, I should be fine. Or in 10 years from

[8:29] now, because AI cannot replicate it. Though that made me hungry again to work on this project. And I have been able to grow it to uh what it is today now where uh the traffic keeps going up and up and up now and it is uh making around 200,000 monthly visitors. The strategy to bring traffic is the same all the time. I just make stuff that people want to share. If I build a feature that makes people proud of sharing on social media, I won. They won. Everybody won. I never have to do marketing. They have something for them to do their own marketing and more people are going to

[9:02] discover my products through them. And this is what's happening when people would share uh screenshot of their nice chart showing their revenue over time. Um I would build stuff like I would you know, let people input their text tag and add their logos, uh input their marketing channel, add even like a a little uh landing page um screenshot embedded directly on their Trust MRR page, connect with GitHub, share update on their product. I really built a bunch of features that would make users uh want to share their Trust MRR page so that you would bring more users. And this is the exact same strategy that I

[9:32] use for my web analytics SaaS Data Fetch to bring more visitors. I just make stuff that people want to use. The globe is a good example where people can uh see their visitors in real time on their websites and they would share that on social media so they would get traffic because it's catchy and sometimes people would mention like, "Oh, how did you do that?" And then they would mention Data Fast. And then people would just visit Data Fast. And it matters even more now because I believe that AI is so good at everything except one thing, which is design. I think AI is I'm recording this

[10:00] in August 2025 26. AI is absolutely terrible at design, which means like a bunch of AI slop websites are being pushed to the world. People are like AI slop aware. They don't want to see any of these anymore. So, if you come up with a good subtle minimalist design, you have an edge. And this is the exact edge I'm using in order to bring traffic to my websites by making features people want to share. I want to finish on something that I think is very important now that there's this super intelligence that can rebuild anything is to pick the right thing to work on. There are two

[10:31] things for me that really matter. The number one is the product I want to work on must have an AI moat. An AI moat, as I mentioned for Trust MRR, is the fact that AI cannot replicate trust. This is something that takes years to build and so no one can just come overnight with a prompt and replicate my startup. Another example of mine is this new little project that I'm working on called Stalker that track mentions of branded keywords on social media. This is Stalker for the Trust MRR and this is how I find feature ideals. So, it would track the keyword Trust MRR and mention

[11:04] all those keywords here so that I could actually filter them by for instance a feature request. And so that's whenever people mention features here, I would just dump it into Codox to see if that makes sense and build a feature. And again here I would leverage the fact that whenever I see something that is being mentioned, I build it right away so I leverage the trend. And at the same time I make stuff people want and it's easier for me to make stuff that will not end up in the void. Again, this little project here could be replicated with AI although it's kind of hard because it tracks, you know, a bunch of

[11:35] social media. For instance, you have to apply to get data from Reddit. You have to apply to get data from YouTube. You have to pay to get data from X and Reddit. So, that makes it harder for an AI to replicate this project. And the second category of product that I work on are the one following a trend. As I'm recording this video, now what's trendy is AI visibility, knowing if ChatGPT mentioned your brand, knowing how many people are seeing your brand keyword inside of

[12:00] Claude. This is super trendy and this is why I'm updating Data Fetch with those AI visibility features. For instance, I added this stuff where you can see the visibility score of how you do versus how your competitors are doing. You can see when AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude are crawling your websites in

[12:19] order to serve information to the users. I think this is extremely trendy at the moment and I'm only trying to build features or product that are trendy. And finally, if this part is in the video, it means it is live. Right now, I'm building a Product Hunt alternative on Trust My Product Hunt called Trust My Product Hunt Launch, which is basically a page that shows all the startups that are being launched today. They're ranked by the most voted ones, so anyone can upvote a startup. The idea is to, you know, showcase a little bit what's going on right now. Any startup has its own dedicated page where you can, you know,

[12:50] upvote the page, see some of the core financial metrics, even engage with the people who are commenting on your launch. There are 200,000 people visiting the site every month, so I figured out that, you know, it could be interesting to have a little feature into funnel some of the traffic to my favorite Indie Hacker friends. That's it. Until the next video, I hope you ship a lot of things and make a lot

[13:12] of money. Cheers.

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