🗞 What's New: Vibe coding for dummies — 11 tips for building w/ AI

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Vibe coding for dummies: 11 tips for building with AI.
• This founder scaled a design service without initially hiring any designers. Here's how he went from zero to $150K MRR.
• Behind the AI app that reached #1 on the US App Store through viral mechanics the founders built directly into the product.

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Everyone's talking about vibe coding these days, but not many are sharing tips on how to do it well.

In part, this is because vibe coding is so new. It's barely been a month since Andrej Karpathy coined the concept on X, which isn't enough time for anything like a broad consensus to form around best practices.

But enough time has passed for lots of indie hackers to have stumbled onto insights we can all take advantage of.

So Courtland and I spent some time on X pulling these insights together: from picking the right AI models, to avoiding time-wasting headaches, to debugging code you didn't even write, to building in public:

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When Maximilian Fleitmann needed a cash cow for his holding company, he didn't let his lack of design skills stop him:

He spotted a proven market need, launched a subscription design service called Magier, and scaled it to $150K MRR in just two years.

His story is awesome. We cover how he validated the idea in a weekend, landed paying clients before hiring designers, and built three powerful distribution channels that now generate 75% of new customers:

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Not financial advice, but:

Godspeed to anyone trying to beat this market.

—@channingallen

By leaving his VC job to work on an AI face-swapping company back in 2020, Dima Shvets placed a bet on new tech and the potential to define a new market.

And the bet paid off.

In our interview with Dima, he shares how his product Reface became the #1 app in the US App Store (beating TikTok and Netflix), the viral mechanics they built directly into the product, and how they handled the chaos when Elon Musk's retweet sent millions of users their way overnight.

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Did you like today's stories? Did they suck? Which ones?

We're constantly changing things up to make this newsletter more useful, so let us know what you think by replying directly to this email. We read every reply!

Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to James Fleischmann for contributing posts.

—Channing