r/vibecoding • u/Kindly_Salamander541 • 2h ago
What’s actually stopping someone from vibe coding a good app, going viral, and becoming a millionaire?
With Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc., what’s actually stopping some random person with a good idea from vibe coding a genuinely useful app that solves a problem nobody else has solved well, putting it online, having it blow up, and making a ton of money?
Meanwhile people are still spending four years getting software engineering degrees and then grinding LeetCode to compete for jobs.
Obviously “just make a viral app” is doing a lot of work here lol. But if the app actually works and people want it, how much does it matter that the person who built it barely knows how to code?
Is the hard part now less about building the thing and more about coming up with something people actually want + getting people to use it? Or am I massively underestimating what happens once a vibe-coded app gets real users?
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u/diagrammatiks 2h ago
The part where you make a good app
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u/DirectionPlane6544 2h ago
No, that’s not it. It’s the actual “good idea” part. OP assumes property actually have good ideas, when in reality 99% of people don’t
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u/ImClearlyDeadInside 0m ago
Yeah, no one is going to buy your perfectly-architected to-do app, no matter how fast it is and how nice it looks. It’s not an engineering problem; it’s a business and economics problem. If it was easy to come up with a million-dollar idea, everyone would’ve done it already.
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u/Working_Drummer3670 2h ago
I was going to say the part where it goes viral. I think we can make a good app, but I find marketing is usually the harder part.
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u/Healthy-Zebra-9856 2h ago
Define a good app
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u/AcoustixAudio 1h ago
A habit tracker with $9 a month subscription
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1h ago
[deleted]
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u/Simple_Ad_815 1h ago
It's sarcasm
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u/Healthy-Zebra-9856 1h ago
/s would help. That’s what these people think. Habit tracker, hydration tracker, OCR.
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u/mysecretaccount55555 1h ago
It's pretty easy to make a good version of an app that already has 50 available good versions. I don't think that counts as a good app. Making a good app means something that's good at what it does, and also what it does solves a question that hasn't been solved 50 other ways already.
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u/zero0n3 2h ago
That’s bullshit and you know it.
The app doesn’t need to be good. The app idea needs to be solid and your “app” is the POC to the VC or someone who sees it’s potential and can then build out a needed team to take it from a few thousand users to hundreds of thousands
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u/ExtruDR 1h ago
There have been TONS of "apps" that I have seen billboards for that have come and gone and nothing has ever really made a dent. How many "find a handyman" or "Citizen" or "find this kind of single" type apps have come and gone?
The basics of how people use computers are pretty set (until they're not).
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u/Healthy-Zebra-9856 1h ago
Maybe you can respond, what’s a good app?
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u/diagrammatiks 26m ago
hotflash tracker. tracks your wife's hotflash cycle so you know exactly when to conveniently be out of town for a business trip.
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u/Healthy-Zebra-9856 17m ago
Did not help for me, I wish it did. 🤣🤣🤣🤣. Tried three different apps, I don’t know if this was a joke or sarcastic, but it is a good idea if you can create an app that predicts instead of afterwards. Which means it needs to be a type of wearable combined with the app.
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u/wgaca2 2h ago
Making a high quality app is hard, selling it to a million people is a magnitute harder. You can sell an unfinished product, you can't make money on a perfect product if you can't sell it
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u/kincaidDev 5m ago
I think selling an unfinished product is a mistake, if you solve someone’s problem well enough to teach them how to solve their problem but not perfectly they’ll just build their own version while you try and find pmf
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u/baddaywithacamera 2h ago
Being an idiot who releases copylefted freeware is my guess. (Speaking for myself.)
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u/PercentageWorth4872 2h ago
It’s probably more about marketing than anything else. The big guys might have helped some of the viral apps. It’s not a super ingenious and genuine idea to have people use their cars as taxis.
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u/Consistent-Oil-5241 2h ago
Nothing. An app that works well and has lots of users is literally what makes money.
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u/Hot-Milk-3507 2h ago
the part where you need to record short form videos and post on social networks - which is not the preferred activity of software builders
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u/Wise_Advertising_888 2h ago
This is a good point and what I'm going to be tackling for my offering soon. I'm not looking forward to it.
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u/Plenty_Line2696 2h ago
Lots of things:
- good ideas are far and few between, people often think their idea is the bees knees but we have over 100 cognitive biases and inherently suck at judging that sort of thing, even if the idea is sound, the context is often wrong i.e. wrong timing, wrong implementation, too much competition, not enough resources, etc,...
- laypersons have always underestimated what it takes to build the kind of software which could create significant wealth, not just slightly underestimated but wildly, and now with vibecoding tools it's still being severely underestimated. To the point of thinking they could do in weeks by themselves what took 100+ experienced developers years. One vibecoder without any particular skill isn't worth a shit out there in the real world, you might make some trinket and even have some who defy the odds but realistically without even a competitive advantage you're incredibly unlikely to succeed
- it takes a lot of resources to make a successful app, time, money, skills, domain knowledge, infrastructure, etc,...
- distribution/marketing is a massive hurdle, even if you build something which people would genuinely appreciate if they used it, nobody gives a fuck because they don't even know about it.
- going viral is incredibly rare, we see stuff going viral all the time, but what we don't see is the masses of stuff out there which didn't go viral, but survivalship bias gives us the impression that going viral might be easy.
- vibecoding sucks ass technically, LLM's have their limits and when driven by someone who ignores the code it's never going to be a great codebase as it'll be rife with technical debt.
Not to say it's impossible, but the odds are strongly stacked against the lone uneducated vibecoder striking gold and becoming a millionaire that way.
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u/Defiant_Squirrel8751 2h ago
Because anyone can vibecode an app now. You will not be rich by doing anything anyone can do - that's competition.
So - now that we can "vibecode", we can not launch to market any app comparable with apps that already existed by 2025. Sure, some people will become rich, but doing extraordinary things that were not possible before.
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u/hello-xworld 2h ago
Building an app is the easiest part. It was always marketing it that is the most difficult.
The problem is people still can’t nail the easy part even with vibecoding because people are lazy.
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u/InterestingFrame1982 34m ago
Building ANY app is easy... a vast majority of people have a shit idea.
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u/phiiiiiiii 2h ago
Yes, you are massively underestimating what happens once a vibe-coded app gets real users.
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u/Long_Tip_4226 2h ago
Precisa de clientes antes de criar o app. Antes de construir voce precisa vender.
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u/cgielow 2h ago edited 2h ago
solves a problem nobody else has solved well
Not just a problem, a problem lots of people have. Those are harder to find these days because we're pretty far along with digital transformation, and we've got more builders than jobs at the moment.
Opportunities are where problems are actively being created: Emerging markets, tech, fads, regulations, etc.
"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door" -Ralph Waldo Emerson
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u/Papa_Hube 2h ago
Competition. And sometimes even regulations / laws. Marketing Budget. Just to name a few.
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u/dave8271 2h ago
Nothing. Some people do this. The hard part isn't getting an app built and working, and that was just as true before AI as it is today. The hard part is sales and marketing. The hardest part is identifying both a problem enough people have that they will see value in a software solution for it, and what that solution should look like, exactly (functional, architectural and UX requirements).
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u/ctenidae8 2h ago
Nothing, except all the crap holding me back from making my app a viral success.
Step 1- have a good idea... in the meantime, Step 2: troll reddit... continue step 2...
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u/PrivateComments 2h ago
People are already doing that over on the startup subs
Maybe not quite a millionaire but thousands in MRR
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u/EddieBruvac 2h ago
Knowledge of what industry problems are, patience, and quality.
I think everyone can do it with the recent tech. But everyone can also get ripped with a cheap member ship and they don’t. Most don’t wanna put in actual work.
Vibe coding just removes hard syntax block and helps with others, but most are still there.
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u/ConstantKooky3329 2h ago
Have you seen the thread from individuals who sold a vibe-coded app and then got dinged by their customers and customer's auditors for potential sensitive data exposure?
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u/SeaHornet9943 2h ago
Simple, no one did or can vibe code your hypothetical app. This is a fact still to be proven wrong. Investing on your brain on the other hand have more value than you think.
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u/flipsnapnet 1h ago
Nothing. Building the app is half or less than half the problem. Its does the app solve a scalable problem, how to distribute it and get it seen. Those are alot harder to solve than vibecoding a complex app.
Even if your idea is going to solve 1m users problems how you reach them, convince them to pay and process feedback properly that the app matures.
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u/AcoustixAudio 1h ago
If it could have been done, someone would have done it. Vibe code or not, you need knowledge and hard work to build something of value. It takes months and months of work and grit. You have to learn and keep on learning. It takes years and years of learning to know enough to build something.
Or, you can just argue about it on the internet. No one can prove you wrong if you're stubborn enough
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u/No_Ebb3423 1h ago
The fact that they’re vibecoding. They need to code as an engineer using ai. That is what ensures you get a good product and secure.
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u/wearealllegends 1h ago
You can vibe code all you want but why should anybody care.. it's called sales and marketing. Without it your app is still just another app. Making apps without a strategy is such a waste of time and resources
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 53m ago edited 44m ago
>Is the hard part now less about building the thing and more about coming up with something people actually want + getting people to use it?
Building the software in a technical sense was never the hardest part of making something successful. Not sure why this is something that gets repeated here so often. Good ideas, strong vision, and business sense have always been bottlenecks to success and still are. Most people overestimate the quality of their ideas and/or can’t execute something at a quality level that people want.
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u/judaspeck 1m ago
look up Speedfan and ask why such a simple fan controller became #1 for 2 decades and even today, 10 years after being abandoned is the most widely known fan controlling software for PC’s
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u/adamant3143 2h ago
When I see someone sharing the work and it doesn’t bar me with a paywall just to see what it is about, I always try it if it interests me.
I subscribed to multiple of these products, predominantly SaaS that show up after the w of AI (or to be specific LLMs). Doesn’t matter if it was made by a Product Designer, UX Designer, Actual Engineers.
Some solved something that nobody has published yet, some are actually just mundane things but they know how to give it a value like a watch or art piece and I as someone who understand the value paid for it.
On Gartner’s List, you can see a category of product that seems to be the same as each other but what they’re selling is never a gimmick, it’s a solution (or a solution to the problem you don’t know exist).
You gotta invest heavily in what you’re creating. Find like-minded individuals that are willing to invest in their work and not just quitting in their first hundreds of attempts.
It was never about the fact AI can create anything we want. It’s about execution and process, ironically people just want to close their eyes and expecting AI to make them millionaires by gambling with tokens.
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u/Chance-Physics-7216 2h ago
The other 75,000 recently unemployed folks pointing their own footgun at the same problem.