😅 You're vibe coding wrong...

Hey team 👋

I've AI-pilled at least 10 founders in the last few months.

Everyone does the same thing:

Get obsessed with letting AI cook. They always make things faster, often even better than they ever could themselves.

Then they all think "I can make money from this" and send me a one-shot website with a Stripe link on it.

The winners who are vibecoding are using AI to accelerate what they’re doing, not making new revenue streams. 

When I was CEO of Heatmap, my CTO pushed for internal tooling. Internal tools pushed back product releases, and it's nothing the board gets excited about.

As Heatmap got larger, internal tooling wasn't optional. Without it, we’d be falling behind our competitors by the week, so we shipped, shipped, and shipped cause now everyone has AI. It’s just hours on keyboard vibecoding and whoever puts in the time wins. Simple.

I “got it” when I started vibecoding with my COO-hat on. 

Every sprint after we built the tools ran faster. The compounding effect was real and I had underestimated it completely. Internal tooling is a force multiplier, and it's the backbone of how we operate at Mentionstack. Most founders treat it like a distraction.

It’s PERFECT when it feels like a collaboration between a COO and CTO. By experience, here’s how I max out my vibecoding hours:

RULES FOR WHERE VIBE CODING WINS: 

Four triggers. If any of these are true, open Claude and start prompting.

1 - You do something manually more than twice a week. 10 minutes twice a week is 17 hours a year. Build the tool in an afternoon. Get the time back forever.

2 - You ping a teammate for a status update more than once a week. Every ask interrupts their flow. Every answer costs them context. Build something that surfaces the status without the conversation.

3 - A weekly decision requires pulling data from multiple places. That's not a workflow problem. That's a tool problem. Build a single view. I've done this three times in six months. Each one paid back in week one.

4 - Quality somewhere is subjective when it should be measurable. If your team is guessing at "good enough," you’ll be inconsistent. Define the standard, build something that scores it, even if partially manual. I did this for our content operation, and it started bringing in so many more leads it’s funny.

The SaaS graveyard is full of things that were fun to build and didn’t sell.

Internal tooling doesn't need to sell, it just needs to work. Build for you before anyone else.

↪️ ↪️ RIGHT TURN ONE MORE ↪️ ↪️

There's a version of this that applies to content & marketing.

Last month I built the AI Search Report on my phone on a hammock in 2 hours.

It's been the most-shared piece of content in my entire career.

Not a blog post, but a real artifact that took two hours because I wasn't using AI as my hands. I was using it as a thought partner. Pushing ideas back and forth, stress-testing the structure, letting it do the parts I'm slow at so I could stay in the parts I'm fast at. 

Some people told me they put it into their Claude as AI training.

🚨BEFORE YOU GO: 

If you've never checked how you're showing up in AI search results, get a fast & free audit. It takes two minutes, and the results are pretty on point. If you want to get aggressive on LLMs mentioning you over competitors… that's what Mentionstack does.

And if you want the full playbook on building an Ecommerce business that actually compounds, it's in Billion Dollar Websites or the CRO Masterclass.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably using AI, so just point it at the right problem.

Dylan