"Vibe coding" influencers are ruining your life

The idea of getting rich as a solo software developer, it's nothing new. You have people with big followings like Marclue and levels.io who have a lot of visibility, and most of them talk about how they left the the corporate or writing code for other people in order to build their own ventures and they're making good money out of it. But what happened in the last couple of months and weeks is that this vibe coding virus just added more gas onto the fire, because it made the whole idea seem a lot easier. This is probably the most famous case with Peter Levels, the influencer I mentioned before, building this um flight simulator with AI and supposedly getting it to 100k MRR. Soon after that, uh tons of other influencers jump onto the vibe coding your own SAS idea and more and more of these people started supposedly building apps with vibe coding, launching them and actually becoming profitable solo app developers. And this is what I want to talk about in this video. About how tech influencers selling this idea of vibe coding your own app are only telling you half of the truth, why AI and vibe coding did not make things easier, but actually harder. The financial reality of a solo independent developer. Why staying an employee, it's a far better option for most software engineers out there. And finally, if you still want to become a founder as a software engineer, what's the best moment to do it? And what you should know before you take the jump. But first, most developers I know are smart, they are analytical and they are also very skeptical people. How come they fall so easy for this? I mean, who wouldn't, right? We live in capitalism. Why wouldn't you want to get rich fast? The internet and social media, it's very good at taking advantage of our desires and make us dream even more. And in the last couple of months, people started joining about how amazing is to become a solo founder. They can, you know, work remotely, they have flexibility, they have freedom, they can

be coding on the beach, then go surfing, and they can travel the world while posting very nice selfies. So you must imagine you have this software engineer working, you know, for a corporate or a startup somewhere in, you know, North America, Canada or even like Germany. You know, whether it's not very nice, winters are very tough, cost of living. It's very high, their job pays well, but taxes are also high.

And then they see these people who are like, you know, all around the world living the dream life, and they say, why not? I I also want the same. You know, I don't want to be stuck in this corporate job and just, you know, having enough money to to buy a home, maybe if I'm lucky and retire. So, of course, the side hustle comes as a solution to everything, right? And it seems like it's even gives you a tan and a six-pack included.

And if you really think about it, you can't really blame neither the influencers who are kind of selling this lifestyle, nor the people who are actually, you know, trying to escape the certain realities they don't like about their life. Most software engineers are in the producer class. You know, they feel like they are writing all this code just for the company to get rich. Their salary, it's in most cases fixed, and they only receive the pressure, the expectations from management, and then they get they get a salary that's highly taxed.

On the other side, the job market became insanely competitive in the last couple of months and years. Uh wages are not getting better, in many cases they stayed flat, but because of inflation people lost money, and ultimately managers are demanding more and more. So a lot of developers are getting the idea that number one, they won't get rich by being an employee, and number two, they're probably burn out and sick and tired of all the pressure they have to face at work.

Then comes AI, which made the idea of building something very good, very easy and very fast. Which is only partially true, because yes, it works for MVPs, but, you know, most users and we will get on to that later, will not actually pay you money for an MVP. I think there's also a promise of certain freedom. Now, I think what a lot of developers forget is that owning a business and running a business actually decreases your freedom.

Because in the end, as much as you own the business, or your app, or whatever you're building, the business owns you. It's like having a small baby. If you live, the baby dies. These days it seems like the only way to to be happy and and fulfilled is by having your own thing, which might be true for some people, but I can tell you now that happiness is not having your own company. Finally, I believe there is a big distortion and miscalculation of everything it takes to build a successful company.

And that's what we're going to talk next, because while I do believe that these influencers, many of them have some good intentions, I do believe they claims are highly misleading. And what I'm talking about is these kind of videos where people are making huge income claims, talking about how much money they make. And the truth is, these influencers are not telling you the whole truth. The truth is most of these people are only sharing wins and upsides, making it look like it's, you know, it's possible for you too, and it's just a matter of how hard you try.

And I don't blame that, I just believe that when it comes to revenue specifically and the numbers they share, they are only sharing the good months. This is very true in business, you can have a month where you're making, you know, 12K, 30K and next month you can make zero and the month after. Which is why a single metric never tells the full story. The truth is that the probability of success is very small when building a SaaS or an app, the reason being it's the market it's already very saturated.

And of course, vibe coding might make building an MVP a lot easier. I agree with that. But in SAS, the barrier of entry, it's not building, nor coding, that's the easy part. The hard part, the barrier, it's actually the cost per user acquisition and the churn, like people, you know, even if you get some users, they use the app for for a few weeks or months. They pay for it once, but then they leave.

And what these people, I'm not telling you, is that they had already very big followings that they used in order to launch their products and have zero cost of marketing. But again, I feel like what most developers are confused about is that at this stage, at this MVP stage is not the building again. It's marketing and sales skills. Why do I mean? Because it's not even about getting a first sale, it's about getting leads, getting people to talk to you, talking to those people, understanding what do they actually want, what are they willing to pay for, then selling it to them, and then maybe start building something.

And you can use Chat GPT and AI to write your landing page and to write copy, and I can guarantee you you will make almost zero sales because it will sound like every other marketing crap out there, and most people have been exposed to so much advertising that when it sounds like advertising, they don't even see it. It is indeed a gold rush, and most people will die digging. And yet, some of them might be successful, but most success does not last.

And again, it's due to this zero cost in marketing because the founders have big social media presence. You know, they have a big YouTube channel, they have social media. And what many of those people are not telling you is that they're probably spending more time on social media than on actually building a good product. Because a lot of these founders are just focused on marketing, marketing, marketing, and actually what they're pushing into the market, it's a crappy product.

The next point is that the financial reality of a solo developer is very far away from, you know, having branches and and surfing and then working 4 hours a week. Because most projects don't make any money. This is a developer who quit their job at Google to become a solo founder and build side projects and see if they can monetize them. And going back to Mark Lou, who it's one of the most transparent person in this industry and actually publishes their numbers.

The first thing you can see looking at this slide is that his revenue fluctuates a lot. Actually, in this last month, he made about 1200 income from around six different apps, six apps that require your attention. And if you factor for taxes, if you factor cost of living, he had probably zero or negative income these last months. Keep in mind that the salary before tax of a US based midlevel developer It's already around 10k, maybe 11. So it'll take you a lot of work just to replicate the income you get from a mid-level developer job. And and the main economic reason for this is that big companies who have specialized people for different functions are able to take advantage of economies of scale. So if you are a developer working for a big software company, the little feature that you built and you took you a few hours, this will be rolled out to hundreds of users. And the company it's able with small changes to deliver immense amounts of value because of economies of scale. In in the case of Mike, a lot of his income, you'll see it comes from actually selling courses on how to start your SAS. And I'm not saying that's not legit or anything like that, I'm just saying is that the expectations that he might be creating are a bit overboard. Finally, cheers to him, I think he's a very capable, very smart guy, and he's being very transparent with his numbers, which, you know, most people in this industry are not. Now, of course, some people would say, hey, you just have to work harder, right? Like you can see levels of IO, only four out of his 70 something projects ever made money and grew. And I think this is a very dangerous mentality when it comes to business. I see many developers falling victims of this, I see many other business owners and thinking about business like a lottery, like you just have to get lucky. Then the best strategy is just to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. Unfortunately, that's not how business works. Yes, there is experimentation, there is trial and error, but there is also strategic understanding of a certain product and a certain industry. And you have people who actually try this, they try building a SAS for 300 days, he made almost zero money. Then, you know, Dory and develops also, built a SAS and indie hacking, it's hard as hell, he tells his his own story, and why my indie hacker's dreams are dying. What all these people have in common is they underestimated the amount of work it takes to actually promote and get someone to use the product. And maybe you don't like that job, that marketing and sales job as a software engineer, which is not what you enjoy doing, but that's what it takes to build and launch a product in today's

is, nor I see, what? And the other question is, do you really want to become this person? I mean, if you decide to go out there and build your own app or your own software, you will stop being a developer. You will be an accountant, you will be a marketer, you'll be a salesperson, you will be everything the company needs for you to succeed. The first problem is you are probably incompetent in many of those areas.

Up-skilling will take you years, and and that's okay, because you don't need to know it all. This is why it's better for you to find a team and become a co-founder. The other thing is, maybe you don't like being on the phone with people. Maybe you don't like, you know, writing copy, writing emails, writing advertisements, making YouTube videos. Maybe you are not going to enjoy it. Of course, at the beginning, everything is so new and it's so cool.

But do you see yourself doing this for the next 5 to 10 years? In the case of many developers, the answer will be no. Then stay a developer, stay an employee, it's a perfectly valid way to live your life and to make your money. Which leads me to the next point, why staying an employee is better for most developers. And the main reason is this, because you might end up losing a lot more money than you make.

You see, let's suppose you make 130k, then you you quit your job to become a solo dev. From January to September, you give it nine months, you make zero money. Then maybe you make some money, but of course you need to cover your expenses, you need to pay tax. And even if you eventually become successful and start making some money, it will still be hard for you to replicate the amount of money you'd get as a salary in a fixed job.

While working 100 week days. Which is the opposite of what you want to do if you want to become rich. As Warren Buffett says, the rule number one, it's never lose money. And rule number two, it's never forget number one. And yes, you can get rich by, you know, properly managing your money, controlling your expenses and just being a good employee. So the real cost of opportunity for developers who try to go that path, it's you dip into your savings, you have no health insurance or retirement contribution.

You lose your future income. It's a huge financial risk. The odds of success again are very small. The barrier of entry again is not building or coding the product. The barrier of entry, it's cost of acquisition, market penetration and churn. Most niches are already full of competitors while much better funded. You compete with companies from Silicon Valley who have a marketing team, they have a sales team, and they have money to stay in the business longer than you.

Again, it's a gold rush, most people will die digging. But we only hear the stories of the ones that found gold. This is also called survivorship bias. And the thing you want to remember is that just because something is possible, doesn't mean it's probable. I love this quote from Naval where he says, "In a thousand parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them, you don't want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you get lucky."

So we want to factor luck out of it. And if you want to have a good life and get rich as a software engineer and you want to factor luck out of it, then you won't try to build your own app or start your own company. Unless, and that's why we come to the last point in this video, there might be moments when you're becoming a founder as a software engineer might make sense. For example, if you're already at senior or lead level, you have contacts, you have the experience.

And you're extremely employable and you can say, hey, I'm going to give a year to this, I can always go back to my day job. If you have at least six months of savings in the bank. Or maybe you have an employment insurance that might give you some cash while you are busy building this thing or moving back with your mom and dad. You know, anywhere where you can decrease your expenses for a long period of time until your app starts making money, then it makes sense for you to fund it.

If you don't have major liabilities in your life. If you have small kids or you have your partner that you need to support financially, then building an app, it's not for you, it's okay, you don't have to do it. Also, you don't want to start this only because you hate your job or because you want to make more money. If you don't like your job, you can switch it. If you want to make money, then don't become a developer, then become a salesperson and start selling real estate.

That's not my area of expertise. But there are very good resources on that. Because this kind of motivation, money or hate of your previous job will not last. All business founders, you know, that build big businesses, they had a certain passion about a problem. Or they learned that passion with time. But money was not their only motivator. So are you willing to sink 5 years of your life into something that might not work?

Or if you have a co-founder who has the marketing and sales skills and they also have integrity and work ethic? Until then, you are better off selling your time for money as a software engineer and enjoying life.