You Guide To Vibe Coding For VC

Vibe Coding 101: Building For VC as a Non-Tech Founder

A few years ago, if you had an idea for a product but didn’t know how to code, you had three options:

1. Learn to code (slow),

2. Hire someone to build it (expensive),

3. Settle for a no-code workaround and hope it didn’t break.

Now you can describe what you want, and if you’re clear enough, a mix of AI tools and low-code scaffolding will get you 80% of the way. It’s fast, it’s messy, and it works surprisingly well.

Some call it “vibe coding.” It’s not a framework, it’s not a stack; it’s a way of building that’s driven by intuition, trial-and-error, and blunt prompts like:

“Build me a tool that takes my deck and shows me which investors are a match.”
“Give me a UI with a headline, three benefits, and a signup form.”
“Fix this code. I don’t know why it’s broken.”

You write, copy-paste, run, and keep moving. It’s duct tape development with ChatGPT as your co-pilot. And it’s how a lot of first-time founders are getting their MVPs live.

What It's Like to Build This Way

I'm not a technical founder, so I have dabbled (although I do have a great technical team to do most of the heavy lifting). But lotsa non-technical founders overcomplicate the early stages. They think they need a full-stack dev, a beautiful design, and a scoped-out feature roadmap. They don’t.

The founders who are moving fastest today are building in real-time. They're not architects, they're tinkerers. They’re using tools like Replit, Cursor, Framer, and Claude to piece together working products, even if they don’t fully understand what’s under the hood.

I’ve seen a founder ship a fully working “founder update generator” tool in under 48 hours without writing a single line of code manually. The idea was simple: founders plug in raw bullet points, and it auto-generates a polished investor update, pre-formatted for email or Notion.

He used Cursor for backend logic (formatting, token limits, saving drafts), Claude to structure the update and rewrite content in different tones (conversational, formal, metric-heavy), Framer to build a clean front-end with a CTA to export to PDF/Markdown, and GPT to help write prompts and validate the UX.

The product wasn’t perfect, but it worked. And it was enough to show an investor. Which brings us to the real question:

Do Investors Take Vibe-Coded Products Seriously?

Short answer: Yes. If you’re honest about what it is.

Investors don’t care whether you built the first version in VS Code or Replit. They care if it solves a problem, if users are reacting to it, and if you’re the kind of founder who can get sh*t done without waiting for permission.

A prototype, no matter how scrappy, shows initiative. It’s a way of proving two things:

1. You’re resourceful enough to build without needing a full team.

2. You can think in systems, even if you don’t write the code yourself.

Don't try to oversell it. If you’ve vibe-coded your way into an MVP, own it. Don’t pretend it’s ready for scale. Tell the story the way it happened. “I needed to test demand, so I strung this together using AI and no-code. It’s fragile, but it works, and five users already said they’d pay for it.” That level of honesty builds more trust than pretending you’ve built a robust product.

What Actually Matters

Let’s say you're a non-technical founder trying to raise. You've built something lightweight, maybe a Chrome extension, a GPT wrapper, a basic SaaS dashboard.

What investors will look for isn’t your tech stack. It’s your speed, your clarity, and your grip on the problem.

If you vibe-code something useful, demo it live. Walk investors through how you built it. Talk about what broke and what you had to fix. That tells them more about how you’ll operate post-raise than any polished product ever could.

And if your product is held together with tape and prompts? That’s fine. Just explain what would need to change to make it production-ready. The best use of vibe coding isn’t to build a final product. It’s to learn fast. You build the wrong thing 10x faster, which gets you to the right thing with way less burn.

Tools That Actually Work

This isn't a definitive stack. It’s just what we see most often working in the wild:

• Cursor: Write and debug code using natural language with Claude or GPT built-in.

• Replit: Build full-stack apps in-browser. Great for MVPs that require backend logic.

• Framer: Stupidly fast frontend builder for landing pages and simple UIs. Lovable AI  is also great for non-technical founders who want to launch landing pages fast without looking like they were built in 2010.

• Claude 3.5 / GPT-4o: Use them in a loop: prompt, copy, paste, run, refine.

• Phind: Like StackOverflow with superpowers. Great for solving specific bugs.

You don’t need to master all of these. Pick one backend tool and one frontend tool. That’s enough.

The Process (IRL)

Here’s what building by vibe actually looks like:

1. You describe what you want. Usually poorly.

2. You paste it into Claude or GPT. It gives you some code.

3. You try to run it. It breaks.

4. You paste the error into Cursor. It tells you what might be wrong.

5. You fix it. Maybe.

6. You keep going until something works.

It’s not elegant, but it works. And most of the time, it’s faster than hiring someone else to build your vision. Although I wouldn't rule that out altogether just yet.

Where It Breaks Down

Vibe coding can get you to a working demo. It can even get you to first revenue. But it’s not a replacement for engineering.

You’ll hit walls if:

• You need scalability or performance.

• Your app has a complex backend or strict security requirements.

• You need a durable codebase for future iterations.

This is fine. The goal isn’t to avoid engineers forever. It’s to build enough momentum that hiring one actually makes sense.

What vibe coding gives you is the ability to test ideas without depending on other people. That’s the most valuable skill in early-stage building: being able to reduce the time between idea and feedback.

If You're Just Getting Started

You don’t need a tutorial or a guide. You need a problem you care enough about to fumble through some prompts. Find a use case. Write it out in plain English. Paste it into a tool like Cursor or Replit and ask it to help you build it. It won’t be perfect. But if you can build something that shows what the product is supposed to do, even just once, you’re further ahead than most. And you’ll know whether the idea has legs a lot faster than if you waited 3 months for a dev to scope it.

Vibe coding isn’t a shortcut to building great products. But it is a shortcut to learning faster. And in the early stages, speed of learning is everything. It's how you avoid wasting 6 months chasing a dead end. It's how you find what users want. It’s how you raise, because you’ve already done more with less. If you can describe what you want, and you’re willing to wrestle with the tools, you can build something real. And if you can build something real, you can fundraise.

All the best.