This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with John Hu, a 30-year-old cofounder of Stan in Venice, California. It’s been edited for length and clarity.
I worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York from 2016 to 2017 and at another investment bank in San Francisco from 2018 to 2020.
I started an MBA at Stanford in 2020 but dropped out to build Stan, a creator monetization platform whose core business is Stan Store, which helps people sell digital products and courses. We went on to launch Stanley, an AI product that helps people develop and scale content across LinkedIn and Instagram.
My cofounder and I vibe coded Stanley over 14 days and launched the LinkedIn version in June 2025. It hit $200,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within six weeks. The Instagram version launched in March 2026 and has also been successful.
Stanley picked up steam quickly
Stan as a whole company has an ARR of nearly $41 million. The breakdown is $3 million in ARR from both versions of Stanley and $38 million in ARR from Stan Store. Stanley for LinkedIn crossed $1 million in October 2025.
We vibe coded the tool and iterated in real time because there was no other option. Everything moves so fast that you have to ship quickly — there was no consideration on our part to do it in more than 14 days. I wish we could’ve done it in seven.
Here are four strategies we leveraged to make our AI tool successful so quickly.
1. Don’t code slop — instead, deeply understand your customer
There are a lot of people coding slop. The way you can actually successfully vibe code a product that genuinely makes money and is a repeatable business first requires you to deeply understand your customer.
We knew what we wanted to build, and because we understood our customers so well, we were literally customers and content creators ourselves.
The important thing to remember is that vibe coding will help you build anything. Whether that thing is worth building or is slop is a different question. That’s the work you now have to do as a human, because you’re no longer the engineer building it, but you have to be the decision-maker who has the right insights into the market or the customer.
2. Pretend to be ‘The Wizard’
A startup is kind of like The Wizard of Oz. You’ve got to get behind the curtain and pretend to be the tool. In our first user interviews, I was pretending to be Stanley.
I came up with content ideas for potential customers to validate. I was sending sample emails and asking, “Is this interesting to you? Would you subscribe to this?” I was the fake Stanley — the Stanley behind the curtain.
We were constantly asking ourselves, “What do I spend my time building versus not?” Building a product is a game of prioritization. We were prioritizing making sure Stanley’s actual usage experience was great.
3. Build and iterate in public
Building in public — sharing your journey of the ups and downs — is a great tactic as you’re launching something. It helps you get more believers who might become customers.
Sharing online has a dual purpose. It helps you build distribution and the brand for your business and, on top of that, attract your first few customers. We reached our first $200,000 in ARR after two weeks of posting. People contacted me to say, “I really want to use this.”
We’re in a phase of the social zeitgeist where, if you share your mission and the highs and lows of your journey, people interested in your product will naturally gravitate toward it and be really excited to be beta testers, which is what happened to us.
4. Have your AI agent send cold emails
We also sent a lot of cold emails, but we didn’t send them ourselves. Stanley did. We identified our first target customers by reviewing about 200 LinkedIn creators’ profiles. We wanted to beta-test our product and convert them into customers.
We had Stanley write them an email with the best possible content ideas. Then we added: “If you want to draft these posts out fully or if you want to use me more, click this link.”
It’s a great way to test if your product is good enough. If they open that email and click through, they’re probably pretty interested as customers.
There’s never been a better time to build something
It will be the people who decide, rather than sit, complain, and scroll social media, to actually take action and put their lives into their own hands who will succeed. I hope everyone does that as soon as they can.
Business is a huge part of who I am, so I really want to make sure I live my mission. After that, I want to have a family, be happy, have a farm somewhere, and then drop off the face of the planet at some point.
