I Found the First Vibecoded Business That Makes Real Money

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Original language: English

Original video: I Found the First Vibecoded Business That Makes Real Money · Channel: Tiago Forte · 30:51 · Watch on YouTube

Topics: AI agents, Task and workflow automation, Software engineering with AI, Markets and economy

Summary

Tiago Forte interviews Kristoff, a business owner with no coding background who used AI-assisted development to build an outbound sales agent for his craft ginger ale company. The agent researches and scores prospective customers, personalizes emails, and has generated leads for notable hospitality clients, while learning from campaign results. After early mistakes with invalid addresses and spam lists, Kristoff added validation and safeguards, then began offering the tool as a tailored agency service rather than a self-serve SaaS product. The conversation highlights how domain knowledge, careful iteration, and AI tools can help a small business build and sell useful software.

Key points

Kristoff runs a craft ginger ale business and also consults with luxury hotels on music and sound environments.
He built an AI outbound sales agent despite having only basic experience with HTML and CSS.
The agent finds and scores leads against an ideal customer profile, researches prospects, and writes personalized emails.
Kristoff tested the system on his own company first and learned to avoid spam problems by warming domains and validating email addresses.
He says the agent reduced email bounce rates from 30–40% to about 2–5% after adding checks and filters.
The agent uses company materials and answers to build a knowledge base, handle prospect replies, and improve campaigns based on results.
Rather than a self-serve SaaS tool, Kristoff shifted toward an agency model with hands-on onboarding and customized agents.
He sees the approach as best suited to B2B sales and stresses that clients need to understand their business and be able to follow up on leads.
The early experiments cost about $18 per month, plus another $20 mentioned in the conversation.

Chapters

Start	Chapter	Summary
00:00	Why look for real examples of vibe coding?	Tiago introduces the question of whether AI-built apps can attract users and make money, then presents Kristoff’s business and background.
02:05	From business challenges to an AI salesperson	Kristoff describes his interest in AI, his sales difficulties, and how he began experimenting with AI coding tools.
06:13	Outbound sales before and after AI	They explain cold outreach, the work required to research prospects, and the business leads Kristoff’s earlier efforts produced.
10:26	How the sales agent works	Kristoff demonstrates lead sourcing, scoring, campaign creation, email settings, and the compliance measures built into the agent.
17:17	Pricing, early mistakes, and fixing deliverability	They discuss the service’s pricing and compare it with hiring staff, then review early bounce-rate and spam problems and the fixes.
21:25	Company knowledge and personalized conversations	Kristoff explains how the agent learns the business, handles prospect questions, and improves its messaging from campaign data.
24:03	Turning a private tool into a client service	After interest from friends, Kristoff moves from a self-serve SaaS idea to an agency model with customized onboarding and mixed client results.
27:42	Who the service works for and what comes next	They discuss client readiness, the value of the business expertise behind the software, maintenance, and advice for aspiring builders.
30:20	Closing thoughts	Tiago summarizes the agent’s impact on Kristoff’s business and invites viewers to share what they want to build.

Quotes

I have three kids, a wife, ton of animals. — 05:11

That reduced my bounce rate to like 2 to 5%. — 20:23

I decided to actually shift and turn it more into an agency — 24:34

The fact that everybody can do it doesn’t mean that everybody will. — 28:15

Give it a shot. Try it out. Iterate. — 29:48

Concepts and entities

vibe coding, outbound sales, sales development representative, Ideal Customer Profile, SPF, DKIM e DMARC, Claude, Kristoff, Tiago Forte, Uncode

Full transcript (original language)

00:00 You’ve heard of vibe coding, but do any of these apps being created with AI have any users? Are they really making anyone more productive? Are any of them making any money? Those questions have been very much on my mind as we’ve witnessed this vibe coding revolution, which is why my ears perked up when I first met Kristoff. We first met each other because our kids were in the same class at school, and I quickly learned that he is involved in a lot of fascinating different types of work. His day job is

00:30 that he consults with high-end luxury hotels all across Latin America on how to design their music and sound environments. He also has a side business making organic ginger ale, and as you’ll learn in this interview, he’s now getting into the software business with the help of AI. I wanted to share with you how this busy father of three, who has so many ongoing projects, a very full schedule, and oh by the way, no coding ability, has managed to not only

01:02 vibe code his own AI salesperson, but is now using it to acquire profitable leads for both his business and now external clients that he’s taking on. It’s honestly a pretty mind-blowing real example of what AI-assisted software development is now making possible for small businesses. This conversation has completely reshaped what I think is possible on this front, and if you have any ideas or even inklings of things you want to build or create for yourself or for others as a profitable business or

01:34 not, I really hope it does the same for you. This is a real-world, at times messy, story of what it really looks like on the frontiers of vibe coding. I hope you enjoy it. Let’s start uh with how this all began. >> Okay. >> So, actually first say a little bit about your background. What do you do? >> Founded this a soda our craft soda, about 5 years ago. >> So >> We have an exemplar right here. I highly recommend it. We drink it at home. Officially endorsed by me.

02:05 >> [laughter] >> I mean, I started getting into AI like 3 years ago. I wanted to see how far I can take AI into my business, into my life, into like solving my personal issues and business issues, automating things, like making things easier, making things cheaper as well. And one thing I’ve really struggled is with my sales team. This this product is also it’s very expensive. Like competing against Coca-Cola or Pepsi is

02:37 >> So what I what I take from that is So from approximately 2019 to 2020 to 2023, you you ran the business without AI. So you know what it’s like to do this without AI. And then ChatGPT comes out and now now talk about the timeline. So so you have this pre-existing business, you have certain challenges, certain opportunities. What happens when AI arrives on the scene? >> And then Blood Code happened a year and a half ago, more or less. So I started getting really into that. And then I started

03:09 experimenting with the business. Tried a couple things and then I I had the idea to build this AI salesman. I started it out. I I I tried a couple different things, made mistakes, landed on spam lists, and had to learn how to fix all that. >> But but let’s let’s rewind a little bit because I want to I want to take people back to this moment. You don’t have a tech background. >> I used to make websites, but that’s

03:39 about it. I understand HTML, I understand CSS, but that’s about it. >> Sort of a a little bit of a a little bit of tech experience, but there’s no there’s no possibility that you’re going to go in and code this thing yourself. >> No, of course not. No, and I mean, I understand like the basis and I have a tech interest, I would say. >> Talk a little bit about kind of like your life situation. >> Okay. >> Uh because you have other kinds of work you do. You have a family. It’s not like you had a huge enormous amounts of free

04:10 time. >> I’m also a music consultant for hospitality. >> Okay. >> Right? So, I travel a lot to different hotels and tell them what kind of music they should be playing and >> Which is important because that that is a domain experience that you have >> Yeah. >> for the industry you’re selling into. >> Exactly. >> So, you have the ginger ale domain. I want to I want to highlight the importance of domain expertise. You didn’t just like think of the most random thing one day. You have the

04:40 ginger ale expertise and you have the hospitality expertise and you’re sort of like putting them together. >> And then my my business uh degree as well. I’ve been selling uh for a long time. I kind of know a bit about outbound sales and and cold selling as well. >> But then like what to pick first? >> Oof. >> Like what led you to outbound sales? It’s such a specific thing. And you could have created and built any role you could imagine. So, what led you to

05:11 that idea? >> Well, if you see my blood code, you’ll see like 40 projects that are started that are half baked. So, honestly, it’s been like I’ve been working on what has inspired me the most at that specific time. And I mean, I I did this at nights, right? Because I have my work and then I have my family as well. I have three kids, a wife, ton of animals. I started doing this when my kids go to bed and I’m watching a movie with my

05:42 wife. >> Wait, you’re watching the movie with Claude code on the side? >> Yeah, of course. >> I have to try that. That’s perfect cuz it’s true, so much of the time you’re just waiting. >> I can like hyper focus on this for like 30 seconds and then it starts working and I watch the movie or like have dinner with my wife and then go back to this and then I don’t know. It It worked for me. >> Yeah, it’s It strikes me that you have you had the advantage of uh this pre-existing ginger ale business which you could use as a sort of testing ground. >> Yeah, I had a

06:13 I mean I I knew the risks uh and I I used my own company as a guinea pig. >> That’s an interesting point about risk. Like like it’s a great reason for people to trust you cuz everything that you’re wanting them to do you’ve done it to your own business first. >> I made mistakes and I fixed them. The worst thing that that happened was like my domain fell in in in spam lists. But I I took them out and my domain’s healthy now. That means like I know what

06:44 not to do now for my clients. Which is huge. >> Let’s uh check out first the website. Talk a little bit about It’s funny like I’m not I’ve never been in sales or anything. Even a word like outbound I’m sort of just like what is that? >> In sales you have inbound and outbound, right? Inbound is like you have your your marketing funnels and clients come to you. Outbound you go to your potential customer. You have to adjust the message for every profile within each company.

07:18 Outbound like there’s a lot of work that goes behind it. You have to really do the research. You have to really narrow down who you’re targeting. >> Okay. So So another another term for outbound is is is really cold. Cold outreach, cold emailing, cold calling, cold something. >> Yeah. >> So that strikes me as people most people’s many people’s like least favorite job. >> You’re going to get no’s 90% of the time. >> Say a little bit about before you had this

07:50 this AI, you know, collaborator, this AI outbound agent. How did it work before? Did you do this work yourself? Did you outsource it? Did you have a staff member? Like what does this look like without AI? >> I started doing cold email by myself. It was so much work. Either I automated it with like mail merge and and different things, but every email is the the exact same. It looks like cold

08:20 email. >> have the time to go and research their background and all this stuff. >> You have like one template and you send it to 1,000 people, right? So, it’s very time-consuming. Uh, results are not great because I mean, people are numb to cold email. Either you automate it and it’s very generic or you actually put in the time to actually research who you’re contacting. So, it’s very time-consuming.

08:51 Results are way better, but it’s just too much time. >> And I’m I’m also curious, um, what would it So, you call this, I think somewhere an SDR, right? What does that stand for and what is that? >> Uh, sales development representative. >> Salesperson. >> Salesperson. Yeah. >> Did any of these leads that you were acquiring turn into customers? >> Yeah. Quite a few. >> With what kinds of customers? Were they Were they high-quality customers? >> Yes. We got into one Four Seasons Hotel, uh, two Belmonds, one InterContinental.

09:23 We’re getting into the the new Aman. We’re in negotiations right now with Liverpool, which is like a big retail store, retail chain here in Mexico. Some one-off restaurants, we’re talking to a few chains of restaurants as well. >> I think this is really remarkable because to to make any money at all with anything that’s Vibe coded instantly puts you in the top 1%. To to to establish existing client relationships

09:55 with major clients that have a a long-term value that is that is I would guess very high. Um is unusual. I don’t hear many examples of it. What does that feel like? Like like take us to that moment. Are you just like amazed? Like >> I think the day after I I I pressed like start, I was having lunch with my wife, got the the notification email. Uh >> [laughter] >> and I was like, “Check this out. It it

10:26 worked.” We’re super stunned and excited. Then like 5 hours later, got another one. I was like, “This is going to change your life, maybe. I don’t know.” >> I feel like we should take a look at it. So, this is the back end. Yes. Right? So, how does it work? And and uh what should people know? >> The agent automatically goes out and finds new leads whenever it’s running low. So, it doesn’t ever stop emailing people, right? So, it it it gets leads uh in

11:01 batches, right? It gets them and then scores them by how close to your ICP they are. >> Cool. >> Right? Um yeah, right now I have 3,284 leads in the pipeline that it hasn’t uh contacted. You can upload your own Excel sheets with leads if you want. Uh you can also upload

11:31 and you should the leads uh from your actual customers. So, the agent never tries to sell to them them because that >> Interesting. >> can look very bad. Before starting, we have to make sure these settings are correct. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Here’s a very quick instructional on how to do all of that. >> This is to make sure the emails don’t bounce, they don’t get marked spam.

12:03 >> Exactly. >> Do you tend to have the agent disclose that it’s AI? >> Not really. I have one customer that said it wants it to disclose it. So, it always says like, “Hey, just so you know, I’m an AI agent.” And like that’s the first contact. The actual is the signature says, “This person’s AI assistant.” And there’s also this

12:34 compliance aspect, right? I mean, this really applies for mailing lists, which this isn’t, but I just want to be extra safe and and use the same compliance needs. Neither me or my customers have any issues, right? So, if anybody wants to opt out or like if they want the agent to stop contacting them, they can just reply, “Please stop.”

13:06 >> Yeah, I feel like this is this is very ethical. You’re You’re finding In some way, publicly email addresses. These email addresses are professional ones, so they’re sort of designed to be contacted. You are using all publicly available info. >> There are countries where it’s not legal, so we don’t contact in those countries. And for the ones that we do, there are just there’s some rules and we follow them. >> I can tell. I can sense that each of these settings came from a real world

13:37 situation. >> It tries it it its best to seem human. >> Mhm. >> Also, it writes with natural language. I have this copywriting agent that writes every email and it has this specific skill to humanize the the text, right? >> Smart. >> I also gave it the the instruction to every now and then make spelling mistakes.

14:09 >> Mhm. >> So, I mean >> [snorts] >> so it looks more human. >> Love it. It’s true. It’s becoming such a signal of humanness. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Is there a certain What are the limitations? Is there a certain number of leads that it reaches out to per month? >> Yes. That’s what I I learned when I ended up in in spam lists, right? I was sending like 200 300 emails a day uh from my main domain

14:41 and from one inbox. That’s a huge red flag to Google, to to Outlook, all of those. So, what like the best practices are don’t send through your main domain, then have multiple domains and from each domain have up to three email addresses, right? So, from each address you can send like uh 75 emails per day.

15:12 >> It’s kind of like Unice has has a variety of skills, not just a sales skill, but there’s a the copywriting skill, the research skill. It’s combining a lot of different capabilities. >> Even finding leads. Like there’s different like is there sub agents that do different things. There’s one that goes into Google Maps and finds physical businesses and tries to find emails from there.

15:43 There’s one that goes into this one I did just last week. I hear in Mexico there’s this national registry of all businesses and their contacts, right? So it’s this huge Excel sheet of I don’t know millions of of businesses. So this specific sub agent goes in there and finds the right businesses based on the neighborhood, the type of

16:13 business, how many people work there, like it can get from that file. >> Can you show us what what does it look like to interact with it? Like do you do you even go into the into the dashboard and attract us or is it mostly all through email? >> I interact through through cloud, really? But here you can you’re going to ask it anything, right? For example, you can ask it to start a new campaign for hotels in California,

16:44 for example, right? So you ask it to do that, it will go out, create the campaign by itself. If it has any any questions, it will ask. Here it gives you like an idea of what kind of of copy and angle it would take specifically for that. These are not the final emails because every email is a bit different, right? And it’s going to test out different copies and different things. So you can see, for example, yeah, this looks good,

17:17 ready to trade. Ready. What it’s going to do is it’s going to create a new campaign and it’s going to go out, find leads, enrich them, and once it has good amount of valid leads that pass all the filters, it’s going to start emailing. I don’t have to stop it so it doesn’t start contacting people in California. I don’t have any distribution there. >> And well, how does pricing work? Like what do you charge? How how is it calculated?

17:48 >> three tiers. The the basic tier is $4.99. Uh it’s one domain up to two um email uh uh uh inboxes. Really the differentiation between all three is volume. >> This is this is so wild to me. This, you know, it’s it’s a standard pricing page, but this represents a paradigm shift in business for a couple reasons. One is the comparison to this is not other

18:18 SaaS. It’s people. It’s labor. What would it cost to hire someone to do that that job? >> here in Mexico, a good one, at least like 30 35,000 pesos a month plus its benefits, insurance, yeah, taxes fees, commissions as well. So all around you’re looking at at least like 50,000 pesos. >> Which is like $2,500. >> 2,500 uh dollars in the US, I think it’s it’s more. >> So so very substantial.

18:49 >> Yeah. >> What is What commission does Unnas take? >> Nothing. >> [laughter] >> That seems lower. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, of course. >> Describe the early the early experiments. How did you >> Okay. >> How did you begin using like using this in the real world? >> They created this open claw agent. It was very scrappy and I connected my a new email account to it. Gave it a fake name as well and gave it the task, right? Okay, find me contacts for this this this and

19:22 this profiles. It got me like way too many contacts that weren’t really my target. Really the volume was way too high. And what I found out was like the bounce rate was huge. I was getting like 30 to 40% of the emails bounced back. >> Why is that? >> Because the emails weren’t real. The the the people there didn’t work there

19:52 anymore. So, um the emails weren’t valid anymore. Eventually, I ended up in in in spam lists. So, I had to do this whole process to take me out of of of those spams spam lists. And then I found out about warming your domains. So, I started warming my domain, getting it healthier, like taking it very slow. So, then after that, I gave it the task

20:23 to before emailing people, actually validate that the people are real, the emails are valid, and all that. I put in a lot of different filters before it can actually send the email. That reduced my bounce rate to like 2 to 5%. So, it’s way better now. >> What was the total cost? I’m just curious of that whole like V1. >> That was like $18 a month. >> Total? >> Total. >> Plus the 20 bucks. >> Plus the the 20 bucks.

20:54 >> Absurd. Absurd. >> Yeah. >> It strikes me too, by the way, that that outbound sales is actually a great domain because the the default failure rate is so high. >> I probably failed to like 5,000 people for this before it could actually work well. And it’s fine. Like there’s there’s too many people you can consult. It came to a point where it actually started working, right? I was getting one to two positive replies a day

21:25 from actual people that were actually interested in in trying it out. You know, so it came to a point where it was too much. So I had to press pause and now the bottleneck was me. I don’t think I I mentioned this, but I made it an expert in my company, right? So it knows everything about my company. Every email it actually sends is a bit different. It’s

21:56 tailored to that person. So when a person replies, it can ask like, “Hey, so what is it made of?” Oh, it knows exactly what to to reply back. So it has these conversations with people that I don’t even see. I only get notified when the person says, “Yes, I want to try it.” >> Free sample. >> Free sample. So the goal is to steer the conversation into them accepting free

22:29 samples. >> Say more about how how did you give it all the context and knowledge about the company? What did that look like? >> So I asked my AI to create a questionnaire for me. What is it made of? Like why this is better than than the other sodas. I also fed it my decks, my presentations, price list, everything. >> Okay, so you’re not you’re you’re having it do the work basically. >> Instead of you having to convert everything to markdown and organize it.

23:01 Um, >> so once it’s intaking this information and these answers, it must have created some sort of persistent knowledge base, right? >> Yes. It has a brag base knowledge base. It also knows everything about your target customer. And also, every email that it is to sends is a data point. So, it knows what subject line works best for what

23:33 profile of of people, what copy. Yeah, it’s getting better. So, every week it analyzes this week’s results and improves. Yeah, it changes what it needs to to to change. So, it gets better over time. >> Take us to the moment where you decided to kind of transform this from like your own private tool to a product and a platform. >> Basically, it started because I was bored one day and there’s this WhatsApp

24:03 group. I shared with them what I did. Like six of them were like, “Hey, I’m Can I use it?” Like I I would love to to try it out. And I felt like, “Okay, maybe maybe there’s a business here, you know? Like maybe I can actually sell it.” I first thought of it as a like a SaaS business where like do it yourself. Gave it to a few friends to try it out. They couldn’t get it to work. Like they didn’t really

24:34 understand it. They had no idea of like how outbound works. So, I was trying to fix it, thought maybe the onboarding process isn’t great, maybe the UX is not good and all that. And I decided to actually shift and turn it more into an agency where I use it like I work with you to find out everything about your business,

25:06 your customers, everything. Uh come up with a with a a a strategy that makes sense and then I program your agent and we get to work. >> So, what happened with this these these first customers? Uh what industries were they from like >> Okay. >> What what where were they operating? >> One of them is uh marketing uh companies, uh other CPGs. There’s one company that that sells like ticket

25:39 ticketing services for events and and and venues. >> And what two results did they start getting? >> So, most of them have had great results. Uh not as good as me. Like the first month and a half between like 20 to 40 uh good leads that that they’re of following up on. There’s one that hasn’t worked. I think it’s way harder to sell through cold email. It might not work.

26:09 >> But for the ones that it has worked well, um you said like what you say 20 to 40 >> on average >> leads. What are those worth to those companies generally? >> Well, it really varies as well. Uh one of them is is also a beverage. I think their case is more like 1,200 pesos. Others are like way higher ticket like from a thousand to 5,000 dollars. And there’s also industries that

26:39 wouldn’t work, I think. For example, my my dad is a a realtor and he’s been asking but hey, I want to use this. I don’t think that would work because that’s more B2C sales. I think this only works for B2B. >> So, how how do you end up making money? It does end up being a SaaS subscription, right? >> The same thing. Like I The onboarding process is the most time-intensive for me because

27:12 we have to really dig in to the company, right? I understand how everything works, how their process works, what’s the goal, right? What do you want the agent to to get from the from the contacts? And that really has helped a lot as well because I have integrated more things that I didn’t need but they did. It’s getting more uh complex over time, you know? And also

27:42 it has this boutique kind of feel because I I can edit this to fit your needs. >> You mentioned before that the the bottleneck quickly shifted to like qualification and follow-up and stuff. Yeah. That’s probably happening with your other customers. They quickly have or pretty soon have leads too many leads more leads than they can follow up with. >> They have to really understand their own business, which is something that that seems obvious but isn’t really for a lot

28:15 of people. Understand their business, their product, their customers, make sure their processes work and can can handle the the leads that that we would send them. >> What do you say if you’re talking to a potential, you know, user, client of of Eunice and they say, “Well, you just vibe coded this in a short amount of time. I’m just going to vibe code it.” What would you say to them? >> The fact that everybody can do it doesn’t mean that everybody will. Yeah. And there’s a ton

28:46 of people that will never do this. There’s a ton of people that would love to and they want to do it, but they won’t. Before Vibe Coding, starting a business like this would mean hiring a team of developers, investing thousands of dollars, and it would take months for it to become successful. They would need to have 100,000 users. I

29:16 don’t need 100,000 users for this to be successful. >> What does the the maintenance on this look like? Do you have >> Mhm. >> Like when you want to add a new feature, or when something’s broken, or a customer complains, how do you change it? >> I just talk to Claude. I mean, the way it’s it’s the set up right now, I get notified whenever there’s a an error, whenever something breaks, it doesn’t work. And I mean, Claude takes

29:48 care of it. >> Do you want to say any final words to I don’t know, maybe someone who is thinking, I guess in a similar position to me, who is thinking of building something. Like what would you tell them? >> Give it a shot. Try it out. Iterate. No, and and like the thing you start with will probably not be the thing you end up building. And that’s what happened to me. If you don’t know how to do or how to start, just ask the AI. >> You can find links to the Uncode website and sign up for a free trial to run it

30:20 in your own business in the description below. Kristof is an example of someone who built a completely Vibe Coded app that’s powered by AI that is already saving him tons of time as a busy founder and father that’s finding him new customers for his business and growing that business measurably and now also taking on external clients as a whole new line of business. He’s told me that it’s already completely changing his life, not just his work life. This isn’t a fantasy anymore. It’s something

30:51 that people are living now, today. I know my brain is cooking with all the ideas of things that I want to build and create now that we have this superpower at our fingertips. I’d love it if you shared below in the comments what you plan on creating or are already creating.