Vladimir Golubovic

We started as a sustainable made-to-order clothing brand. Custom pieces, small batch, everything done internally sourcing, pattern making, grading, cutting, production. The unit economics actually worked because we controlled the whole chain. We even partnered with creators in the thrifting space to get the word out.

But we still couldn't reach enough people. Getting a small brand in front of a large audience without a huge marketing budget is a different kind of impossible. We were bootstrapping and every channel felt like shouting into the void. The product was good. The audience just couldn't find us.

That was the moment realizing we didn't have a product problem, we had a distribution problem. And no amount of improving the clothes was going to fix it.

I ve been testing the 'Free Tier' limits of the 2026 AI landscape. While everyone swears by Claude 3.7 or GPT-5.2, I m trying to find the 'Golden Ratio' for makers on a zero-budget.

My current findings for the Office Bee MVP:

• The Brain: Gemini 3.1 Pro (via AI Studio) seems to have the highest 'Reasoning-per-Dollar' (free) for deep R&D.

• The Frontend: v0 (Free Tier) for shadcn/ui components.

• The Glue: Bolt.new for the initial scaffold.

The Challenge: Most 'free' models hallucinate complex state management in full-stack architectures.

Vibe coding seems to be everywhere right now, people are building apps just by prompting AI.

But I m curious if anyone here has actually made money from something they vibe coded, especially people who didn t come from a coding background.