Vibe Code Cafe

Vibe Code Cafe is basically a listing site. It was designed to help people upload their products (something like a Product Hunt directory) and make it super easy for people to find new technologies that are being developed.

I started to build the site because I liked the name. I even hired a graphic designer and paid 300k for the whole design. It looks super nice, and I really like it, but within a few months of launching, I realized I actually had no marketing or sales strategy.

The site looks nice, but it was mostly me who uploaded the content. There were no backlinks, no content strategy, and no distribution mechanisms. It was basically a vibe-coded project with no sense of virality. That is how I would put it.

Overall, I would say it was a bad experience and I wouldn't do it again. Listing sites are super hard, even AI listing sites. Forget about making money; even just appearing in search pages is difficult. There is really no point to any of it because there are a million listing directories already. Maybe I should just rank those directories and sell that list for money; I think that makes more sense.

The main value proposition of the site was Auto Bump. It is basically modeled after the way sites like Cydia or Product Hunt function to increase daily active users.

The way it works is that you incentivize channel or website owners to visit the site, log in, and press the bump button. That allows their site to return to the top of the page again and again. Through this system, you attract a solid list of active sellers or media buyers who want to acquire traffic.

Once you have a consistent flow of daily and monthly active media buyers, all you need left is the traffic itself. Once you figure that out, it becomes an infinite machine.

I was charging $5 per Auto Bump. This means that instead of the person coming in to manually press the button, they just pay, and their website is automatically bumped to the top of the site every six hours. I still think it is a good idea, but I just never managed to gain the necessary traffic and traction. I really should have.

I even built a whole n8n automation workflow to scrape Product Hunt, find the owner of the website, automatically list them on the site, and email the owners the news that their website is now featured on Vibe Code Cafe.

Vibe Code Cafe Basic n8n workflow

But no, nothing. Most of those people were like big scammers; they didn't have emails or phone numbers to begin with.

I think Product Hunt is just a graveyard now for wannabe startups or traffic hunters. I doubt anyone actually uses it to find gold anymore. It is not even about Product Hunt anymore; it is more like an AI SaaS hunt.

But yeah, even though I really like the site, eventually no one visited.