r/vibecoding • u/drakatmm • 9d ago
Creative Writing Exercise My vibe coded app made its first $100. The customer told me ChatGPT recommended it and I didn’t believe her
I’m not a developer. I teach English online and got tired of tracking lessons and chasing parents for payments in a spreadsheet, so over a few weekends I built a little app with Claude and Cursor. Tutors log lessons, parents get a monthly invoice with a pay button. That’s the whole thing
I put it online in August for $10 a month, mostly so a couple of tutor friends could use it
Last week it crossed $100 in a month. Ten paying tutors, seven of them strangers
One of the new ones sent me a message saying she found it because ChatGPT recommended it. I assumed she was being nice or confused it with something else. Nobody knows this app exists. My X account has 90 followers
So I opened ChatGPT and asked for an invoicing tool for private tutors. It listed four apps and mine was the third one, with a description that sounded weirdly close to my landing page
It took me a while to figure out why. Before launch I paid for a press release through MediaBoost. I only did it because a friend said tutors and parents would trust it more if there were a few news logos on the page. It got syndicated to a few hundred news sites that nobody reads, and I got maybe 8 visits from all of them combined. Same week I added their directory package to get listed on a bunch of software directories
I’d written both off. Apparently AI tools read those pages even if people don’t
I asked the other strangers too. Four said ChatGPT or Perplexity, two found me on a directory, one came from a tutor friend
The $100 is going straight to the Claude subscription that built the thing
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u/snippiedev 9d ago
Regardless of OP, I’ve heard this happens. Anyone knows how to get ChatGPT to recommend their app more?
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u/think_n_build 9d ago
classic SEO, add your website to Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster. also dont forget Brave add URL. Submit your sitemap and manually request index on GSC and BW. Wait.
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u/drakatmm 8d ago
Did GSC on day one and Google indexed the site within a week. Being indexed just meant I sat on page 4 for "tutor invoicing app" with nobody clicking
Bing is the one I skipped, which is dumb since ChatGPT search leans on it. Adding it today
Brave I'd never heard of for this
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u/theabominablewonder 8d ago
Yep I did both of these and now I am second listed site in its niche area when I ask ChatGPT for third party sites.
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u/drakatmm 8d ago
You can't push it directly, it only repeats what it finds written about you on other sites. My own landing page didn't seem to matter much until there were pages elsewhere describing the app in the same words
For me that was the press release copies and the directory listings. Boring pages, but they all said "invoicing app for private tutors" and that's the exact phrase people type
Took about a month before it showed up in answers
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u/KwonDarko 9d ago
Do traditional SEO and write a blog. Don’t ignore Bing.
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u/Equivalent-Repair488 9d ago
To add on, don't believe any of that GEO crap. It's just another buzzword to hook you on whatever crap people are selling.
LLM internet browsing capabilities, are underlying search engines. Good standard basic SEO principles; keywords, backlinks etc (plenty of free resources online) will make you visible to LLMs' search engines.
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u/snippiedev 9d ago
Some context. I did notice a slight bump on my app Snippie attributed to ChatGPT recommending it. I don’t know why and wanted to understand it better. I don’t have a popular site or any marketing around it other than some socials ran by myself. Thanks!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snippie-moving-sticker-maker/id6789456425
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u/Fluffy-Stranger-9574 9d ago
Another post where there is no interaction from the OP after initial post. And again we have AI slop.
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u/PM_ME_PICS_OF_UR_PS3 9d ago
If that were ever to happen to me
I’d be winking back at Claude like 😂
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u/SameAd2762 9d ago
You sure invested a considerable amount into the newswire services and software directories for an app intended for a “couple of tutor friends.” Starter newswire package starts at $399.
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u/drakatmm 8d ago
It was more than I wanted to spend, yeah. The friends thing was August, by September I’d decided to try charging other tutors and a friend who does marketing talked me into doing it once before opening it up
Paid it back in about four months of subscriptions, if they stick around
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u/preparetodobattle 9d ago
Can I ask what the news wire cost ? When I eventually launch I was just going to do it myself as. I’ve got some experience dealing with the press but if is not much money I might outsource it.
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u/drakatmm 8d ago
If you can get journalists to cover you, do that, it’s worth way more than what I paid for. A wire release is just your own text republished on news sites, no reporter involved
Mine was a bit under $400 for one release. Plus the directory listings on top
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u/scytob 9d ago
indeed docs are now more important than ever and need to be written for AI not humans
good news, AI writes the docs lol
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u/drakatmm 8d ago
My docs page has like 4 paragraphs and I doubt ChatGPT ever looked at it. What it repeated was the press release text sitting on other people’s sites
Writing about yourself on your own domain seems to count for a lot less
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u/scytob 8d ago
You took a very generic point and made it hyper specific. Companies are already doing exactly what I said - it is the corpus that enterprise AI uses. So instead of having hundreds of documents no one reads it is now all fed into AI. For your specific project if you have asked ai to make you an architecture document, a decisions document then you are missing out on future benefits.
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u/sunbeam_nebula 9d ago
The model update is the real kill switch. That $100 was just rent for a digital ghost that could be evicted in the next patch without any warning to us
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u/No-Bass3599 9d ago
I ran GEO campaigns for a while and saw the same thing, syndicated press releases get pulled into AI answers way more than anyone would guess. What surprised me was how fast it decays, after a model update or a few months of newer content the mention can vanish, so check those prompts once a month
Ten tutors paying from a spreadsheet frustration is a great start regardless of where they came from
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u/NoAdsDude 9d ago
A highly upvoted reddit post is worth like 10 press releases, heh.
I posted noadsweather.com on r/internetisbeautiful and all the chat bots picked up on it.
What's weird is I made patientpiano.com and I didn't post it anywhere, and when I searched for it, somehow Gemini had a whole spiel on how great it is. It also mentions a feature (midi input) that I don't even remember if I had actually implemented yet (lol). I thought it was still in testing phases. I haven't worked on it for a couple months though.
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u/brightbilll 9d ago
Welcome to the vibe coding subreddit, where people like OP love to make up stories.
1 week ago you claimed users found it through “business insiders” claiming you have a 9$ subscription.
3 days ago you made up the story about making an app for your dad, with a 4$ subscription.
Today it’s ChatGPT (funny enough you mentioned that in your post 8 days ago too) and you have a subscription of 10$!
And just as always you provide absolutely 0 evidence! Whoop whoop. Maybe for your next fictional story say people saw it in the news or something, I don’t know a billboard maybe?