Vibe Coding in 9½ Stages

The setup

I'm a non-technical marketer. In roughly 18 months I've shipped 48+ live software products using Lovable and a handful of adjacent tools. This is not a story about learning to code. It's a story about learning to *direct* a system that codes.

The 9½ stages, in order

Stage ½ — Antenna. Notice the itch. Someone complains, a category is ugly, a joke wants to become a product. Write it down inside sixty seconds.

Stage 1 — Name the reader. Not "target audience". One human. What would make them screenshot this and send it to a friend?

Stage 2 — Pick the smallest useful shape. Landing page? Directory? Utility? Feed? Choose the shape that ships this week.

Stage 3 — Design tokens on day one. Colors, type, spacing. Not "brand". Constraints so nothing looks like the default Lovable/Tailwind starter.

Stage 4 — First-prompt discipline. The first prompt is the whole spec. Write it like a brief, not a wish list.

Stage 5 — Data before delight. Model the tables before you touch a hero section. If you can't describe the data in one paragraph, you don't have a product yet.

Stage 6 — Publish ugly. The domain buys you feedback. Ship at 60% and let the URL do the marketing.

Stage 7 — GEO/AEO tuning. If ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini can't cite you, your site barely exists in 2026.

Stage 8 — Compound. Cross-link to your other properties. One site is a page. Ten sites is a network. Forty-eight sites is leverage.

Stage 9 — Kill or keep. Every quarter, one property gets retired. The ones that survive get invested in.

Why the ½

Because the first, unnumbered stage isn't a step you take — it's the sensitivity you cultivate. Everything downstream compounds off of that one line you jotted down before the idea got sensible.