a vibe coded app with 11.2k+ users in the first 3 months. interview with the founder.
every single day I read all those loud headlines about founders who vibe coded their product and are making a million gazillion tons of money with it every day.
true / not true? do we buy the hype?
well, I’m not buying anything until I’ve seen it with my own eyes. so I found the founder who did exactly that: no team, no coding background, nothing.
she built the app MVP at Lovable’s SheBuilds Hackathon in 48 hours. the core idea of the app is to help women track their menstrual cycle and to turn this data into the productivity superpower.
is it even possible? Is the product the key? let’s say, you’ve just vibe coded it and it works - now what? I give you the founder Jenia Zimmerman-Buhaienko and our interview for this newsletter.
presenting Atta:
category - women's productivity & health
business model - D2C SaaS app
current stage - live on App Store, Android Market is coming
traction - 11.2k users, $1.5k MRR, 1k DAU, $0 ad spend, 3 months since launch
> on the first-time founder experience:
Building and launching something on your own is a life-changing experience. Even with nine years of GTM experience working with other startups, it is a totally different beast. You might know best how your product should work and sound, but you simply cannot be ready for everything.
My confidence lies in customer research, strategy, and product marketing. I talked with more than 200 women before building an MVP, and from that I learned A lot about how Atta should sound, feel like and even be talked about. But I wasn't prepared for the technical side. Once I got into UX/UI design and engineering logic, I realized that to make it truly great, I needed to bring in experts.
I also wasn't prepared for how dull some days can be when you're building solo. As a marketer, you have a specific domain. As a founder, you have to handle everything you've never thought about: domain settings, security, Google authentication/Apple sign-in, all the APIs.
But the hardest part, for me personally, is working relentlessly with no proof that people will actually buy your product before you launch. You just open your to-do list, tackle the tasks, and keep going without knowing if you are right or wrong. You have to trust your instincts, listen closely to your first users, and have enough stubbornness to get to launch day.
> on the product and market differentiation:
Once I started syncing my schedule to my cycle about two years ago, I knew I wanted to share this with other women. Unfortunately, typical period-tracking apps are solely focused on fertility, not daily productivity. And cycle-syncing apps — they do not adjust their advice to each woman, it’s like 1 tip for millions of women with different cycles, lives and needs. Crazy, right?
That’s why I created Atta. While "turning your cycle into a superpower" was our initial positioning, user feedback has shown that it’s fundamentally about self-care and, as a result, productivity that doesn't harm your body. That is the superpower I want Atta to help women feel.
> on the category of women’s health & wellbeing, and the GTM messaging & visibility:
Have I ever hesitated to talk openly about it? No. Hormonal health is an essential part of our biology, exactly the same as testosterone in male biology. The tipping point will be when we stop thinking of periods as something dirty or "too personal" and start treating them like any other health reality. When men have a sore throat, they aren't ashamed of it. Why should we be ashamed of bleeding every month?
That being said, I do feel some discomfort pitching Atta in the startup and investor environment, which is still majority male. It’s a bit more difficult to explain the value to some men, but it's just another task to do. If we want to create something great, we need men in this conversation.
With users, I don't have any discomfort at all. But we do face another hurdle: social media algorithms frequently penalize female health content. If you use completely normal words like "bleeding" or "breastfeeding," your content can be blocked. Normalizing how we share about women's health online is another major layer of breaking through this discomfort.
> on a $0 marketing budget, 118 users in the first 3 days, 54% conversion to free trial:
Hear me out, fellow startup founders: publish your journey and your waitlist as soon as possible! I am saying this because the majority of those first users came directly from a waitlist.
Even before having the idea for Atta, I was sharing my journey on LinkedIn, Threads, Instagram, and in various communities. Then, when the idea was in place, I started my research and asked women who were interested in female health and productivity to have a chat with me.
Later, even before creating the MVP, I shared the waitlist across my socials, and hundreds of women joined.
What's really interesting is that those first women really stuck with Atta! I love seeing how they continue their subscriptions and share feedback like, "Hey, I've been here from day zero, thank you for Atta."
If you don’t want to hear only flattering stuff, the people giving you that first real feedback shouldn't just be your friends and family. They need to be real people who actually use your product. And the best way to get their attention is to share your story publicly.
> on the distribution channels that work and channels that didn’t:
TikTok is definitely driving more installs for Atta than Insta, it's just easier to go viral there.
Atta’s TikTok content targets women who aren't familiar with the app yet, focusing on educational, relatable content about how they feel during different cycle phases and how to sync their schedules.
On the contrary, Instagram’s focus is more on nurturing current users. I started posting on Instagram right when Atta launched, primarily to keep waitlist users updated. But I would love to experiment with it in the same way as with TikTok.And by building in public on LinkedIn I met investors, booked podcast guest spots, and was invited to speak at events.
The best channel overall is Threads, followed by LinkedIn and organic App Store search. Threads is incredible for product discovery through recommendations, like "this app changed my life as a woman". Or through short-form content about building a startup!
So my ranking is: Threads, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, and then Apple Search (soon Play Store).
> on money wasted early and the issue behind it:
Paid advertising on Instagram and Facebook didn't work at all. I share publicly that we spent zero dollars to acquire our first 8,000 users, and that is entirely true. During the first few days of launch, I tested different ad messaging, and zero users downloaded the app. Not just zero subscriptions, zero downloads!
The issue was a lack of credibility. We didn’t have a massive amount of users back then or AppStore ratings. People download Atta because they trust our content, a friend's recommendation or my building-in-public journey. Promoting an unknown app with cold ads just didn't convert.
But I wouldn't call it a waste of time. I don't believe in that. Even when a test fails, you gain valuable knowledge. I learned exactly how the app shouldn't be promoted at this stage, and that was a great takeaway.
> on being a solo founder with no engineering background:
I've been working with engineers because of my product and marketing roles in previous startups but I've never written code before.
What was shockingly easy was how, with a single prompt, you can cover the main features, your vision for the flows, and the basic design, and Lovable makes it real. That was awesome.
The urge to throw my laptop out of the window? Oh yes, I remember that :) It has been happening when I realized how many important parts it skips if you don't explicitly prompt for them. For example, I mentioned "flows," but when I started testing the features, I realized the connections were completely illogical.
Also, the backend database isn't structured logically unless you specifically tell it what to do. And if you want to separate data tracks or see if someone clicked a notification, you have to explicitly ask for it.
I hated the days when I had to figure out why a bug was happening by just trying random things because I couldn't ask anyone for help, and Lovable wasn't helpful when something broke.
Ultimately, you reach a point where you need deep engineering and data security work that you just can't do on your own. For that, I worked with a freelance engineer. I'm really grateful for that help because I wouldn't have had a chance to make Atta secure without him.
> on the first role to hire for:
To clarify, I do have a part-time content creator who works with me on Atta, and I collaborated with a great UX/UI designer and a freelance engineer who did a tremendous job (let me know if you’d like a reference).
So, the first role (content creator) is already filled. The next hire will definitely be a full-time engineer, followed by another marketer to scale our digital channels, and then bringing the UX/UI designer in-house.
To get there financially, I'm currently raising a funding round.
Securing this investment will help me build out the core team and get us to our $1 million ARR goal much sooner than without it.
> a message to founders to wrap up with:
NOW is the best time to start. Even if you think you don't know enough – you are wrong.
Start with research. Ask people about their experiences with other solutions and what goals they still haven't been able to achieve.
Share your journey publicly, because that's how you find the first people to test your product.
Create the easiest possible test: a landing page or a no-code MVP with Lovable. You just have to put it out there and see what the feedback is.
The longer you keep it trapped in your head, the more it will demotivate you. Action is the best remedy for anxiety – so start doing it right now 🫶🏻
And if you need any help, advice or a pinch of motivation on this exciting path - you can always drop me a message on LinkedIn.