This told essay is based on a conversation with Vitalii Dodonov, a 29-year-old founder and CTO based in Toronto. Edited for length and clarity.
I studied chemical engineering at the University of Alberta in 2014 after someone recommended it as a solid career path. In college, I worked in a mineral processing lab where I observed people performing repetitive manual tasks. I thought there had to be a better way, so I started learning coding on the side.
Deloitte came to my campus for recruitment. I was hired because of my dedication throughout my career teaching self-taught coding. At the beginning of my fourth year in 2018, they offered me a job working as a data scientist. I started working there three months after graduating.
At Deloitte, I realized my passion was in coding and software and continued building side projects on my own. One of them was Vhinny, a platform that aggregates financial information of listed companies.
My experience building Vhinny laid the foundation for my current company, Stan, which generates tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. One of Stan’s AI products, Stanley, was vibe-coded in just two weeks.
After about two years at Deloitte, I started looking for other opportunities.
I felt underpaid and knew the best market for my skill set was software engineering, not consulting.
I struggled because most big tech companies wouldn’t consider me because I didn’t have any formal software engineering qualifications. I discovered the role of open software engineering at eBay. And it just naturally gravitated toward the things that interested me the most. I was fortunate enough to be able to use LinkedIn’s easy application feature for the eBay role.
I failed the technical interview at eBay.
My strength was discussing Vinny. I did this for two years, working 5-9 a.m. and 5-9 p.m., and taught myself engineering. When a hiring manager asked me why I’m great at what I do, I pulled out Vhinny’s architecture and gave a full demo, explaining in detail how it worked.
I used skills commonly practiced by senior and staff level engineers. All of this I learned on my own from Google and YouTube, working backwards from the questions. They hired me as a Senior Software Engineer in May 2020.
While at eBay, I met my current co-founder, John, and decided to build Stan, an all-in-one platform that allows creators to sell digital products through a single link in their profile.
I left eBay to work full time at Stan in June 2021
I am currently the CTO. We spent the next few years building our core creator commerce platform. As we seek to better serve our customers, our mission to help creators earn a living working for themselves has become clear. We realized that our biggest challenge was not selling digital products, but building an audience willing to buy them.
We saw an opportunity to help creators build audiences instead of treating them as utility-driven monetization products.
My co-founder and I locked ourselves in our apartment for 14 days to vibecode a product to do this from scratch
I believe that to be creative you need to think outside the box. A new environment helps you see things differently. We chose London because neither of us had ever been there.
We wanted to target creators and entrepreneurs, so we focused on LinkedIn. I didn’t write a single line of code. It was all just me and the cursor. We vivecoded Stanley, our AI “content head” product to help creators create high-performing content on LinkedIn, into a fully functional tool in 14 days.
The platform uses AI to generate posts that sound like your own voice and tracks which posts perform best by analyzing engagement data. It has evolved from a writing assistant to a performance-focused tool that helps creators refine their content and consistently generate viral posts. We documented the entire process on YouTube and made it available to 250 paying customers on the first day.
Stanley was an immediate success.
Within six weeks of launching earlier this year, we reached $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Currently, Stanley is tracking $3 million in annual recurring revenue. $1.5 million of that came from Stanley Instagram, which he later launched, and $1.5 million from Stanley LinkedIn. Stan earns approximately $40 million annually.
Our vision is to build the world’s AI content stewardship for everyone. There are a lot of people doing great work, but very little online presence. Building that presence is a full-time job, and many people don’t have the time or skills to do it well.
We believe that if AI content executives can grow their online footprint while giving people the tools to focus on what they do best, they will create more opportunities and be more successful.
No prior experience is required to start vibecoding, but a certain mindset is required
One of the pitfalls of vibe coding is believing that coding itself is the solution. The correct way of thinking is that it is simply a means to provide value to the customer. Success depends on understanding the problem you are trying to solve and being able to solve it for as many people as possible.
Next, define your goals, such as building a $10 million business, quitting your job, or creating financial security for your family. Work backwards from that goal and ask, “What do I need to do to get there?” From there, you can accomplish anything you want.
We live in a world where AI agents give individuals the power to rival entire corporations. It will take effort to get there. If you are willing to work backwards and work hard, there is almost nothing that is out of your reach.
My ambition is to build the next generation of companies that the world will still be running in 30 to 40 years. I’m working on different aspects to make that happen. Will I ever go back to work? Very unlikely.
I don’t see myself working for anyone.