From Vibes to Ventures: How AI-First Startups Like Giggles Are Redefining the Rules of Entrepreneurship

In January, 18-year-old Justin Jin introduced Giggles — an AI-powered social entertainment app that has already drawn over 120,000 people to its waitlist and generated 150 million impressions. Remarkably, this momentum came without venture capital backing, a marketing budget, or a conventional engineering team. Instead, Jin and his young co-founders harnessed AI to create a platform for Gen Alpha and Gen Z, blending AI-generated content, digital collectibles, and gamified social experiences.

Soon after, another player emerged — Base44, founded by a non-technical creator who used AI to “vibe code” a no-code development tool. Within six months, with fewer than ten team members, it achieved profitability, reached 300,000 users, and sold to Wix for $80 million in cash, as reported by TechCrunch. Together, these companies highlight a new startup archetype: ventures driven not by traditional coding teams but by creativity, culture, and AI orchestration.

AI is enabling visionaries without computer-science backgrounds to build platform-level products. Still, doubts remain — can this model scale without deep engineering expertise? The concept of “vibe coding,” coined by Andrej Karpathy, encapsulates this trend: creating with AI by simply speaking ideas. “You fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists,” Karpathy tweeted earlier this year.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan notes that many startups now

[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.