Show HN: Creao – Vibe coding product for founders
creao.aiHi HN! I'm North, DevRel from the CREAO team. We are a 15-20 person startup, and we spent a couple of months building this vibe coding product. We've been exploring the possibilities of how agents should assist people's work for productivity in various scenarios.
Three months ago, we noticed that all small teams and companies are struggling with subscribing to multiple SaaS tools that never fit their exact needs. Pretty much all founders and SMB professionals need customized productivity tools that fit their daily work routines, but they don't have developers to build these lightweight tools for them. So we thought we needed to build a vibe coding product that allows them to ship their own tools in minutes and get rid of these SaaS subscriptions.
For our product features, we built it differently from all the other vibe coding products. We want our users to build something actually useful instead of just a product prototype. But the current well-known code agents are performing poorly at building complex data schemas and integrating APIs. So we fine-tuned a small model for the following features:
1.Automatically builds complex relational data schemas
2.Automated MCP/API connections with existing systems
With these core capabilities, our code agent can then build internal tools that connect with existing systems with state persistence. For example, I built a dashboard to track my X engagement and export results to a CSV file.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FBBOdrtonlj_56jgQuAoPpGnABB...
This productivity boost is specifically designed for small team founders—you can build your own CRM workflows, data dashboards, revenue tracking, etc. Each of these could cost you $20-50/month in SaaS subscriptions.
We are still in the early stage and improving our user experience. Our team is delivering new features pretty much every week, and we would love to hear from HN to give us some suggestions on how we can do better. You can always reach me at north@creao.ai. I love to shape the product together with community users. I hope you can find our work very helpful for your productivity.
Thanks!
> We are a 15-20 person startup,
wow, that's a lot of people for such a product. what are you all doing there? seems seriously over-hired.
Fair question, I understand that 15-20 person sounds like a lot for a startup. However our product is not just a UI tool wrapped with Claude code, the reality is that making AI generate actually working full-stack apps with MCP/API integration in one shot required way more infrastructure than people thought.
If you test out lovable, you will notice that they require more than one round of conversations to build full-stack apps like asking you to config supabase manually. And it 's very hard to connect with existing systems either through MCP or customize API. If you can take a look at the use case video link I put in post, you will get a better understanding of what I mean by the capability differentiation.
Getting errors in console, won't start.
hook.js:608 Failed to parse JSON from match: SyntaxError: Expected ',' or ']' after array element in JSON at position 207 (line 3 column 194) at JSON.parse (<anonymous>) at build-studio-C28lcD4m.js:67:471
Stuck at "Starting project..."
Also, seems like 15-20 people to build this, after just a couple of months. Something is off with the numbers. Also, vibe coding platforms are becoming commodity with other platforms lightyears ahead, approaching zero margins.
Definitely wish you luck, but something feels off with the numbers, timeline, product and the market you chose :)
Nice idea!
As a UX designer with some dev chops, I’ve been getting a lot of value from the whole vibe coding thing lately. I can get from idea to solid working product super quickly.
I’ve noticed 2 parts where I get slowed down and I’m sure there’s a market for a product or two, which would fit your idea (I think):
- setting up all the tracking/monitoring/netlify config. So like GA, Search Console, AdWords, netlify hosting etc.
- guiding me through the launch - helping me plan and track how to market and get users onboarded
Would love to chat as I’ve had a bunch of ideas and your product looks like it’s off to a great start. Not sure if you’re hiring?!
Thanks for your advices! We are using amplitude for the user tracking/monitoring config. And yes we should add the guide through feature for newly registered users to onboard the product.
This is my email: north@creao.ai, let's have a chat!
> from idea to solid working product
What platforms have you been using for this? Did you face any challenges in getting the backend setup?
Delightful design, but from the verbiage on your landing page I wouldn't have guessed you were targeting founders, that sort of thin detail is usually reserved for disconnected decision makers.
Auch, your comment is sharp and I do really appreciate that! According to the think detail fact, we are planning to add a community use case page with some solid functional use cases in different categories, or do you have any suggestions? Would love to hear from you!
And here's my email if you would like to have a chat: north@creao.ai
This. There are a dozen vibe coding apps whose landing pages promise roughly what this one does. Why isn’t your tagline “Vibe coding for founders”?
All the em-dashes in the AI-generated text on the landing page are… a decision I guess.
> disconnected decision makers
auch. but you nailed it right
> Each of these could cost you $20-50/month in SaaS subscriptions.
Sounds to me that's a bargain, for half an hour in wages I get a battle tested solution built by real humans with real human feedback in the real world, instead of some unmaintainable oneshot AI approximation with zero support. I would easily waste more than that trying to wrestle some prompt into doing what I need, and even when it finally does it's still spaghetti code that will eventually fall behind surrounding reality and lock my precious data into a custom abomination.
Clearly the value proposition here is not replacing SaaS solutions but creating very customized solutions that simply don't exist as a product - just like spreadsheets in the previous era. A spreadsheet does not pretend it is a programming language, it just solves the data processing problem the user has in a visual and intuitive way.
This is to me the most glaring issue with vibe tools, they do seemingly advanced stuff but their users don't really understand the result they get, they are just firing their harpoon and get dragged wherever the whale will take them.
Thanks for your value prop advice, that really provides us some deep insights.
> Clearly the value proposition here is not replacing SaaS solutions but creating very customized solutions that simply don't exist as a product
This is true, I was thinking we should also target on SMB professionls who don't have IT department to customize a product solution for them. But they face the barrier that they generally don't have PM knowledge to craft what to build, do you have any thoughts on that?
A spreadsheet is a programming language and I will die on this hill.
That's the point, spreadsheets get users to solve issues algorithmically without forcing them to learn programming, but allowing them to understand and control the solution.
Full stack vibe tools solve some 1st order approximation of the problem, but then leave the user clueless to how adapt and evolve the solution without learning programing - and in fact are harder to maintain and debug even for those who do know programming. Re-applying the same tool is widely understood as a guaranteed disaster in the long run, current vibe tools can't really maintain their own creations.
Excel is OG of vibe coding
> Each of these could cost you $20-50/month in SaaS subscriptions.
or maybe don't. all founders I know are cutting on every single dollar. zero-subcriptions is a trend now.
This space is SERIOUSLY saturated. We tried our hardest to break into the vibe coding space with Hypership, but we counted about 40 different vibe coding tools with that number growing weekly.
Yours will make it 41.
Good luck. Seriously. It's a war zone out there.
it feels like it is war zone in every single software product niche now (games, iOS App Store, personal apps, social networks, AI tools)
how many different / how specific use cases will actually be build with this AI?
their demo "Task Management", "Budget Tracker" — all cliche and trivial. nothing new or specific here. build it once and re-use for everyone.
Some first impressions:
- I think you should drop the confusing black loading screen. It is (or should be) a static page, so just display it.
- Under "The Simple Path to Power" the first and third videos don't display for me, and I just get a grey box (I assume there's supposed to be a video there). Chrome on Windows.
- I can't make any sense of the paragraph starting "Software shouldn’t wait for clicks". None of the sentences seem to have meaning. It reads like AI slop with no context of your product.
- "Because they run in your stack, you keep ownership of logic and data, evolve them week by week, and avoid rented, brittle SaaS.": how is what you're selling not a rented, brittle SaaS? Everything else on the page makes it seem to be one.
- The pricing is totally opaque. What is a "credit"? Is the Pro plan really more popular than the free plan, as claimed? That would be surprising.
- When you say "Copilot" are you referring to Microsoft's product? If so, how is it running in your customers' apps, and what does your product contribute? If not, you should probably change it before MS complains about trademark violation.
- The Pricing link at the top doesn't link to the pricing section. Don't even put in Community and Blog links if you've got nowhere to point them.
- The little app mockups at the top can be dragged around (why?!) but not clicked on to find out more. The dragging is pretty buggy for me.
- Three of the five social media logos at the bottom don't link anywhere - don't put them in.
- What do you mean by "stack"? You say "Own the Stack" and "Because they run in your stack" - does that mean self-hosting? You say "Connect your stack automatically", which seems to refer to MCP/API connections to things the customer doesn't own. Where do the apps run?
- You're missing any kind of evidence that your product works, that people can use it successfully, or any other social proof. Link to demos of actual things made with your tool, and show exactly how they were made.
I've read the whole page, but I still have no idea what your product is or does beyond somehow magically enabling vibe-coding of some (unspecified) limited kinds of production apps by non-technical people. That's a big claim to be making, so you need to be backing it up with evidence.
Here, you write "This productivity boost is specifically designed for small team founders—you can build your own CRM workflows, data dashboards, revenue tracking, etc. Each of these could cost you $20-50/month in SaaS subscriptions." which is clearer than anything on the actual site (but still not very clear).
Thanks for your comprehensive feedback. I've read through each of your point. We will put more efforts on the marketing words refinement and the overall value prop, and would you test out our product to try out one project build tell us your thoughts? Thanks!
Also here's my email: north@creao.ai, would love to hear more feedbacks from you.
Some good feedback here.
The landing page is confusing and trying to use some clever tricks to impress, like those draggable boxes, which stopped me from easily scrolling (viewing on an iPad) and the wall of text that is fading in.
All this degrades usability.
Keep it simple.