While Johnathon was using greatVibe to build greatVibe, I was using it to build everything else. The company, the brand, the numbers, the website, the legal structure. All of it.
That is our truest proof case, and I think it is worth telling properly. Not a case study we pulled together after the fact to make ourselves look good, but the actual lived experience of building a company on the product we are asking you to buy.
Here is how it went.
Where I started
I have done a few startups, so I know roughly how long things take. A proper GTM plan, a financial model that holds up to questions, a set of brand documents you actually believe in. These things eat weeks. Sometimes months. And that is before you factor in the constant context switching, the things you meant to do last week, and the slow creeping feeling that you are running fast without going anywhere in particular.
So I opened greatVibe and asked Claude to put together a checklist. Not a vague list of things to think about, but a real one. Market-ready and investor-ready. What do we need, in what order, and what depends on what?
Claude came back with something solid. I pushed back on a few things and added things from my own experience, and we went back and forth until I felt like the list was genuinely mine. Then we broke it into three sections: pre-release, investor ready, and post-release. And then we sequenced it properly, so we were always working on the prerequisites first rather than building on foundations that did not yet exist.
That sounds obvious. But when you are the only person in the room, it rarely happens that cleanly.
The team I never had
The closest way I can describe what followed is this. Imagine you had ten people in a room, all of them genuinely smart, definitely sharper than you in certain areas, who never went home and never lost the thread, but who waited for you to lead. They brought the thinking. You brought the direction and the experience that shaped it.
That is what it felt like.
We started with ICP. Who are we actually building this for, and I mean really. Not a broad segment or a vague persona, but a specific person with a specific pain who would feel the value immediately. Getting that right early meant that everything we built afterwards had somewhere to point.
From there we worked on brand. Voice, essence, positioning. I did not write a brief and then wait three weeks for an agency to come back with something that kind of missed the point. I worked through it directly in sessions with Claude, back and forth until I had something that felt honest and that I actually believed in. It took a morning.
Then GTM. Where do we play, who do we go after first, what does the sales motion look like, and what does a buyer feel when they land on our page. Having done the ICP work first made this so much cleaner, because we were not inventing our audience as we went.
Then pricing strategy. How we think about value, what each tier unlocks, how we make margin without painting ourselves into a corner later.
And this is where it started to feel like something different. That pricing strategy fed directly into the financial model. I built a six-year model in Excel, real formulas with proper outputs, all of it within greatVibe, and when I changed an assumption in the pricing layer it moved through the model. When I updated the ICP, the assumptions updated too. Everything stayed in sync because it had been connected from the start, and changing one thing genuinely flowed through to everything downstream.
I set up a local dev server and built the website by working against the brand guide we had already written together. The design came from the brand, the copy came from the voice, and I could sit at the URL and iterate in real time. No handoff, no wait, no briefing document that got half-read.
Legal came last. Shareholders agreement, company setup. Not final without a lawyer, but structured, drafted, and ready for a final review rather than starting from a blank page.
The thing nobody tells you about
None of those things sat in isolation, and it turns out that matters more than I expected.
I could move from the financial model to the website security page to the shareholder agreement and back again, in any order, on any day. And greatVibe never lost where we were. I never had to re-explain the project, never had to set the scene again from scratch. The cognitive load of switching between very different tasks was a fraction of what I was used to, and that freed up real mental space for the actual thinking rather than the overhead of remembering.
Working with Johnathon was part of it too. I could ask greatVibe to share a piece of work with him, and he could take my pricing documents and feed them straight into product planning. I could take his technical decisions and update the financial model. We set decision-required flags for each other, things that needed a human call before work could continue, and it kept us honest and moving without needing a meeting to figure out what the other person was doing.
We could also ask greatVibe to pull together a summary of everything that had happened in the last 24 hours. Outstanding items, decisions made, things still open. It became our daily brief, and it was genuinely useful in a way that I had not quite expected.
What it actually felt like
I did not want to stop.
I would look up from the screen and it would be midnight, and I had honestly thought it was nine. Not because the work was compulsive in a bad way, but because it was actually working. I was moving faster than I had in a long time, and every session produced something real that I could point to.
I have done startups before and I know the grind. The context switching, the thing you meant to do last Tuesday, the document you cannot find, the slow accumulation of half-finished work that sits just outside your peripheral vision. I know what it feels like to run hard without being sure you are going anywhere.
This was different. I felt like I had put something on that made me bigger than I am. Not smarter, necessarily, but bigger. More capable, more organised, more confident that the pieces were all connected and pointing in the same direction.
I had trouble going to sleep at night. Not from stress, but from excitement, which is a feeling I had not had at work for quite a long time.
Why it matters
We did not build greatVibe and then look around for a proof case to attach to it.
We needed to build a company. The brand, the GTM, the pricing, the financial model, the website, the legal documents. All of it built on the same product, all of it connected, none of it sitting in isolation. Changing one thing flowed through to everything else, and that is not a feature we planned for. It is just what happened when you work in a system that holds the context and connects the dots.
That is the proof. I am it. And if you are a builder with a company to run or a project to deliver, that is what we made this for.