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AI & I · 3 min instead of 51 min · Oct 14, 2026

Vibe coding his own app taught an investor why SaaS still sells

Matt Hartman

Founder & Managing Partner, Factorial Capital

As a Betaworks partner, he was the first investor in Hugging Face, Anchor (bought by Spotify) and Squad (bought by Twitter).

  • NQ

    Natalia QuinteroHost

About this segment

Hartman built Ghost Pepper, a local voice-to-text app that hit number one on Hacker News. Maintaining it showed him that SaaS buyers pay for constant upkeep, which complicates SaaSpocalypse talk.

From “How Hugging Face’s Investor Spots Winners”, Oct 14, 2026. Watch the full episode

“The other thing I learned was when you just vibe code something for yourself, you have to maintain it.”
Matt Hartmanat 37:23 · AI & I37:23

Takeaways

  1. Local models remove inference costs, so open-sourcing the app was free
  2. Constantly swapping in the newest models made it faster than paid rivals
  3. Vibe-coded tools must be maintained; SaaS fees pay for that upkeep
Watch 2:51 from 35:23

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 18:07Back founders whose pivot foot is technology, not a market3:03

  2. 35:23Vibe coding his own app taught an investor why SaaS still sells2:51

  3. 31:01How Hartman judges an earned insight in early founders2:24Up next

Transcript

From the transcript AI & I publishes with the episode.

  1. 35:26

    So a product that I built that got a little bit of attention earlier this year was called Ghost Pepper. There's these apps, and there are many of these things that are used to, you hold out a hotkey and you speak. Like a lot of by coders just want to speak the prompt. And so I was using it and I was thinking, you know, I'm seeing all these local AI models for voice attacks. Why do you even need to pay for inference for this thing?

  2. 35:50

    Couldn't you just do it on your own machine? So I went to Claude Code, I think, and said, look at the hugging face repos. Here's a couple that I know about, but find whatever you can. Um, and I want to build something like, uh, like this. I use this skill, which I love called superpowers, which I think for any product developer, if you add superpowers, I think it's available for both Codex and Claude.

  3. 36:15

    I was using it in Claude. Um, it's, it's by this guy, Jeff, uh, I'm sorry. Jesse Vincent. I, yeah. It's probably this guy, Jesse Vincent, who is like a genius prompt engineer, I think, is how it works. But the difference between using this product to build things and not is night and day, in my opinion. So I used superpowers, and I had Claude do a bunch of research with me on voice models. I told him what kind of computer I had.

  4. 36:42

    And then I built this voice-to-text network. tool that I called Ghost Pepper, and put it on Hacker News, and it ends up going to number one on Hacker News, which I'd never posted anything to Hacker News. I was really excited, but I open-sourced it. So anybody, because you don't have any inference costs, so why not let anybody just try this and run it, and I can run these things for free? And it was an interesting lesson both in I learned you could build a very high quality product.

  5. 37:11

    A lot of people shared out that it was actually faster than a bunch of state-of-the-art products. I think probably because it was just constantly looking for the newest, fastest models. And particularly with voice detects, I think local works really well. The other thing I learned was when you just vibe code something for yourself, you have to maintain it. And I started to appreciate, there's all this talk about the SaaSpocalypse.

  6. 37:36

    these paid apps aren't that expensive. And in a way, what you're paying for is them making sure it stays a great product. As long as these, I think that the job to be done in a way for SaaS apps is to always continue to iterate and be at the edge. But I now have a different appreciation for these SaaS products that really do release all the time. And so it's definitely a fun project. I think, I don't know, there's like, Thousands of people are using it, which makes me happy.

  7. 38:08

    Yeah, I think I saw it has like over 3,000 GitHub stars. That's so cool.