Vibe coding and AI have helped me more than double my Etsy and Shopify revenue in one year. Here's how I use it.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Therese Waechter, the owner of Otto's Grotto, an online sticker shop, from Indiana. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I recently started vibe coding — using AI to generate specific code and make improvements to my Shopify store.

I've been using AI for my online businesses for years, and it's one of the reasons I was able to more than double my revenue in 2024.

I started Otto's Grotto, my sticker shop, in 2020. When the pandemic happened, I was laid off from my job in government. I didn't know my next move, so I started selling my graphic designs to pass the time.

This wasn't the first business I'd started. Back in the mid-2000s, I ran a business making content management systems on WordPress. I'd also taught myself graphic design on Photoshop.

Selling stickers on Facebook and Etsy was good money

I started selling my designs as laser-cut Christmas ornaments on Facebook Marketplace, which had introduced a shipping and check-out option during the pandemic that was incredibly popular. Sellers were making a decent living of Facebook sales.

On a whim, I decided to start selling a sticker version of one particular design that had a lot of sales. They were an instant success, so I turned a couple more designs into stickers. I ended up doing about $50,000 in sales in 2021. I don't think I would have gone through with the business if it weren't for that instant success.

At first, I didn't want to invest too much in stickers because they didn't bring in high profits. But people just kept buying them, and it slowly became my full-time job.

By 2022, the Facebook surge had ended, but I'd already started selling on Etsy and Amazon. Now, I have a 10-foot printer my husband operates, and I've started a wholesale division of the company that's as big as my retail business.

I've always tried to learn new skills online

I've always used the internet to learn new skills, even before I started my business — AI was the same.

I'm constantly hunting through Reddit and Facebook small business groups to discover new ways I can use tech to upgrade my business. I'd started using AI before ChatGPT came out.

I was using Jasper AI, an early AI marketing tool, to speed up writing item descriptions and marketing materials. I'd considered hiring someone to do the writing, but AI sped up my copywriting output significantly.

ChatGPT caught up to Jasper's capabilities, and I use it for everything from generating hashtags to checking domain availability. It's almost like my Google now. I've used AI for my social media copy, customer catalogs, creating images and designs and improving my website.

How I use vibe coding to make improvements

I tried to teach myself how to code back in the early 2000s with a big, thick coding book. It was super tough to learn. Ultimately a friend in website development told me I needed to learn from the code in other websites, which was much more effective.

I've always Googled how to do different things with code and would eventually find the answer, but it was sometimes hard to find and laborious. Now, AI does the searching and the writing for me in no time.

I have a Shopify e-commerce store, which uses a coding language called Liquid that I'd never bothered to learn. Before vibe coding, I'd either rely on Shopify Support or just wouldn't do the customizations I wanted, but now I can use AI.

I coded in a wholesale catalog and added customizations for listings without developer help. I think these features increased trust in my brand for government clients and retail stores, and boosted my conversion rate for high-profit items.

You still need to understand the basics to vibe code

ChatGPT does lie to you sometimes. It will give me instructions using code that I can't see, so I have to re-ask with a prompt such as, "I'm running Dawn theme on Shopify version 2.0 and I don't see that piece of code, are these the right instructions?" It'll respond that it made a mistake and give me another answer. Sometimes, it might take three or four tries with me rephrasing my question, but it still saves me hours of time.

When I first started learning how to code, I was told the concept of "garbage in, garbage out." What you input makes a huge difference to your end result.

One thing that works well is finding examples of things I like on other websites and asking ChatGPT how to recreate them or what code created that result.

I also recommend people who want to start vibe coding to start with the basics. Ask ChatGPT to breakdown of how the different types of code work together on the platform you're using. If you don't understand the basics, you likely won't know what to input.

Lastly, know that eventually you're going to break something, so always copy and paste your code to a note before you mess with it.

Vibe coding means I don't need to hire a developer in a lot of cases. I can troubleshoot my existing site plugins, or add new plugins to do things like accept pre-orders.

I've also added color swatches to my listings, embedded YouTube videos onto my homepage, and added elements like an FAQ bar to my listings. For high-level changes, I will still hire a developer.

As a graphic designer, the capabilities of AI are kind of spooky. When it first started gaining traction, designers in Facebook groups I was in were against it. But I realized it's a freight train you can't stop. You can either embrace it — or become obsolete.