She Vibe Coded a SaaS With Zero Coding Experience (Our First Podcast Episode is Live)
Kirsten had the vision. AI had the code. Now Bisque has real users.
Let me be transparent: I’ve been sitting on this podcast idea for months. I kept overthinking it — what should the format be, do I need fancy equipment, who would even want to be a guest?
Then I just did it. And our first guest made me so glad I stopped waiting.
[Watch the full episode on YouTube →]
Meet Dr. Kirsten Lee Hill
Kirsten is one of the founding members of Women Building with AI. She’s a researcher with a PhD who spent 10 years having the same frustrating conversation with clients: “Do you have the budget for Qualtrics, or are we hacking something together on Google Forms?”
One day on a client call, she said as a joke, “I’m just going to build my own survey platform.”
They said, “Why don’t you?”
She wrote it down on a post-it note. Bought a frame for it. And eight months later, Bisque is live with real users, real revenue, and features that compete with platforms charging $5,000/year.
Her coding experience before this? Customizing her MySpace page in high school.
The Stuff That Actually Stuck With Me
This conversation was over an hour, so here’s what I keep thinking about:
On getting started: Kirsten brain-dumped 50 pages of ideas into ChatGPT before writing a single line of code. She knew exactly what she wanted the platform to do — she just didn’t know how to build it. AI filled that gap.
On tools: She’s used ChatGPT, Copilot, Cursor, Codex, and just started using Claude Code last weekend. Her approach? Use multiple AI tools and play them off each other. She’ll ask Claude to audit code that Codex wrote, then feed Claude’s feedback back to Codex. “I love teamwork,” she said.
On persistence: There was a 12-hour debugging session that ended at 4 AM when AWS went down. She ran out of tokens on two different ChatGPT accounts and had to download Claude Code just to keep going. The data export still wasn’t working. She kept going anyway.
On the haters: Every time she posts a build-in-public video, men in the comments tell her it’s impossible, she doesn’t know what she’s doing, she can’t have real features. Her response? “I will gladly bring the receipts.” The platform has Stripe integration, real-time collaboration, multi-factor authentication, and AI-powered survey review. It works.
On what makes vibe coding actually work: “When you have such a deep understanding of a problem, the thing you’re lacking is just the tool to translate that understanding into something practical.” She didn’t need to learn computer science. She needed AI to execute the vision she already had.
The Platform: Bisque
Bisque is a survey platform that actually cares if you get good data. It costs $25/month (compared to Qualtrics at $5,000/year for 1,000 responses). You can upload your existing survey in any format and AI will build it out for you — no more copy-pasting question by question.
The feature Kirsten’s most excited about: an AI review tool that flags bad survey design before you send it out. Double-barreled questions, unlabeled scales, overlapping number ranges — all the mistakes that ruin your data but nobody teaches you to avoid.
She’s in pilot right now and planning a public launch by end of year.
Check it out: hellobisque.com
Why This Episode Matters
I started Women Building with AI because learning AI can be incredibly isolating. You’re watching tutorials, experimenting alone, and wondering if you’re doing it right.
Kirsten’s story is proof that you don’t need permission, a technical co-founder, or a computer science degree. You need a problem you understand deeply, a willingness to sit with frustration, and the stubbornness to keep going when the mean comments roll in.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
Watch the Full Episode
We go way deeper in the actual conversation — her full tech stack evolution, the Streamlit disaster, why AI is bad at survey design, and her advice for women who want to start building.
[Watch on YouTube →]
Join the Community
Kirsten is active in our Slack workspace. If you have questions about vibe coding, building a SaaS, or just want to connect with other women who are figuring this out together, come hang out.
[Join Women Building with AI on Slack →] https://www.womenbuildingwithai.com/
More podcast episodes coming soon. If you’re building something with AI and want to share your story, DM me.
— Meg