Meet the vibe coders who want to be the 'MrBeast' of apps

Los Touré and Marc Mueller, two software engineers, call themselves a "boy band."

They're not making music. They're making apps.

"It's app music, not rap music," Touré, whose legal name is Carlos Mayers, told me at his startup's office in downtown New York City.

Danger Testing — which is something between a tech startup and a performance art project — has become Touré and Mueller's full-time business. After meeting at a tech party in 2024, well before "vibe coding" was a buzzword, the two formally joined forces in April 2025.

Since then, they've dropped more than 50 apps. Some are wonky websites, others are interactive mobile games.

One of their apps, called "Performative," is simply a digital Labubu doll. At the height of the Friend AI ads saga in New York City last year — when the AI wearable startup stirred buzz and civilian outrage over its ads — Danger Testing launched a website where people could vandalize a digital version of the NYC subway ads. When Drake dropped new music in May, they spun up a fake version of Spotify to stream fake Drake songs.

It's all vibe-coded.

Touré said the pair consider themselves part of a new "creative class" they have dubbed "appstars."

"It's someone that is going to treat apps the same way that any other creative would treat any other medium," he added.

Another way of phrasing it: They are vibe-coding creators.

Danger Testing's apps aren't meant to be the next Facebook or TikTok, and Touré and Mueller don't focus on downloads, retention, or other typical app success metrics.

Danger Testing's fan base is more important than the user bases of their apps. Like the biggest stars on YouTube and TikTok, they are looking for social virality: views, comments, and reach.

They are also building their business around a creator economy staple: brand deals. One of their first sponsorships was with voice-to-text company Superwhisper on a digital walkie-talkie.

Danger Testing has raised $2.6 million in venture capital funding to date from firms Long Journey Ventures, Asylum Ventures, Tiny VC, and Common Magic.

Josh Kaplan, CEO of Smooth Media, which manages creators in the tech and AI category, said interactive media — in the form of apps — has the potential to become a new layer of the creator economy.

In a social media landscape of endless scrolling and AI slop, content that makes someone stop can be refreshingly engaging and participatory.

"That's what's going to break through the noise," Kaplan said.

Churning out apps like content

The vibe-coding tech stack has grown rapidly since Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, coined the term in 2025. Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and a slew of startups like Cursor, Lovable, and Replit are redefining coding while raising billions in funding.

"Two years ago, I was working at a company. I was a lead iOS engineer," Touré said. "I was writing code all day." However, for Touré, coding an app the old-school way is now a thing of the past.

For Touré and Mueller, the hustle of being a modern-day coder looks a lot more like being a content creator than sitting at a tech startup's desk all day.

"Making an app that makes someone recognize me on the street as the 'app guy' is so much more interesting than being another SaaS person," Touré told me, referring to the acronym for software as a service. "With respect to all the SaaS people."

To be a creator, all you need nowadays is a smartphone with a camera. That's quickly becoming the case for vibe coding, too.

According to data published by The Information in April, Apple's App Store witnessed an 84% increase in new app submissions year-over-year for the first quarter of 2026.

Welcome to the vibe-coded creator economy

Touré and Mueller said the animating force of their initial partnership was figuring out how to marry the worlds of creators and coders.

"How would a MrBeast of apps look like?" Mueller said. "How would a YouTube of apps look like?"

Danger Testing likens the cadence at which they're dropping apps to how frequently a YouTuber would upload to their channel. In between vibe-coding sessions, Touré and Mueller create more traditional content with short-form videos, posts on X, a Substack newsletter, Instagram pages, and livestreams.

The apps supplement the content with something tangible that their followers — or internet passersby — can interact with.

"Every app needs to have a screenshot moment," Mueller said. "One very strange moment where you're like, 'What is going on? I need to send this to my friend.' That informs a lot of the vibe coding or designing we do."

Meanwhile, Danger Testing is sketching out the business model for vibe-coding creators like themselves.

There are costs associated with the vibe-coding creator economy. Mueller said Claude Code costs Danger Testing about $4,000 a month. Other costs include web hosting, content tools, and app-building tools like Supabase and Figma. Danger Testing has six full-time employees, Touré said.

For now, brand sponsorships are the primary revenue model.

"Advertisers are looking for these software marketing stunts right now," Mueller said of brand deals.

Kaplan said that tech companies more broadly have a "storytelling problem." Working with tech content creators, like Danger Testing, can help those companies "feel more human," he added.

More AI-savvy creators could be on the way.

As Danger Testing expands, it wants to grow into something of an agency — or, as Mueller described, a record label — for signing other vibe-coding creators.

"We want to connect the creatives and help them build a fan base — audience — around the tools and software they drop," Mueller said.

A viral fad — or a vibe-coding revolution?

Apps-as-content is the thesis driving Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian's investment in vibe-coding apps like Vibecode.

"As more people look to build, remix, and distribute quick-turn ideas, our investment aligns with the belief that the next billion-dollar platforms will be those that allow people to continually 'ship' creative output as easily as posting content online," he previously told Business Insider.

Startups like Sekai and Wabi, which have each raised millions, are trying to build social platforms around vibe-coded content.

It's reaching mainstream platforms, too. This year, Meta hired the team behind the vibe-coding social app Gizmo, which let people create interactive content (like mini-games) in a vertical feed with only a few words. Now, Meta's gearing up to release its own similar app called Pocket.

Amber Atherton, an investor at gaming and consumer-focused VC fund Patron, thinks Danger Testing is onto something. She said they're cracking what a new "ephemeral" meme looks like in the AI content era.

"Apps are going to be the new media," Atherton said.

Like many things online, these ephemeral apps could be the latest fad to come and go. In the AI era, though, consumers are hungry for new content formats.

"For so long, Instagram was like, who's the hottest?" Kaplan said. "When there's these other creative tools, such as making apps, different types of people can thrive."