When you’re not technical enough to code, but too stubborn to sit this one out.

🍜 No Soup For You

The event was called Ramen Club.
It was in Dalston.
It was 7pm.
There was a glowing neon noodle bowl hanging in the window and a big communal table full of people on laptops.

So obviously, I thought: Noodle soup. Co-working. Vibe coding.

I imagined slurping miso while swapping tool-stack horror stories.
Maybe there’d be bao buns too? So. Hungry.

Instead, I walked straight into a full-stack coding ritual where everyone spoke fluent terminal and someone was live-building an agentic something with memory persistence.

I thought I could, you know, 😅 blend in 😅.
Everyone was super nice.
And then I did the worst thing imaginable.

I asked what they meant by “ramen profitable”.

The group-wide snort symphony hit like a tsunami.

And suddenly I was the dumbest girl in the cult.
The soup cult.
Except there was no soup.
Just RAG.

And a vibe so awkward it felt like quoting Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi in 2025, like I just did.

10 minutes in, I realised I was physically trapped at the centre of the communal table in a full room with no exit strategy and no idea of what the hell was going on.

So I silently packed my shit and had to excuse myself out of the alleged ramen restaurant to 50-ish people who knew exactly why they were there. New levels of social awkwardness: UNLOCKED.

Turns out “ramen profitable” is a sacred tech bro rite of passage.
And I had brought a SaaS-y idea to workshop and an appetite.

Rookie mistake.

✨ Manifest Your CTO

Everyone loves to say “just build it”.
As if “building it” is something you can just double-blink into existence.

As if you can burn some Palo Santo, whisper MVP 3 times into your matcha latte and suddenly there’s a back-end.

No.
What they mean is: “Get a CTO.”
Or better yet: become one overnight through vibes, shame, and 53 YouTube tutorials.

I’m not a dev.
I’m a Founder.
I have a product, a strategy, a use case, and a pain point so real I’d tattoo it on my forehead.

But because I don’t speak code, the startup ecosystem keeps handing me two options:

1. Marry a fullstack engineer

2. Shut up and go back to Figma, while the grown-ups cook

So I did what every semi-technical, broke, chronically online founder does:
I duct-taped a stack, until I hit a wall. The same wall all of us hit:

Tooling isn’t the problem—only.
The culture is.

Everyone talks about accessibility, open source, and AI levelling the playing field.
But the second you build anything without a dev degree, you’re a “non-technical founder”, AKA: not to be taken seriously.

Ask one wrong question, and the whole room SHM’s with polite concern as if you just asked what “WiFi” stands for.

No one’s building with you.
They’re building AROUND you.

And hoping you don’t show up hungry for noodles instead of Node.js

A hot bowl of ‘not it’

👷🏻‍♀️ We’re Still Building, B*tch

No, I’m not a back-end engineer.
I don’t identify as full-stack.
My pronouns aren’t 0/1.

But I can API my way out of a paper bag and trigger a web-hook in platform Doc Martens.

I’m about to ship a micro-SaaS built with GPT, N8N, and a Framer front-end that’s basically emotionally unstable under pressure.
It’s NOT elegant.
It’s NOT industrial-grade.
But it moves. It thinks. It (mostly) doesn’t explode.
Just me, my AI sidekick Gepetto, a Miro system diagram, and a Chrome tab rave fest.

See, being semi-technical means you’re just technical enough for everyone to assume you know what you’re doing, until something breaks.

And then suddenly it’s “have you considered getting a co-founder?”
Spoiler: I have.

They’re all at Ramen Club, coding in silence, ignoring me.

Because here’s the game:

• You can build as long as you don’t ask questions

• You can ship as long as it’s done “the right way”

But the second you try to actually make something useful at scale, the energy shifts. Suddenly you’re not Scrappy the Squirrel anymore, you’re overcomplicating things.

Support dries up. Tutorials get vague. And somehow, the solution to everything becomes “just find a technical co-founder.”

👉 This is the part no one says out loud: there is no place for people like us.

The startup world has endless tools and infrastructure for devs and designers, for coders and creatives. But if you’re somewhere in the awkward ——middle—— (if you understand product, systems, and logic but don’t speak back-end fluently) there’s no real roadmap for you.

We don’t get playbooks. We get a pat-on-the-head.

We don’t get a community. We get a couple of optimistic tweets about how “building with AI” is everything practically done out of the box. Easy!

It’s a very lonely spot to be in.

My beautiful tool-stack bouquet of chaos

🖤 Middle-Stack Is The New Black

I didn’t end up at Ramen Club because I got lost. I ended up there because there’s nowhere else to go.
There are no safe spaces for semi-technical founders who can build enough to be dangerous but not enough to be invited to the LAN party.

No community. No scaffolding.
Just a black hole between Bubble baby steps and LLM demigods.

Tools levelled up.
So did we.
The ecosystem? Still stuck in 2012.

It still worships the binary:

✨ Visionary ✨ and 🧑‍💻 Engineer 🧑‍💻.

Pitch girl and Terminal boy.
The one who dreams and the one who builds.
Guess what? We do both.

We are the middleware.
The API between chaos and clarity.
The glue holding a stack together with a string of hack-y workarounds and a prayer to Sam Altman.

And we’re done pretending we need a co-founder just to get a login page working.

Want the future of SaaS?
It’s not another AI plug-in or low-code hype drop.
It’s US.
The ones with no GitHub street cred but maximum shipping audacity.

We’re not a niche. We’re not an edge case.
We’re the next wave of founders.

So if you’re building with duct-tape, delulu, and no CTO in sight—come say hi.
Let’s find each other.

Let’s stop waiting for VC money, dev support, or permission.
Let’s carve the space out with chopsticks if we have to.

Screw the Ramen Club.
🍣 Let’s build the Sushi Club.

The product is raw.
The idea is half-baked.
But dinner’s f*cking served.

_____

With 🧡💜🖤 from the middle-stack,
Esther from Singularity

💌 Hate mail here: esther@singularity.uk.com

📚 The Clickbait™ Substack here: theclickbait.substack.com