Build. Grow. Repeat.

Ben Sufiani
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

Build. Grow. Repeat. is the podcast for skilled professionals and early-stage founders who want to build a real product and grow predictable revenue — without hustle culture, or “get rich quick” fantasies. This show helps you close the gap between building a product with vibe coding and growing with growth marketing by treating them as one craft. Every episode is designed to give you something you can actually use: a clearer decision, a tighter customer journey, a better experiment, or a concrete next step you can run this week. What you’ll learn here: Build faster (without needing to know how to code): vibe code real software and offers quickly — and validate what matters before you over-invest. Grow calmly and predictably: positioning, funnels, pricing, and experiments that turn attention into revenue without persuasion theater. Run on signals, not just vibes: activation, retention, and product–market-fit indicators that tell you what to double down on — and what to stop. Use AI as leverage: vibe coding and AI-native workflows that speed you up while keeping human judgment in charge. Commit without gambling: how to choose one direction and test it through small, reversible bets that produce proof. You’ll get a mix of solo deep dives, builder interviews, and occasional teardowns of customer journeys and decisions that looked “logical” on paper — but fail in real life. About the host: I’m Ben Sufiani, founder of Pirate Skills. I’ve been building and growing products for over 15 years across startups, consulting, and hands-on growth work. Pirate Skills exists to help builders turn ideas into evidence — by shipping, learning, and repeating the loop until something holds. If you want to go deeper, check out Pirate Skills at pirateskills.com. Build. Grow. Repeat. Cheers, Ben

  1. 1d ago

    Finally, Your Mobile App in a Weekend

    A native mobile app, built in one weekend and running on my own iPhone – with my kids over for most of it. Two years before Pirate Skills, at Maple Apps, a designer and three full-time developers still needed two weeks to get from finished screen designs to the App Store – and that was a high-performing team. The industry standard is months of work and tens of thousands of euros you'll probably never make back. This time it was one founder and Claude Code, and that was fascinating to me: it's truly possible now. You'll see the Maple Apps rule – no line of code before 1,000 people are on the waitlist – and why an app is not your business but one more door into it. There's the choice between going fully native (Swift and Kotlin) and React Native with Expo, and why that took a weekend instead of a debate. You'll see screen designs made with Claude Design, the first screens on the phone through Expo Go, and the moment the app was really installed, on an hour-long ride to a kids' birthday party. To be honest about where we are: it's not in the App Store yet. The Apple and Google developer accounts are waiting for approval, then come the store rules and the review. Test users are planned for Vibe Coding Cologne on 7 October, with the app live in the stores by November at the latest. The push to finally try came from a first-time builder at our hackathon who shipped her first app without any technical background. If she can do it, and I can do it, you can too. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00:00 – A native mobile app in a weekend 00:01:05 – Maple Apps: 1,000 sign-ups before a line of code 00:03:30 – Two weeks vs. months and tens of thousands of euros 00:04:15 – The app is one door, not the business 00:06:19 – Native or React Native + Expo 00:08:36 – Friday: a protected API and new screen designs 00:11:21 – Saturday: the first screens on my phone 00:12:52 – Installed for real, on the way to a birthday party 00:14:39 – Not in the App Store yet 00:15:46 – Your weekend: the step-by-step guide 00:19:41 – Upcoming events and the Pirate Forge DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full Article + the starter prompt: https://pirateskills.com/insights/mobile-app-in-a-weekend ⚓ Pirate Forge – 30 September : learn vibe coding and vibe marketing by building a real app alongside me: https://pirateskills.com/pirate/forge 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    Finally, Your Mobile App in a Weekend

  2. Sep 14

    Open Your Vault to Agents

    Your users can now send their own AI agent to get what you offer: find an event, sign up, search your knowledge, even prepare a checkout. They never have to open your website. Most vibe-coded Next.js apps can't do that yet. Your website is a teller who needs to see a face: the code behind every button checks the browser's login cookie first, and an agent calling from ChatGPT, Claude or a server has no cookie. So it gets turned away. Not because it isn't allowed, but because the teller can't see a face. On 13 September I connected pirateskills.com to my own Claude.ai, sent one chat message, and it registered me for an event. Here is how we got there, explained for people who vibe-code, not for senior engineers. First, build the vault once. Each valuable action (discover events, register, search the knowledge, start a checkout) becomes one server function that is told who is asking, with the same AI SDK tool card for every door. Then open thin doors onto it. The Captain, our on-page chat built with the Vercel AI SDK and the AI Gateway. An MCP server with OAuth sign-in for Claude, ChatGPT and Codex. API keys you create and revoke yourself. And a CLI for anyone in a terminal, you or your coding agent. Why not stop at MCP? I personally am annoyed that these types of connections rarely hold. An agent running in the cloud, on OpenClaw, Hermes or a scheduled job, has nobody there to click "allow". OAuth is the convenience. The key is the guarantee. A public SKILL.md is the treasure map: which door, when to use each tool, and an explicit yes before anything that changes something. And for money, the crew prepares the Stripe checkout and you sign. No tool can charge a card. You don't need five doors. One vault and one door is the whole first version, and the article has the six steps plus a prompt to hand your coding agent. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00:00 – Open your vault to agents 00:01:52 – The teller problem: six clicks to join an event 00:02:49 – Demo: signing up for the AI Compass from Claude 00:04:26 – What's in your vault 00:06:02 – Five doors into one vault 00:08:58 – How to build it with Next.js and the Vercel AI SDK 00:11:59 – Your own chat, MCP, and why an API key holds 00:15:45 – The skill: a map for your users' agents 00:17:52 – Agentic commerce: the agent prepares, you pay 00:20:26 – Open your first door, with a live build 00:26:26 – Where to go from here DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full Article (with the four doors, the handshake-vs-key table and the prompt for your coding agent): https://pirateskills.com/insights/open-your-vault 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    Open Your Vault to Agents

  3. Sep 9

    The Self-Driving Startup

    Your product can keep fixing itself while you sleep — and so can your marketing. For two weeks pirateskills.com has run on a loop I set up inside Claude Code: a scout that reads every data source once a day, a fixer that works the queue every four hours, and me answering a question only when the system is unsure, changing product direction, or about to do something risky. 142 passes, 38 product fixes, 39 signals watched, a test suite that more than doubled. PostHog proposed the self-driving product. This goes one step further. The same shape watches your marketing, your funnel and your money path, not just your code — which is why I've started calling it the self-driving startup. You'll see my actual screen: the loop's setup and the cloud routines it runs on, the Linear board the agent manages on its own, the Vercel runtime logs and PostHog events it reads, the database advisors and Stripe checkouts it checks, and the skill file that decides how far it may go without me. The shape matters more than the tools. Many sources feed one queue. Two roles, finders and finishers. A verification bar instead of a reviewer. A human who answers questions instead of doing tasks. And re-measurement, so what ships changes what the loop reads next. You don't need my setup to start. One source, one queue, one agent working it is the whole first version — and the last stretch of the video is the seven steps to build it this week. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00:00 – Beyond the self-driving product 00:01:25 – What you don't see happening in your own app 00:04:02 – The shape: one scout, one fixer 00:06:41 – The numbers after two weeks 00:08:56 – Source one: your runtime logs 00:13:18 – Source two: analytics and the money path 00:17:04 – Database, payments and dependency updates 00:19:22 – The same loop for marketing, and moving it to the cloud 00:23:24 – Linear is the inbox, and the rules the agent lives by 00:33:51 – Build your own: the seven steps 00:39:01 – Where to go from here DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full Article (with the live coverage map, the one-day timeline and the free 7-day checklist): https://pirateskills.com/insights/self-driving-startup 📈 The Meta Ads Loop — the marketing half of this shape, in detail: https://pirateskills.com/insights/meta-ads-loop ⚓ Pirate Forge — Q4 cohort starts Wednesday, 30 September: six weeks to vibe code your first revenue-ready SaaS, then six weeks to vibe market it: https://pirateskills.com/pirate/forge 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    The Self-Driving Startup

  4. Aug 31

    Vibe Code Your Ad Reporting Stack

    Marcus Haas is a mechanical engineer. Paul Anduschus is a former event manager who studied business psychology. Together they run DreamyTales, selling personalised AI-generated books, songs and videos in more than ten countries — and neither writes code. This is the conversation I've wanted to record for a year: how do you actually find a positive-ROI campaign instead of guessing, and how much of that can you hand to an agent? They cancelled Triple Whale and rebuilt blended ROAS themselves. Meta comes in through the Meta Ads MCP, Shopify through an app they built, and three skills merge the data into a dashboard that runs every morning inside Codex. No database. Why two sources? Because Meta only shows you 60 to 70 percent of the truth. The most interesting part is how the automation was built. Paul already had rules for scaling, killing and creating campaigns. He talked them out loud, had AI turn them into a document, and that document became skills. That's the real lesson: the ceiling on your automation isn't your technical skill. It's how much of your own judgment you've made explicit. They haven't gone fully automatic. The agent creates campaigns, but Paul still approves daily budget moves because his rules still have gaps. Marcus supervises the big steps while openly admitting the model makes fewer mistakes than he does. And on creative, AI is good at describing what's in a competitor's winning ad but, in Paul's words, “really bad at describing the aesthetics of it.” So the humans work out why it performs, and the machine generates ten videos per prompt. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 – What a €90 subscription actually costs the people selling it 01:22 – Meet Marcus and Paul: a mechanical engineer and a jack of all trades 08:08 – Running a whole backend without being a developer 15:17 – Three years of organic didn't work. One euro of paid did. 23:00 – The Triple Whale problem every D2C brand has 28:23 – Meta only tells you 70% of the truth 30:15 – The three skills that replaced the dashboard 32:25 – "We are not operators anymore. We are supervisors." 35:51 – Where they give the agent the leash, and where they don't 49:22 – The creative pipeline: from the Ad Library to ten videos 1:01:08 – The real superpower isn't finding the secret ingredient DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full article — the argument, not a recap, with every quote timestamped to this episode: https://pirateskills.com/insights/vibe-code-ad-reportin 🏴‍☠️ Vibe Coding Cologne — Wednesday 2 September, 18:30–21:00, STARTPLATZ Cologne: Paul and Marcus are on stage on agentic performance marketing. Free: https://pirateskills.com/events/vibe-coding-cologne/2026-09-02 🎁 DreamyTales Marcus and Paul's company: https://www.dreamytales.de 🔗 Marcus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-haas-212a77215/ 🔗 Paul on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-anduschus-912060190/ 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    Vibe Code Your Ad Reporting Stack

  5. Aug 27

    Navigating AI Compliance for Teams That Want to Ship

    Dr. Alexa Scheffler builds the software that answers one question for large companies: are we actually allowed to use AI for this? Her reading of the EU AI Act is close to the opposite of the one most German companies are operating on. She spent years inside corporates watching good ideas die at the compliance step — not because anyone could produce the rule that forbade them, but because nobody in the room had read far enough to say otherwise. So she built REGULIGHT: a chat agent that asks only the questions it actually needs, and a workflow that keeps the evidence tidy for whenever an audit shows up. The part of this conversation I keep coming back to is what the Act asks for first. Not a ban, not a registry, not a consultant. It asks that the people in your company are educated with AI — and that you write down who was trained, when, and on what. Two names, a date, a topic. Her words: "Write it down and then you're safe. It's not that difficult." We also get into where the risk actually lives. Fully automated credit decisions and hiring with no human in the loop are high risk, deliberately and for good reason. But move the human back into the decision and the same tool changes category — which means most of the time you aren't asking permission, you're choosing a design. And the question that unlocks the meeting isn't "are we allowed?" but "is this a manageable risk?", because that one hands the call back to whoever owns the outcome. The second half is her own build story, and it rhymes with the first. Computer science degree, then almost a decade without hands-on code, waiting — in her phrase — for "this magical technical co-founder" to make her ideas happen. Vibe coding ended that. We compare setups, argue about terminal versus desktop, and she explains why she sends coding work to Claude and strategy work to Codex using a classroom metaphor I've stolen since. She closes on the cost of waiting, and she has a specific word for it: falling behind. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 – Why German companies move with the brakes on 02:30 – How the EU AI Act sorts risk, and what's actually high risk 05:13 – The better question: is this a manageable risk? 06:45 – The Act's first requirement is AI literacy 09:09 – The questionnaire that became REGULIGHT 11:24 – A computer science degree and a decade without code 12:32 – No more waiting for the magical technical co-founder 14:55 – From Cursor to the terminal: Alexa's setup now 23:11 – Claude, OpenAI, Gemini: the classroom metaphor 25:36 – Obsidian: the markdown vault your agent reads 38:09 – The only woman in the room DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full Article: https://pirateskills.com/insights/navigating-ai-compliance 🏴‍☠️ Vibe Coding Cologne — Wednesday, 2 Sep, STARTPLATZ Cologne: Alexa is on stage, showing REGULIGHT. Free: https://pirateskills.com/events/vibe-coding-cologne/2026-09-02 ⚖️ REGULIGHT — Alexa's product: https://regulight.io 🔗 Alexa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-alexa-scheffler/ 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    Navigating AI Compliance for Teams That Want to Ship

  6. Aug 24

    Build It for One. Sell It to Many.

    Gianna Hodel sells software she built by talking to Claude Code. No developer background, no course, no permission slip — and the first version was written from a converted school bus in Mexico with Starlink on the roof. She's a freelance marketer. She got sick of copying numbers out of one marketing tool and into a spreadsheet, tried for hours to make a chatbot do it for her, failed, and decided to build the thing herself instead. That dashboard became Hebelytics, a product other people now pay a monthly subscription for. What makes this conversation useful isn't that it worked. It's how ordinary each step was. Prompting, in her words, is just briefing — say what the problem is, what you want to see, what the outcome should look like, then give feedback. When Claude told her to connect GitHub, she asked what GitHub was, looked it up, and kept going. Hosting, backend, deployment: all learned one question at a time, in the middle of doing the work. We also get into the part nobody puts in a founder story. Getting Google's read-only API approval, so that any customer could connect their own data, took her roughly six weeks of paperwork — including recording a video to walk the reviewers through the login flow. The code was never the hard part. And her one regret isn't technical either: she'd have shown it to twenty people early instead of letting one or two clients be the only feedback. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00 – It's 2026 — why am I still doing this in Excel? 01:18 – A school bus in Mexico, with Starlink on the roof 07:46 – Teaching yourself to build when nobody's teaching you 09:24 – Prompting is briefing 10:40 – Why nine out of ten go looking for a course instead 16:51 – Building the dashboard for one client 19:25 – The API paperwork nobody warns you about 24:09 – The moment a third person says "I've never seen this" 29:18 – What marketers build that developers don't 44:40 – How much do you actually need to understand? 49:45 – If you're still the one in Excel DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full article — the argument, not a recap, with every quote timestamped to this episode: https://pirateskills.com/insights/build-it-for-one 📊 Hebelytics (Gianna's product — connect your marketing tools, find the leak): https://hebelytics.de 🏴‍☠️ Vibe Coding Cologne — Wednesday 2 September, 18:30, STARTPLATZ Cologne: Gianna is on stage giving a live demo of the thing she built. She came to the last one as an attendee. Free: https://pirateskills.com/events/vibe-coding-cologne/2026-09-02 🔗 Gianna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gianna-maria-hodel/ 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN 🍎 Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    Build It for One. Sell It to Many.

  7. Aug 18

    What's possible beyond ChatGPT: Chat, Co-Work, Code

    There's a whole level past ChatGPT, and it opens the moment you stop learning tools and start handing over tasks. The same sentence comes up over and over at the vibe coding events I host in Cologne: I've been messing around with ChatGPT, and I'm here to learn what happens beyond. This is the answer to that sentence, recorded for exactly those people. Beginner-friendly. The mindset shift comes first: don't think in tools, think in the tasks you repeat every week. From there it's three levels — Chat is a genuine thinking partner that has never seen your actual work. Co-Work gives an agent a folder and connectors and hands back mostly finished work. Code stops doing the task and builds the tool that does it. Same chat window every time. Nothing to relearn. You'll see all three inside Claude and ChatGPT side by side, the connector list behind the co-work level (Attio, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Linear, Notion, Slack, Stripe), and the real Claude Code conversations that run Pirate Skills — ads, CRM, campaigns, events, funnel, security review. Plus one starter prompt per level, and the five checkboxes that tell you whether you've hit the chat ceiling already. Not everyone needs level three. Every business has a floor, and level two unlocks a lot on its own. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00:00 – Beyond ChatGPT: who this is for 00:00:50 – Stop thinking in tools, start thinking in tasks 00:02:02 – Chat, Co-Work, Code: the three levels 00:02:25 – Level 1 (Chat): what it's great at, and where it runs out 00:03:53 – The ceiling test: five signs you've outgrown chat 00:05:17 – Pick one recurring task, and name your business model 00:06:44 – The same task at all three levels 00:08:45 – Level 2 (Co-Work): treat the AI like a colleague 00:11:39 – Level 3 (Code): little machines that run without you 00:16:05 – One environment, three levels — nothing to relearn 00:16:33 – AI Compass, the 7-day plan, and where to go next DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full Article (with the interactive Task Walker, the ceiling test and the 7-day plan): https://pirateskills.com/insights/beyond-chatgpt 🧭 AI Compass — Wednesday 26 August, 18:00–19:00 Berlin: free online session, once a month, same spine every time. Bring one recurring task, find your floor, and leave knowing which level you actually need: https://pirateskills.com/aicompass/2026-08-26 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    What's possible beyond ChatGPT: Chat, Co-Work, Code

  8. Jul 23

    From Architect to Founder: How AI Set His Ideas Free

    What if the technical co-founder you've been hunting for the last two years is a chat window you haven't opened yet? Ben Schönenstein isn't a coder. He's an architect who spotted a problem in a café in 2017, assumed he was too late until AI got good enough that "maybe I can just do it myself" stopped being a fantasy. Two years of arguing with models later, he's shipped a laptop-friendly café finder (Kofi) and Matchbox, a problem-first product search engine already holding 17,000+ apps with a growth loop that fills its own gaps. This one goes deep on the honest version of the vibe-coding story. You'll see Matchbox live — type any problem, however big or small, and watch it surface real solutions instead of the heaviest SEO spender. You'll see the personal bug-tracker he built in a day that fixes its own bugs with a single button press and a merged pull request. And you'll get the full stack he'd reach for tomorrow. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00:00 – Two Bens in Cologne 00:00:38 – From architect to accidental vibe coder 00:06:22 – Do you still need a technical co-founder? 00:12:03 – Margin as a moat & the real bottleneck: distribution 00:16:12 – Matchbox live: type a problem, get real solutions 00:18:35 – The bug + idea apps that fix themselves 00:24:03 – "AI isn't a tool, it's a reflection" 00:25:15 – Running parallel work streams in Claude Code 00:31:57 – How to decide what to actually build 00:37:47 – The full stack he'd start any app with 00:40:38 – Just start: the advice, and where to build with us DEEP DIVE LINKS Find Ben Schönenstein on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-sch%C3%B6nenstein-928ab6158/ His app Co-Fe finds cafés where working is actually welcome: https://co-fe.de/en/ Matchbox, have a real problems, and find matching products: https://askmatchbox.com/ 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    From Architect to Founder: How AI Set His Ideas Free
See All (37)

About

Build. Grow. Repeat. is the podcast for skilled professionals and early-stage founders who want to build a real product and grow predictable revenue — without hustle culture, or “get rich quick” fantasies. This show helps you close the gap between building a product with vibe coding and growing with growth marketing by treating them as one craft. Every episode is designed to give you something you can actually use: a clearer decision, a tighter customer journey, a better experiment, or a concrete next step you can run this week. What you’ll learn here: Build faster (without needing to know how to code): vibe code real software and offers quickly — and validate what matters before you over-invest. Grow calmly and predictably: positioning, funnels, pricing, and experiments that turn attention into revenue without persuasion theater. Run on signals, not just vibes: activation, retention, and product–market-fit indicators that tell you what to double down on — and what to stop. Use AI as leverage: vibe coding and AI-native workflows that speed you up while keeping human judgment in charge. Commit without gambling: how to choose one direction and test it through small, reversible bets that produce proof. You’ll get a mix of solo deep dives, builder interviews, and occasional teardowns of customer journeys and decisions that looked “logical” on paper — but fail in real life. About the host: I’m Ben Sufiani, founder of Pirate Skills. I’ve been building and growing products for over 15 years across startups, consulting, and hands-on growth work. Pirate Skills exists to help builders turn ideas into evidence — by shipping, learning, and repeating the loop until something holds. If you want to go deeper, check out Pirate Skills at pirateskills.com. Build. Grow. Repeat. Cheers, Ben

Information

  • Creator
    Ben Sufiani
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    37
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Ben Sufiani
  • Show Website
    Build. Grow. Repeat.