Build. Grow. Repeat.

Ben Sufiani
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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. 31 de ago.

    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

  2. 27 de ago.

    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

  3. 24 de ago.

    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.

  4. 18 de ago.

    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

  5. 23 de jul.

    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

  6. 20 de jul.

    Capability isn't Value: A CMO's Take on AI in B2B

    AI has never been more capable — and the people winning with it in B2B are the ones who know exactly which work to hand over and which conversations to show up for themselves. Matthew Whyatt runs Tech Torque, sits as a fractional CMO for software companies, and has sold into the biggest mining companies, governments and agencies in the world. He uses Claude every single day — and he'll still tell you that the moment he spots AI slop in your post, he's out. Not because AI is bad. Because nobody curated the output. This conversation goes to both ends of it. Matt walks through his actual setup: a Claude briefing that reads his email and calendar before every meeting, a research analyst project that turns a URL into a one-pager his client can take to the C-suite, and the trick he found last week — talk at Claude via Whisperflow for five minutes, then have it write its own project name, description and instructions. Paste, done, works first time. There's also the Whisperflow reality check: 700,000 words spoken in 57 weeks on Ben's side, 46,000 in five weeks on Matt's. And then the other end. The $300,000 "maximum unviable product" Matt spent three years building and never launched, because he never asked anyone if they'd buy it. Goldratt's bottleneck, and why piling more ideas at the front of the machine slows the machine down. Daniel Priestley's rule: if you can't find a hundred people who'd buy it, don't build it. Ben's version: no code before 1,000 subscribers — two of six apps hit a million users. The through-line: when anyone can ship software over a weekend, features stop being interesting. Features are expected. The speed at which you can build and transfer trust is the speed at which you can build your business. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00:00 – Capable vs. trustworthy: the gap nobody talks about 00:01:44 – AI slop, broken trust, and what has to stay human 00:06:26 – Matt's Claude setup: daily briefings and a research analyst 00:09:26 – Whisperflow: 700,000 words in 57 weeks 00:12:43 – The trick — let Claude write its own project instructions 00:17:06 – OpenClaw, rabbit holes, and "the juice isn't worth the squeeze" 00:21:25 – Goldratt's bottleneck and the $300,000 unviable product 00:27:35 – When anyone can build, trust is the product 00:29:19 – Marketing does the lifting, sales gets one shot 00:35:56 – CRMs: Salesforce to Zoho, HubSpot, and going AI-native 00:39:27 – What to automate first, and how to reach Matt DEEP DIVE LINKS 🔧 Matt's company — Tech Torque: https://techtorque.co/ 💬 Connect with Matthew Whyatt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewwhyatt/ 🤖 Vibe Coding Cologne — Wed Aug 5: monthly meetup, short talks and real builds, in person in Cologne: https://pirateskills.com/events/vibe-coding-cologne/2026-08-05 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    Capability isn't Value: A CMO's Take on AI in B2B

  7. 14 de jul.

    A Company AI Brain for Non-Techies

    This week I'll show you how to build an AI company brain that's friendly even for non-techies. The whole idea is to connect all your processes — your CRM, your calendar, your inbox, every tool you use — with Claude Code at the center. You work on the brain, and the brain coordinates your agents and your team. For me and Christina it's been a massive productivity boost, and none of it takes exotic tech to set up. Because here's the quiet truth: everyone's arguing about "agent memory" right now — vector databases, graph engines, courses from Google and Anthropic — but the thing that actually runs my business is a folder of plain text files, and I never wrote a line of database code to build it. We'll go screen by screen through the real setup: the dashboard that tells me what to do next, one ongoing conversation per work stream, and the four kinds of plain files that make up the brain — docs, skills, journals, and dashboards. You'll watch it rewrite its own documentation, and see a live example of turning 20 conversations from a startup night into tracked follow-ups. It's not fully hands-off, and I won't pretend it is — nothing sends, spends, or publishes without me. But none of this is infrastructure. It's a writing habit with tools attached, and you can start this week with a single folder. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00:00 – Intro: an AI company brain for non-techies 00:01:00 – Work out of a coding agent (Claude Code at the center) 00:02:25 – One conversation per work stream 00:04:45 – Every conversation needs context + tools 00:06:20 – Documents & skills, not a vector database 00:07:41 – Journals & dashboards, built to your needs 00:08:30 – A real example: 20 leads from a startup night 00:10:03 – A brain that rewrites itself 00:11:49 – You don't need to be technical 00:12:25 – Permissions, trust & the review gate 00:14:05 – Where to start + upcoming events DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full Article: https://pirateskills.com/insights/company-ai-brain 🧪 Pirate Lab — Wed July 15 (online): we build your company brain together, live — bring one work stream you want to automate: https://pirateskills.com/pirate/lab/2026-07-15 🏴‍☠️ Vibe Hackathon Cologne — Sep 4–6: 48 hours building with AI. Early bird €60 until July 31 (then €90): https://pirateskills.com/events/vibe-hackathon-cologne/2026-09-04 🚀 Pirate Forge — become your own vibe coder & vibe marketer. Next cohort starts Sep 30: https://pirateskills.com/pirate/forge 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    A Company AI Brain for Non-Techies

  8. 7 de jul.

    Build Better Pitch Decks with AI

    Two weeks ago a pitch deck wasn't on my agenda. Then an investor evening opened up – and the price of admission was a deck. So Christina and I decided to raise a small pre-seed for Bridesmaid, our agentic wedding planner, and I built the whole thing the way I now do most of my work: one Claude Code conversation on the left, the deck rendering live on the right. Research, investor targeting, the slides, original imagery, a full cohort-based 12-month financial model in Google Sheets, and a print-clean PDF – all in one unbroken session. Work that used to mean a designer, an analyst, a couple of tools and several days. Here's the part I want you to take away, because it's the opposite of most "AI makes your deck" advice: the agent will happily one-shot you a beautiful, generic, wildly over-optimistic deck – and that deck loses you the meeting. The value isn't the generation. It's the steering. In this video I walk through the real Bridesmaid deck, the strategic fights I had with the agent, and where a founder's judgment does the work the model can't. This is the actual deck we're sending to investors. Real numbers, real targets, nothing staged. IN THIS EPISODE 00:00:00 – Intro: the real deck we're using to raise for Bridesmaid 00:02:21 – Start in the repo, not a slide tool (and why HTML) 00:04:34 – The key move: make it interview you 00:05:54 – What Bridesmaid is + the €250k / €1.5M pre-money ask 00:07:54 – B2C or B2B? Reframing the model with the agent 00:09:32 – Choosing the investors: NRW.Bank, neoteq, TS Ventures 00:14:49 – Framing the deck for specific investors: the 10 questions 00:21:10 – Make it attack the deck from the investor's side, cut the b******t 00:22:44 – The money slides: building the model in Google Sheets 00:29:53 – Educated fantasy land: don't trust the AI's first numbers 00:36:44 – Walking the final deck, top to bottom DEEP DIVE LINKS 📖 Full Article: https://pirateskills.com/insights/ai-pitch-deck 💍 Bridesmaid – the working prototype (7-day free trial): https://bridesmaid.love 🧪 Pirate Lab — Wed July 8: this week it's all about the pitch deck. Free live session where we put this insight into practice – bring your build and turn your own strategy into an investor-ready deck with the crew: https://pirateskills.com/pirate/lab/2026-07-08 🗓️ All upcoming events: https://pirateskills.com/events 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7kFl0BJiOYih8yqQTRR9SN 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/build-grow-repeat/id1870561487 💬 Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/

    Build Better Pitch Decks with AI
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Sobre

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

Informações

  • Criado por
    Ben Sufiani
  • Anos de atividade
    2026
  • Episódios
    34
  • Classificação
    Explícito
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Ben Sufiani
  • Site do podcast
    Build. Grow. Repeat.