Build. Grow. Repeat.

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 sl...

What does it actually take to build AND grow a real software product solo in 2026 — while raising kids and picking up the odd contract to stay afloat? In this episode of Build. Grow. Repeat., Ben sits down with Jamie Murphy, a developer-turned-product-manager who used Claude Code to ship Still Mind, an AI-guided meditation and journaling app that started as a weekend favor for his wife and turned...

A/B testing used to mean a paid tool, a developer, and weeks of setup — and the best tools kept leaving the market. Google killed Optimize; VWO and AB Tasty moved their free tiers upmarket toward enterprise. Startups got left behind, guessing and redesigning on a hunch. Now it's one Claude Code session through PostHog's MCP. You say one sentence, and the agent builds the whole experiment — feature...

What if setting up a proper Meta ads campaign took minutes in a chat instead of hours clicking through Business Manager? Meta's official Ads MCP connects your ad account to Claude or Codex. You describe the campaign – objective, audience, budget, creative angles – and the agent builds the full structure in minutes, named and tracked from the start, with everything paused until you launch it yourse...

You've built the strategy, the content, and the funnel. But can you tell whether it actually works — before you burn a month and a budget finding out? Analytics is the advanced half of the Growth Codex, and its real job isn't dashboards. It's collapsing your learning loop: with the funnel instrumented, a couple hundred euros of ad spend tells you in days what organic would take months to reveal —...

What if the agent that already holds your strategy and your story could write your whole funnel - landing page, lead magnet, follow-up sequence - without you re-explaining a thing? That's the third move in the Growth Codex series. Once strategy and content already live in your codebase, the funnel stops being a design file in a separate tool and becomes the user-facing rendering of context the age...

Shipping a new feature has become cheaper and faster than posting about it. That's ridiculous, right? The grindiest job in any founder's week is content — and it's the one job we keep doing by hand. This episode shows the way out: take the four questions every brand has to answer (why we do this, what we talk about, how we say it, when we post it), put the answers in your codebase, and wrap them i...

Your product lives in the codebase. Your growth strategy lives in Notion, in slide decks, or in conversations you had on a walk. What happens when you move it all into the same repo your agents already read? The setup is simpler than it sounds. You open Claude Code in your product's repo and answer prompts out loud through Wispr Flow – the agent writes the markdown for you. Every session after tha...

Paul Graham named founder mode. Brian Chesky added AI to it. Jack Dorsey laid off 4,000 people to get there. All three are catching up to where small-but-mighty teams already operate. AI Founder Mode isn't a new playbook for big companies. It's the long walk back to where two-person teams already are. We never built the middle layer — so "stay in the details, intelligence at the center, founder cl...

What if 80% of every weekend hackathon was already built before you sat down? Every new agentic SaaS project starts at the same wall: auth, database, payments, deploy, AI streaming, env-var roulette. By the time the magic interaction is in reach, the weekend is over. The Pirate Launch Kit is a skill that scaffolds that whole 80% from an empty folder to a deployed, working agentic app shell — landi...

Your SaaS has a ceiling it will hit — and it's already programmed in by two numbers. Back from MicroConf Portland with the slide that reframed everything: Max MRR = New MRR ÷ Churn. Jason Cohen showed Kit's real revenue chart flattening at $150k/month, and underneath the math was the two-sided formula I'd been teaching for years without realizing it. Build · Grow · Repeat is not a tagline — it's t...

What if the "Zero-Human Company" everyone's hyping is actually a trap? The frustrations behind it are real – managing humans is distracting, most early hires can barely pull their own weight, and getting to traction is often easier with 3 people than 15. But removing all humans strips out the ambition, the taste, the soul. This episode lays out the counter-position: the Augmented-Human Company. A...

What happens when you stop treating AI as an assistant — and start onboarding it like a real teammate? The leap from "AI power tool" to "AI teammate" had nothing to do with smarter models. The missing piece was infrastructure and onboarding — a workspace, communication channels, tool access, and clear responsibilities. The same things you'd invest in for a human hire. Meet ChristAIna — our first O...

What happens when a non-technical couple locks themselves into a 48-hour hackathon with an engagement ring and an idea? Most people think building an AI product requires months of learning or a technical co-founder. Christina spent weeks scrolling through Bridebook and WedStay — generic catalogs, no personalization, nothing that understood her taste. Then one shower conversation turned frustration...

Everyone's using AI. Nobody knows where they actually stand. There's no shortage of AI tools, tutorials, and hype. But there's no map. No way to know: am I a beginner who thinks they're advanced, or someone further along than I realize? And what should I actually learn next? I couldn't find a clear progression path, so I built my own. The AI Skill Path is a 6-level framework — from Landlubber to A...

What would you do if you only had 48 hours to build and launch a startup from scratch? The old playbook said: build a landing page, run a survey, do customer development interviews, then build. But vibe coding changed that — it's now faster to build a working MVP than to set up a survey campaign. That changes the order of operations completely. The Pirate Launch Plan is a 6-stage operating system...

What would it look like to run a full customer acquisition engine — content, ads, website, data, analytics, emails, and sales — without an agency, without a team, and without losing your mind? Turns out it's possible. Vibe marketing applies the same principle as vibe coding: AI does the heavy lifting, you steer with intent. After 12 weeks of building and running this system, every layer is connect...

What if learning AI felt less like a computer science lecture and more like getting your letter from Hogwarts? Turns out, building your own website with AI is the best way to experience the magic everyone's talking about — and the simplest place to start. No databases, no user accounts, no moving parts. Just images, text, and a layout that changes when you talk to it. This episode walks through th...

Most founders use AI to build products. In this Captain’s Insight article, we show a different application: using vibe coding to automate the operational work behind your product — the repetitive setup, coordination, and admin that quietly consumes hours every week. The episode walks through how we at Pirate Skills rebuilt its internal event system: - 84 events planned for the year - Google Calend...

What separates a vibe coder who ships week after week from someone who hits a wall after their first demo? The answer isn't talent or technical background — it's the stack. Most builders start with one-shot tools that feel magical at first, then run into limited debugging, no data ownership, and payment integrations that barely work. The stack that actually lets you ship real products is one where...

What happens when you move your business strategy, OKRs, and project management into your codebase — and let AI run it? The counterintuitive discovery that kept me organized, productive, and sane as a solo founder: your codebase is a better home for business context than Notion, Asana, or Google Docs. Once AI can read your strategy, goals, and bottlenecks without you re-explaining them, planning a...

What does AI change about message testing and marketing decisions? In this episode, I walk you through how I use AI to turn message testing from a “nice-to-have” into a repeatable, data-driven system. As a growth marketer, I’ve always believed in testing — but like most teams, it often slipped to a B-priority because it took too long. AI changes that completely. What used to take weeks of creative...

What does AI actually change for non-technical operators? In this conversation, I’m joined by Anna Nadeina, Head of Growth at saas.group and host of the SaaS Unbound podcast. Anna has spent years working with founders and SaaS teams — without a technical background — and now sits front-row as AI reshapes how modern companies operate. We talk about: - How non-technical marketers and operators can r...

What does it really look like to commit to vibe coding for a full year — as a non-developer founder who's spent most of his career on growth? In this episode, I walk you through my first 365 days of building real software with AI: the decision, the frustration, the turning points, the tools, the communities, and the systems that finally made it feel sustainable. This isn't a "watch me build" tutor...

For builders and marketers tired of half-finished projects piling up — the scope rule that turns building into progress your users can actually feel. Read the full article on here: https://pirateskills.com/insights/ship-every-week or watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dZfR-_LGyE Cheers, Ben https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensufiani/