Pirate SkillsBuild. Grow. Repeat.
Vibe coding and growth marketing as one craft – for founders and marketers building their own products and growing them into predictable revenue.
100+ vibe coders and marketers join every month · 2,000+ since June 2025
Find your way around
Everything Pirate Skills offers in one quick map – free events, free resources, paid programs. New here? Start here.
Vibe Coding Cologne
Monthly hybrid meetup at STARTPLATZ Cologne. Share real-world AI coding projects, discover new tools and use cases, and trade workflows with builders shipping with AI. Show up in person, dial in remote, or grab the recording.
Once a quarter we run the Vibe Hackathon – a weekend sprint to build an AI product end-to-end.
Pirate Lab
One free monthly online session covering vibe coding, vibe marketing, and the Build-Grow-Repeat playbook. Meet Ben, ask anything, find your bottleneck.
Captain's Insights
Weekly insights for founders. Each one a 7-Day Ship Plan. Read as an article, watch on YouTube, or listen as a podcast.
Pirate Codex
The founder's playbook for building (vibe coding) and growing (vibe marketing) your first SaaS.
Captain on Deck
1-on-1 access to Ben's growth brain for your toughest challenges. 15 years of experience across founding, scaling teams, and solving the technical + strategic problems you're facing right now. Book a 30 min call with Ben to get started.
Pirate Forge
Build. Grow. Repeat. From zero dev skills to your first vibe-coded, revenue-generating SaaS – together, in 12 weeks. Six Build workshops + six Grow workshops, live with Ben on Zoom, with the recordings, the Pirate Codex and a private builder crew. On the Forge Pass, which includes the Pirate Pass and its free hackathon ticket every three months.
Upcoming events
Build products faster and grow steady revenue at our hands-on meetups, labs and hackathons.
Product and growth should never have grown so far apart
Splitting product, sales and marketing is a mistake – more so since AI. If you only build or only grow, you slow down and waste money.
Just building – fails
- Opinion-driven roadmaps ship features no one needs
- Slow time to revenue – months to the first payers
- No product-market-fit signals – activation and retention unknown
- Team bloat over AI and automation; burn climbs, speed drops
- Vanity metrics replace cohort learning and survey truth
Just growing – also fails
- Detached funnels chase clicks, not product usage
- Acquisition cost inflates, payback drags, churn stays high
- Slow learning loop – insights never shape the roadmap
- Onboarding ignored – activation flatlines, retention stays weak
- Vanity dashboards hide what the product-market-fit survey says
Build and grow – one craft, practiced together
Ship a narrow working tool fast with AI, validate it with activation, retention and product-market-fit signals, and scale only when the unit economics work. Small on purpose, evidence over ego, priced on value.
Builder Codex
The guide to AI-assisted development: prompts, workflows and best practices that keep a team lean and shipping.
GrowGrowth Codex
Our six-part growth marketing framework – data-driven, tested in the field with real SaaS products and measurable results.
Build and grow, livePirate Forge
Build your SaaS product with AI and grow it to paying customers – in one 12-week program. Ship features with authentication, database and payments in the first half, then master activation, retention and revenue growth in the second.
Learn from a serial founder with real-world experience
Proven strategies from someone who has actually been in the arena.
Ben Sufiani
The Captain
Founder from Cologne, Germany with 15 years of startup experience across 10 ventures. After helping thousands of entrepreneurs master growth marketing, Ben became a beginner again at the start of 2025 – learning vibe coding from scratch. Within three months he launched his first SaaS, CaptAIn, with paying customers. His latest venture, Bridesmaid.Love, is an AI wedding planner built in 24 hours at a vibe hackathon. Now he leads the Vibe Coding Cologne community, blending real founder scars with a teacher's clarity to help non-technical founders finally ship.
- Level
- 44
- Founder XP
- 15 years
- Kids
- 2
- Startups
- 10
- Customers
- 250+
- Workshops
- 1,000+
Special skills
- Entrepreneurship95%
- Vibe coding87%
- Vibe marketing98%
- Agentic automation91%
- Patience2%
A personal message from the Captain
The story behind Pirate Skills, and why product and growth should be one craft.
Hi, I'm Ben, the founder of Pirate Skills.
I started Pirate Skills in 2016, and after 15 years of building nine startups, I've learned something crucial: splitting product and marketing is a huge mistake. The founders who win are the ones who treat building and growing as one craft – shipping working software fast while running growth experiments that tell you what to build next.
That's why Pirate Skills exists: to help solo founders and lean crews turn ideas into profitable SaaS products without big teams or endless outsourcing. Whether you're productizing a service, launching your first SaaS, or trying to make monthly revenue predictable, I'll teach you to vibe code with AI and run the growth experiments that actually matter – activation, retention and real product-market-fit signals, not vanity metrics.
Through the Builder Track (vibe coding, ship features) and the Grower Track (experiments, optimize revenue), you'll learn to build, grow and repeat as one continuous loop. We teach independence – no done-for-you dependency. You get hands-on courses, live bootcamps, battle-tested playbooks, and a community of founders who are doing it themselves, keeping crews small on purpose.
Pirate Skills is built on my passion for independence and experimentation. It's about enabling you to build software customers truly want and grow predictable revenue without permission. That's what we do here: one craft, lean crews, AI-first – building and growing as one.
So, why join the navy when you can be a pirate? Join me on this journey, and let's build and grow together – one craft, no limits.
AARRR!
Ben Sufiani
Founder and Captain
Why join the navy when you can be a pirate?
Start with a free event – meet the crew, see what people build, and find your next step.