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 (or fully on-demand). Includes the Pirate Codex, a private builder crew, and ready-to-ship templates. Live cohort or digital-only, one-time or monthly.
Join Our Events
Build products faster and grow steady revenue at our hands-on workshops and labs
PRODUCTGROWTH
should have never grown so far apart
Splitting product, sales & marketing is a mistake – more so since AI. If you only build or grow, you slow down and waste money.
Just Building — fails
- Opinion‑driven roadmaps ship features no one needs
- Slow time‑to‑revenue — months to first payers
- No PMF signals — activation/retention unknown
- Team bloat over AI/automation; burn climbs, speed drops
- Vanity metrics replace cohort learning and survey truth
Just Growing — also fails
- Detached funnels chase clicks, not product usage
- CAC inflates, payback drags, churn stays high
- Slow learning loop — insights never shape the roadmap
- Onboarding ignored — activation flatlines, retention weak
- Vanity dashboards hide PMF survey truth
BUILDGROW
one craft — practiced together
Equip lean crews to Build – Grow – Repeat: ship a narrow working tool fast with AI, validate with activation, retention, and PMF signals, and scale only when unit economics work. Small on purpose, evidence over ego, price on value.
Learn from a serial founder with real-world experience
Proven strategies from someone who's 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.
SPECIAL SKILLS
A Personal Message from the Captain
Discover the story behind Pirate Skills and why product & 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 MRR predictable, I'll teach you to vibe code with AI and run the growth experiments that actually matter— activation, retention, and real PMF signals, not vanity metrics.
Through the Builder Track (vibe coding, ship features) and Grower Track (experiments, optimize revenue), you'll learn to Build → Grow → 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 MRR 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 & Captain