[REDACTED] Episode 7: How a Marketer with One Broken Assembly Class Built a Lead-Gen Tool Solo

Ben Pope, who leads the new AI Solutions business unit at Levitate, joins Redacted as its very first guest. Ben spent five years on Levitate's marketing team as the company grew from six million to roughly fifty million in annual recurring revenue, before shifting a month ago to help small businesses fold AI into their own workflows. This episode is mostly show and tell: Ben screen-shares a lead-scoring web app he built entirely on his own, despite having no formal engineering background, along with the morning briefing and post-meeting automation skills he uses every day to prep for calls and follow up with clients.Along the way, the conversation turns into a practical breakdown of how to actually build with AI tools in a real business. Ben talks through why he prefers lightweight Claude skills over traditional workflow automation platforms, how he decides when a process needs to be deterministic versus handed to an LLM, and how he manages the sprawl of having built around a hundred skills over the past year, many of which he's since retired.What makes Ben's story distinctive is the contrast between his background and his output: a marketer who taught himself to ship production web apps, and whose client consulting work is now feeding directly back into Levitate's core product roadmap.Timestamps00:00 Cold open, welcome to Redacted 00:34 What Redacted is about 01:33 Meet Ben Pope and Levitate's pitch 02:28 Ben's five years at Levitate, from $6M to $50M ARR 03:06 Founding story: Jess, his wife Brooks Bell, and word-of-mouth software 03:58 Ben's new role: launching the AI Solutions business unit 04:40 Levitate by the numbers: 9,000 customers, 300 employees 05:06 Why Ben wanted this role (the GWC test) 08:24 Demo starts: the lead-scoring web app 09:35 Walking through a live example (Union Special bakery) 11:36 Turning a business search into an enriched lead 12:16 What Ben used to build it: Claude, Codex, pre-November 2025 tools 14:20 Hardest parts of building solo, trial and error 17:21 How the scoring tool works under the hood 18:37 Killing Webflow, migrating to a Claude-editable GitHub site 21:03 Claude Club and internal hackathons at Levitate 21:45 Example client: an LA family-law attorney's intake workflow 22:50 Product-market fit and figuring out the sales process 25:29 Building Claude skills to interview clients automatically 26:35 Ben's morning briefing skill, demoed live 29:07 Manual runs vs. cron, why Ben hasn't automated it yet 33:05 Skill bloat: ~100 skills built, many abandoned 35:57 Deterministic vs. probabilistic, when not to trust the LLM 37:24 AI Solutions as Levitate's forward-deployed engineering arm 39:17 Where to find Ben 40:08 Shoutout: Simon Willison's agentic engineering resource 42:04 Show notes, sanitized skills repo, and wrap-upFind Redacted wherever you listen to podcasts, or on YouTube for the full screen share.Show notes from the episode: https://github.com/instanttaylor/redacted-podcastWhere to Find David:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshaner/Where to Find Taylor:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorcotner/More about Offline: https://www.linkedin.com/company/offline-media-inc-/Where to Find Ben: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminmpope/Levitate: https://www.levitate.ai/--- This episode of Redacted is hosted by David Shaner and Taylor Cotner, and presented and produced by NC Tweener Fund.We couldn’t share posts like this without our amazing sponsors: Platinum: NC IDEA: https://ncidea.orgGold Sponsors: - Balentine: https://www.balentine.com/triangle-entrepreneurs - EisnerAmpner: https://www.eisneramper.com - Robinson Bradshaw: https://www.robinsonbradshaw.com  Silver Sponsors: - Automated Consulting Group: https://automated.co - Bank of America: https://business.bofa.com/en-us/content/technology-industry-group.html  ------Triangle Tweener Talks is sponsored by:Atomic Object: https://atomicobject.com/