{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"NC Tweener Talks","title":"[REDACTED] Episode 7: How a Marketer with One Broken Assembly Class Built a Lead-Gen Tool Solo","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2585,"description":"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.\nAlong 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.\nWhat 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.\nTimestamps\n00:00 Cold open, welcome to Redacted\n00:34 What Redacted is about\n01:33 Meet Ben Pope and Levitate's pitch\n02:28 Ben's five years at Levitate, from $6M to $50M ARR\n03:06 Founding story: Jess, his wife Brooks Bell, and word-of-mouth software\n03:58 Ben's new role: launching the AI Solutions business unit\n04:40 Levitate by the numbers: 9,000 customers, 300 employees\n05:06 Why Ben wanted this role (the GWC test)\n08:24 Demo starts: the lead-scoring web app\n09:35 Walking through a live example (Union Special bakery)\n11:36 Turning a business search into an enriched lead\n12:16 What Ben used to build it: Claude, Codex, pre-November 2025 tools\n14:20 Hardest parts of building...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/UEzoK7N1siD9YRaSVBWfZ8B3suSS2aonEIZ5NwBH1Gs/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80NjBh/YWVhZTA4ZTUyY2Fl/MDdhNzQwZWFhNDI4/MDc3Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}