[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.

Timestamps

00:00 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)