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Guest: Ben Fisher, founder of Skinny and Bald. Hampton member. Been coding since fifth grade. Has been CEO twice, CTO three times. Describes himself as 60% product, 40% engineer.

The pull: Ben is one of the sharpest guys in the Hampton AI channel. This is his second time on the pod. Jordan came with real questions about funnels, databases, and skills — Ben answered live, then pulled up his actual meeting-processing skill on screen share.

What we covered

The build vs. buy question. Jordan’s giveaway funnel pulls comments → emails → form fills → booked calls across LinkedIn and X, six campaigns a week. His partner said use GoHighLevel. Ben’s framing: build custom with Claude when you control the maintenance, use a tool when it solves 80%+ without workarounds. Texting is the exception — Twilio’s regulatory rabbit hole can eat days even with Claude Code.

Databases and custom funnels. Jordan wants the funnel experience to mirror what the user clicked — landing page copy, follow-up sequence, everything. Ben’s example: he still uses Kit.com for his newsletter, but layered custom API logic on top. He didn’t rebuild Kit. He enriched it.

The thing that separates real builders from vibe coders. “What distinguishes really effective builders really comes down to workflow.” Same models. Same Claude. Different results because of how people work. Ben’s non-negotiable: test-driven development. Plan first. Write the tests. Then build. Otherwise Claude tells you it shipped something that doesn’t exist.

The “your friend Ben is absolutely correct” story. Hampton buddy building a chief of staff agent in Slack and WhatsApp. Asked Claude if it was secure. Claude said yes. Ben listed four gaps. Buddy pasted Ben’s message into Claude. Claude wrote back: “Your friend Ben is absolutely correct. We don’t do this, this, this, and this.” Lesson: you cannot ask the AI to verify the AI.

Claude Skills, real talk. Skills are mostly plain English text files the AI reads. They get highly personal fast — Ben said his public repo of skills is becoming less useful to others because the nuances are his. Best move for most people: use someone else’s skill as a reference, have Claude analyze how it works, then build your own flavor.

Ben’s content-from-meetings workflow (live demo). Fireflies records every call → transcripts get stored as markdown files in a local folder → a Claude skill called process meeting notes runs on demand, pulls the last 3 days, formats each meeting in EOS Level 10 format (clear accountability, agreements, action items), and routes to-dos to the right project repo. Why local files instead of remote Fireflies calls? Speed. His second brain reads disk faster than it makes API calls across nine months of transcripts.

Writing in your voice with AI. Ben studied journalism and advertising. He uses Claude as a sparring partner first, last-mile editor second. Reference for anyone serious about this: every.to publishes their full editorial AI process, including how to build an anti-AI style guide. Ben also actively removes em-dashes from his AI output now because they’ve become the tell.

Markdown files as the convention. .md is what the AI world runs on. Pound signs for headers, asterisks for bold. Doesn’t really matter if you use .txt or .docx — but markdown gives the AI hierarchy it can parse.

Tools and references mentioned

Fireflies, Claude Code, N8N, Zapier, Kit.com, GoHighLevel, Twilio, Obsidian, every.to, Superpowers (Claude skill harness), Hampton, EOS Level 10 format, Ruben’s “How AI” Substack.

Where to find Ben

skinnyandbald.com — consulting offers

dearben.ai — Ben’s AI podcast where execs submit questions and he answers live with screen share, plus his newsletter

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Ben Fisher

I help companies figure out where AI fits — and then build it.