Everyone learned to vibe code this year.
So now the internet is full of half-decent apps with zero users. Building stopped being the bottleneck. Distribution is.
That's why I stopped everything to watch a masterclass Greg Isenberg recorded with James Dickerson, the guy behind The Boring Marketer. James is a growth marketer who has, by his own count, spent well over $100 million on ads. And in this episode he does something I haven't seen anyone do this well: he builds a complete vibe marketing system live, in one Claude Code sitting. Positioning, copy, landing page, lead magnet, SEO pages, video ads. All of it.
I pulled the whole playbook apart so you don't have to take notes.
What vibe marketing actually means
Vibe marketing is vibe coding's younger sibling. You bring the strategy and the taste. AI agents produce and test the assets.
James has been chasing this idea for a while. Back in early 2025 he was wiring up n8n workflows and agents, and it worked, but it was painful to scale. Then skills and MCPs landed, and in his words, Claude Code is "what makes vibe marketing 100% a real thing."
The unlock is that your marketing now lives in the same place as your product. Same terminal, same repo. You ship a feature at 2pm and the landing page for it at 2:40.
No Zoom call with an agency, no waiting 3 days for someone's deck.
The system has 3 layers (and most people skip the first one)
Most people open an AI tool, type a prompt, and expect a great output. James says that's exactly where AI slop comes from: they're "skipping the boring research step."
He'll spend up to an hour on research before creating anything. His stack:
- Research MCPs first. Perplexity MCP for market and competitor research. Firecrawl for scraping (its Agent can go find every Facebook page for local businesses in a niche and compile them into a doc). Playwright to open competitor sites, click around, and capture screenshots. Playwright is open source and free.
- Then skills. Instruction manuals for your agent. James built 17 of them and uses them daily: positioning angles, direct response copy, lead magnets, keyword research, DTC ads. His copy skill is trained on Eugene Schwartz and Claude Hopkins, then updated for today's internet.
- Then assembly. Claude Code stacks those skills on top of the research and builds the actual assets.
One thing he said about skills stuck with me. Generic skills get you 80% there. The last 10 to 20% is expert perspective, and that's the part nobody can copy. If you've spent years in a niche, downloading your brain into a skill is a moat.
The live build: a full agency funnel in 54 minutes
To prove it, James builds a fake business on camera: an AI marketing agency for boring local businesses doing $2M to $10M a year. Plumbers, HVAC, roofers, electricians.
Watch the sequence, because this is the repeatable part:
1. Positioning. He runs his positioning angles skill and gets back real emotional framing: "from chasing work to selecting work." Plus a unique mechanism: in home services, first response wins 35% of jobs (his number from the episode), and AI responds in minutes, not hours. Claude even names the company Boring Money.
2. Copy. The direct response skill writes the landing page: "You've fired enough marketing agencies. Try the one that delivers in days, not months." It also writes a founder story section about the $4M revenue business with 15% net margins that every agency ignores because it isn't a shiny DTC brand. That's good copy. A human copywriter would bill you four figures for it.
3. Design. He captures screenshots of competitors like Scorpion with Playwright, then runs Anthropic's free front-end design skill. No purple gradients, no rounded-corner AI look. Greg's reaction on camera: "It doesn't look vibe coded at all."
4. Next step, decided for him. This is my favorite trick in the episode. James has an orchestrator skill. When he's stuck, he tells Claude "I don't know what to do next" and the skill maps what exists (positioning, brand voice, landing page) against what's missing (lead magnet, emails, traffic). It answered: "Without a lead magnet, you lose them forever."
5. Lead magnet. The lead magnet skill pitches 4 concepts. He picks the 5-minute marketing audit: 15 yes/no questions, instant score, book-a-call button at the end. It feels like a tool, so the perceived value is way higher than a PDF. The alternative was paying Typeform all year for the same thing.
Total elapsed time when the funnel was standing: about 54 minutes.
Traffic: 100 landing pages and 100 ads from one prompt
A funnel with no traffic is a diorama. The back half of the episode is how James fills it.
On the organic side, his keyword research skill finds a programmatic SEO play for local markets, and his SEO content skill generates the pages ("HVAC marketing in Phoenix" and so on), each with the audit lead magnet embedded. He's honest about the caveat: pages still need indexing and links, publishing alone ranks nothing. It's the same thesis as the agentic SEO system Rasty Turek used to grow Vaultaire to $41K a month: one research-backed, agent-produced page a day compounds.
On the paid side it gets wilder.
Video ads render in the terminal. Remotion (free, and its prompt repo is public on GitHub) builds animated product ads straight from Claude Code, in square, vertical, and landscape formats, programmatically. James went back and forth with it for 30 minutes and got an ad he's actually running in a campaign.
Statics come from Nano Banana Pro, called through the Glyph MCP, with Claude Code writing the image prompts and spinning out variations.
And the angles come from DTC. E-commerce brands run more ad tests than anyone, so he mines the Facebook ad library for hooks and formats, then repurposes them for whatever he's selling.
His line for all of this: "You could become a testing machine in a sitting." Twenty landing page variants, twenty ads, one afternoon.
I remember paying designers who had never shipped a converting ad in their life. A conversion-focused ad designer used to be a unicorn hire. Now it's a skill file.
What the whole stack costs
This is the part that should scare agencies.
James quoted the traditional path at $5,000 to $10,000 a month for a retainer, or $15,000 to $25,000 and 6 to 8 weeks for a project like the one he built in under an hour.
His stack: a $200/month Claude Max subscription ("I've never run out of tokens"), Playwright free, Remotion free, Anthropic's design skill free, plus Perplexity and Firecrawl API costs. Call it a rounding error next to one agency invoice.
Budget stopped being the constraint. The constraint now is whether you know what good looks like.
How I'd steal this playbook this week
If I were starting from zero on Monday, here's the condensed version.
Step 1: Pick one funnel that matters. One product, one audience, one offer.
Step 2: Do the boring research first. An hour with Perplexity and Playwright on your market, competitors, and angles. Save it all as files in your repo.
Step 3: Build 3 skills, not 17. Positioning, direct response copy, lead magnets. Have Claude draft them from deep research, then inject your own taste by hand. That last 20% is the moat.
Step 4: Build the funnel in one sitting. Landing page with the front-end design skill, one lead magnet that feels like a tool, one email sequence.
Step 5: Become a testing machine. 10 page variants, 10 ads, ship, measure, kill the losers.
This is basically the job I described in my piece on the marketing engineer: one person with judgment, armed with agents, doing what a 5-person team did in 2023.
The founders who win the next 12 months won't be the best builders. They'll be the ones who market like this.
FAQ
What is vibe marketing?
Vibe marketing is using AI agents (mainly Claude Code with skills and MCPs) to research, create, and test marketing assets the way vibe coding creates software. You set the strategy, the positioning, and the taste. The agent produces the landing pages, copy, lead magnets, SEO content, and ads, and iterates on them with you in the terminal.
What tools do you need to start vibe marketing?
James Dickerson's core stack is small on purpose: Claude Code on a $200/month Max plan, three MCPs (Perplexity for research, Firecrawl for scraping, Playwright for browser work), plus Remotion for video ads and Nano Banana Pro for static images. Skills do the heavy lifting, and you can write those yourself for free.
Isn't AI-generated marketing just slop?
It is when you skip research. James's whole argument is that slop comes from prompting without context: no market research, no positioning, no expert framework. With an hour of research loaded in and skills trained on real copywriting principles, the output in the episode looked like senior agency work.
Do I need to be technical to do this?
Less than you'd think. James drives most of it by voice with Whisper Flow and plain English prompts. The terminal looks scary for a day, then it's just another chat window. If you can describe your customer and your offer clearly, the agent handles the implementation.
Want more playbooks like this?
Every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast I sit down with bootstrapped founders and pull out the real numbers: the ad spend, the funnels, and what actually converted.
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