Creating a $200k Side Project Without Writing a Line of Code with Ben Tossell of Makerpad

Courtland Allen 1s

Ben Tossell, welcome to the Indie Hackers podcast.

Ben Tossell 2s

Thanks for having me.

Courtland Allen 2s

Ben, you’re the founder of Makerpad. Makerpad helps makers figure out to build apps and website without writing a single line of code. In fact, at the top of your website, it says very boldly – literally in bold font – “whatever tool you want to build, you can do it without code.”

You’ve been working on Makerpad for less than a year now but it already, I think, made over $100,000 in revenue in the first of this year and it’s probably on track to do more than in the second half.

You’ve tweeted that that’s 95% profit. You have very few expenses. You built the whole site in a meta kind of way without writing any code yourself and what’s the craziest to me is that this is a side project for you. You’ve got a full-time job, you run Makerpad in your free time. So, let’s start there.

Most Indie Hackers are doing this for freedom. They want to be their own bosses and control their own time. If they had something like you do that could make them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in their free time, they would quit in a heartbeat and just go work on that.

So, I think this is kind of revealing of your motivations. Why are you building Makerpad and why isn’t it your full-time thing?

Ben Tossell 1m 1s

Well first of all, that was an awesome introduction, so I appreciate that. Well I’m working with Amos Capital which is entirely sort of runs the fund. I wouldn’t want to call it alternative to BC but more early stage investing in bootstrappers so it’s people who get 3K, 5K, MRR who want to go full time in this thing which sort of like is full circle that potentially Makerpad could be sitting in that bucket at well.

Especially solo founders are very small teams on our starting off on their bootstrapper journey but we sort of give them the cash to go full-time and then they can quit their jobs, hire some extra support staff and get access to our mentors and deals and things like that. We put it together for them. I mean that’s an amazing opportunity for me and I Tyler basically reached out to me when I was doing a previous project.

I think it was more so he was seeing if I was going to be take investment but then he said what the fund was going to be doing. I said I just have to be involved. I wanted to be involved in the fund. Don’t worry about investment stuff. I didn’t know. So, ultimately, I was doing things full-time. I’ve been on my own for two years or so. So, I just wanted to be involved in the fund so here am.

Courtland Allen 2m 15s

That’s pretty unusual for a founder to talk to an investor and decline to take investment and instead ask to work with the investment firm. What was it about Earnest Capital that made you so excited to work on it?

Ben Tossell 2m 27s

Well, it’s just one of these things I think that comes around only once every several years, I think. The community’s been desperate for it and Indie Hackers are doing it and everything around that. The community is just becoming bigger and bigger and there’s more stories, especially your telling this on this podcast that people are going out and doing things a different way than raising BC money.

So, just seeing what Tyler was – what his vision was for Earnest, I just really wanted to be involved and my whole career in tech has been trying to help founders do things. I never thought of myself as I’m going to be the founder who can have this big company and do something myself necessarily. Mine was more for fun or learning but yeah, it just gave me an opportunity to work with founders on different problems. Every week is something different. So, it’s just been awesome to be a part of that.

Courtland Allen 3m 15s

It’s funny hearing you describe it that way because that could easily be the description for your business Makerpad as well. You’re helping founders accomplish things. Every week you’re working on different problems. I’m curious how it works actually.

If I am somebody who doesn’t know how to code and I come to Makerpad, your website, how do you help me learn how to build something without code?

Ben Tossell 3m 35s

So we’ve got basically a series of tutorials and we’ve got templates on there as well. I say we. It is just me. But some of the tutorials are free; some are [ ] table for pro members. It’s essentially broken down into a by-use case or by role.

So, if you’re looking to build like an Airbnb startup on the web or mobile app and there’s different versions of that so you can use one of the tutorials using Glide to make the Airbnb mobile app or there’s a tutorial that teachers you how to make Airbnb on Webflow, AirTable and Zapier [ph], all tied together.

But then there’s other smaller tutorials which are things like how super human builds their product market for engine. I just built a version of that using AirTable and do it step by step, run through how to build your own version of that, too.

Courtland Allen 4m 27s

Yeah, you’ve got a ton of stuff on here and it’s pretty obvious that you’re just really good at building things without code. You’ve been doing it for years and your website is really just a way for you to take all that knowledge that you’ve accumulated and impart it on to other people who show up who never built anything without code.

What’s interesting to me about this is I know so many software engineers, so many developers, who will never build anything on their own. They kind of some day sort of maybe possibly want to do that. But they never get over that initial hurdle because it’s, quite frankly, kind of nerve wracking to build something and release it to the public.

And yet, here you are, you don’t know how to code and yet you’ve built up this huge repertoire of all these things you’re able to build. What got you over that initial hurdle that stops so many other people from getting started?

Ben Tossell 5m 8s

I think it’s – I’m sure so many people listening and so many people from Indie Hackers will understand this situation where you want to build something. You’re not technical; you must try and go out and find that technical cofounder out there. Oh, hey, can you build this thing for me? Why should I build it? Blah, blah, all that.

So all those struggles and then you basically come to two parts which are finding a technical cofounder or you learn code and for me, it was like well I don’t want to spend nine months learning to code when I’ll then be able to make someone’s shitty version of an app idea that I may have, when for me, I had ideas every week or the few ideas I had had and I thought well this could be cool. This could be cool, as well.

I imagine basically none of the time – when you think of something you want to build, you build it. It’s not necessarily going to be the thing that becomes successful so I thought the only way to build something and not be so attached to it that I’ll be upset when it doesn’t work is what’s the minimum time, I can spend on it to build it.

Then, when I was working on at Product Hunt, it basically meant that I got to see all these new tools launching and it was things like [inaudible] that I was like wow, I can actually just a really quick website in like 10 minutes if I want to. So it allowed me to really explore these tools and [inaudible] and then that’s what got me to make a bug using these other people’s tools which were launching all around me.

Courtland Allen 5m 8s

They say that the man with the hammer, suddenly everything starts to look like a nail. In other words, whatever tool you have at your disposal you begin to kind of see the world through the eyes of somebody using that tool.

So, if you’re a developer, you’re sort of obsessed with solving every problem using code. And yet, here you were, not a developer, and suddenly all of these other tools are coming onto the scene that help you build apps and websites without having to write any code whatever. So, of course that’s what you’re doing to do. What would you say was your initially motivation for building all this stuff?

Ben Tossell 7m 2s

I think my motivation has changed over the years. Initially I think I thought okay, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to run m y own business. I want to be a millionaire by the time I’m 30, all the standard things.

And then when you get into it, it almost becomes just the thing that you love to do with is figuring out how to build things. I think lots of people talk about how I’m not a developer but I build things anyway. It actually shares a lot of the same mindset around how you thinking about the problems, break them down and you actually build them.

It's just I use other people’s code with their tools that I put together. Then, once you start building, you just almost [inaudible] think oh, I can build that thing. And then you see something else and you’re like oh, maybe I can build something else or maybe even tie these together.

Courtland Allen 7m 46s

Yeah, exactly, it’s like you can’t help yourself once you know how to do it. Was there ever a point where you actually considered learning how to code instead of using this no-code tools?

Ben Tossell 7m 51s

Often must be 50 times. But I’ve gone I’ve said alright, I’m going to take this coding company course or I’d even spend up a basic product term app even before I was working there I remember going through the steps, following all these things and it just – it drove me insane just to see, you get to one step, it didn’t work and then it just didn’t work and it didn’t work and it didn’t work. And then it just did work.

So, I thought I can’t do this. But then it’s funny how years later, I do the same thing with no-codes and there’s plenty of times when something doesn’t work, doesn’t work and doesn’t work and it just won’t work. So, it’s funny how the same problems happen.

Courtland Allen 8m 31s

Yeah, you’ve got to kind of choose your preferred pain. If you really don’t like de-bugging code but you’re okay de-bugging problems with these no-code tools, then use the no-code tools.

Ben Tossell 8m 40s

Yeah, I guess. It might depend on almost how your brain works and how your brain sees this. I like to see things in blocks, check this, check this, put this here, connect this to that. Rather than what I see as just letters, symbols, numbers all in like a massive line. Sometimes it looks a bit difficult to me.

Courtland Allen 8m 57s

A lot of that description of code, just a random collection of letters and symbols and numbers organized into one giant line really does not sound appealing when you put it that way. One of the things that you did to avoid having to deal with these giant lines of code is that early on you partnered with a developer. So, there’s this guy is name is Mubbs. He is one of the most prolific developers that I’ve ever talked to.

I had on him the Indie Hackers podcast a couple years back. I think he won Paleton’s [ph] Maker of the Year Award, at least once, maybe two years running. He will put out like five or six apps in the span of a month without breaking a sweat. He just codes so much, he codes so fast. He’s really good at it. How did you as somebody who can’t code, convince somebody like Mubbs to partner with you on a product?

Ben Tossell 9m 37s

I think it was very insight that the person I ended up reaching out to was Mubbs because like you said. he built so many things that he was like, yeah, sure, sounds cool. How can we build it? Whereas I know from experience that trying to find other people to build stuff for you is never often that easy.

But we were in the same slack group together and I was sort of an annoying person saying hello and trying to be really helpful to everyone else. So, always speaking to and really just talking about ideas and talking about things and just being really – I like to say helpful. Give a man [inaudible] But it just helped because Mubbs could see that I was helpful to other people and him, the feedback, or whatever it was, testing things, so when it came down to oh, I’ve got this idea. I want to build something as well. He’s like yeah, come and we’ll build that. And like he built it in his sleep. So, he was like yeah, sure, I can build that.

And I spent hours and hours and hours putting together a massive spreadsheet of all the things that needed to go on there and he could have done that in his sleep for sure.

Courtland Allen 10m 32s

What was it that you guys actually ended up building together?

Ben Tossell 10m 35s

Well I was working in social media market at the time and Brian [Karenstein] I want to mention his name there. He worked on something called Start-up Stash which is basically a lot of resources for entrepreneurs, everything from idea generation, coming up with names, finding domains, logo design, all that sort of stuff. Everything you’d need to start a project.

So, I thought it would be quite cool if there was a version of that afloat. All the marketing things, cause there’s so many social media tools, there’s automation tools, there’s blog creation things and there’s just tons of other things. So I thought what don’t I do it for marketing focus things and I thought it was a fairly easy thing to get my toe in the water of building something because I believed he put together all these tools in a spreadsheet [inaudible] loves to build something for me that is uploaded and then I just thought yeah, it would be an easy first step. So that’s what we launched with.

Courtland Allen 11m 32s

Marketing Stack ended up being one of the top 20 most uploaded products of all time on Product Hunt with something crazy like 4,000 up votes. How did you get it to do so well?

Ben Tossell 11m 42s

I mean I think that was a bit of [inaudible]. I think it was early on in the days where the stash stack sites had not been done before really. Like Brian had his first one; I had the second one and basically after that there was one new in a week. So, people got very tired of those. But they were very interesting, helpful products for people initially.

And I think I must have just been – I was in a stack trying to be helpful to people. They just wanted to help me with my first product. I was on my first thing. We launched on my 25th birthday as well and I don’t know, it really struck a nerve with some people and I imagine some of the calmer me yet to being in those groups probably helps being onboard more than it would otherwise.

Courtland Allen 12m 26s

This is good stuff. You pretty much just named two different unfair advantages that founders can have. The first is that because you had your ear to the ground, you knew what the trends were. Product Hunt. And so you were able to capitalize on that early before that particular trend got really old.

And also, because you were participating in the community, the second unfair advantage was that everybody knew you and everybody like you because you’re helpful and you’re invisible and so when you submitted a product, they recognized you. They’re like oh, it’s Ben and of course they’re going upload you and help you to sort of pay it forward.

And these are two things that I think any founder can do if you don’t just sort of receded into a hole and build things by yourself. I’m curious about the second one. What did it look like exactly when you were helping people out in this slack groups?

Ben Tossell 13m 8s

I mean I’d like to see this back too because I’m not sure I was so very helpful but I was definitely – I was in a slack group called Maker Hunt [ph] and then from there I was in Product Hunt trends global, slack group which is thousands of people. There was like a Product Hunt book club group so all of these things always just saying to whoever I could, let me know if I can help with anything.

So at Maker Hunt we had lots of –it was almost like the very early version of the Indie Hackers introduced. We just had AMAs with different founders. So, I just offered to follow in this – it was all in slack basically. So, I followed the whole conversation, copied and pasted everything over because obviously everything was going to get lost, formatted it all into Medium posts and then posted them out. So, we just had these AMAs. There must still a Medium somewhere but yeah, all these articles from founders probably some cross-over which we’ve had on Indie Hackers as well. But yeah, that’s where I mostly started being helpful, I guess.

Courtland Allen 14m 10s

Yeah, it almost sounds like you were playing community manager for this slack groups which is funny because you ended up going on to become the community manager for Product Hunt itself.

Ben Tossell 14m 18s

That’s exactly how it happened. I was already the community manager for these groups and Product Hunt slack grounds so all the makers, people launching on products already knew me through this groups and Eric, Tyler and [Brian] who I mentioned previously, were both working at Product Hunt at the time and they actually both separately recommended me to Ryan so he followed me on Twitter when I was on work.

I was like oh, my God, what the hell is happening and he came to me and said I think we need to have a chat and I was like oh, my God, what the hell? Then we had a chat and he said that they had an opening and wanted to hire community managers and they think that I’d be great for it. So, I was like I’m going to quit my job and do this.

Courtland Allen 15m 0s

Were you nervous at all taking over this job because you had never done community management as a professional and Product Hunt was huge. They had millions of fans?

Ben Tossell 15m 8s

I didn’t know how big it was I don’t think. Obviously, it was such a cool opportunity and I was like well I’m doing lots of this stuff anyway. I must have felt fairly nervous but thought I should up and do this. I’ve just being a person who everyone was going to and chatting with anyway but I just thought okay, I’m going to go.

But I remember on my first – the day before my first day – we and Ryan were trying to have a Zoom call and I was in Starbuck’s and the Internet was cutting out and he’s trying to explain to me how to run the homepage of Product Hunt. And I just couldn’t ever figure out – I just wasn’t working [inaudible] so I couldn’t really get to the bottom of how to run the site.

So, on a Monday morning, no one awake at that time, I was just here on my own just like okay, I’ve gotten to look past this website now How the heck am I going to do this? But I got through it and in the end it was fun.

Courtland Allen 15m 58s

Yeah, it worked out. You ended up staying at Product Hunt for a couple of years. And in that time, you saw 80,000 products launch. What are some of the product launches that stood out to you the most and that influenced you?

Ben Tossell 16m 9s

I mean I can’t remember so many of the products but there was a product called Be My Eyes where if there was a blind person in need they could switch on the app straightaway and you would be there eyes. You could help them show is this milk out of date, all these sorts of things. That was one that stuck out for me.

What I really starting seeing was people building things to help other people build things. So, like AJ built [cobs] and released that. I remember that. I felt highly shocked and I believe this and I can use this and I started using it and I was like I probably just stopped working for like half an hour that day and thought oh, my God, I’ve already built a website. And that’s happened – that quickness – to build something and have it ready for someone to go on there was just insane to me.

And then I saw other companies like Workflow, Bubble because I was in charge of launches, there was always people being introduced to me through email. It was all the people who I see were all coming through our email to me. I was just getting – speaking to everyone.

So, it was a chance to really see behind the scenes of all these things and half of them get to launch. Things are so – it was like I need to build more. I need to build more. I want to do this thing and the whole sort of chat bot hype was coming around. And then there was something called chat fuel which was a super easy way to build chat bots. So, I was like oh, my God, I can build a chat bot in half an hour as well.

So there were all these things that just helped with the speed of having a [ ] idea to them being able to have something to show someone else.

Courtland Allen 17m 39s

Sounds like it was really coming at you from all sides there. I think we’re all just a product of environments. If you find yourself in a situation that you were in where you’re seeing all these new product launches every day, where you’re getting emails from founders and you’re helping them launch their products. Where you’re seeing all the new things you can do, it’s pretty impossible to be there and not get the urge to do your own thing. I can imagine it’s got to be pretty hard to resist that urge.

You eventually did do your own thing. You launched your first business called [Newco]. What’s the story behind that?

Ben Tossell 18m 6s

Yeah, so I build a few things before that but Newco was – after I left Product Hunt and I’d been sort of doing some consulting and other things on the side to pay the bills, I saw in the –actually I saw in the [akers] go rails. There’s another one. It’s a busy screen casting business. I thought I can do that. I can just record myself building these things without code, release one a week and just charge people for a [inaudible]. Yeah, sure let’s do that.

So, I used the Product Hunt [inaudible] and messaged a bunch of people who had signed up for newsletter that I had put out ages ago and just said, look, I’m going to do this. It will cost $49 dollars. Get them to pay now which was basically a link to a type form and you’ll get yearly access and this is what we’ll do. I didn’t have a website ready but I had like 10 or 12 people pay me.

I was like, oh, my God, okay, this is something and people seem like they want to do this. So, I used Webflow, put a website together and I started on this path to building this company and screen [inaudible] is a harder job than I thought it was. It’s really not that simple. I really struggled to figure out what’s the next thing I’m going to build. I’ve got this pressure now.

I’ve got to build something this week and it’s got to be out there and I was going to be out there on my own. Oh, no, is it going to be good enough? What am I going to do with it?

So, as usual, I went back to Mubbs and said hey, Mubbs, I meant to build this into a platform where other people can use this to do other things like host their own hack-a-thons and all this sort of stuff. So, you could probably tell already that the initial idea had completely changed for no reason other than I thought you needed to go bigger and better every week and tell it like something really clicks on.

So, sort of part-time and then I had all this pressure. People were signing up for more videos and things which I wasn’t [ ] as much and then it was just this new platform that nothing ever happened with it and I was just sort of a bit lost. Like okay, where is Newco now? What was this? And that was sort of the end of last year.

So, I sort of decided to close it down and re-think what it is I was trying to do or what I wanted to be doing.

Courtland Allen 20m 20s

Where do you think this idea came from that you had to keep pushing, that you had to keep trying these new things rather than just sticking with your original idea of recording stream casts of how to build these no-code apps?

Ben Tossell 20m 30s

Well I mean I was in a certain embodied bubble. I was in Product Hunt and saw all these companies launching from [ ] slack, everything. The thing to do was you build the company, it was to grow 10% a week or a month or whatever it is and then you raise money and then that’s how the fairy tale ends.

It was just being ingrained in me that that was what you were supposed to do. I was reading Indie Hackers on and off throughout the time but always thought yeah, but that’s something that some people – that doesn’t happen to most people that do this big strapping thing. I don’t know if I can really do it. I wanted more for no other reason really than I wanted it to be this bigger thing.

So, yeah, at the end of last year I started reading some things, listening to some things and reading some interviews with some people and I thought now that’s the situation I would like. Or that’s how I’d like to run something and not this other way. And you just – instead of reading all the back news posts and stuff with all these big raises, I thought why don’t I just try and build something this other way.

Courtland Allen 21m 33s

I remember kind of following along with Newco and you had a lot of things going on that seemed at least from the outside that they were doing really well. You had – what was it – like a 30-day challenge?

Ben Tossell 21m 42s

Thirty-day start-up, yeah.

Courtland Allen 21m 43s

Yeah, the 30-day start-up. That seemed huge. You had like 3,000 people join in the first 24 hours. It seemed like it was going really well. What happened with that?

Ben Tossell 21m 52s

It went [ ] I think. It was a similar thing to like the 100-day – what was it – 100 days of coding? And I just said, look, it will be 30 days. Why doesn’t everyone just try to build something within 30 days or put out some stuff that is like okay, this is how you can come up with ideas. This is how you can talk to user. This is how you can do this, this is how you can do that. And it started off well but it’s just a difficult thing to try and have 3,000 come together and actually do something and follow it. I didn’t really put too much thought into it.

I thought about it, built the website in probably [ ] when I thought maybe comes if no code is that you can build something so quickly. It doesn’t mean you should. But I did and I launched it and I jut didn’t really – it didn’t get to plan.

Courtland Allen 22m 40s

So, let’s talk about what that looks like when things don’t get to plan. How did you decided definitively that these things weren’t working and it was time to move on? What was it like pulling the plug?

Ben Tossell 22m 48s

I think it’s pretty easy to know when things aren’t going well. It’s just whether you accept it or not. I sat around stressed out that something’s not clicking. I think you can tell when something is not going well and you can tell when something is going well. And if you’re somewhere in the middle then it’s probably not going well.

So, I sat at home day after day, stressed out about what’s going to happen, something’s not right. I’ve got pressure to do this. I don’t really want to do this thing but I feel like I should but I don’t want to and it just that cycle of feeling shitty about something you don’t want to do or feel pressured to do and it’s not the thing that you really love or that you feel like you should be loving about it.

It took me a while to figure out that I just needed to stop doing the shit that I don’t want to do like – and that was – it was I think one of the interviews I looked at once a guy from Podepat [ph] and he was so straightforward and said, look, I only do things, it’s like a decision matrix. [ ] make me money, make my users happen or not take [ ]. It will be easy to do. I mean it’s got to be at least two of those things otherwise, I won’t do it.

And I was just like that’s just an insane way of thinking, in a good way. I love to just say okay, I want to figure out my own almost work principles of what are the things I want to do and how do I want to do them? So I spent a lot of time on that last year and thus, so many things were stripped away.

Courtland Allen 24m 12s

What did you end up coming up with on your list of work principles?

Ben Tossell 24m 15s

So, I think it was more of a – I mean it didn’t [ ] principles but I took away [ ] declaring revenue because I think people have got 3,000 [ ] revenue products that they’re already paying for already and they keep on building it and if I’ve got a recurring revenue product, every month I have to give that person that value all over again so I’m just going to make that for now. This might change soon is the lifetime [ ].

And so it pays once, I guess he should get that value straightaway and then I don’t feel like I’m in debt to them any longer. So, it would be like we’ve done our deed now just enjoy all the rest of the stuff that you get now basically for free.

Another one was I want to build to just build the things I want to build whenever I want to build them. If I don’t record something and [ ] one week, I don’t want to feel bad about that. If I decided to build five things one day, or that week, [ ].

But I don’t want to be on anyone else’s schedule. I want to be on my own. If I want to go off for two weeks, which I just did, I came back yesterday, then I want to be able to do that. So it was just some of this little things that I was thinking about. Yeah, I think it was more of a [ ] says in his company of one is focus on doing next. I think, yeah, that was a big one for me because not thinking about I have to grow 10% every week or anything like that.

So, if you had like a $10K month one month and the next month was like $7K, you should not be feeling bad about that because a $7K month is insane. People are programmed to feel bad about a decline in growth and for that month you still had a fantastic growth that many people would love to have. Yeah, that’s something that stuck with me as well.

Courtland Allen 26m 3s

Yeah, this is good stuff. I’m noticing that it’s all about feelings. It’s about how do feel good as a founder? How do you make sure you don’t feel undue pressure? How do you make sure you don’t’ actually hate the business that you started? How do you make sure that things are going well, that you don’t feel guilty or bad or behind.

And it’s really the whole – the whole reason to start a company is to make yourself feel good so I think more people should really follow example of setting out some principles at the very beginning because if you don’t – if you don’t define like what you stand for, what you will do, what you don’t do, then you end up just being sort of swept away by whatever wave you’re a prat of.

If you’re product of the Product Hunt, raise money, you know, start a high gross start-up crowd, you’re just going to follow whatever principles they set for us and copy whatever they do. That might not be the thing that makes you happy. So you have to deliberately make those decisions yourself.

Ben Tossell 26m 51s

Yeah, I think designing a business that you want to build is a huge part of something. When you’re starting it – for example, another one of mine was if I had double the amount of customers I don’t want to have double the amount of support. So, what does this company look like this week compared to what may it look like in three months’ time, six months’ time?

And I probably wouldn’t look any further out than six months because things do change but yeah, essentially who wouldn’t want to have an easy business that brought them in $300K a year where t hey want to do what they want on their own schedule? There’s no pressure, they enjoy talking to their customers because you’re not fighting to try to get them to keep on paying you. You’re not trying to keep up appearances or anything like that.

It’s more of I’m enjoying doing this. It just so happens that some things you need to pay for. People pay them and they all –it’s working out for now. I mean not to say that I’m making all the world [ ] next year, who knows? But it’s how I want to be right now with how I’m running Makepad and it’s been really good to me in the last six months, for sure.

Courtland Allen 27m 56s

One of the tricky things here is that while you’re designing the ideal business that you’d like to run that makes you feel good and makes you happy, you also have to design a business that works. That actually makes that grows at least to some degree where you can justify continuing to run it. What was that process like for you and deciding to run Makerpad.

Ben Tossell 28m 16s

So after Newco I sort of realized that folks are now doing less, what do people like, what do I like doing? And it came down to essentially the – like how I started in this. I like making videos, not necessarily making videos, but I like showing people how to build something without code.

So, I said why don’t I just do that one thing? So, that’s all I did was th at one thing and I reinvented it Makerpads and people have just been loving it ever since. It’s been incredible and it was one of those times when I just thought this is – like this is right. People are liking this. This is sticking. People are saying that they could never build something b efore and now they’ve got actually something built.

That’s a huge thing for me. There is X, Y, Z founders who were asking for my templates and using my tutorials to build things themselves like communities 25% at least developers, so it’s a huge part of technical people who just want another way of doing something.

And just hearing all these things made me almost know that this is the thing I should be doing. But you said it’s difficult to design a business where you don’t know if it’s going to work and find out that it can be beneficial to you to actually do it.

So, after – If I have a week where I feel like everything is being reactive rather proactive, so I’m applying to people or I’ve got to do this or that, I’m writing off my own to do list or [ ] box, I take a Friday or take the weekend and say, wait, what’s going wrong for this to be what last week was like – why is this not how it was of how I want it to be. Sometimes it takes a few adjustments. Sometimes it’s things like you ‘ve got to just not reply to email or you’ve got to do let things not be an issue and just kind of re-jig the model every few weeks.

That’s been my thing. You just [ ] back and think okay, is this the right direction I was thinking and planning on going? Is it changing? Is it messing up for my – or how can I [ ]. So, just re-think whenever that happens.

Courtland Allen 30m 19s

Yeah, you always have to kind of stay on top of your business. Otherwise it will get away form you because it’s pretty much a living, breathing thing. You know, you’ve got customers, you’ve got emails coming in, you’ve got features that are sort of begging to be created.

And if you don’t control what you’re doing then it’s going to find a path of its own and eventually you’ll find yourself doing something you don’t like. So, I think it’s a very wise approach to sort of step back at the end of every week and ask yourself if that’s the week you really wanted to have and if that’s the week you want top keep having in the future.

Ben Tossell 30m 45s

Yeah, for sure. And I think there’s so many things I could build with Makerpad and so many directions I could take it in but I’m very aware of what I did with Newco. When I’m building something, I build it maybe 30 minutes, an hour, so from [ ] there’s a higher marketplace where you can hire experts – or no-code experts. That, to me, seemed to me like it was something that needed to be built just because I could build it. Didn’t mean I should have but I built [ ] page in half an hour and [ ] up there and there’s over 100 people listed but I can tell already that I shouldn’t be putting my focus into that.

That’s up there. If people want to use that, that’s fine are the people. That’s just them and I’m all for it. That’s not where I’m going to go and try and look at making my money. At the moment, I’m trying to grow that one piece of it because that’s not what I initially set out to do.

So, it’s always a nice thing to remember just you can build it, doesn’t mean you should or you should build it to completion, just like to the minimum and then to take [ ] sometimes.

Courtland Allen 31m 49s

So, let’s talk about what you initially set out to do. You said that your passion really was building these apps without using code and teaching other people how to do the same. Is that really different than what you were doing with your previous business, Newco?

Ben Tossell 32m 3s

Nope. That was the – that was the funny thing it was – when I sort of took time to reflect and look back, I thought well what was the thing that I thought was working at Newco and that people really liked and that I enjoyed doing? It was that – it was building things without code. Teaching others how they were paying for it.

It was going well. I just – since I’ve come back to that focus of building things that I want to build. [ ] it’s just [ ]. Here’s how I actually built it; here’s the recording of how I built it and you can go and build it yourself, too. I like that sentence.

Courtland Allen 32m 41s

There’s a quote with Charlie Munger that I love. Somebody asked him and Warren Buffett during a Q and A session, I think, what their sort of unified principle was for investing for business and he said, they kind of stick to the things that they enjoy doing and they enough good sense that when something’s working, they keep doing it.

In fact, he said the fundamental algorithm is life is to repeat what works and that’s exactly what you did with Newco. You cut out all the parts of your business that didn’t work and you took the part that was working and you just doubled down on that. Because why on earth would you go back to the drawing board, throw out the entire business, start something completely new when you know you’ve got this one kernel of it that works really well.

Walk us through the process of how this works exactly. For example, you’ve got this article from Superhuman. Everybody read this article and was kind of like how do you use surveys to determine whether or not your company is a product market fit. How did you take that and turn it into a tutorial so that people could do that without code?

Ben Tossell 33m 35s

So actually what I do is if I figure out how to build something, I might record my screens for an hour, three hours, four hours, whilst I’m figuring out how to build something. Then, I might do the exact same thing again. I might say okay, I figured out how to do that. I’ll record my screen and build it again , hopefully in a lot less time and then I just split it up into smaller videos. I like everything to be sort of a few minutes long. 
And I don’t do audio yet. I don’t do audio on my videos because I don’t like doing it for one. And I remember having – I think when Newco launched, I was doing a review for someone who said, oh, this is really cool but its voice is dreadfully dull. So, it’s like oh, that’s lovely.

There were some people who just continue tutorials with a voice over and just think it sounds awesome. But, to me, how I like to do it and how I like to consume it is here’s a video and here’s a little text to follow along. If it’s like two-minute video or less, the text is there to [ ] I feel like that’s the best way to do it.

Now, I may get some more people along soon and maybe we’ll talk about that to do some tutorials and have people teach in a different way but for now, that’s just sort of how I do it and it’s easy for me to create stuff that way. I think there’s – there’s an [ ] in this in that if I’m going to create a video, I know I’m going to do a tutorial and it’s going to be a certain length of time. It’s going to have these certain features and it’s going to have audio even like the process of trying to think I’ve got to do that thing almost stops me from doing it. And then I put it off for weeks and weeks and it becomes just a big thing that I’m never going to get around to doing it.

So, I’d rather see it like an easy thing. I’m just messing around. I’m recording stuff and messing around to see how I mess up and I fix something. I could see it that way in that [ ] polished, perfect thing. And a lot of these things you do just have to be curious and like mess around and play at things until they actually work together.

Courtland Allen 35m 39s

How do you make money from al this? You mentioned that one of your takeaways from Newco is that you don’t want to charge recurring revenue. You just want to charge a one-time fee up front. Do people pay you to access these tutorials on Makerpad?

Ben Tossell 35m 52s

Yes, so you’ve got less than 400 or 500 users on the [ ] for now so it’s quite a lot of them and there are a lot of those who are just free because I did some promotions with [ ] tech and other stuff like that where we were giving out free memberships.

It’s not to say that I’m not [] recurring model because I know some of you want to have less money down because they just want to access that one course or whatever it is and also it’s a way to have a bit more projectability in revenue. So, if I hire someone like instructors, that might be something we play around with but for now we just have lifetime memberships. But we also have a B to B side which is companies pay us and I work with them to create content and have a company profile on Makerpad so if you go onto the [ ] profile, you’ll see tutorials built with their table. You’ll see job posts from their table which can either be technical or non-technical roles and just have a very – an overview of what [ ] can do.

Because my thought process is people won’t necessarily go AirTable to realize what AirTable can do. They might want to go somewhere to see what can I build with something [ ] I can build [ ]. I can build a product [ ]. Model and they use AirTable. Maybe I can go and use AirTable.

So, from there I think they will then navigate to AirTable. So, there’s tons of companies, I mean, there are so many companies out there. Even [ ] tool, newsletter creation tools. There’s just thousands that I could be reaching out to and probably should be reaching out to but again, it’s one of those for now everything’s okay, so I’m just taking it along and I’m choosing the best tools to partner with. So I’ve got a few amazing tools [ ], Clay, Double Workflow, AirTable, Zapier, [ ]. There’s a good bunch coming on and working with us where we can create some more content of theirs. On Glide as well which has been an amazing one recently with the mobile app space.

Courtland Allen 38m 1s

Cool. So, how would you say your revenue breaks down between these two sources? On one hand the makers who are paying you for these tutorials to learn how to build stuff without code and on the other hand, these companies who are creating content with you and really just paying to be advertised?

Ben Tossell 38m 15s

So I think it’s been about $130K revenue this year. I’d say maybe $50K is the business to business side. And then the rest is these memberships.

Courtland Allen 38m 25s

That’s pretty cool. That’s a pretty even split. It’s not often that people have multiple business modes that are both pulling equal weight.

Ben Tossell 38m 33s

Yeah, and the thing is I could, like I said, I could be spending 12 hours a day just calling [ ] and chasing down companies, but I almost don’t want to do that. I’ve got several reasons but it’s more a what’s right to make that now and just explore. It’s nice to have this period and to sort of casually explore certain different things and how it all works.

Courtland Allen 38m 55s

So I’ve heard a lot about what you’re working on from my friend, Lynn Tai [ph]. She’s sort of working with you. She’s sort of a mentor for you and the sales department because she spent the last year and a half doing sales for her business Key Values.

And I’m kind of a mentor to her for other parts of her business. So, maybe you can bring things full circle, Ben. You can mentor me on the sales stuff. What does your sales process look like for Makerpad and how do you actually approach these businesses and convince them to partner with you?

Ben Tossell 39m 20s

Yeah, I mean Lynn’s been a massive, massive help to me since we got connected. So, definitely she has been a help but a lot of these companies that I’ve been working with – I say working with. I’ve just chatted to over the last God knows how long just because they’re in the no code space and I seem to be the person in the no-code space which is great.

They reach out and say what do you think of this? Is this cool? Can we have you on this ebook? Can you give your opinion here? Can you do this for me? Talk about this? So, those conversations have happened naturally and lots of people will ask me, because they know I’ve got my finger on the pulse of the no-code space and what people are wanting.

So, we usually just have connected through that and then yeah, it just goes from there, just – the only companies that we have sold on have been ones where we’ve made that connection without being like hey, do you want to come on to Makerpad and have a profile? It’s never usually that cold email. So, I don’t know what the sales process is yet. I haven’t figured it out. But I imagine it’s going to be more of a hey, I’ve used your tool to create 10 tutorials on Makerpad so far. They’ve gotten thousands of views already. We should work together to create more and like we’re gong to give the community what they need. Because I think that works out in the best interest for everyone. There’s no like – no one comes up badly there and it’s what everyone in the whole triangle wants.

Courtland Allen 40m 46s

So you’ve talked about revenue. We’ve talked about how your product works. Let’s talk about the expenses for a bit because the expenses are what really slow a lot of Indie Hackers, like how long it takes to build stuff, how much time you’re investing and also how much money it takes.

With you, it seems like expenses aren’t much of a problem. You have 95% profit margins. You are working on this on the side in your free time. How is so cheap? How is it so quick for you to build something like Makerpad?

Ben Tossell 41m 13s

Well if it’s quick because I’m using the tools that I’m using. So, the site that we build on Webflow, I used member stack and there’s always like member space who handle the memberships are the things which Webflow. So, you can just take payments directly there.

Courtland Allen 41m 29s

So explain to us what these tools are. Webflow helps you actually build websites as a non-developer?

Ben Tossell 41m 32s

Yeah, so Webflow is a website builder – I mean a [ ] with CMS and we have their own ecommerce features and everything, too. That [ ] allow you to create a member ship for a Webflow site. They also square space and others. They’re already coming along in terms of their functionality.

So you basically just have the start-up account, connect it with these membership sites and add it to your workflow site and then you’ve got a fully functioning membership site, people can sign up, sign in, have a payment plan, carry revenue or a lifetime memberships. Coupons and all that stuff. So, my only expense there is the hosting on Webflow and any start-up fees I have to pay. 
Then, I pay for [ ] account because I test so much for them with new [ ] tutorials and stuff like that and any automations that I want to have [ ]. And I have a converter account which is my email newsletter and that’s going really well. There’s a ton of people joining us every day which is amazing but all in all, it’s basically it. I don’t know what else I really pay for.

Courtland Allen 42m 52s

That’s really – it’s a lot of tools but they don’t seem to be that expensive. They seem to be pretty fast. We haven’t talked a lot about just the no-code movement in general.

If I’m listening to this podcast, I don’t know how to code but I want to build stuff, what is sort of an overview of the tools that I should be aware of that I might now really know about?

Ben Tossell 43m 8s

So there’s a bunch of things. I mean obviously I’m going to say the best place to go is to Makerpad because we’ve got a bunch of featured tools in there, recommended tools that are good for different things.

When you click on each one, you’ll see what they’re good for building. So something like a mobile app that most people want to build overlaps. So, Glide is just amazing for that. It’s essentially run off the back of a [ ] sheet. So, I built a tutorial for an Airbnb [ ] with an app [ ] and the user app basically all [ ] sheets. It takes about less than an hour to build and follow a tutorial and it’s just yeah, super easy.

Courtland Allen 43m 48s

It takes you less than an hour to build Airbnb?

Ben Tossell 43m 51s

Yeah, exactly. It’s crazy and I did a web version where I did – of Airbnb again – which was Webflow, AirTable, and [ ] and it wasn’t as polished as the mobile version, but it’s just like you can do a lot of this functionalist with these tools.

And it seems like boundless [ ] and Bubble who have – they have like a web [ ] monitoring system where you can do – if this happens, then do this, then do that in their platform already. So there’s just so many tools coming out that really push [ ] of this [ ] stuff. It’s just crazy what you can do. And then you think – I mean I’m working with a lot of things where we are just seeing what new things are coming out and it’s just crazy. I think it’s really very exciting for the future of what no-code is going to be about and what that sort of empowers people to build.

Courtland Allen 44m 39s

I saw this clip from the Jetsons last week and there was this robot. It was like an office robot and it was just moving stacks of paper from one office to another and I think the Jetsons – do you guys have that in the UK?

Ben Tossell 44m 54s

Yeah.

Courtland Allen 44m 56s

do you guys have show? Yeah, it’s like it came out in the 60s or the 70s or something. And it’s so interesting like their idea of what the future is going to look like. You know, all these futuristic robots, people living in the sky.

But fi you think about it when you’re talking about all these no-code tools, when you’re talking about Zapier [ph] to create rules and automations, you’re basically building robots. I mean in the past I think t hey thought the office would be this physical space but no it’s kind of the digital office. And you don’t have stacks of paper on your desk. You just have a bunch of Google docs and emails. Like you don’t pass messages back and forth. You don’t’ have alarm systems. You have notifications.

So, it’s like we’re building better robots today than they ever imagined because robots don’t need physical bodies and I think it kind of goes to show how hard it is to predict the future. But nevertheless, I’m going to ask you, Ben, to predict the future here.

What do you see as happening in the future of this no-code space and what are some of the developments that you’re excited to see happen that haven’t happened yet?

Ben Tossell 45m 47s

Yeah, well I think it’s probably good to clarify here that I don’t think it’s either you code or it’s no code. And I know that we simply go out there and think I’m just against learning to code but it’s not that at all. It’s just – that was at least – that was the path of least resistance for me.

It was the easiest way for me to learn to build something in the quickest amount of time that probably wasn’t going to go anywhere, that I could throw away and not feel like I wasted nine months learning to build that thing.

We’re going to always need people to code, to build these [] tools. Like I’m very aware that that’s how a no-code tool works is someone has coded it. That helps me obviously a lot. But I do think that obviously there can be a world made with code could also be made available to you without code. So, everything can be a modular block and we’ll get to see more of connecting this with that. If this happens, then that happens. There will be a lot more advanced things with that. And that could end up being – I mean there’s so many basic websites of so and so is in Marketplace. It works in a certain way or it’s a non-demand app. They work in certain ways. There’s some slight differences and slight variations on how they look or whatever it is.

But behind the scenes, a lot of the functionality is if this happens, then that happens and I think we just get more and more to the future of that will be how you can build stuff without code. It just depends on how you connect those things and I think it’s best for everyone that more of these things happen and a lot of people will build their own community website or their own [ ] membership sites for [ ] or whatever tiny thing they want to be building.

So, I just think that yeah, it’s a thing that people will be working thenselves and most people will be working themselves which I think they will be and [ ] which we embrace in the no-code movement. I don’t think we can expect everyone should learn to code or will learn to code. I don’t think that will be everything but I do think that everyone will be looking towards [ ] themselves and no-code definitely helps towards that future.

Courtland Allen 47m 53s

Yeah, I think when people say that everybody should learn to code, that’s a prediction of the future and it’s hard to predict the future. The Jetsons got it wrong. Most people get it wrong. Who knows what the future is going to look like. I don’t think code will be unimportant but I could imagine a future in which most of the code is written by a few companies who make these tools and these tools are good enough for the vast majority of people to make whatever kind of business or app they want to make. So, pretty excited to see what’s going to happen, either way.

If we zoom out a little bit, here, Ben, you’ve been a maker, you’ve been an Indy Hacker for several yeas now, what’s your advice for people who are considering just getting started down this path? People who really want to earn a living from the things that they build online?

Ben Tossell 48m 32s

I think it’s to figure out what is the path of least resistance for them whether it’s code or no-code and I think that the [ ] things that you build will be [ ] anyway. So, I really wouldn’t worry about what they are. I just think that the first things you build will be great and you should look at what is the site or the type of site you look already and how can you build the similar thing or 80% of that thing but for your own interest group. Just do that. It’s okay to like copy these things because that’s the best way you’re going to learn and figure out these things work together.

Courtland Allen 49m 6s

I love that point of view because if you just sort of assume that your first few products out of the gate are going to be crappy, then it’s way easier to get started. There’s less pressure. You don’t feel like you have to hit a grand slam at your first at bat.

Anyway, Ben, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for sharing your story. I think Makerpad is one of the coolest, one of the most impressive side projects that I’ve featured on the podcast. Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more about what you’re up to?

Ben Tossell 49m 29s

Yeah, so we’re at Makerpad.co and on Twitter you can find me @Ben Tossell.

Courtland Allen 49m 35s

Cool. Thank you so much, Ben.

Ben Tossell 49m 37s

Cheers.

Courtland Allen 49m 45s

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a really easy to support the podcast, why don’t you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review? If you’re looking for an easy way to get there, just go to Indie Hackers.com/review an that should open up iTunes on your computer.

I read pretty much all thee reviews that you guys over there and it really helps other people to discover the show so your support is very much appreciated. In addition, if you are running your own Internet business or if that’s something you hope to do some day, you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders at the Indyhackers.com website. It’s a great place to get feedback on pretty much any problem or question that you might have while running your business.

If you listen to the show, you know that I am a huge proponent of getting help from other founders rather than trying to build your business all by yourself, so you will see me on the forum for sure, as well we more than a handful of some of the guests that I’ve had on the podcast.

If you’re looking for inspiration, we’ve also got a huge directory full of hundreds of other products build by other Indy Hacker, every one of which includes revenue numbers and some of the behind the scenes strategies for how they grew their products from nothing.

As always, thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next time.