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Andrew Warner: This guy created the number one community for no Code Builders. Then he sold it to Zapier. What’s he doing now? Helping developers stop coding by using ai. I. Ben Tossell is the founder of Maker Padd, the Maker community that he sold to Zapier. He is now the head of developer relations at Factory, the agent native software development company.
Introl: ~Next new thing,
Andrew Warner: Ben, I gotta start with this question. Dude, you created Maker Padd. This is like the platform for teaching people how to code without coding. You sold the fricking thing too, Zapier, and now instead of going and creating another business using no code solutions, you took a job working a factory as head of developer relations.
What’s up with that?
Ben Tossell: It’s just hard. It’s really, I dunno whether it is the, the period of time after I sold that made it made everything else feel like the whole period was harder or whether it was just. It was actually really hard doing it because both feel true to me. I wrote this in my newsletter today actually.
The developer relations feels very similar to like a founder role where you need to be on top of your community. You are the person that everyone reaches out to. You’ve gotta build the product or you understand the product in and out. You’ve gotta grow the product. You’ve gotta sort of be in charge of growth.
And there’s just a ton of the core aspects of running a company feel like similar to to developer relations, I. I mean, I had a company, I sold it that I didn’t need to work again. So I felt like, okay, well I’m not gonna rush into anything. And then I learned a lot about myself in the post acquisition, which was like the typical story of a founder who feels lost, that they sold their thing and now doesn’t know what to do.
Like poor, poor me, like sold for load of money and, and all that kind of stuff. And I get it like. No one gets it unless you actually do the same thing. Then you’re like, oh, actually everyone, what else is right? You do feel that way? I think there’s some sort of like loss of self or loss of something where you have this community of people looking to you all day, every day, and then all of a sudden they just like, don’t need you anymore.
Or like, you don’t need them. And there’s like that loss of, oh wait, but I like liked hanging out with you and I wanted to chat with you, and like, I wanna keep doing these, and they didn’t wanna
Andrew Warner: talk to you anymore.
Ben Tossell: Well, no, they would, but it’s not, it’s just not the same. I think at the time of the acquisition of Mepa, I, I feel like I was trying to figure out how does this continue to be a business for a long term?
’cause I really like one time payments. I don’t like subscriptions, I don’t like paying subscriptions. So I felt like it would be stupid of me to charge subscriptions. Um, all little things like that I, that I chose. Maybe for ego’s sake. Like we didn’t do any Facebook advertising or anything like that, so I was just like, I don’t like that, but I know you’re supposed to do that if you’re a business at a certain level and all that kind of stuff.
Um, and I just didn’t really know, like, what was, what was the business like, what, what did it look like and how big was it gonna be? It was never gonna be a venture company. I never wanted it to be that. It wasn’t built to be that way. I don’t like managing people. I want everyone to get on with it themselves.
So then I had almost made myself like a checklist. Of like, okay, if I’m gonna work on anything, again, these are the things that it needs to satisfy what, and one of them was like, needs to be a one to many thing. So like a newsletter, a course type thing. Like all of those kind of feel like they’re one to many.
It’s not a service based business, for example. Um, another thing on my list. It was like, don’t get on a, a content treadmill. Like, okay, if you do this once, one week, you’ve gotta do it again the next week. And obviously we could talk about how I didn’t do that because I started a newsletter.
Andrew Warner: A daily newsletter.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, exactly. Um, and there was just things like, okay, I, I was having twins at the time. My work revolves around my life, not the other way around. So when I don’t wanna have to take calls ever, I don’t wanna do the, like, a bunch of things I didn’t wanna do. And then I had a list of like 20 ideas that I hadn’t done anything with, which to me is a signal to myself that I’m not interested enough to do anything with it.
’cause you would normally, in previous times,
Andrew Warner: mm-hmm.
Ben Tossell: Add an idea. I would start working on that idea that day or like at least start a landing page or something. ’cause that’s kind of how I did things. Um, so yeah, just haven’t been ready to start a company. I dunno if I ever will be. Um, I kind of. Shifted to, I mean, Ben Spice technically is a company, but yeah, that’s kind of how I felt.
Andrew Warner: You know, no one talks about how difficult it is to start a company. We talk about how great it is. You get freedom and all that stuff, but it really is difficult. You’re so uncertain all the time. You’re constantly doing every single thing all the time. I loved in Ray Kroc’s book how he talked about how they used to have to sweep the floor, right?
You go from being someone who can do like. Top work to then also being the janitor, literally to also being the person who fixes other people’s screw ups and it’s so painful. I wonder though, I thought with no code, things were becoming easier. Do you think at least now with like AI making it even easier to create software, that all of this stuff goes away?
All the pain?
Ben Tossell: No, I think it probably gets worse.
Andrew Warner: Why?
Ben Tossell: Because in that example you just gave, which I completely agree with. It’s a lot of context switching. There’s lots of different tasks going on at different times, right? And different priority levels and all the rest of it. Today, if you look at developers now, everyone’s talking about like having parallel agents running on your product and like you can spin up a swarm of a hundred agents to do, like 20 of them will do ads and 20 of them will do growth or whatever it is.
Like people are thinking that way. And until you’ve like had any employees whatsoever, you start thinking, how are you gonna manage all of that? Like even just for yourself mentally, how can you visualize all the tasks these people are working on? I see.
Andrew Warner: Meaning like it’s one thing to have all these agents out there in the world and yeah, they’re doing great work for you, but are they really doing great work?
No. You have to go back in, you’re saying, and check on things they’re doing and then, yeah. Got it. So you may not have to deal with feelings and family issues. You do still have to deal with outcome and adjusting of, of directions and all that.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, and I think it’s just still, it’s all those different contexts switching between all these different things all of the time.
And I don’t see how that is gonna go away. Like it feels like it’s actually, you can work on even more stuff now. So actually people are gonna get worse off feeling like they should be really productive. But actually feeling like I’ve done absolutely nothing this week except for I tried to do these million things.
But none of them got through or got over the line in terms of like that’s the thing that is actually now on forever and I love the output of that.
Andrew Warner: Okay. And you’re saying the AI agents are gonna be another level of the same old thing of more work piling on top that you have to MA manage. Okay. That’s fair.
That is sad and it’s scary and it’s fair. And is this something that you’re feeling now because you’re kind of tired of, of the previous company, or did you also see that with the Maker Pad companies that were being built using no code?
Ben Tossell: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s kind of the same like, so with with Maker Pad, the whole reason I started it was I, I couldn’t code.
I still can’t code traditionally. Um, everyone told me if you wanted to be a CEO or run a tech company, you have to learn to code. Right? And I just. I tried, I did try. I tried multiple times and I couldn’t get it to work. Like it just didn’t gel with me and I couldn’t figure it out. And I was like, that’s really, that can’t be the only way that I can go and be a business person, a c like I run my own company and it, I wanted it to be in the tech world.
I wanted it to be online. I, I felt like I, all the advantages come with you start a website, you can sell one to many. Like obviously that is the preferred option than starting a shop in my local village or whatever. Um, and. So that was kind of the premise was I can’t code, I’m gonna figure out how I can make tools work together to feel like real software.
So I managed to put like a web flow site with Zapier on the back, like as the API connector and then Google Sheets or Airtable is like the database. Um, and then I was, then I built, what I first did was build probably 50 things with that kind of stack of tools. I’m hoping that one of those is gonna be my business.
That was like, this is why I’m a hotshot. CEO now is ’cause of one of these, but no one bought a single thing of any of those products. Um, so I was like, okay, well rethink this. But everyone’s asking me how I built it if I can’t code. I was like, okay, those are gone do teach. So I will start a company that teaches people how to do this.
I can, like, I think I saw, um, there’s a guy, I think his name’s Chris, who started a company called Go Rails. Mm-hmm. Which is a. Effectively a tutorial site for learning a framework, a coding framework, rails, Ruby on Rails. Um, and I was like, oh, well, and I think he was on Indie Hackers at the time, making like 50 K, 15 KA month.
And I was like, that sounds great. I’ll do that and I’ll just record how I build stuff with no code. So all my weird ideas that I have, I can still build them, just record my screen and then sell access to it, like, great. Um, so that’s how Makeup ADSD started. And then sort of fast forwarding through the journey of makeup adsd.
The thing I didn’t realize until, I don’t know whether it was within the Make Padd life or after, it was like, I’m still teaching programming, but in a different format. Like there’s different, the tools just look differently. Like they don’t look like a code base or a code file or GitHub or anything like that.
It looks like you’ve got issues. Okay, your Zapier connection didn’t work and you’ve gotta debug that. And actually you gotta fill in all these different forms. Form fields in Zapier to like do that and test it and then like, oh, let’s run it again. Did that work? No it didn’t. Let’s try a different thing.
Do it again. Like that’s bug fixing. It’s the same. It’s the same kind of thing. And I think it helped me a lot to understand a bit about like sort of system thinking around what’s the front end, what’s the back end, what’s the API layer? How do these pieces connect? But it wasn’t the true, like my mom can now build an app if she wants to with no code.
Like I thought was gonna happen. Um, but then, I mean, we can fast forward to today and thinking my mom still won’t build an app. Even though you can use something like lovable, it’s, ’cause I think it’s still, you’ve gotta want to do the building bit. Like that’s still the issue. It’s either something like my mother wants the app built, doesn’t wanna spend any time in the building of the app.
So no code. You’re spending time in that building phase. Fix fixing Zapier and Airtable and, and whatever else. Um, so I think that’s sort of happening today on a much quicker scale so you can get something working quicker. But if, if you’re having to type 10, 15 prompts to any tool to get to work, you have to either enjoy that process or have a very high threshold for going through that process to get to the end.
Um, that’s kind of how it feels similar and different today.
Andrew Warner: You are now not at Zap, Zapier, where you sold your company. Are you using Zapier still? I’m not because ‘
Ben Tossell: cause I have a very high threshold for pain and I want to code it.
Andrew Warner: So you are actually getting into coding then?
Ben Tossell: Yes,
Andrew Warner: I am. How do you square that circle That you are not a developer, but at the same time you code.
Ben Tossell: For myself, I would need to feel like I, I truly understand all of the workflows that, like the engineering team I work with do, and like why they do them and why they’re important and like, why you shouldn’t do this, but you should do this. That’s like one that I’m like, okay, I can learn some of that stuff at some point, but I haven’t got it all like learned yet.
Um, I couldn’t sit there if you took. The AI tools a way to build anything either, like I couldn’t sit down and write lines of code. I would’ve no idea where to start, really. Um, and I think on some level it’s definitely helpful to be able to do that, to then get the most outta these tools. Yeah. But then I don’t also think the future’s coming faster than the present is like sticking around.
And I think you don’t need to, like, you don’t, I feel like the, the original thesis of UB was right, you don’t need to learn to code. But like, there’s asterisk, asterisks all the way through since then, which is like, but it might help. Or like, it sure would help, or like it might help now. Um, so that’s kind of how it feels, is like I can, yeah, sure, I can get stuff done.
Not at the level of like a top programmer, but more so than a non-technical person. And, and like, so I’m somewhere, I’m like a technical, non-technical person
Andrew Warner: somewhere who’s, who’s, what I’m understanding about how you do it based on what you’ve told me before and what you’re saying now. You’ve really created these AI tools for yourself that allows you to communicate with developers by having it translate what developers are doing and, and tell you in, in English, and having you tell software in English what you want and have it converted to developer talk.
And at the same time, all the work that you did with Zapier, which is basically, um, these. I don’t know how to describe Zapier with it. It’s basically this if then this, then that type of experience. That’s very visual. It still taught you how to reason through getting what you want with all these different possibilities if this, then that and if that, then this and all that.
And so you’ve learned the logic of coding and now you don’t have to learn the language of it because AI is your translator.
Ben Tossell: Fair? Yes. Very fair.
Andrew Warner: Okay, so that’s actually the dream that we’re all aiming for here with ai. Now, not all your mom is not aiming for this dream. Like, you know what? It is becoming easier and easier to do plumbing, for example.
I still don’t want to be a plumber. I still don’t want to go and fix my own pipe. That’s where people are. So a lot of people are not gonna want to code. The dream of AI is gonna make us on into coders, all of us, into coders not there. But for those of us who want to be, who have the, the desire and the understanding of the logic behind it, it’s more acceptable.
Fair?
Ben Tossell: Yes. I think so. I think, I think AI generally is making people more technically able and also making people more curious. Um, and I think. In order to want to get anything out of life, I guess, is the curiosity is, is a key piece of that. So for me, I’m really curious about all of these systems, how to work, like it doesn’t feel like work to me and like building this system to Yep.
Understand the code base and like the, the, uh, roadmap and our documentation as much as it’s to help me figure out answers for the community. It is also like me learning the product, like in and out. Like all these questions I probably need to ask once and then I know it. And then also learning how to build a system and like tweaking the system and get better at that system.
Like there’s all learning opportunities for me and I was not interested in learning until I could start building stuff and that’s when I was like, this doesn’t feel like learning. So that’s why I love doing it.
Andrew Warner: Okay. Let’s look at one of the things you built and then we’ll come back away from screen share.
Um. Here’s how I would describe what you’re about to show us. You’ve got a team of people who are all using linear project management software to keep track of what they need to code into your, into the, into the factory software, right? Yeah. You don’t wanna go into linear because linear only tells you what they’re working on and what they’ve done.
And what you wanna do is you wanna also understand. What did they say? They’re done but is not fully done. What did they say is ready to be published, but they forgot to tell the, the project management software is actually part of our code base and it’s published. And so you wanted to have this check and balance on the system.
Am I right?
Ben Tossell: Yeah. I wanted a source of truth that was, anything that’s been worked on should be in linear, should be, and then anything that is being done should be in the code base and then everything that is actually public and shipped. And it’s like feature flag on, so everyone has access to it should be in the documentation.
So all those three stages should be like anything we’ve thinking about all the way to everything that users can use and touch and feel today.
Andrew Warner: Okay. Let’s take a look at it. And this is you using factories own software to, uh, to manage all this. Show me the screen. Let’s take a look. Yes. So how would you describe factory in one sentence, by the way, while you bring it up,
Ben Tossell: it’s the number one coding agent in the world.
So it’s kind of like a core code, but we get more out of the models than the model companies do themselves. Um, and we’re model agnostic, so you can use any of the models in our software. Okay, so this is factories Droid, CLI tool. Um, so this is in my terminal, which is something we can touch back on, which is something I was scared of for a long time.
Um, but you can just think about it as like a chat, bt chat effectively. So I’ve. Ask the question, and this droid exec is one of our products. So it’s like a, a way to use droid without, um,
Andrew Warner: okay, so you are using terminal as like a chat experience. Highlight what you’re talking about as you’re describing.
What are we looking at here? Where it says linear, linear at the top, and then there’s a checklist of. Two items that have checks next to them and four items that have this push pin next to them. I’m assuming the push pins mean they’re almost, they’re not ready yet. They’re almost there. Yes. Correct. Yeah.
And the check is, and so this is the, this is work that your team, the developers have worked on, right?
Ben Tossell: Yes, exactly. Um, yeah, so this, like, the summary here is showing me what did I ask and then gives me a quick summary of this is what it is, answer to my question. Um, and it talks about. Um, okay. There are some, some enhancements that are tracked in linear that aren’t yet shipped.
Okay. Helpful to know. Um, and then here we’ll show these are the tickets specifically to your query. And like you can link to them and go and click and check them out. Um, so for this, this one for example, I looked at previously, so I set this up for, for this demo, but this, this one for example. Yep. Says ready for release.
But when I check it in linear, it’s got a bunch of sub issues or subtasks within it that haven’t been done. So the full thing isn’t fully done, but whereas this ticket says it is ready, so there’s like that, that discrepancy does happen. Um, okay. And
Andrew Warner: then, and the reason that happens is because somebody said in linear, your project management software, it’s done, but they didn’t look to see that the subtask still needed work.
Ben Tossell: It, it could be that, it could be that actually for the top priority. We just needed to get like these four things out the way, and then these six things are to be done in Q4 or Q1. Okay. Things like that. So I think there’s like developers have their own way of working within the developer team. They’ve probably all got their different ways of working with linear.
I’ve never used it, so I’m coming in. Being like, okay, where, where, where’s everything? Um, okay. And this is a really, for me, like I said, it was a sort, it’s a source of truth for me. I don’t need to, I’m in the uk, my team is in San Francisco. I don’t want to ping all these questions on Slack that are effectively sort of support like questions.
Yep. So like I should be able to answer them and answer them well and understand them and understand our users of what they’re actually asking, like me learning the product. Um, so this will have a bunch of linear tickets. Mentioned here, it’ll then specify where in the code base any of the P, like any of the sort of response it’s given me is, is linked.
Okay. So like this is where this happens and this is where the session stuff happens, or this is where the streaming output happens. And then we have our docs as well, which then shows this is where we documented anything to do with this query that you’ve asked. Got it. And then it gives me a suggestive reply, which I don’t.
Ever use, it’s just, I sort of added it to the template. Um, and it’s just, and then this is just a way to show me what it did to check all the above information was correct. It looked through the different, like these different search queries mm-hmm. Across the different files and systems I’ve got. They reviewed the docs and the key implementation in our code base, and then it queried linear.
Through another little tool, which I built, and then it sort of combines everything into one place. Um, but there’s no actual code written for this. This is just one big
Andrew Warner: instruction manual that you’ve given, uh, droid and Droid now knows what to spit out for you. And you’ve also told it on my computer in this folder is where you’re gonna find our code base.
Ben Tossell: Yeah,
Andrew Warner: exactly. And go search that. Okay. Gimme an example of something you were able to do here that you couldn’t have done if you just spent a little time with linear and just learning linear instead of learning this. Um, well,
Ben Tossell: I think it’s important for things where stuff is on the roadmap, but there might be, there might be some things within the code base that.
Okay, it’s ready for this feature in the, in the future. But this feature, this, like this is something that maybe the team wanted to do a while back, but now we decided in Slack that we’re not gonna do it. So there might be tickets in linear for that piece of work. Nothing in the code base or vice versa.
Um, there’s very, there’s varying levels of, of what this can do and also just helps me, even with things like billing, like billing can be complicated with AI tools. There’s like. Tokens. There’s free trials, there’s like credits, there’s all these different terminology and like different ways to work with it.
That even if you just asked how does our billing work from, from an internal point of view, like how does the billing work so I can have a really clear, most of it is to have a really clear answer in my head or a really clear, like visual in my head of, okay, okay, I understand where that works. And actually now I know where it is in the code base that I can now.
If I wanted to go and look at it and look at the code and then go and ask questions of the code, I can go and do that quite easily. Um, so that’s kind of, I don’t know that I could get this any other way because I, ’cause I built this linear, so the way I’ve got linear in this is that there’s a small tool that uses my API key and just searches linear.
So it has like different search queries based on whatever I’ve sent the system. Um, if I did the same thing in linear. I might get some tickets, but then I don’t know, again, if one says ready for release, is that in the code base? Is that live? Is that live in production or is that on our sort of dev environment?
I see. Is that like, so what it’s doing is it’s
Andrew Warner: searching all these different places at once, so you don’t have to,
Ben Tossell: yeah,
Andrew Warner: there’s a brand new idea that somebody wants to do. You can come in here and it can search and say, you know what? We actually considered this before and we scrapped it, but we did some work in putting it in project management.
We don’t have to rethink how to do this. Here is the, here’s the origin of what we’d thought about before, and we can use that as a beginning for what would do next.
Ben Tossell: And that’s a perfect example for it. That’s an example. I think if I think there’s something that like, oh, this would be a really cool feature.
Mm-hmm. I would use this system to say, okay, firstly research around, like is there any scaffolding or anything else in place that would be crucial for this new feature that I wanna add? Is there anything in linear already? Have we talked about it? Have we scrapped it? Did wasn’t an approach before that we wanna avoid.
All that kind of stuff. So it kind of gives me context across product management, the code base and what’s been live, um, and then gives the system the context to like do a better job of writing the right code.
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. We can stop screen sharing, unless is there’s something else you wanted to show.
Ben Tossell: No, I dunno. If you wanna show the. Instruction manual. I dunno if it’s,
Andrew Warner: yeah. Let’s see the instructions that lead to this.
Ben Tossell: Okay.
Andrew Warner: And what you’re gonna going to show us is how you’re searching multiple platforms to get answers.
Ben Tossell: This is my instruction manual, which is the only file that like factory Cs before it goes.
And does any of those searches. So here I’ve basically got a a number of examples. So like an example question that someone’s asked me and then an expected output. This is what it should look like. You should see the linear tickets. You should, you should see what’s done. Scroll up. Lemme see what
Andrew Warner: that summary is.
Lemme see if I can read that. Uh, a little bit more. A little bit more. Okay. Summary. Provide a one or two sentence answer that states what’s shipped, what’s in progress, and any caveats. Got it. And that’s the beginning that you, that you showed me earlier. So before you see all these details, you wanna know, summarize for me what’s going on.
Number two thing that you ask it to give you is for each provider include a subheading with the status and evidence. And then underneath that it says core support. And there’s the check boxes that we saw that what you wanna know is check linear, tell me what’s done, and show me what’s in progress and update it to, for me in this format.
And that format includes a link back to linear in case you ever want to click and see the the ticket itself. Got it.
Ben Tossell: Exactly. Same with, same with the cloud base, and same with the docs. Like just tell me if it’s supported, if it’s in progress, if it’s not supported and linked to the things that are relevant.
And then. Gimme a suggested reply. Um, and then there’s further examples, but effectively there’s the instruction. Instructions Sort of start here where it says, okay, do parallel searches across the different, um, files and folders that I’ve told you that you should look at. Do an initial exploration, then deep dive into any key files, then do targeted feature searches with the context.
Mm-hmm. And then there’s like a research strategy here, which is like cast a wide net first focus on documentation, drill down with context, verify completeness, and then bring it all together for the output. So this is like, yeah, here we go. There’s, there’s some more instructions here. So treat this example as like.
Gospel. You should follow this exactly.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Ben Tossell: Execute the tools in order. This might be something I’ll change, but like, this is what’s worked for me. Um, crosscheck findings. Cross linear coding docs before drafting the outputs. Reuse the suggested reply format for linear. Use this tool, so I, I built a little CLI tool that it can just call with this command.
They’re basically just using my API key looks at linear. And as that droid obviously built that little tool for me. And then get your products data from my code base on my machine, and then also the documentation from the docs on
Andrew Warner: my machine. How did, this is a really detailed document, really detailed recipe for how to take care of Ben when Ben wants to know what’s going on at the company.
How did you write this? I didn’t, um, tell me. I.
Ben Tossell: I was trying to do this work without having this already done. Um, just playing around with, with droid back and forth, and at one point I got a, an output that I really liked and I was like, that’s perfect. Like, I really, really liked that. So you can see all the different tool calls and things it did.
So I kind of just copied all of that and then said to droid, like, give me step by step instructions exactly on what you just performed to get to this output. I said, okay, great. Now put that into an Agent MD file as instructions for another agent to understand and follow this exactly. To get the same output as I would with any input.
And I kind of just do it that way, and that’s how I’ve, how I build a lot of these systems. Is that that way?
Andrew Warner: That’s so interesting because when I asked Gary Tan, uh. The head of Y Combinator, how he created his prompt for chat GPT to create the perfect Gary Tan YouTube script. ’cause he’s big on YouTube. He essentially said the same thing.
He kept going back and forth and saying, look, here’s the finished product. I want you to create something like this. Then once you’ve done that, I want you to give me a prompt that will get to that, and then just keep giving it the prompt, asking for edits and asking at the end, recreate the prompt for me.
That got you to this end, and that’s the way that he did it, instead of writing the prompt himself.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, I, I think AI is so good at getting you off the blank page problem, and that I really struggle with the blank blank page.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Ben Tossell: I’d always rather have something. And with AI you’ve always got something and sometimes it’s helpful and sometimes it’s not.
But it’s always, I find it always helpful for me, whether it’s, I hate it, all of this. At least I know that Okay, I know have any of that in the end of what I’m working on. Um, and I think it just. Yeah, it’s just a way to, it’s an agent itself. It’s gonna write in a way that it would understand. So like, I can write these instructions, but maybe, and maybe some of these would be better off written differently.
Um, and I haven’t tweaked it too much yet, but I realized at the bottom of this, it’s something I did look at doing, but I haven’t actually used it for anything yet, which is okay if I wanna make any tutorials or how tos on how to use the product. I should also have instructions on how to do that using the same tool that I’ve built.
So this actually looks at, okay, looked at recently completed, like linear issues. ’cause like is there a new feature that I wanna cover and do like, as soon as it’s launched, I’ll do a video that day and then show people, um, and then yeah, writing documentation for it and all that kind of stuff. So this is something I forgot was here.
Until right now, and I should go and try and do some of these.
Andrew Warner: How did you start getting comfortable with Terminal when you’re a person who is, was comfortable with flow charts of Zapier and make? I felt
Ben Tossell: weird. Like probably most people that like everything was now a chat. Like everything was just okay.
You just type in a question and get a response. So like sometimes, depending on the task you’re doing, it’ll show you code, it’ll show you not code, it’ll show all sorts of different things. Um. And then I came across a product called Warp, which was a terminal product, but with like chat deeply embedded in it.
So a terminal, if people don’t know is on your machine. So it comes with when you buy your new laptop and it’s a way to enter commands into your system. It can read your files, it can move files around. It can delete files. So be careful of that. Um, and do all sorts of things at the. Sort of machine level.
Um, our new developers use the terminal and have experience there, and they know the commands. Like you need to know very specifically what commands you are typing in. Otherwise the system just says, Nope, doesn’t exist. Nope. And you’re like, okay. There’s literally no margin for error. Whereas with like chat bt, it felt like.
You could make a spelling mistake, it would still know what you made, right? So with Warp, I felt like I can type in, Hey, can you create a folder in this? No. Can you create a file in this folder? And it was like, okay, yeah, you meant whatever the commands are, like MV whate, like it is already weird command.
So it would like translate that. And I was like, okay, so I can actually just talk to it like a normal person. It will talk to the computer like a computer. And I still get the best out of those things. And then, then Claude Code came along, which is a CLI tool again, and within that you can just talk in natural language within your terminal and it will do all of these different weird and wonderful things.
So that was definitely my sort of feeling like I can just talk to this. I don’t need to worry about what it’s gonna do. Over time, I’ve. Worried a bit more. Like I can see it like deleting files. Now I need to know what the hell it’s deleting. But you find yourself watching a lot of what’s going on and like picking up.
Okay. I know there’s a command for that now. And sometimes I might use a command where I wouldn’t before. I would have no idea what it was before. So they definitely got me comfortable and actually I now use the CLI tool, overusing, chatty or Claude on the web for almost anything.
Andrew Warner: Gimme an example of something that you’re doing in terminal that you couldn’t have done without it.
Ben Tossell: Well, it’s kind of like, okay, well I want to start a new project, so create a folder in my, in my system, and then I need four files in there. I need one, which is the instruction file. I need one, which is like, oh, just go and copy this thing from this PDF or like, get that PDF information and put it in there.
Um, actually rename that file and actually that other one we don’t need now, so we can delete it. Like you can do all of that with clicking, dragging. Sort of copy pasting, but like in a sentence or two, I could have that done and handled and like all done correctly and set up.
Andrew Warner: What’s a project that you would, that you needed to do in the early days that you were able to do because of this?
What’s one that made you go, yeah, this is amazing.
Ben Tossell: I think one I tried to build was like an email tool where ar ai search on email is awful. Whichever tool and like wrapper you use, I’ve tried a lot of them. It’s, it just doesn’t work. Um. And I was like, okay, well I’d love to build an email tool that is like AI powered somehow.
Like I can just search all my emails. How do I do that? And I think I built it three or four times that never really worked. I, I would try rep it or try something else that felt like an all in one builder. Um, yeah. Or I just tried like cursor and try and build a project. I’m like, I’ve, I, I just don’t know enough of what I’m doing here.
Um, and then it sort of came back to like, if I built. A tool in order to call my email, so like a CLI tool. And then just have an instruction file that says when you’re looking for emails for Ben, use this tool and then search in these kind of ways. And this will be a better experience than everything else he’s experienced.
Um, and I think it’s ’cause what I tend to do is build first and think about it later. And I kind of learned that way. Like I, I build ahead of myself where I shouldn’t really be here, but like, I’m here now. So what you, what are you gonna pick up in the process? Um, and I go back to like, this could be simpler.
This feels like I’m in a, and maybe if I was a developer or was better equipped, I’d know how to navigate some of the harder pieces there. But I, I almost don’t need to in a way that I’ve built some of these things, which is just have a really clear and structure manual with an agentic tool. There’s not much else you need in between those, to be honest with you.
Like you obviously need to call with an API your Gmail stuff, so you need to set up an an app on Google Cloud, which is horrible in of itself. Yeah. But other than that, that’s kind of. They’re the kind of systems I’ve ended up doing
Andrew Warner: and building myself. Okay. Let’s talk about now marketing. When you were doing Maker Pad, you had to build a a community in order to get paid members.
How did you get enough people in your community that you could sustain the community, have them help each other? What did you do?
Ben Tossell: My first response is like, I didn’t really do that much. Yeah, because it didn’t feel like I was, I was, I wasn’t like planning, okay, I need to do this ’cause then this will do, this will have this follow, like this knock on effect.
What happened with Make Padd was when I was building those tools that no one ever bought, people were asking me how I built them. So then I actually sent out a Typeform, they had like 800 people on my list, sent a tfor and said, if, if you pay 15 or $50, maybe 15, I think it was, if you pay $15, I’ll make this tutorial site.
And like 15 people paid. So I was like, okay, I’ve made money now. Um, and I kind of, I take that approach with everything is like, don’t, I don’t, I don’t know if this contradicts what I’ve, what I was just talking about, which is like, I build first, I kind of just jump into stuff and I think I’ll figure it out along the way and like, nothing’s really that catastrophic or bad of an issue if, if you, if you need to revert something.
Um, so I just started recording what I did. Hmm, how I was building certain things and putting it on Twitter and just a ton of people wanted to like, learn more and, and it was an easy way to just like plug a new tutorial that I made. And then there was a Slack group. And the thing I, when anyone asks, asks me for advice on community, the number one I thing one, number one thing I say is you gotta lead by example.
Like if you are not in there talking, no one else is gonna be in there talking. If you are not in there asking. Seemingly stupid questions. Other people aren’t gonna feel like they can ask those questions either. And this kind of came back to when I worked at Product Hunt where like we’d, we’d want every single post to have a good comment thread underneath it, but like people, it might be a really technical product and like, oh, I don’t know what to ask about that.
And I would just go in and say, cool logo. Where? How’d you make it? I would just like try and break the ice. Like start the conversation going, I saw that this doesn’t need to really be, you were on everything. Yeah, I know. It’s kind of my job to be, but I. I didn’t really think of it like I’m gaming anything, but looking back it looks like, oh actually that’s a really good way to like kind of gain that thing.
Um, and I just think that’s, it’s important. Like I think the leading by example make another feel comfortable that other people feel comfortable enough that they can ask their question no matter how technical or not, like it’s bringing accessibility of the conversation to anybody which. Hmm. It’s just something I’ve, I’ve done since the product 10 days and then has carried through to like today.
Like I still do it now. Like I know people will come after me for not being technical, but I’m like, yeah, but like I can do a lot of stuff that non-technical people definitely can’t do. And I can understand a ton about the developer stack and all the rest of it.
Andrew Warner: If I’m understanding you right, what you said was first you built up a mailing list of people who are following along as you were, um, as you were doing no code development.
Then you said to them, I would, if you pay me $15, I’ll create a tutorial on how to build using no-code. Yeah. 15 people paid. By the way, that doesn’t seem like even a lot, but it was enough for you to say, okay, at least somebody loves me, somebody wants this. You went and you created something. You sold it to them.
Then how did you get people into a Slack community?
Ben Tossell: I probably just put the button to open Slack on Webflow. That’s like when you paid, when you joined the membership or when you paid, it was like, here, oh welcome email. Here’s your invite to Slack. Like that’s Got it. Yeah. So
Andrew Warner: all the paid people were then in Slack, and then what you did was you kept that slack active by asking questions, sometimes basic questions, answering questions, engaging with people.
And then so then from there, how did you go, how did you build up the Slack community? Slack was only for paid, right?
Ben Tossell: Yes. Yeah, it was, um, well, it just becomes. It just becomes its own thing. If you do, if you get community rights, they do do the selling for you and like they spread the word for you. The problem is people start thinking, we’ll do we’ll set up communities so that we can do that.
So that that end piece is what we’re setting up the community for. Not truly for like, Hey, I want to talk to people who were building in this way or like wanting to learn this stuff. Like I was interested and still didn’t know. Yeah, all the things that I didn’t know then it was like a way for me to learn like, oh, what do you wanna see?
Like, what should I try and build? Like I’m, this is all new and like, I’m trying to push the limits of what NOCO can do. So like, gimme ideas, I’m gonna run out at some point. Um, and I think it’s just, yeah, you’ve gotta build an authentic community first. Um, I, I, I think too many people, especially for the, over the last few years have been trying to build community for it to be your.
Sales, like viral moment to other people.
Andrew Warner: Okay. How did you get more people to to join your email list? To join and buy and join the community?
Ben Tossell: It was just consistently putting tutorials on Twitter. That’s all I did. Twitter,
Andrew Warner: it was simple tutorials on Twitter, people would join to what? Buy to get the full tutorial.
I don’t remember that.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, sometimes, yeah, sometimes there would be just some free tutorials just to like get people in and then sometimes it would be. I would do like a, a quick trailer almost of like, this is what I built and like full tutorials here below and then Got it. Okay. Not be paid. Yeah.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
And then I know, uh, from the every interview that you did, you also used to go and under like Sundar, phai Post, you quickly commented, so we all would see you in there. And was that around this time?
Ben Tossell: No. That, that was for Ben’s bite. Got it. So that was the newsletter I created when it Zapier. And again, at the time I didn’t think.
I’m doing some like big gamified thing. Obviously looking at it, it looks like that now. Definitely. And like I probably knew somewhere that like, oh, this would be a good way to hack getting visibility. So I would basically go, anytime Sam Altman or Sundar would post a big new AI thing, I’d be the first one to post under and say, awesome, I’ll put this in my newsletter tomorrow.
And then that just like defeated a bunch of people signing up my newsletter. But my newsletter was the first, like the first and only AI daily newsletter at the time. Other people started newsletters and also started doing the same thing. And then I was like, oh, well I don’t wanna do this anymore. This is now looking like a Twitter growth hack.
Yeah. I didn’t mean, but I, I thought about it recently when I was, and I was talking to someone I think last week about it, where I think that comes from the product 10 days where if someone had built an interesting product and shared it on Twitter, my job was to say, Hey, you should post this on Product 10.
And I didn’t. Really connected at the time of like, actually that was a growth hack thing for Product Hunt.
Andrew Warner: Mm. Like
Ben Tossell: I wasn’t just reaching out to the community. It was like tagging product hunt, linking it. I was like doing all of that for anyone else who was following these product launches.
Andrew Warner: Here’s the part that I used to see.
I would go on YouTube looking for a tutorial on any kind of um, no code software, and I would see a video from Maker Padd, but it wasn’t you creating it. Who did that?
Ben Tossell: So I hired a few people from the community to do this. So I, I got to a point where I was like, okay, I need to be like proper business person now.
I need to like hire people and like get out of the day-to-day of it, um, of like creating the content and to make this big, I feel like I need a few people who can make 10 times more tutorials than I can, and I’m struggling to like, think about an idea, sit down, record it, edit it, all that kind of stuff that comes with it.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Ben Tossell: And. I put out a call to the community and said, Hey, is anyone loving no-code stuff and like building on their own and like, would you be interested in doing any tutorials? And then there was a guy called Tom and then a girl called Amy who reached out. Mm-hmm. And I said to Tom, have you done any tutorials before?
And he’s like, no, I don’t. I said, I think he said no. And I said, okay, well just do a loom of like you walking me through a bill that you did. Um, and he did that. And I said, great, you’ve done a tutorial. Now we’re gonna post this. Like that’s, that’s, that’s the job. Like there’s that you’ve done it in that way.
I think just making it feel like I’m talking to one person and then describing what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. I see it’s kind of all the job of that. Even though I couldn’t convince myself to continue doing it, it was like, that’s how I sort of started that. But it was, it was always people in the community that we hired.
Like I never. I think I very rarely hired outside of the community, which helped because they knew what the mission was, what we were trying to do, who we were trying to teach. Who the, yeah, who the community looked
Andrew Warner: like. They know the aesthetic. They know the vibe. Yeah. Um, did you give them any guides, guidelines to doing it?
I think
Ben Tossell: at some point we must have had some star guides of like, okay, this is kind of how the, how it should, how it should work. But I think Amy and and Tom both had their. Flavor of tutorial and I didn’t really wanna change it too much. I think at one point we did have quite a structured, okay, this is the intro now and this is the outro.
This has gotta be how we do it. ’cause this is what businesses do and this is what it looks like when it’s professional. And I’ve actually gone back in my thinking now where I think any video that is just like a loom style with a floating head. That’s all you need. Like that’s kind of all you need for any part.
I don’t
Andrew Warner: know. I really liked that there was consistency in it, especially if you are not part of it. I like the consistency and it made me feel like it was a bigger company than it turns out it was.
Ben Tossell: Yeah. I think that, yeah, and that’s kind of one of the reasons we probably did it was like, let’s look professional, let’s look like we are a bigger company.
Um, yeah, but I mean, even thinking about just like. For YouTube. I mean, YouTube’s a different game that I never wanted to play and I never really was good at thinking about how to like get a load of views for that. It was more I wanna share something organically. The best place to do that is Twitter for me.
Everything in my life has happened through Twitter professionally anyway. Um, and I think the best videos on Twitter are the ones that are just, Hey, I’ve just clicked record. I’m just doing this thing. I’ve just posted it. And that’s kind of it. And like I like that. That feels like that’s a community member talking to a community member.
Yeah. It’s not like this company presenting to you this video that we’ve spent hours doing.
Andrew Warner: Um, okay, I got it. Let me just close out with a couple of obnoxious questions. So I’ll start with this one. You said you didn’t need to work after the sale. What did you sell the company for?
Ben Tossell: I’m not allowed to say, which is frustrating because I wanted to.
Like that as the data point to show you didn’t have tolin code to get rich and like do this stuff. So that’s, but you
Andrew Warner: literally would not have to work right now.
Ben Tossell: And you I do now you live off that. I spent a lot of money, so I, I do need to work now. Um, no, I think in seriousness, I, I could’ve made it work, but I think it was the figuring out what made myself work, like what I want to be doing and like, could I just, no.
Millions we’re
Andrew Warner: talking about then.
Ben Tossell: EI can’t say.
Andrew Warner: And then when you say you spend a lot of money on what
Ben Tossell: house? Cars, holidays, all that kind of stuff? I mean, obviously I invested a bunch of it. Um, I haven’t really spent all my money. It’s more that like there’s some money tied up in shares. Um, and I think after thinking for two years, I wasn’t gonna work again.
In a normal, like a typical capacity that I then realized that I only care about working, like I actually need to work. There’s a creative part of me that like is essential, otherwise I’m just sitting here and like wasting away, like wasting my life. Did you spend two
Andrew Warner: years doing nothing?
Ben Tossell: I spent two years vesting shares working at Zapier and really struggling with what am I doing?
What am I gonna do next? Like what has happened? Like I did miss your
Andrew Warner: voice. Then honestly, I feel like you were so present and then it felt like you were less
Ben Tossell: present.
Andrew Warner: Yeah, I did.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, I just died off. Thank you.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. Yeah. It almost was like in top secret mode, which was, which I get now because I don’t know what your, like what should your role have been?
Should you have been the community manager for Zapier or No, they’ve got people for that. Should you have been the guy who’s cheerleading this maker pad, I guess. Maybe, but Maker Pad became a different thing. Um, okay. I think I’m seeing then where this goes. And then the way that you’ve discovered Factory where you’re working now is you have a Ben by Ben’s Bytes Fund.
Yes. That invested in it. How did you find companies to invest in?
Ben Tossell: Lots of people have been, readers of the newsletter have reached out. I’ve helped them with launches. I’ve. Giving them advice or something along the way, and then they reach out and say, oh, by the way, I’m working on this new, new product, um, with Matan, who’s the CEO of factory.
I think one of my friends actually introduced me. So someone who also was in the no-code space, who also has a fund, I think he introduced me actually to email. Um. And there’s a, yeah, a few other people I’ve, I’ve made friends with. So every, everyone in my network I’ve sort of made through the varying places I’ve worked and yeah, that kind of, I got introduced to Matan in October 23, I believe.
So that’s, it’s the first investment out of the, uh, out of the fund.
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. Can we say that you’re raising another one, or should I edit that out because we’re not allowed to talk about it?
Ben Tossell: You, I think you can talk about it ’cause it’s, yeah, I
Andrew Warner: think it’s fine. I think you can talk about it. Alright.
Congratulations on the fun. Congratulations on getting more comfortable with coding yourself, and I really appreciate that you can be open about how, look, I’m not using Zapier. I’ve evolved into this other thing. I think there’s a place for both.
Ben Tossell: Yeah. I think what I really want to do now, I want, I feel why I’ve jumped into a job.
Is I’m not old and just wasting away, like I’m not, I’m not done. Like I really feel like I’m not done. Like this is the most interesting time in technology ever, in this space, in like this space. Especially given my background and like where I am on the non-technical to technical scale. There’s no better like meaty challenge that I could jump into and feel like that’d be a really, really good opportunity for me to be in.
And I just wanna. I truly believe that the right message all along was, you don’t need to learn to code, but there’s a new way of like what things look like now and we can figure this out together. I’m figuring it out. I’m trying to help figure it out myself so I can teach other people how to figure it out themselves and like sort of run back some, make pads, pastime, stuff that I can, uh, I can share and do some video.
I did, I actually did a video a couple of weeks ago on a coded thing that felt like, Ooh, this feels like. However many years, six years ago now. So, um, yeah, it was awesome actually to, to do that. So, yeah, I just feel excited. And one, like if I believe non-technical people should be using tools like this to do work, and there’s different way to do that, who’s gonna tell ’em, like, I’m, I’m, I’m willing to stand up for that.
Andrew Warner: Who should I interview? Who’s doing this? Who actually is using AI to create this one person operation that is standing up and being a model for others? Who do you know who’s doing that?
Ben Tossell: We hear this all the time, there’s gonna be one person, 10 billion company. Like, okay, well it’s boring by yourself. Like people wanna have other people around them.
I think it’s natural to, oh, I just, I could just do use just some help with just this thing. So I think we’ll see. We’ll see how that truly plays out and when and if it does.
Andrew Warner: You know what, even if it’s not exactly where we’re gonna end up. One person company, I think is a direction for what’s power, what’s possible for individuals.
It’s absolutely there. Even in the early days of the internet, I interviewed one of my first, one of the first entrepreneurs who I interviewed was a woman named Rosalyn Resnick. And I think she had had this vision that everything was gonna work on the internet, and we’re talking about like the year in the nineties, and she said, no one’s gonna need a salesperson.
I’ll just put the buy button on the web and no one’s gonna need this. And I’ll just, and she just thought it would all be like that. She ended up hiring salespeople because she realized that if you really want the big deals from companies like IBM, which she got, you need a human being to talk to them.
It doesn’t matter that she was wrong about the detail of whether you need a landing page or a salesperson. She was directionally right in the sense that. The internet was capable of doing more than people thought. And if her vision was, the internet will do everything including closing sales, but she didn’t completely get there.
She got a lot closer because she kept that North star. And I think if we don’t end up with one person, billion dollar companies, but we end up in a direction where one person feels much more empowered and the business is not this big operation of humans, but it’s this big operation of maybe agents. It’s okay.
Ben Tossell: I agree. I think actually. That feels very similar to like the American Dream, which is why I think Americans typically have
Andrew Warner: Yes.
Ben Tossell: Like a lot more optimism than people in the UK, for example, who are just a bit more cynical and less like, obviously there’s, there’s many people here who think like me, but it’s, there’s something to go for.
Like if you go to Silicon Valley, San Francisco and spend some time there, you can think, you can come away with kind of two responses. I think one is. God, these, all these guys have got their, like heads in the sky and like they’re drinking all the Kool-Aid and they’re just like, they’re away with the fairies.
Or you can come back and thinking, well, this is where all the biggest companies in the world are built. So maybe like, yeah, I can take a bit of this optimism and forward thinking and try and be like that. And yes, there’s obviously gonna be grifters and, and opportunists in the, in the, in the mix of it, but it’s no different than anywhere.
But I think it’s the true why I think really negatively and poorly on it when you can choose not to.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. All right. Thanks for doing this interview. I’m gonna keep doing interviews and understand this space, and I wanna see if I could be a part of helping more businesses get closer to that one person billion dollar business.
In fact, I, I don’t necessarily even, I’m not driven by that. I need a different mantra that’s more mine. But I do love the business side of business and I think that, um. I wanna hear from more people who are building the business side of AI who are not just saying, look, here’s how I develop something, but here’s how I develop something and here’s the growth hack that got me to sell it to, to customers and understand their needs and build a business around it.
And all that’s fun.
Ben Tossell: Yeah, I agree. And that’s like kind of what I wanna do in my role is devout, is like, how can I build tools to help me do my job as a one person operation rather than there could be 10 people on all parts of this.
Andrew Warner: All right. Thank you. Thanks. Bye everyone.
