Ben Tassle, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
Thanks for having me.
Ben, you're the founder of MakerPad. MakerPad helps makers figure out how to build apps and websites
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 half of this year.
It's probably on track to do more than that in the second half.
And 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 any 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 can make them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in their free time,
they would quit on 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?
Well, first of all, that was an awesome introduction.
So I appreciate that.
Well, I'm working with Enos Capital, which is, as Tyler, who runs the fund,
wouldn't want to call it alternative to VC, but more early-stage investing in bootstrappers.
So it's people who get to sort of 3K, 5K MRR, who want to go full-time on this thing,
which is sort of like a funny full circle that potentially MakerPad could be sitting in that bracket as well.
It's basically solo founders or very small teams who are 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've put together for them.
So, I mean, that's really like an amazing opportunity for me and Tyler basically reached out to me
when I was doing a previous project.
I think it was more for, he was seeing if I were going to take investment,
but then he said what the fund was going to be doing.
I said, I just have to be involved.
Like, I just want to be involved in the fund.
Don't worry about the investment stuff.
I didn't know.
So I'm helping out with doing things full-time as I've been on my own for two years or so.
So I just wanted to be involved in the fund.
So here I am.
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?
Well, it's just one of these things I think that comes around only once every several years, I think.
The community has been desperate for it.
Indie hackers have blown up your site and everything.
Around that, the community is just becoming bigger and bigger and there's more stories,
especially you're telling, especially on this podcast,
that people are going out and doing things a different way than raising VC money.
So just seeing what Tyler was, what his vision was for Earnest,
I just really wanted to be involved in.
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 final learning.
But yeah, just giving opportunity to be able to work with founders on different problems
every week with something different.
So yeah, it's just been awesome to be a part of that.
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.
And 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?
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 behind the table for pro members.
It's essentially broken down into either by use case or by a role.
So if you're looking to build like an Airbnb style app on the web or a mobile app,
then there's different versions of that.
So you can follow the tutorials using Glide to make the Airbnb mobile app.
Or there's a tutorial that teaches you how to make Airbnb on Webflow,
Airtable and Zapier sort of all tied together.
But then there's other smaller tutorials,
which are things like how Superhuman built their product market fit engine.
And I just built a sort of a version of that using Airtable
and do a step by step run through of how to build your own version of that too.
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 onto other people who show up who've 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 someday sort of maybe possibly want to do that,
but they never get over that initial hurdle
because it's like 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 from that initial hurdle that stopped so many other people from getting started?
Yeah, 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 almost try and go out and find that technical co-founder.
Oh, hey, can you build this thing for me?
Why should I build it?
All those struggles.
And then you basically come to two paths which are, yeah,
finding that technical co-founder or you learn to 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 some shitty version of an app idea that I may have
when for me I had ideas every week,
or there's a few ideas that I had that I thought,
well, this could be cool, this could be cool as well.
And very, 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 do,
I can spend on it to build it.
And then when I was working at ProductTent,
it basically meant that I got to see all these new tools launching
and there was things like Card which launched that I was like,
well, I can actually just build a really quick website in like 10 minutes if I want to.
So it allowed me to really explore these tools and just push them to the limit
and then that got me to make a bug using these other people's tools
which were launching all around me.
They say that to 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 these other tools are coming out of the scene
that help you build apps and websites without having to write any code whatsoever.
So of course, that's what you're going to do.
What would you say was your initial motivation for building all this stuff?
I think the motivation has changed over the years.
Initially, I think I thought, okay, I want to be an entrepreneur,
I want to run my own business, I want to be a millionaire by the time I'm 30,
all these standard things.
And then when you get into it, it almost becomes just the thing that you love to do,
which is figuring out how to build things.
And I think lots of people talk about how I'm not a developer,
but I build things anyway.
It's actually shared a lot of the same mindset around how you think about the problems,
break them down, and then you're actually building them.
It's just I use other people's code with their tools that I put together.
And then once you start building,
you just almost get the bug fit and think, oh, I could build that thing.
And then you see something else, you're like,
oh, maybe I could build something else, or maybe I'm going to tie these things together.
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 these no-code tools?
I've done that.
It must be 50 times.
And I've tried too well.
I've gone on, I've said, right, okay, I'm going to take this Code Academy course,
or I've even spun up a basic product app.
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,
something didn't work, and then it just didn't work, and didn't work,
and didn't work.
And then it just never 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 code.
And there's plenty of times where something doesn't work,
doesn't work, doesn't work, and it just won't work.
So it's funny how the same problems happen.
Yeah, you got to kind of choose your preferred pain.
If you really don't like debugging code,
but you're okay debugging problems with these no-code tools,
then just use the no-code tools.
Yeah, I guess it might depend on almost how your brain works
and how your brain sees things.
I like to see things in like blocks.
Click this, put this here, put that there, connect this to that,
rather than what I see is just letters, symbols, numbers,
all in like a massive line.
It's like, sometimes it looks a bit difficult to me.
I love 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's name is Mubs.
He is one of the most prolific developers that I've ever talked to.
I had him on the Indie Hackers podcast a couple of years back.
I think he won Product Hunt's Maker of the Year Award,
at least once, maybe two years running.
And 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,
given somebody like Mubs to partner with you on a product?
I think it was very unfair that the person I ended up reaching out to was Mubs
because, like you said, he built so many things that he was like,
yeah, sure, it sounds cool.
I'll happily 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 just that sort of annoying person saying hello
and trying to be really helpful to everyone else who I was speaking to
and really just talking about ideas and talking about things
and just being really, I like to say, helpful.
People may not have agreed, but it just helped because Mubs could see
that I was being helpful to other people and him with 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 was like, yeah, I can build that in, like, he can build in his sleep.
So he was like, yeah, sure, I can build that.
And I just spent hours and hours and hours putting together a massive spreadsheet
of all the things that need to go on there.
And yeah, I mean, he could have done that in his sleep for sure.
What was it that you guys actually ended up building together?
Well, I was working in social media marketing at the time
and Bram Canstein, I might have butchered his name there,
he worked on something called Starflip Stash,
which is basically just a load 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
like your first project.
So I thought it'd be quite cool if there was a vision of that,
like all the marketing things, because there's so many social media tools,
there's automation tools, there's like blog creation things,
and like there's just tons of other things.
I thought, well, what am I doing for marketing focused things?
And I thought it was a fairly easy thing to get my toe in the water
of building something, because I could easily put together all these tools
in a spreadsheet, beg labs to build something for me that I uploaded.
And then I just thought, yeah, it'd be an easy first step.
So that's what we launched with.
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 Upvotes.
How did you get it to do so well?
I mean, I think that was a bit of a fluke.
But I think it was early on in the days when the Stash Stack sites
had not been done before, really.
Like Bram had his first one, I had the second one,
and then basically after that, there was one new one a week.
So people got very tired of those.
But they were very interested in like helpful products for people initially.
And I think I must have just been, I was in like the Slack group,
really trying to be helpful to people that they just wanted to help me
with my first product.
I was like, oh, this is my first thing.
I think I launched it on my 25th birthday as well.
And I don't know, it's just really stuck in there with some people.
And I imagine some of the calmer of me, yeah, just being in those groups
probably helped spread it on more than it would have otherwise.
This is good stuff.
You pretty much just named two different unfair advantages
that founders can have.
The first one is that because you had your ear to the ground,
you knew what the trends were on 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 liked you because you were helpful and you were visible.
And so when you submitted a product, they recognized you like,
oh, it's been, and of course they're going to upvote you
and help you to sort of pay it forward.
And these are two things I think any founder can do
if you don't just sort of recede 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 these Slack groups?
I mean, I'd love to see this back too
because I'm not sure I was severely helpful.
But I was definitely in a Slack group called Maker Hunt.
And then from there, I was in the product hunt trends,
global Slack group, which was thousands of people.
It was like a product hunt book club group.
So in all of these things, I was just saying to whoever I could,
like, let me know if I can help with anything.
And so in Maker Hunt, we had lots of,
it was almost like the very early version of the indie hackers interviews.
We just had AMAs with different founders.
So I just offered to follow in the, 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 a medium post and then like posted them out.
So we just had these AMAs.
They must still be on my medium somewhere.
But yeah, all these articles from my founders,
probably some crossover with the ones we've had on the indie hackers as well.
But yeah, that's where I initially started sort of being helpful, I guess.
Yeah, it almost sounds like you were playing community manager
for these Slack groups, which is funny because you ended up going on
to become the community manager for Product Hunt itself.
That's exactly how it happened.
I was already the community manager for these groups
and Product Hunt Slack groups.
So all the makers, people launching on Product Hunt and things
already knew me through these groups.
And Eric Tyenberg and Bran, who I mentioned previously,
were both working on Product Hunt at the time.
And they actually both separately recommended me to Ryan.
So he like followed me on Twitter and I was at work
and I was like, oh my God, what the hell is happening?
And then he DM'd me to say,
hey, I think we need to have a chat.
And I was like, oh my God, what the hell?
And then I had a chat and said they've got an open
and want to hire community manager
and they think that I'd be great for it.
So I was like, I'm going to quit my job and do this.
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.
I didn't know how big it was, I don't think.
I was like, oh, this is such a cool opportunity.
And I was like, well, I'm doing lots of this stuff anyway.
I must have felt fairly nervous,
but I thought surely I can do this.
I've just been the person who everyone's going to
and chatting with anyway.
But I just thought I'd give it a go.
But I remember on my first, the day before my first day,
me and Ryan were trying to have a Zoom call
and I was in Starbucks and the internet was cutting out
and he was trying to explain to me
how to run the homepage of Product Hunt.
And I just couldn't ever figure out,
like it just wasn't working like a call.
So I couldn't really get to the bottom of how to run the site.
So I'm on a Monday morning.
There was no one awake in SF time.
I was just here on my own, just like,
okay, I've got to look after this website now.
How the hell am I going to do this?
But I got through it in the end, so it was fun.
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?
I mean, I can't remember so many of these projects,
but I remember there was a project called Beat My Eyes
where if there's a blind person in need,
they could switch on the app straight away
and you would be their eyes.
You could help them show, is this milk out of date?
All these sort of things.
That was one that stuck out for me.
But what I really started seeing was people building things
to help other people build things.
So like AJ built a card and released that.
And I remember that.
And I thought, like, holy shit, I can use this.
And I just started using it.
I was like, I've 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 never happened before.
Like that quickness to build something and have it ready
for someone else to go on there was just insane to me.
And then I saw other companies like Webflow, Bubble,
because I was in charge of launches,
there was always people being introduced to me through email.
There was all the people through YC were all coming through
our email to me.
And we just got speaking to everyone.
So it was a chance to really see sort of behind the scenes
of all these things and help them get to launch.
And yeah, just the things I saw was like,
I need to build more.
I need to build more.
And I want to do these things.
And the whole sort of chatbot hypers coming around.
And then there was something called chat fuel,
which was like a super easy way to build chatbots.
So I was like, oh my God, I can build a chatbot
in like half an hour as well.
So there's all these things that just helped with the speed
of having a random idea to then being able to have something
to show someone else.
Sounds like it was really coming at you from all sides there.
And I think we're all just a product of our environments.
If you find yourself in a situation that you're 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?
Yeah, so I built a few things before that,
but Newco was after I left product temp.
I've been sort of doing some consulting
and other things on the side to pay the bills.
And I saw all, actually I saw on indie hackers,
there's a Go Rails, and there's another one.
So basically screencasting businesses.
And I thought, I could do that.
I could just record myself building these things
without code, release one a week
and just charge people for it.
I thought, yeah, sure, let's do that.
So I used the product temp feature
and messaged a bunch of people who had signed up
for a newsletter that I had put out ages ago
and just said, look, I'm going to do this.
It'll cost $49, click here to pay now,
which was basically a link to a type form
and you'll get yearly access.
And this is what I'm doing.
I do have a website ready.
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 like on this path to building this company.
And screencasting is a harder job than I thought it was.
It's really not that simple and just,
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'm like, oh no, I don't know.
Is it going to be good enough?
What am I going to do with it?
So as usual, I went back to nubs and said,
hey, nubs, I'd love to build this into a platform
where other people can use this to do other things
like host their own hackathons and all this sort of stuff.
So you can 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
until something really clicks off.
So it got down that path and then I had all this pressure.
More people signing up for more videos and things
which I wasn't putting out as much.
And then it's 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 it sort of decided to close it down
and rethink what it is I was trying to do
or what I wanted to be doing.
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 screencasts of how to build these no-code apps?
Well, I mean, I was in a certain valid bubble.
I was in product time.
I saw all these companies launch in from YC, Slack, everything.
The thing to do was you build a company,
was it 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 the hackers on and off throughout the time,
but always thought, yeah, but that's only some people.
That doesn't happen to most people
that would do this bootstrapping thing.
I don't know if I could really do it.
I wanted more for no other reason, really,
than I wanted it to be this bigger thing.
So yeah, I think the end of last year,
I started reading some things, listening to some things,
and just reading some interviews with some people
where I thought, that's the situation I'd like,
or that's how I'd like to run something,
and not this other way.
Instead of reading all the Japanese posts and stuff,
all these big raises, I thought,
why don't I just try and build something this other way.
I remember following along with Nuco,
and you had a lot of things going on that seemed,
at least from the outside, like they're doing really well.
You had a 30-day challenge?
A 30-day startup, yeah.
Yeah, the 30-day startup. That seemed huge.
You had 3,000 people join in the first 24 hours.
It seemed like it went really well. What happened with that?
It went catastrophically, I think.
It was a sort of similar thing to 100 days of coding.
And I just said, look, it'll be 30 days.
Why doesn't everyone just try and build something within 30 days?
I'll put out some stuff that's like,
okay, this is how you can come up with ideas.
This is how you can talk to users.
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 people come together
and actually do something and follow it.
I didn't really put too much thought on it.
I thought of the idea, built the website in probably 30 minutes,
which also, this is one of the maybe cons of no code
is that you can build something so quickly,
it doesn't mean you should. But I did.
And I launched it.
Yeah, it just didn't really. It didn't get to plan.
So let's talk about what that looks like
when things don't go to plan.
How did you decide definitively that these things weren't working
and it was time to move on?
And what was it like pulling the plug?
I think it's pretty easy to know when things aren't going well.
It's just whether you accept it or not.
I was sat around stressed out that something's not clicking.
I don't think you can tell when something's not going well.
And you can tell when something is going well.
And if it's somewhere in the middle, then it's probably not going well.
So I was sat at home day after day stressed out that,
oh, what's not happening? 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's 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 you feel like you should be loving something about it.
It took me a while to figure out that I just need to stop doing
the shit that I don't want to do.
And that was, I think one of the interviews I looked at was
a guy from Podepad.
Yeah, that's the way.
Yeah, it's just so straightforward.
I'm just like, look, I only do things.
So the decision matrix was, it's either going to make me money,
make my users happy or not take a lot, or be easy to do.
And it's going 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,
like in a good way, thinking that I love to just say,
okay, I want to figure out my own honest 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 yeah, that's how so many things are stripped away.
What did you end up coming up with on your list of work principles?
So I think it was more of a, I mean,
I don't know if they're necessarily principles,
but I took away the monthly pricing, like a recurring revenue,
because I think people have got 3,000 recurring revenue products
that they're already paying for already,
and they keep on building up.
And if I've got a recurring revenue product,
every month I have to give that person that value all over again.
So I've just gone with Makeup Ad for now,
that's my change soon, is the lifetime pricing.
So they pay once, they basically should get that value straight away.
And then I don't feel like I'm in debt to them any longer.
It's already like, we've done our deed now,
just enjoy all the rest of the other stuff that you get now,
basically for free.
Another one was, I want to be able to just build the things
I want to build whenever I want to build.
And if I don't record something and upload it one week,
I don't want to feel bad about that.
If I decide to build five things one day or that week,
upload them all, then that's great.
But I don't want to be on anyone else's schedule.
I want to be on my own.
If I want to go offline for two weeks, which I just did,
I came back yesterday, then I want to be able to do that.
So it's just some of these little things that I was thinking about.
And one of, yeah, I think it was more of a poor driver says it
and his company of one is focused on doing less.
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 10 K months, one month,
the next month was like seven K.
You should not be feeling bad about that because seven K month is insane.
Like people are programmed to feel bad about a decline in growth
over that month.
But you still had like a fantastic growth that many people would
love to have.
So yeah, that's something that stuck in me as well.
Yeah, this is good stuff.
And I'm noticing that it's all about feelings.
You know, it's about how do you 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?
You don't feel guilty or bad or behind.
And that's really the whole point.
Like the whole reason to start a company is to make yourself feel good.
So I think more people should really follow this 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 won't do,
then you end up just being sort of swept away by whatever wave
you're a part of.
If you're part of the product hunt, raise money, you know,
start like a high-growth startup crowd,
you're just going to follow whatever principles they set for us
and copy whatever they do.
And that might not be the thing that makes you happy.
So you have to deliberately make those decisions yourself.
Yeah, I think designing the business that you want to build is a huge part
of something when you start in it.
I think, for example, another one of mine was if I have 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 they get to do what they want
on their own schedule, there's no pressure,
they enjoy talking to their customers because that, like,
you're not fighting to try and get them to keep on paying you
and you're not trying to, like, keep up appearances or anything like that.
It's more of a, I'm enjoying doing this.
It just so happens that some things you need to pay for, people pay them,
and it all sort of is working out for now.
I mean, not to say that everything will make a pad.
It'll be like this next year.
Who knows?
But it's how I want to be right now with how I'm going to make a pad.
And it's been really good for me over the last six months, for sure.
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 money that grows at least to some degree
where you can justify continuing to run it.
What was that process like for you in deciding to run MakerPad?
So after Newco, I sort of realized that folks are not doing less.
What do people like? What do I like doing?
And it came down to essentially the, like, how I started it.
I like making videos, well, 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 that one thing.
And yeah, I reinvented it as MakerPads.
And people have just been loving it since.
It's been incredible.
And it was one of those times where I just thought,
this is like, this is right.
People are liking this.
This is sticking.
People are like saying that they couldn't ever build something before
and then now they've got actually something built.
Like, that's a huge thing for me.
There's XYZ founders who are asking for my templates
and using my tutorials to build things themselves,
like the community's 25%, at least, developers.
So it's like a huge crowd of technical people who just want to look
at another way of doing something.
And just hearing all these things, maybe almost like know
that this is the thing that I should be doing.
Like you said, it's difficult to design a business
where you don't know if it's going to work
and it's going to be financially beneficial to you to actually do it.
So if I have a week where I feel like everything's been reactive
rather than proactive, so I'm applying to people,
I've got to do this, I've got to do that.
I'm running off my own to-do list or email inbox.
I just like take a Friday or take the week I need to say,
wait, what's going wrong for this to be what my last week was like?
Why is this not how it was or how I wanted it to be?
And then sometimes it takes a few adjustments.
Sometimes it's things like you've got to just not reply to an email
or you've got to just let things like not be an issue
and just kind of re-dig the model every few weeks.
Seems to be my thing.
You just sort of look 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 happiness level or what?
So just rethinking that whenever that happens.
Yeah, you always have to kind of stay on top of your business,
otherwise it'll get away from you
because it's pretty much a living, breathing thing.
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 to keep having in the future.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think there's so many things that I could build with Makepad
and so many directions I could take it in.
But I'm very aware of what I did with Nuco
and when I'm building something, I'll build it maybe 30 minutes an hour.
So for example, there's a higher marketplace
where you can hire experts for no-code experts.
That, to me, seemed like it was something that needed to be built
and just because I could build it didn't mean I should have.
But I built a landing page in half an hour
and people are up there, 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 to find other people and message them
and then think 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
and try and grow that one piece of it
because that's not what I initially set out to do.
So it's always a nice sort of thing to remember
just because you can build it doesn't mean you sort of,
you should or you should build it to completion,
just like do the minimum and let it take course itself sometimes.
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're doing with your previous business, Nuco?
Nope.
That was the, I think that was the funny thing is that it was that
when I sort of took that time to reflect and look back,
I thought, well, what was the thing that I thought that was working at Nuco
and the people really liked and I enjoyed doing?
It was that, it was building things without code
and teaching other people how they're paying for it.
It was going well.
I just, since I've come back to that focus of the other things that I want to build,
there's no priority list based on anyone else's agenda.
It's just nice that this is how I actually built it.
Here's the recordings of how I built it
and you can go and build it yourself too.
I like that set up for now.
There's a quote with Charlie Munger that I love.
Somebody asked him and Warren Buffett during a Q&A session, I think,
what their sort of unified principle was for investing for business.
He said, they kind of stick to the things that they enjoy doing
and they have enough good sense that when something's working, they keep doing it.
In fact, he said, the fundamental algorithm of life is to repeat what works
and that's exactly what you did with Nuco.
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
throughout 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.
It was kind of like, how do you use surveys
to determine whether or not your company has hit product market fit?
How did you take that and turn that into a tutorial
so that people could do that without code?
Often what I do is if I figure out how to build something,
I might record my screen for an hour, three hours, four hours
whilst I'm figuring out how to build something
and 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'll 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.
I remember I had, I think when Newco launched,
there's one review from someone who said,
oh, this is really cool, but his voice is dreadfully dull.
So I was like, oh, that's lovely.
There's just some people who just could do these tutorials
with a voiceover and just think it sounds awesome.
But to me, how I like to do it and how I like to consume it is,
there's a video and here's all the text to follow along.
And if it's like a two-minute video or less
and the text is there to accompany it,
I feel like that's the best way to do it.
Now, I may get some more people on soon
and maybe we'll talk about that to do some tutorials
and there'll be people who 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 an analysis paralysis in this,
in that if I've got to create a video,
I know I've got to do a tutorial
and I've got to like, it's got to be certain length of time.
It's got to have these certain features
and it's going to have the audio,
even like the processing 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 such a big thing that I never want to get around to doing it.
So I'd rather it seem like an easy thing that I'm just messing around.
I'm recording stuff as I'm messing around.
People can see how I mess up and then fix something
and they can see it that way,
in that everything's not like a really polished, perfect thing.
And a lot of these things you do just have to be curious
and like mess around and play with things
until they actually work together.
How do you make money from all 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 upfront.
Do people pay you to access these tutorials on MakerPad?
Yes, so we've got about 400-500 users on the pro membership for now.
So there's quite a lot at the moment.
And there are a lot of those who are just free
because I did some promotions with women in tech
and stuff like that where I've given out free memberships.
And it's not to say that I'll not ever do a recurring model
because I know some people 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 predictability in revenue.
So if I hire some more instructors,
that might be something we play around with.
But for now we just have lifetime memberships.
But we also have a B2B side,
which is companies pay us and I'll work with them to create content
and have a company profile on MakerPad.
So if you go onto the Airtable profile,
you'll see tutorials built with Airtable.
You'll see job posts from Airtable,
can either be technical or non-technical roles.
And just have a little bit of an overview of what Airtable can do
because my thought process is
people won't necessarily go to Airtable to realise what Airtable can do.
They might want to go somewhere to see what can I build with something first.
So if they see I can build a sales CRM,
I can build a product market fixed model
and they use an Airtable, maybe I should go and use Airtable.
So from there, I think they'll then navigate to Airtable.
So there's tons of companies.
I mean, there's so many companies out there,
email marketing tools, 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 sort of okay.
So I'm just, I'm taking along and I'm choosing the best tools to partner with.
So I've got a few amazing tools like Boundless,
Clay, Webflow, Airtable, Zapier, Standard Library.
There's a good bunch coming on
and working with us where we can create some more content out there as well.
And Glide as well, which has been an amazing one recently with the mobile app space.
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.
On the other hand, these companies who are creating content with you
and really just paying to be advertised.
So I think there's been about 130k revenue this year.
I'd say maybe 50k is the business side
and then the best is these memberships.
Pretty cool. It's a pretty even split.
It's like not often that I've thought to people
we have multiple business models that are both pulling equal weight.
Yeah. And the thing is, I could, like I said,
be spending 12 hours a day just cold email and chasing down companies.
But I almost don't want to do that, I guess, for several reasons.
But it's more of a what's right for Makepad now and just exploring things.
It's nice to have the freedom to sort of casually explore certain different things
and how it all works.
So I've heard a lot about what you're working on from my friend, Lin Tai.
She's sort of working with you. She's sort of a mentor for you
in the sales department because she spent the last year and a half
on her sales or 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?
Yeah. I mean, Lin's been a massive, massive help to me
since we got connected.
So yeah, definitely shout out to her.
But a lot of these companies I've actually just been working with,
I say working with, I've just chatted to over the last,
just because they're in the no-code space
and I seem to be the person in the no-code space, which is great.
Like, 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?
Can we talk about this?
So those conversations have happened naturally
and lots of people will ask me because they know
I've got my sort of 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
to just the only companies that we've sold on
have been ones where we've made that connection first
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're getting thousands of views already.
We should work together to create even more
and really give the community what they need
because I think that works out
in the best interest for everyone.
There's no one comes off badly there
and it's what everyone in that whole triangle wants.
So we've talked about revenue.
We've talked about how your product works.
Let's talk about the expenses for a bit
because the expenses really slow down 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 it so cheap?
How is it so quick for you to build something like MakerPad?
Well, it's not to be quick.
It's because I'm using the tools that I'm using.
So the site is completely built on Webflow.
I use a member stack.
And there's others like memberspace
who handle the membership side of things with Webflow.
So you can just take payments directly there.
So explain to us what these tools are.
Webflow helps you actually build websites as a non-developer.
Yeah, so Webflow is a website builder.
There's a ton more functionality there with CMS
and they have their own e-commerce features and everything too.
Member stack and memberspace allow you to create a membership
for a Webflow site.
They also do Squarespace and others.
But they're really coming along in terms of their functionality
so you basically just have a Stripe account,
connect it with these membership sites
and add it to your Webflow site.
And then you've got a fully functioning membership site.
People can sign up, sign in, have a payment plan,
recurring revenue, or lifetime memberships, coupons,
and all that stuff.
So my only expense there is the hosting on Webflow
and any Stripe fees I have to pay.
And then I pay for a Zapier account
because I test so much with them
with new little tutorials and stuff like that.
And then the automations that I want to have
I run through Zapier.
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, that's basically it.
I don't know what else I really pay for.
That's really it.
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 not really know about?
So there's a bunch of things.
I mean, obviously I'm going to say the best place to go
is look on Make It Bad
because we've got a bunch of feature tools
and our recommended tools that are good for different things.
And when you click on each one,
you'll see what they're good for building.
So something like a mobile app.
Lots of people want to build mobile apps.
So Glide is just amazing for that.
It's essentially all run off the back of a Google Sheet.
So I built a tutorial for an Airbnb clone with an admin app
and the user app, basically all off one Google Sheet.
It takes about less than an hour to build and follow that tutorial.
And it's just, yeah, super easy.
And it takes you less than an hour to build Airbnb.
Yeah, exactly. It's crazy.
And I did a web version where I did of Airbnb again,
which was Webflow, Airtable, and Zapier.
And it's not as polished as the mobile version,
but it's just like you can do a lot of this functionality with these tools.
And there's things like Boundless Labs and Bubble
who have like a workflow management system
where you can do, if this happens, then do this,
then do that in their platform already.
So yeah, there's just so many tools coming out
that really push the boundaries with this no-code stuff.
It's just crazy what you can do and everything.
I mean, I'm working with a lot of these
where we are just seeing what new things are coming out.
And it's just crazy.
I think it's going to be very exciting for the future
of what no-code is going to be about
and what that sort of empowers people to be able to build.
I saw this clip from the Jetsons last week,
and there was this robot.
It was like an office robot,
and it was just like moving stacks of paper
from one office to another.
I think the Jetsons, do you guys have that in the UK?
Do you guys have that show?
Yeah, it came out in the 60s or the 70s or something.
And it's so interesting their idea of what the future is going to look like.
All these futuristic robots, people living in the sky.
But if you think about it,
when you're talking about all these no-code tools,
when you're talking about using Zapier to create rules and automations,
you're basically building robots.
In the past, I think they thought the office would be this physical space,
but now it's kind of the digital office.
You don't have stacks of paper on your desk.
You just have a bunch of Google Docs and emails.
You don't pass messages back and forth.
You don't have alarm systems. You have notifications.
We're building better robots today than they ever imagined
because our robots don't need physical bodies.
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?
Yeah, well, I think it's probably good to clarify here
that I don't think it's either U-code or it's no-code.
And I know there'll be some people out there who think
I'm just against learning to code, but it's not bad at all.
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've wasted nine months
learning to build that thing.
And we're going to always need people to code
to build these no-code tools.
I'm very aware that that's how a no-code tool works is someone's coded it.
I get that. That helps me, obviously, a lot.
But I do think that everything that can be or will be made with code
could also be made available to use without code.
So everything could be like a modular block.
And we'll be able to see more of connecting this with that.
If this happens, then that happens.
And there'll be a lot more advanced things with that.
And I think that it'll end up being...
Because, I mean, there's so many basic websites of so-and-so is a marketplace.
It works in a certain way, or it's an on-demand app.
They work in certain ways.
There's some slight differences and slight variations
of 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're just getting more and more into the future of,
that'll 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 allow people to build their own community website
or their own little forum or their own membership site
for crossing for dogs or whatever,
like the small tiny things they want to be building.
So I just think that, yeah, if we think that people will be working themselves
or most people will be working themselves,
which I think they will be in the future,
then we should be embracing the no-code movement.
And I don't think we can expect that everyone should learn to code
or will learn to code.
I don't think that'll be everything.
But I do think that everyone will be looking towards working with themselves.
And no code definitely helps towards that future.
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 indie hacker for several years 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?
I think it's to figure out what is the path of loose resistance for them,
whether that is code or no code.
And I think that the first several things that you build will be shit anyway.
So I really wouldn't worry about what they are.
And I just think that the first things you build will be great.
And you should look at what is a site or a type of site that you'd like already.
How can you build the similar thing or the 80% of that thing
but for your own interest group?
And just do that. It's okay to copy these things.
That's the best way you're going to learn
and figure out how these things work forever.
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 back.
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 featured on the podcast.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to learn more
about what you're up to?
Yeah, so we're at MakerPad.co
and you can find me at BenTossel, T-O-W-S-E-W-L.
Cool. Thanks so much, Ben.
Cheers.
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