#2287 AI made a “no code” founder into a coder

0:00This 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. Ben Tossel is the founder of MakerPad, the maker community that he sold to Zapier. He is now the head of developer relations at Factory, the agent native software development company.

0:28Ben, I got to start with this question. Dude, you created MakerPad. This is like the platform for teaching people how to code without coding. You sold the freaking thing to 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? It's just hard. It's really, I don't know whether it's the period of time after I sold that 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 the developer relations feels very similar to like a founder role where you need to be on top of your community you're the person that everyone reaches out to you've got to build the product or you understand the products in and out you've got to grow the product you've got to 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 and 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 a 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 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 had 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 liked hanging out with you and i wanted to chat with you and like i want to keep doing and they didn't want to talk to you anymore well no they would but it's not it's just not the same i think at the time of the acquisition of make that i feel like i was trying to figure out how does this continue to be a business for a long term because 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 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 i just didn't really know like what was what was the business like what would it look like and how big was it going to be it was never going to 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 almost made myself like a checklist of like okay if i'm going to work on anything again these are the things that it needs to satisfy what and one of them was like it 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 was like don't get on a content treadmill like okay if you do this once one week you've got to do it again the next week and obviously we could talk about how I didn't do that because I started a newsletter a daily newsletter yeah exactly um and they're just things like okay I was having twins at the time my work revolves around my life not the other way around so when I don't want to have to take calls ever I don't want to do like a bunch of things I didn't want to 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 because you would normally in previous times I had an idea I would start working on that idea that day or like at least start a landing page or something because that's kind of how I did things um so yeah I just haven't been ready to start a company I don't know if I ever will be.

4:36I kind of shifted to, I mean, Ben Spice technically is a company, but yeah, that's kind of how I felt. 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.

5:09And 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 no i think it probably gets worse why because in that example you just gave which i completely agree with it's a lot of context section there's lots of different tasks going on at different times 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 100 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 going to manage all of that like even just for yourself mentally how can you visualize all the tasks these people are working on i see 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 the thing they're doing and then yeah got it so you don't have to deal with feelings and family issues you do still have to deal with outcome and adjusting of of directions and all that 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 going to go away like it feels like it's actually you can work on even more stuff now so actually people are going to 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 a thing that is actually now on forever.

6:57And I love the output of that. Okay. And you're saying the AI agents are going to be another level of the same old thing of more work piling on top that you have to 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 the previous company? Or did you also see that with the MakerPad companies that were being built using no code? Yeah, I think it's kind of the same. So with MakerPad, the whole reason I started it was I couldn't code. I still can't code traditionally. Everyone told me if you wanted to be a CEO or run a tech company, you have to learn to code.

7:38And 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, like I run my own company. And I wanted it to be in the tech world. I wanted it to be online. I felt like 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. and so that was kind of the premise was I can't code I'm going to 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

8:28and then I was then I built what I first did was build probably 50 things with that kind of stack of tools hoping that one of those is going to be my business that was like this is why i'm a hot shot ceo now it's because of one of these but no one bought a single thing of any of those products um so i was like okay we'll rethink this but everyone's asking me how i built it if i can't code i was like okay those are going to 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, which is effectively a tutorial site for learning a framework, a coding framework, Ruby on Rails.

9:13I was like, oh, well, and I think he was on IndieHackers at the time making like 15K a 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. So that's how Makeup had started. And then sort of fast-forwarding through the journey of MakerPad, the thing I didn't realize until, I don't know whether it was within the MakerPad life or after it, was like I'm still teaching programming, but in a different format. Like there's different, the tools just look different.

9:51Like 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 got to debug that and actually got to 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 kind of thing. And I think it helped me a lot to understand a bit about like sort of system thinking on 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 mum can now build an app if she wants to with no code like I thought was going to happen but then I mean we can fast forward to today and thinking my mum still won't build an app even though you can use something like Lovable because I think it's still you've got to want to do the building bit like that's still the issue it's either something like my mother once the app built doesn't want to spend any time in the building of the app so no code you're spending time in that building phase fixing the zapier and air table 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 you are now not at zap zapier where you sold your company are using zapier still i am not because because i have a very high threshold for pain and i want to code it so you are actually getting into coding then yes i am how do you square that circle that you are not a developer, but at the same time you code?

11:54For myself, I would need to feel like I truly understand all of the workflows that the engineering team I work with do and why they do them and why they're important and why you shouldn't do this, but you should do this. That's one that I'm like, okay, I can learn some of that stuff at some point, but I haven't got it all learned yet. I couldn't sit there if you took the AI tools away to build anything either like I couldn't sit down and write lines of code I would have no idea where to start really and I think on some level it's definitely helpful to be able to do that to then get the most out of these tools 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 I feel like the original thesis of Makeup Hub was right.

12:48You don't need to learn to code. But there's asterisks all the way through since then, which is like, but it might help, or it sure would help, or it might help now. So that's kind of how it feels. Yeah, sure, I can get stuff done. Not at the level of a top programmer, but more so than a non-technical person. So I'm somewhere, I'm like a technical, non-technical person. So here'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 tell you in English and having you tell software in English what you want and have it converted to developer talk.

13:36and 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'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. Fair? Yes, very fair. 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.

14:14Like, 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 going to want to code. The dream of AI is going to make us into coders, all of us into coders, not there. but for those of us who want to be who have the desire and the understanding of the logic behind it it's more acceptable fair yes i think so i think i think ai generally is making people more technically able and also making people more curious um i think in order to want to get anything out of life i guess is the curiosity 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 understand the code base and like the the roadmap and our documentation as much as it's to help me figure out answers for the community it's 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 get better at that system.

15:24There'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. Okay, let's look at one of the things you built and then we'll come back away from screen sharing. 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 the factory software, right? Yeah. You don't want to go into linear because linear only tells you what they're working on and what they've done.

16:00And what you want to do is you want to 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 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? Yeah, I wanted a source of truth that was anything that's been worked on should be in linear. And then anything that has been done should be in the code base. And then everything that is actually public and shipped and is like feature flag on, so everyone has access to it, should be in the documentation.

16:33So all those three stages should be like anything we're thinking about all the way to everything that users can use and touch and feel today. Okay, let's take a look at it. And this is you using Factory's own software to manage all this. Show me the screen. Let's take a look. Yes. How would you describe factory in one sentence, by the way, while you bring it up? 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. And we're model agnostic, so you can use any of the models in our software. Okay, so this is factory's Droid CLI tool.

17:13So this is in my terminal, which is something we can touch back on, which is something I was scared of for a long time. But you can just think about it as like a chatty-witchy chat, effectively. So I've asked a question, and this Droid Exec is one of our products. So it's like a way to use Droid without needing to... So you're 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.

17:50I'm assuming the pushpins mean they're not ready yet. They're almost there. Yes, correct. And the check is. And so this is work that your team, the developers, have worked on, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah, so 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. And it talks about, okay, there are 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 it says ready for release 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 and then 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 subtasks still needed work it could be that it could be that actually for the top priority we just need to get like these four things out of 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 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 is everything um okay and this is really for me like i said it's a sort of 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 effectively sort of support like questions yeah i feel 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 will then specify where in the code base any of the like any of the sort of response it's given me is linked 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 and then it gives me a suggested 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 these different search queries across the different files and systems I've got.

20:45They 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. But there's no actual code written for this. This is just one big instruction manual. that you've given 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 going to find our code base. Yeah, exactly. And go search that. Okay. Give me 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.

21:26Well, I think it's important for things where stuff is on the roadmap, but 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 going to 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 really clear like visual in my head of 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 because 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 once there's 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 that like so what it's doing is it's searching all these different places at once so you don't have to yeah 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 and putting it in project management we don't have to rethink how to do this here is the here is the origin of what we thought about before and we can use that as a beginning for what we'll do next and that's a perfect example for i think if i think there's something that like oh this would be a really cool feature i would use this system to say okay first to research around like is there any scaffolding or anything else in place that would be crucial for this new feature that i want to add is there anything in linear already have we talked about it have we scrapped it was there an approach before that we want to 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 okay All right, we can stop screen sharing unless is there something else you want to show?

24:20No, I don't know if you want to show the instruction manual. Yeah, let's see the instructions that lead to this. Okay. And what you're going to show us is how you're searching multiple platforms to get answers. This is my instruction manual, which is the only file that factory sees before it goes and does any of those searches. so here i've basically got 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 see what's done scroll let me see what that summary is let me see if i can read that 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 showed me earlier.

25:14So before you see all these details, you want to 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 want to know is check linear, tell me what's done and show me what's in progress and updated for me in this format. And that format includes a link back to linear in case you ever want to click and see the ticket itself. yeah exactly same with same with the code 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 give me a suggested reply um and then there's further examples but effectively there's the instruction the instructions sort of start here where it says okay do parallel searches across across the different files and folders that I've told you that you should look at.

26:16Do an initial exploration, then deep dive into any key files, then do targeted feature searches with the context. 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 okay execute the tools in order this might be something i'll change but like this is what's worked for me um cross check findings cross linear code and docs before drafting the output reuse a suggested reply format for linear use this tool so i built a little cli tool that it can just call with this command.

27:07They basically just use my API key, looks up linear, and does 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 my machine. 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 I 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 like 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 agents.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 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 it's so interesting because when When I asked Gary Tan, the head of Y Combinator, how he created his prompt for ChatGPT to create the perfect Gary Tan YouTube script, because he's big on YouTube, he essentially said the same thing.

28:41He 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 yeah i think ai is so good at getting you off the blank page problem and that i really struggle with a blank blank page 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 all of this at least i know that okay i know when you have any of that in the end of what I'm working on.

29:25And I think it just, yeah, it's just a way to, it's an agent itself. It's going to write in a way that it would understand. So like I can write these instructions, but maybe some of these would be better off written differently. And I haven't tweaked it too much yet, but I realized at the bottom of this is something I did look at doing, but I haven't actually used it for anything yet, which is, okay, if I want to make any tutorials or how to's 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.

30:06Cause like, is there a new feature that I want to cover and do like, as soon as it's launched, I'll do a video that day and then show people. And then yeah, write 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. How did you start getting comfortable with Terminal when you're a person who was comfortable with flowcharts of Zapier and Make? I felt weird, like probably most people, that everything was now a chat. Everything was just, okay, you just type in a question and get a response. And 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.

30:47And then I came across a product called Warp. which was a terminal product, but with 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. And do all sorts of things at the machine level. I knew developers use the terminal and have experience there and they know the commands like you need to know very specifically what commands you're 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 ChatDBT it felt like you could just make a spelling mistake it would still know what you made 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 whatever like it's already weird commands 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 claw 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 going to do over time i've worried a bit more like i can see it like deleting files now and i need to know what the hell it's deleting.

32:36But 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 over using ChatDBT or Claude on the web for almost anything. Give me an example of something that you're doing in Terminal that you couldn't have done without it. 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 um 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 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 i think one i tried to build was like an email tool where ai search on email is awful whichever tool and like wrapper you use I've tried a lot of them.

33:55It just doesn't work. And I was like, okay, well, I'd love to build an email tool that's 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 would try Replit or try something else that felt like an all-in-one builder or just tried like cursor and try and build a project. I'm like, I just don't know enough of what I'm doing here. 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 because what I tend to do is build first and think about it later.

34:51And I kind of learned that way. Like I build ahead of myself where I shouldn't really be here, but like I'm here now. So what are you going to pick up in the process? 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 almost don't need to in a way that I've built some of these things, which is just have a really clear instruction manual with an agentic tool. There's not much else you need in between those, to be honest with you. You obviously need to call with an API your Gmail stuff, so you need to set up an app on Google Cloud, which is horrible in and of itself.

35:32But other than that, they're the kind of systems I've ended up doing and building myself. Okay, let's talk about now marketing. When you were doing MakerPad, you had to build 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? My first response is like, I didn't really do that much because I didn't feel like I was, I wasn't like planning, okay, I need to do this because then this will do, this will have this follow up, like this knock on effect. What happened with Makeup Pad was when I was building those tools that no one ever bought, people were asking me how I built them.

36:14So then I actually sent out a type form they had like 800 people on my list sent a typhoon and said if if you pay 15 or 50 dollars maybe 15 i think it was if you pay 15 dollars i will 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 and like nothing's really that catastrophic or bad of an issue if you if you need to revert something um so I just started recording what I did how I was building certain things and putting it on Twitter and just a ton of people wanted to like learn more 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 me for advice on community, the number one thing I say is you've got to lead by example.

37:17If you're not in there talking, no one else is going to be in there talking. If you're not in there asking seemingly stupid questions, other people aren't going to feel like they can ask those questions either. And this kind of came back to when I worked at Product Hunt, where we'd want every single post to have a good comment thread underneath it. But 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 do you make it i'll just like try and break the ice like start the conversation going i saw that this doesn't need to really run 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 game that thing 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 is just something 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 I can do a lot of stuff that non-technical people definitely can't do.

38:35And I can understand a ton about the developer stack and all the rest of it. If I'm understanding you right, what you said was, first you built up a mailing list of people who were following along 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. 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 i probably just put the button to open slack on webflow as like when you pay when you joined the membership or when you paid it was like here oh welcome email here's your invite to slack oh that's got it yeah so 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 stack it was only for paid right 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 are building in this way or like wanting to learn this stuff like i was interested and still didn't know all the things that i didn't know then it was like a way for me to learn like oh what do you want to 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 no code can do so like give me ideas i'm going to run out at some point um and i think it's just yeah you've got to build an authentic community first um 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 okay how did you get more people to to join your email list to join and buy and join the community it's just consistently putting tutorials on twitter that's all i did twitter it was simple tutorials on twitter people would join to what buy to get the full tutorial i don't remember that sometimes yeah sometimes there would be just some free tutorials just 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 that'll be paid yeah okay and then i know uh from the every interview that you did you also used to go and under like sundar pachai's post you quickly commented so we all would see you in there and was that around this time no that that was for ben's bite so that was the newsletter i created when at 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 that say awesome i'll put this in my newsletter tomorrow and then that just like feeded 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 i don't want to do this anymore this is now looking like a twitter growth hack 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 and 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 Hunt.

42:17And I didn't really connect it at the time of like, actually, that was a growth hack thing for Product Hunt. Like 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. Here's the part that I used to see. I would go on YouTube looking for a tutorial on any kind of no-code software and I would see a video for MakerPad, but it wasn't you creating it. Who did that? So I hired a few people from the community to do this. So I got to a point where I was like, okay, I need to be like proper business person now.

42:53I need to like hire people and like get out of the day-to-day of it, 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. and i put out a call to the community and said hey is anyone loving note code stuff and like building on their own and like would you be interested in doing tutorials and then there was a guy called tom and then a girl called amy who reached out and i said tom have you done any tutorials before and he's like no i don't i think he said no and i said okay we'll just do a loom of like you walking me through a build that you did um and he did that and i said great you've done a tutorial now we're going to 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 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 always people in the community that we hired like i never i think i'm very rarely hired outside of the community which helped because they knew what the mission was what we're trying to do who we're trying to teach who the yeah community looked like they know the aesthetic they know the vibe yeah um did you give them any guides guidelines to doing it i think at some point we must have had some star guides of like okay this is kind of how that how it should how it should work but i think amy and tom both had their flavor of tutorial and i didn't really want to 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 got to be how we do it because this is what businesses do 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 i don't know i really liked that there was consistency in it especially if you're 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 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 want to 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 it's not like this company presenting to you this video that we've spent hours doing um okay i got it let me just close out with a couple of obnoxious questions i'll start with this one you said you didn't need to work after the sale what did you sell the company for i am not allowed to say which is frustrating because i wanted like that as the data point to show you didn't have to learn to code to get rich and like do this stuff so that you literally would not have to work right now and you do now i spent a lot of money so i do need to work now um no i think in seriousness i i could have 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 millions we're talking about then i can't say and then when you say you spend a lot of money on what 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 going to 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 years doing nothing I spent two years investing shares working at Zapier and really struggling with what am I doing what am I going to do next like what has happened like I did miss your voice then honestly I feel like you were so present and then it felt like you were yeah I did present yeah I just died on yeah yeah it almost was like in top secret mode which was which i get now because i don't know what you're like what should your role have been should you have been the community manager for zapier 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's Bites fund that invested in it.

48:09How did you find companies to invest in? Lots of people have been readers of the newsletter, have reached out, I've helped them with launches, I've given them advice or something along the way. And then they reach out and say, Oh, by the way, I'm working on this new product. 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 through email um and there's a yeah a few other people i 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 it's the first investment of the uh out of the fund 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 you i think you can talk about it yeah i think it's fine i think you can talk about it all right 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 yeah i think what i really want to do now i want to 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 want to 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, oh, this feels like however many years, six years ago now.

50:26So yeah, it was awesome actually 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 ways to do that, who's going to tell them? Like I'm willing to stand up for that. Couché 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? We hear this all the time. There's going to be a one-person,$10 billion company. Like, okay, well, it's boring by yourself. People want to have other people around them.

51:02I think it's natural to, oh, I could just use 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. You know what? Even if it's not exactly where we're going to end up, one-person company, I think is a direction. for 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 Rosalind Resnick. And I think she had had this vision that everything was going to work on the internet. And we're talking about like the year in the 90s.