Makerpad: How Ben Tossell Bootstrapped a $240K Side-Project

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Ben Tossell is the founder of Makerpad, a website that teaches you how to build apps and websites without writing a single line of code.

When Ben was working as the community manager at Product Hunt, he came across a lot of products that made it easier to build apps and websites without writing any code.

Being non-technical himself, Ben was intrigued by the idea of being able to use these tools to build his own products. He started spending all his spare time tinkering with these tools.

Eventually, he launched a website where he published screencast tutorials and charged people for access. He promoted it to his email list and signed up some early customers.

He kept pushing to add new features and functionality. But he quickly started to lose focus. He was trying to do too much for too many different types of customers. It was becoming a mess.

Eventually, he decided to shut that website down and go back to the drawing board.

He'd just finished reading A Company of One by Paul Jarvis. This time he decided that he was going to keep things really simple, focus on a single idea and do less.

He relaunched as Makerpad, a site focused on teaching you how to use no-code tools.

In less than a year, Makerpad has generated over $200,000 in sales – as a side project while Ben was working as head of platform for Earnest Capital.

And now he's working on Makerpad full-time and building a recurring revenue business.

Although Makepad isn't technically a SaaS product, I invited Ben on the show for two reasons:

There are a lot of parallels with Ben's experience of Makerpad and what new SaaS founders have to go through. I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned.
I wanted to talk about how the no-code movement is helping non-technical founders build and launch SaaS products without writing any code.

Ben's an extremely down to earth guy and we had a great conversation.

I hope you enjoy it.

This episode is part of our Bootstrapping series.

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Makerpad: How Ben Tossell Bootstrapped a $240K Side-Project

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