Ben Tossell
Founder, Ben's Bites. On 2 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorauthoroperator@bentossell ↗bentossell.com ↗
Ben Tossell is the founder of Makerpad, a no-code education and community platform acquired by Zapier in 2021. He later launched Ben's Bites, an AI newsletter and resource hub, and actively invests in early-stage startups.
2shows
3appearances
32statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
16said about them ↓ Everything Ben Tossell said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Tossell: Not everyone should learn to code
“I don't think anyone should learn or every, I don't think everyone should learn. Sorry, that's going to piss people off.”
Tossell: Prompt engineering will become worthless as AI models abstract it
“I don't think prompt engineering is actually valuable, a valuable thing, because I believe all these models and all these tools will actually, like, abstract that away anyway.”
Tossell: A two-person company will generate hundreds of millions by 2027
“We'll have a company pulling in like hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and it'll be like one or two people actually running that, that company.”
Tossell: Developer relations mirrors founder roles in community and product ownership
“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 a product or understand the products in and out. You've got to grow the product…”
Tossell: AI Agents Will Worsen Founder Context Switching and Productivity Anxiety
“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 thes…”
Tossell: AI coding tools will not turn everyday consumers into software builders
“My mum still won't build an app even though you can use something like Lovable. It's, 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 someone like my mother wants the app built, doesn't want to s…”
Tossell: AI-powered email search is awful across all existing tools
“AI search on email is awful. Whichever tool and like wrapper you use, I've tried a lot of them. It's just, it doesn't work.”
Tossell: Solo billion-dollar companies are unlikely because building alone is boring
“We hear this all the time. It's going to be one person, ten billion dollar company. Like, okay, well, it's boring by yourself. Like, if people want to have other people around them, I think it's natural to, oh, I just, I could just do, use some help with just …”
Text-to-app AI builders like Bolt create polished UIs with broken features
“I just think generally text to app builders are over building everything or completely setting everything up as an overbuilt tool. But actually all the features are under, under built. So if you ask for like a Shopify, a Spotify clone with Bolt, it'll spit out…”
Task-based AI tools are better for beginners than text-to-app builders
“I kind of feel like this is a better place to start than a text app builder, because like I said, it's going to build a big fancy thing. And what you're going to end up in is like seeing a bunch of terminology code being written tests failing. They're all to d…”
Tossell: AI is mostly a bolt-on feature, not standalone products
“I think AI is actually more of a bolt on. It's like a feature for most companies rather than AI is the thing.”
Tossell: Big tech will easily replicate lightweight AI wrapper products
“Lots of these bigger companies or lots of companies in general will just be able to do most of the capabilities that lots of these, like, I don't want to like downplay them, but these like more throwaway products. The AI is enabling.”
Tossell: No-code tool workflows are fundamentally programming in a visual format
“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. Like, they don't look like a code b…”
Makerpad founder Ben Tossell no longer uses Zapier, preferring to code
“Because I have a very high threshold for pain and I want to code it.”
Tossell: Generate agent instructions by asking AI to document successful executions
“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…”
Tossell: I now use CLI tools instead of ChatGPT web apps
“And actually I now use the CLI tool over using ChatWT or Claude on the web for almost anything.”
Tossell: Community leaders must ask basic questions to drive engagement
“When anyone asks, asks me for advice on community, the number one, I think, number one thing I say is, you're going to lead by example. Like, if you're not in there talking, no one else is going to be in there talking. If you're not in there asking seemingly s…”
Tossell: Raw screen recordings outperform polished corporate videos on Twitter
“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.…”
AI coding agents will eventually fully automate GitHub pull request workflows
“I just think you start here and you can think, well, at some point the, like the PR stuff, that's going to be automated. Like, I'm sure you can get bots now that if there's a successful pull request, it'll just merge it to the main branch. So like, you never h…”
MCP makes complex workflows like database management very easy in Cursor
“Then there's things like MCP, which are making a lot of this very, very easy in things like cursor.”
Tossell: AI and no-code share one goal—democratizing software development
“And I think it's even as prominent today as it was then. I just think even with all this AI stuff, I think they're all actually connected and it's all to do with democratization of software development, like doing more with software without needing to be techn…”
Tossell: AI startup categories mirror existing tech categories with AI enablement
“They're all the same categories as startups and technology in general. It's just AI enabled in front of them.”
Tossell: AI will automate end-to-end ad copy, imagery, and performance optimization
“You could even have ads being optimized, like AI could be writing the copy and showing and generating image and then all of a sudden it'll swap and change a few things and it'll see what that CTI was much better. Let's go with this one. And then they just opti…”
Tossell: Standalone AI writing apps lose users to workflow friction
“If you have to go to another place to start writing your thing, but you actually like writing in Google Docs, like that's already a change of scenery for you, and it might already disrupt your flow, and you've got like your templates, you've got things that yo…”
The other half of the tape: Ben Tossell's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 16 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Greg Isenberg 13Erik Torenberg 3
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Startup Ideas Podcast 16
2024 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2022 10 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ben's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Founder, Ben's Bites | 2 | 20 | 100% 4/4 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |
 MIXERGYLEDGER | Founder, Ben's Bites | 1 | 12 | — | full record on Mixergy → |