Ben Tossell, founder of MakerPad, explains why he took the Head of DevRel role at AI startup Factory instead of starting another company.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Opinion
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 …”
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
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.”