newCo

Ben Tossell had been leading community at Product Hunt and wanted to build his own projects. He experimented with no-code tools like Typeform, Carrd, and Zapier, discovering he could assemble them into products that "feel, look, and work like real software." He launched several projects to test ideas but hit a wall: "I tried many ideas and people seemed to be interested but no one actually paid for anything." Then he discovered screencasting companies like GoRails making $15,000/month and thought, "why don't I film myself creating stuff, and then people can pay and get access to that?"

Ben messaged his 1500-2000 person email list about video tutorials. "15 people paid." He needed a company name and, unable to think of one, called it newCo. The tech stack was hilariously simple: a Webflow site linking to a Carrd payment page integrated with Stripe. When people paid, Ben emailed them a password called "positivebananas" to access protected tutorials on Webflow. He brought in friend Mubashar Iqbal, "a technical guy and a prolific maker," who built for free. The goal was to scale early, which Ben later realized was "far too early. There was no need to be doing that."

Ben's growth strategy was organic and chaotic: "I didn't really know what I was doing. I was just tweeting stuff saying this is a cool thing I built." Twitter worked best. He also tried Hacker News and Reddit with poor results. By June 2018, newCo had 90 paying customers and $8k in total sales. However, because he'd sold lifetime access rather than subscriptions, this equated to only "~$700 MRR."

The core problem: too many bets at once. Ben wanted to do video tutorials, build a platform that could "scale," offer consulting, and more. "We were doing too many things at the same time and it became a bit of a mess." His Product Hunt launch included a harsh review: "this idea is really cool, but the guy is dreadfully dull." Video production proved harder than expected. Most critically, Ben lost the thread: "I was not really sure what I was selling, how I was selling it, or who I was selling it to. Soon enough, I didn't recognize our product as what we were trying to do."

Ben also acknowledged the toll: "Promising weekly screencasts is a big thing to do and when motivation is down from the slow growth, it can be an even tougher ask!"

Ben shut down newCo after a few months. He traveled for three months with his girlfriend and read "Company of One" by Paul Jarvis, learning that sustainable, solo-founder businesses were viable. He realized: "There was something working with newCo. People really liked learning about doing no-code stuff." He relaunched the core idea as Makerpad in January 2019, ditching the platform complexity and building it himself. This time, he focused on one thing: a learning community teaching no-code. Makerpad became one of the leading no-code communities.