NewCo
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
NewCo was a no-code education business founded in 2018 by Ben Tossell, the former community lead at Product Hunt. It sold video tutorials teaching people to build software products with no-code tools such as Typeform, Carrd, Zapier, and Webflow. The product was a simple Webflow site: customers paid through a linked payment page and received a password to unlock the tutorial library. By the end of June 2018 it had 90 paying customers and about $8,000 in total sales. Tossell shut it down after a few months and relaunched the same videos as Makerpad in January 2019.
02 / NewCo FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
NewCo died from trying to do too much at once. Tossell tried to turn a simple tutorial site into a scalable platform with features for companies, chasing what he thought was the right startup playbook — growth, venture funding, scale — instead of listening to what customers actually enjoyed. Within months he no longer recognized the product: he wasn't sure what he was selling, how, or to whom, and promised weekly screencasts became unsustainable as motivation faded. He shut it down, admitting he had chased the wrong things; notably, he reported losing no money, since the business was essentially just him recording videos.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Ben Tossell launched NewCo in 2018, selling no-code video tutorials through a Webflow site after 15 email subscribers paid for the idea.
- Early traction
By the end of June 2018 the business had 90 paying customers and about $8,000 in total sales, equivalent to roughly $700 MRR from lifetime payments.
- Shut down
After a few months of scope creep and fading motivation, Tossell shut NewCo down, then relaunched its videos as the no-code learning community Makerpad in January 2019.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
After a few months of operating, Tossell decided NewCo had become unfocused — he no longer knew what the product was becoming — and shut it down.
- 02
He traveled for three months, then relaunched the same video content as Makerpad in January 2019, a focused no-code learning community that he built and serviced himself.