Ben Tossell

Ben Tossell is a British entrepreneur, investor, and writer based in the United Kingdom. He is the founder of Ben's Bites, a 7-figure AI newsletter business, the creator of MakerPad (a no-code education platform acquired by Zapier), and a venture investor through Ben's Bites Fund. He is active on X as @bentossell with 181,000+ followers.^[1]

Career

Tossell studied International Business with Mandarin at university before moving into social media advertising at an agency that was subsequently acquired by Sprinklr. He joined Product Hunt in 2015 as one of the first hires, running community and launches, where he caught the "builder bug" despite being non-technical.^[2]

He went on to build 50+ products with no-code tools at near-zero commercial success, then launched newCo, then joined Earnest Capital as Platform lead (2018). He co-founded BotList in 2016 and subsequently built MakerPad — a platform teaching no-code product development — which Zapier acquired.^[3]

In late 2022, shortly after ChatGPT launched, Tossell launched Ben's Bites, a daily AI newsletter. The business reached seven figures in under a year — more revenue than his entire Makerpad exit.^[4] He also scouts for a16z and runs two funds of his own (backed by Sequoia, O'Shaughnessy Ventures, Ron Conway, Ryan Hoover, and Thrive), having invested in companies including Supabase, FlutterFlow, Pika Labs, Gamma, Etched, and SF Compute.^[2]

As of 2025–2026, he is at Factory AI and has co-founded a paper greeting card company with his cousin Andrew Gold.^[5]

Connection to Jan

In May 2025, Ben Tossell contacted Jan expressing interest in investing in uithub. Jan noted this in his diary with emphasis ("BEN TOSSEL - WANTS TO INVEST"), placing it alongside the Upstash sponsorship and Iterate trial week as a notable validation event. Jan was pursuing a $250,000 pre-seed raise for uithub at the time, and Ben was a prospective backer.^[6][7]

See Also

• Jan Wilmake
• uithub
• Ryan Hoover