Nocsdegree Revenue & Valuation (2024)

hello everyone my guest today is pete mccloud he's a self-taught developer and entrepreneur from scotland he launched no cs degree a year ago to inspire people to learn coding it features 90 interviews with developers and taught themselves coding that taught themselves coding or learned at boot camps he also has a jobs board a bootcamp index and an imposter syndrome book pete you're ready to take us this off yeah totally all right so if folks want to follow along the website is no cs degree dot com so what's the business model are people buying sort of one-off courses here or is there a sas play um sure so it's a bit of a mix really so i've got um lots of content on there so i've got over 92 interviews so far with developers so lots of them are sponsored i've also got a book out recently on imposter syndrome and i've actually got a job board as well and a bootcamp listening website so companies and bootcamps uh paid to feature on those and to get sorry what is what are you saying you're saying bit camp uh bootcamp bootcamp got it but the main so the main website though is no cs degree correct yeah that's correct yeah okay and and so if you like do you make money on the job board or no is that a free tool uh no um i make more money from the main website but um yeah so basically at the moment like i made a rookie mistake to be honest i made different brand names so i'm kind of like combining them at the moment into those yesterday so which tool today because this is what we'll focus on which tool today generates the most revenue for you the boot camp sales um not the sponsor content on this yesterday okay so so help me understand what that looks like i'm on no cs3.com right now where can i find some of the sponsored content sure um if you so basically there's like over there's about 100 articles on the website so far so if you scroll down um there will be yeah there's i think the latest one that i did was with a flat iron school so i've done i've had sponsor content with flatiron school and makers academy in london so one of the yeah the recent one with flatiron school was someone that did their cyber security course so that was i think uh joanne pacheck i hope i'm getting their name right and yeah they did um a course they served in the us army and then and after that they learned cyber security flat iron school and now they're working in the job in that area so it's really a good way to show that i'm in that article right now the headline is getting an entry level cyber security job thanks to flatiron school um you're saying this is sort of a sponsored piece of content so so what does a sponsor pay to get featured in a blog post like this um well i wouldn't be able to like give a precise figure because basically that gives information to competitors and i don't think i haven't really like agreed with that school yeah peter range is fine we're trying to understand the business here sorry a range is fine we're just i'm trying to help the audience understand the business yeah yeah sure in the like hundreds of dollars range okay and what are they paying for are you driving a certain number of clicks or doing an email send or like what return are they expecting on the 500 spend with you yeah sure um so basically they get mentioned in the newsletter they get sent out twice a week they get people applying for their courses i'm very active on twitter so they get basically a more in-depth guide to life at their boot camp than they would do say ordinarily on another website okay and um how many sorts of sponsors like this are you working with on a monthly basis like are we talking like you're doing like two grand a month in sponsorships or like 20 grand a month on sponsorships uh near two grand okay and so i mean are you doing this full time uh yeah that's correct so how are you sort of hustling your way to make sure you sort of couple your expenses and do anything you can to generate cash now so you can build a bigger business in the future sure um well i actually just spoke to a few founders this week so i've had some really good advice from people so basically um i'm gonna be yeah i'm going to be at the moment there's a lot of content on the website i'm going to be directing people more towards products um but really it's a case of i'll do i'll research lots of people on linkedin i'll do lots of cold emails i'll reach out to people on twitter which is my biggest social media channel by far so i guess it's really a case of just reaching out to people and building relationships and luckily lots of people like no cs3 and they see that there's lots of cool interviews there there's lots of people that have really transformed their lives and gone from say working as a waitress working as a developer so yeah there's lots of positive stories so i guess it's quite a good start for talking to people and building these kind of relationships so you have 4 000 uh 4100 followers on twitter your pin tweet from july 23rd said it's my business birthday 14 600 in revenue 94 interviews published 4 500 email subscribers and 211 000 page views is that all that all accurate yeah that's completely accurate it does a lot of scent that's great and so 14 000 in revenue over what period of time uh so that's a year so basically um i'm like wanting to get to the kind of benchmark that a lot of people do which is like ten thousand dollars a month um one of my like main mentors pat walls who run starter story he just hit 10 000 a month and i guess me and him have got similar sights so yeah i'm really taking a leak leaf out of facebook and other people like cortland allen who started uh indie hackers so they're my kind of two big inspirations and yeah so i'm really wanting to build it up a lot higher i think the first year's always going to be the hardest one of course now is pat wall's business model also to sell sponsorships um no he will originally sell sponsorships but he's moved towards i guess having a community of people that are wanting to start their own businesses and yes so he's basically he started it quite gradually he had a low price point per month and now he's just switched to a yearly pricing model so that's obviously built up a lot of good cash flow for him so yeah that's definitely a really good inspiration and yeah i'm taking lots of advice from lots of people at the moment that's great so you launched then about a year ago 2019 yeah that's correct yeah and walk me through i mean getting your first 4 000 subscribers on a newsletter is not easy how'd you get your first 100 um i did really well with my launch i launched some product hunt and got i guess in the top five or so i got but the biggest thing was i launched on hacker news and i didn't have any profile there or any kind of you know yet any like big kind of following or backing there but everyone really loved it and it stayed top of hacker news for like a day so that got like i can't remember how much it was exactly but something like 30 000 hits and got loads of people in even emailing me in on day one just to like tell me about their story of being self-taught developers so that's cool so i had lots of content straight away so yeah i guess having a really good launch out and also just being really active on twitter and just promoting the newsletter you know all the time at the end of you know every article and whenever i'm talking to people on podcasts like this one i guess yes so how did you okay so hacker news can give you a bunch of traffic i get that there's a sort of art and science to ranking high on hacker news we're not going to try and reverse engineer that because it really is sort of art plus science we can reverse engineer though the flow once those hits hit your website so if 30 000 people hit your website from hacker news where do you put the email opt-in yeah and so it's like front and center right at the start of the website and the header so i think having that's really important i would say that i use a exit and pop-up which is a really good idea but i think a lot of people intuitively now are a little bit you know against pop-ups and i'd say that's true if they're like straight away but an analogy i heard from harry dry he does a great marketing website is kind of like do you go into a museum and someone goes up to you straight away and says hey can you give 10 bucks to sport museum you're probably not going to do that but if you've had a really good time at the museum and you're leaving and someone says hey you had a good time can you support this place you're more likely to so basically my pop-up is one that when someone's about to leave the website then i say hey what's your conversion rate on the exit pop-up um i don't have that info at hand to be honest but i would say that some other tools that you can use on a pop-up to help would be things like talking about values instead of saying subscribe you can say you know get help with coding so make a value proposition rather than you know subscribe is kind of like a bland kind of word that doesn't really got it so this hacker news launch i'm looking right now is july 23rd 2019 it got 692 upvotes which is a lot so i can see why this drove 30 000 clicks to your website on that first day or two of of that post going live on hacker news or y combinator how many new email options did you get uh how many subscribers new email opt-ins subscribers yeah yeah um i think i got about i think it would have been about 500 or so i didn't have a great i didn't optimize it amazingly well so basically when i was doing my launch as i was doing my launch i was like improving the email signup flow as i went so people so when i first launched i didn't have say like an exit pop-up and then people were telling me to add one so this when i have when i launched my job board a few months later that i had everything prepared for that and i got a thousand subscribers in a week and that was definitely it was definitely good that i'd learned from my first launch so yeah i think as with anything you do things enough times you can hopefully use things this is teachable movement and then you haven't been able to catch the lightning in a bottle twice right so i look at all your posts on hacker news you've posted about sort of once or twice per month for the past call it 12 months no none have gone anywhere near 700k you know up votes like your first one all right so it's many would argue it's not a repeatable process right so i get the launch strategies i understand that um talk to me about the product hunt launch so when you launched no cs3 on product hunt you got about 280 upvotes this was also about a year ago did that drive more or less new email subscribers compared to hacker news um i think how can you use drove more um but i would say that in product hunt the benefit is that it is obviously much more of a i guess a community where people for instance uh you know talk to each other and support each other and i guess hacker knew what i'm trying to say is hacker news is kind of like there is a lot of luck involved and it can be quite hit or miss whereas in product hunt if you launch lots of times you can build up a following and people can see you and get to know you and say you know there's lots of people i know in product hunt because i've been launching like i've launched other things like my book so they can see that i've launched you know several products in the same area so yeah i think product hunt is probably better for kind of like building up a following whereas hacker news can be more of a kind of yet you can plug away at lots of things and it can either go sky high or nothing so it's more of a black or white situation i'd say yeah you've done a lot of project launches you did the tech press list back in the day i got about 400 up votes uh did that i mean are those lists effective can i mean can you cold email those and get a good response rate um are reportless effective the tech you launch tech press list oh yeah sure um yeah basically yeah that isn't all products so it's not something that's active anymore but i would say that that's kind of like a good indication with product hunt is because that was my first ever product and it did really well so i think i mean i think product hunt is good because if you make something that people like um then people will upvote it so i think there's a little first first by the way you didn't just i mean you you put in the work you put in the work to learn because you had peach cheap travel peach cheap trains ho d huddle me bitcoin play do you even ship demo details and then tech press list which got 400 uploads yeah you're um yeah well i say i think as i seem to remember i think i think that might be a reverse chronological list so i think i'm pretty sure tech press this was the first one but yeah i would say that it's kind of like you the best way to learn with launching is to launch the last your most successful your most successful one was a a travel play nomad flights what happened to that business you got 738 up votes from that yeah um well i'm kind of glad i'm not in the flights business right now because obviously everything's grinding too hot um yeah i think with that one it was like there's a lot of things that do great on product hunt and it was like the perfect kind of niche for that audience but i couldn't really find a business model that worked with that and so i think i mean this is my opinion but i think with something like a cheap flights website with scott's cheap flights which is obviously the original numero uno i think that works because he's got like a vast number of subscribers and you can there's so many so i think it's he can only if he if you have say like a million subscribers you can you don't have to convert very many to have a good business or maybe you have 10 million subscribers whereas if you have something that's incredibly niche like digital nomads which you know there's far fewer of them than regular consumers that's right i think that's in general i think it's a harder thing to make work i think now no no no cs degree you've bootstrapped right yeah that's correct and how many folks are on the team just you uh just me so that's got is upsides and downsides so upsize a lot of kind of independence and i can choose what direction to take business but obviously and then if they uh it's limited because there is just me so i can't send out i don't have a sales guy or a dev guy or martin guy or people of course you'll hustle you'll hustle your way there uh in the meantime though pete we're out of time let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book um make pick by peter levels number two is there a ceo you're following or studying the ceo and i guess i caught on darling from indie hackers number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business uh definitely trilo just for staying organized number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i try to get eight okay and what's your situation married single kids uh in a relationship okay no kids no kids and how old are you i'm 35. 35. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew uh don't get a job start business guys there you have it no cs degree.com playing big in the no code and low cut low code sort of space in these communities uh pat wells sort of communities uh pete has grown his business to you know many thousands opted into his email list 4 500 he monetizes by sponsorship deals does about two grand a month on sponsorship deals looking to scale that he's on 14 grand over the past 12 months now he's looking to scale to create more sort of a membership site sort of thing community site sort of thing pete we're rooting for a man thanks for taking us to the top okay nobody thank you