SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
NoCSDegree used HackerNews and ProductHunt to Get 4500 Subs, $15k in Revenue
31 Aug 2020
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So $14,000 in revenue over what period of time? So that's a year. So basically, I'm wanting to get to the kind of benchmark that a lot of people do, which is like $10,000 a month. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Pete McLeod.
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 that taught themselves coding or learned at bootcamps. He also has a jobs board, a bootcamp index, and an imposter syndrome book. Pete, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, totally. All right.
So if folks want to follow along, the website is nocsdegree.com. So what's the business model? Are people buying sort of one-off courses here or is there a SaaS play? Sure, so it's a bit of a mix really. So I've got 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 bit out recently on imposter syndrome.
And I've actually got a job board as well and a BitCamp listing website. So companies and BitCamps pay to feature on those. Sorry, what are you saying? You're saying BitCamp? Boot Camp. Oh, Boot Camp. Got it. So the main website, though, is No CS Degree, correct? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. Okay. And so do you make money on the job board or no? Is that a free tool?
No, I make more money from the main website. But 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 No CS Degree. So which tool today, because this is what we'll focus on, which tool today generates the most revenue for you? The bootcamp sales? No, the sponsored content on NoCSDegree.
Okay. So help me understand what that looks like. I'm on NoCSDegree.com right now. Where can I find some of the sponsored content? Sure. If you... So... Basically, there's like over there's about 100 articles on the website so far. So if you scroll down, there will be. Yeah, there's I think the latest one that I did was with Flatiron School.
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Chapter 2: How did Pete McLeod launch No CS Degree?
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 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 in sponsorships? Near two grand. Okay. And so, I mean, are you doing this full time? Yeah, that's right. So how are you sort of hustling your way to make sure you sort of cover your expenses and do anything you can to generate cash now so you can build a bigger business in the future? Sure.
Well, I actually just spoke to a few founders this week. So I've had some really good advice from people. So basically, I'm going to 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. But really, it's a case of... 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 NoCS3, 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 to working as a developer.
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Chapter 3: What business model does No CS Degree use for revenue?
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 4,100 followers on Twitter. Your pinned 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 accurate? Yeah, that's completely accurate.
That's great. And so $14,000 in revenue over what period of time? So that's a year. So basically, I'm wanting to get to the kind of benchmark that a lot of people do, which is like $10,000 a month. One of my main mentors, Pat Walls, who runs 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 leaf out of his book.
and other people like Cortland Allen, who started 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 is always going to be the hardest one. Of course. Now, is Pat Wall's business model also to sell sponsorships?
No, he, well, originally it was the sales sponsorships, but he's moved towards, I guess, having a community of people that are wanting to start their own businesses. And yeah, so he's basically 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 for him. 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 did you get your first 100? I did really well with my launch.
I launched on Product Hunt and got, I guess, in the top five or so. But the biggest thing was I launched on Hacker News. And I didn't have any profile there or any kind of, you know, yeah, any like big kind of following or backing there. But everyone really loved it. And it stays 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. Got loads of people 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 helps and also just being really active on Twitter and just promoting the newsletter, you know, all the time at the end of,
know every article and whenever i'm talking to people on podcasts like this one i guess 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 hits your website so 30 000 people hit your website from hacker news where do you put the email opt-in yeah um so it's like front and center right the start of the website and the header so
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