Pete Codes — A Newsletter Business That Started with Interviews of Non-CS Developers

Pete Codes is the public name of a content entrepreneur based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Starting from his flagship project No CS Degree, he ran a newsletter, online courses, and a founder community, creating multiple revenue streams. It is a case of starting with interviewing developers and expanding even his own experience of selling content and building an audience into products.

Turning the Information He Needed into Interviews

He studied political science and Spanish at university, worked in several research roles, and began full-time entrepreneurship in July 2019. Because he was learning to program himself at the time, he was curious about the experiences of people who had become developers without majoring in computer science. In communities such as Telegram, he met developers who were self-taught or had gone through bootcamps, asked them questions by private message, and thought it would be useful to make the answers public to other learners as well. Turning these questions into formal interviews was the starting point of No CS Degree.

The interviews centered on the learning process, first jobs, and products actually built. For example, the 2020 interview with Shawn Wang, known as swyx, covered how he studied with freeCodeCamp, went through the Fullstack Academy bootcamp, and landed his first developer job at Two Sigma. It discussed which education he chose, where he encountered job opportunities, and what he explained in interviews. Readers could gain the concrete experience they needed to decide their next move, rather than vague success stories.

On July 23, 2019, he introduced the site directly on Hacker News. He explained that he had turned the questions he asked non-CS developers while learning to code into public interviews, and he stated from the outset that he would be transparent about visitors and revenue. In the post, he answered readers' questions and pointed them to the newsletter, using the developer community as a place to find interview subjects and early readers.

Alongside the website, he also built a base of email subscribers. In a November 2020 interview, he said there were more than 2,000 free email subscribers and that some emails had open rates above 50 percent. He gauged responses by receiving replies from readers, and he also heard that people had gotten jobs through the site.

For operations, he connected existing tools. The setup he shared in 2020 used Ghost to publish posts, EmailOctopus to send the newsletter, and Zapier to move subscriber information. For the email signup page, he used Carrd to provide the features needed for publishing content and acquiring subscribers.

Turning demand around readers into revenue

No CS Degree's main revenue sources were newsletter ads and affiliate fees from educational products. It sold ad placements to companies that wanted to promote their products to programming learners, and received fees from providers when readers purchased through affiliate links to some courses. The site links to courses naturally mentioned in interview answers, and explains that many interviews have no affiliate links.

He also created revenue streams targeting employers and educational institutions. On the separately run job board No CS OK, he sold paid job listings, and later folded it into the main No CS Degree site. He also used a model in which bootcamps sponsored articles showcasing success stories from their graduates. It was a structure that gathered information useful to learners while securing companies and educational institutions trying to reach those learners as customers.

The next product was his own newsletter experience. In October 2020, he launched Monetize Your Newsletter, which taught monetization methods, and later sold it alongside a course on audience growth. The content covered tasks he had done himself, such as promoting a newsletter, copy that drives signups, selling ads, and negotiation. Knowledge gained while creating content for programming learners became an educational product to sell to people who wanted to run newsletters.

What made up USD6,000 in revenue in one month in 2021

Episode 34 of the Indie Bites podcast, released on October 20, 2021, covered the case of his multiple projects earning USD6,000 in one month. The episode description mentions No CS Degree, the newsletter course, the High Signal community, and Remote Companies together. This figure is revenue for one specific month combining multiple activities. The published episode description does not present the revenue share by business or net profit after deducting costs.

One of the areas he expanded into at the time was a founder community. High Signal, launched in July 2021, was a group for founders with verified revenue, and what he wanted was relationships where people got to know each other within a small group. He turned his discomfort with promotional posts in free communities and with paid communities that were too large into a business idea.

Initially, he used a method of raising the membership price by USD1 each time a new member joined. He later recalled that this method helped people who had been putting off joining make their decision sooner. In a 2023 post, he said that for much of its operation the price was USD19 per month for participation in the Telegram group, or USD39 per month including Zoom meetings.

Another project, Remote Companies, was a site for finding fully remote companies. After working on it for about seven months, he launched it in July 2021, and ultimately chose Webflow to keep building and deployment simple. He sold the site in March 2022.

What to Keep From the Businesses He Grew

The paid community did not grow to the size he had expected. After changing the name to Indie Friends, on May 12, 2023, he stopped accepting new paid members and kept it as a free, invite-only group for existing members. The figures he shared at the time were about $4,650 in Gumroad revenue over roughly 10 months, and he explained that some early payments were received separately through Stripe. He judged that although he had run it for nearly two years, the income was not enough to justify continuing to devote time to it.

The problem he pointed to was that overlapping customer requirements had made the market too narrow. Among founders who already had revenue, he had to find people who preferred Telegram, were willing to join Zoom meetings, and also fit a UK-centered time zone. By contrast, he wrote that working with a single ghostwriting client for a few months could earn more than running the community for a year. When winding down the business, what he compared was not the number of members itself but the income that could be earned from the same amount of time.

The ghostwriting service began in March 2022. It involved writing social media posts on behalf of founders and companies and helping with account management and growth strategy. His own timeline records that he first reached $10,000 in monthly revenue in July 2023, without giving a breakdown by business. When he returned to Indie Bites in January 2025, ghostwriting for Twitter, Bluesky, and LinkedIn was presented as his main livelihood. The center of gravity of the business had shifted from his own content products to writing services for business clients.

He continued to use the name High Signal for the founder newsletter. He explains that, seeing how companies that grew by increasing revenue still had to raise outside investment to gain media attention, he wanted to give more attention to founders building real businesses. According to the official description checked on October 5, 2026, it publishes founder news and interviews twice a week and covers the process of making a living through online businesses.

The Aftermath for No CS Degree and What This Case Shows

On November 5, 2025, he announced that he was pursuing a sale of No CS Degree. The assets offered at the time were 9,477 email subscribers, more than 200 interviews and blog posts, and the website and brand. He explained that the subscriber list was split roughly in half between those receiving interview content and those receiving job opportunities open to non-CS candidates. The reason he pursued the sale was that, while juggling ghostwriting, search engine optimization work, and publishing High Signal, it had become difficult to spend time on the site.

In the same post, he revealed that he had barely touched the site over the previous one or two years and that the previous 12 months had been unprofitable. Although the content and subscriber list remained, in periods when publishing and ad sales were not carried out sufficiently, income could not keep up with operating costs. This record shows a business that still needed separate operations and sales even after early revenue success.

His own timeline, marked 2026, states that while focusing on ghostwriting and search engine optimization work for clients, he resumed sending the No CS Degree newsletter. He is also continuing to publish High Signal, so his publicly described current activities combine client-facing services with his own media. The 2025 announcement of the planned sale should be read separately from materials confirming a completed sale.

The key to Pete Codes' case is that he expanded his ability to build an audience and create content into different products and services. His experience running an interview site became a newsletter course, and his writing and social media work became services offered to business clients. After trying several businesses, he compared the time each activity required with the actual income it generated and chose what to keep. Alongside the record of USD6,000 in monthly revenue, what matters is the process of continuing to change his revenue structure while making a living since then.