Pete Codes quit the worst job imaginable to build a business to $10k/mo with zero experience

Pete Codes quit his nightmare of a job and built No CS Degree with zero experience. Since then, he's branched out to newsletters, courses, a job board template, and services — in fact, ghostwriting is now his bread and butter.

He hasn't had a job since, and now he's making between $5k and $10k per month. Here's Pete on how he did it. 👇

The worst job imaginable

I never had any interest in business when I was younger. I definitely didn’t have a side hustle when I was 8 years old. I really just fell into entrepreneurship in my 30s as I became unhappy with my job situation.

I had a string of 9-to-5 jobs that were very repetitive. I wasn't developing professionally or learning new things.

For me, the final straw was when I was working at a bookie's in 2019, which was just the worst job imaginable. Aggressive customers, rude staff, drunk people passing out, people smoking crack cocaine in the toilets... The last straw was when a customer threatened to stab my boss. I quit that evening.

I figured, as nothing had really worked out by working for other people, I would work for myself instead. In a way, not having a big six-figure salary was an advantage. I can’t really imagine earning $500k and saying you’re going to leave all that behind to start a business.

I didn’t have anything to lose. In a way, that was liberating.

Running multiple businesses

I started working full-time on my No CS Degree website back in July of 2019. It’s essentially a blog, so I just got a Ghost blogging account and went to work!

I had $5k in the bank and I was quite frugal at the time, so I gave myself six months to make at least $1,000 in a calendar month. I actually got that in the third month, when a founder sponsored my newsletter for a few months.

From there, I started working on other ideas. Focusing on one business would be boring for me. I need a little more variety than that, so I have a mix of products and services. My revenue is quite variable but I usually make between $5k/mo and $10k/mo from them:

• Twitter and LinkedIn ghostwriting: Founders and brands pay me to provide a social media strategy and write posts for them

• High Signal founder newsletter: A twice-weekly summary of indie startup news and interviews with founders

• No CS Degree newsletter: Interviews with self-taught and bootcamp-trained developers and a job board.

• Newsletter courses: I have video courses on how I’ve grown and monetized newsletters

• Speedy Job Board: A Webflow template for making a job board quickly

But, of course, you need a balance. Some people take things too far and try to run eight businesses simultaneously. That’s not smart.

Ghostwriting for a living

In general, ghostwriting brings in the most money, then newsletter ads, then the job board template.

I actually got started with ghostwriting when I saw an advert for a job on IH! Someone was looking for social media help so I started doing it as a hedge against my other businesses, taking some risk off the table. At the time, I was really inspired by a post on IH that said most indie hackers don’t make more than $2k/mo and that you should, therefore, de-risk your founder life with a job or contracting.

So ghostwriting was originally a way to do that. It wasn’t supposed to be long term, but it’s proved to be the better business.

That’s the good thing about going into a crowded market. Competition is validation.

Growth via cold emails and social media

Most of my customers and clients come from social media and cold email.

Cold emails

I’ve written a lot of emails over the years to get ghostwriting clients and newsletter sponsors.

My best advice for cold email is to personalize them. You have to write an email that is just for one person because, otherwise, the recipient will flag it as spam. The more messages that are sent to spam, the worse your sending reputation will be. Eventually, all your emails will get marked as spam.

It's a bit like dating apps. You can't just send someone a generic message like "Hey, how's it going?" and expect them to be dazzled. You have to make some effort.

So write a "you" email instead of a "me" email — make it about the other person. Talk about them and their problems more than yourself.

Also, keep them short. You don't need to list everything you've ever done. No one cares that you came 3rd on Product Hunt or that you have a bronze swimming certificate for the 200m. You can write a great email that converts with a handful of sentences.

Social media

My social media has grown over the years, as I’ve done — and shared — more things.

My High Signal newsletter, for example, was primarily grown by being very active on Twitter and LinkedIn. And I recently got a new ghostwriting client on Twitter.

Building in public can definitely help you. But you have to offer people a reason to follow you. What that reason is totally depends on you. My best-performing posts have always been the ones about sharing successes or giving business advice.

But what if you haven't made anything yet? Well, you don't have to be an expert in something to grow on social media (although it helps!). You can document learning something new and share that with people. I've seen that work a lot! Or you can be funny and share lots of startup memes. Or you can create a satirical account like VC Brags that shares cringe posts from VCs.

I think it's about experimenting and seeing what works, but always do something that is genuine to you.

Start with one social media channel — don't spread yourself too thin. And when you post, make sure you have a great first line to capture attention. You might have really interesting things to say, but if you can't get someone's attention in the first line, they won't read the rest of your post.

I like to think of the first line of a social media post like a newspaper headline. For instance, with the assassination of JFK, newspapers could have had a very uninteresting headline like "man shot in Texas", but obviously, that doesn't convey the gravity of the story. Naturally, the newspapers at the time went with some variation of "Kennedy shot!" or "Kennedy dead!"

Focus on where the money is

Sell things to people with money. This usually means selling to businesses.

Whenever I’ve sold to businesses, it’s generally gone well. Whenever I’ve sold to consumers, it’s generally gone badly.

Similarly, I've found it a lot easier to sell something like ghostwriting, which costs thousands of dollars, than a $5 ebook.

And learn to spot red flags with clients. If I get a bad vibe from someone or they have unrealistic expectations, I listen to my intuition and walk away. On the flip side, if I get a good vibe from a client I’ll do my best to work with them. It’s always easier to do work for a client you actually like.

You can follow me as I continue to grow my revenue on X. And check out High Signal, No CS Degree, my job board template, or my services: X ghostwriting and LinkedIn ghostwriting.