I'm selling my No CS Degree website
I'm looking for a buyer to acquired my website, No CS Degree. It's a website that inspires people to learn to code. I share interviews with self-taught or bootcamp-trained developers and talk to them about how they got hired or started their successful business.
It has previously acted as a job board and some people got their first internships and jobs in software through it. Lots of people have told me since 2019 that the interviews with developers helped them get into coding and changing career.
Nice!
So why are you selling?
I simply don't have time to work on No CS Degree.
I do LinkedIn and X ghostwriting, I do freelance SEO and I send the High Signal newsletter twice a week.
That's just too many different projects so it's time to let No CS Degree go to a new home.
What's on offer?
• The NoCSDegree.com domain
• The No CS Degree website (hosted on Ghost, domain rating of 39)
• A Beehiiv email list with 9,477 subscribers (Past 12 months: 38% open rate, 5% CTR)
• An X account with 7,835 followers
• The content published on No CS Degree (200+ interviews & blog posts), the logo, the No CS Degree brand, etc
*The email list is about a 50/50 split between people who get sent interview content and people who are sent job vacancies open to people without a CS degree.
There is also a YouTube channel with 366 subscribers and 11 episodes. Plus, a podcast with 13 episodes that is still on Spotify.
Who should buy No CS Degree?
• Companies that want to reach a developer audience
• Companies selling coding or AI courses (or are coding bootcamps)
• Newsletter experts that can monetize the list with sponsors
• Job board owners - this could easily be converted to a paywalled job board for junior devs (see Remote Rocketship as an example)
• Directory owners - this could easily be a coding course directory
• Paywall experts - there are about 200 interviews here so anyone good at monetizing content with paywalls/ebook publishers could do well here
• Recruiters or tech companies could use it as a hiring tool
How much time to run it?
You can easily run No CS Degree in around 5 hours a week, so this could be a good evening project for someone to start with:
• Publish an interview and send newsletter: 1-2 hours
• Publish a blog post: 1 hour
• Do newsletter and partnership sales: 1 hour
• Do social media: 1 hours
Total time: 5 hours
Of course, if you're a bigger company, you can spend more time on it and grow it a lot faster.
How is No CS Degree monetized?
Nowadays, it's mostly monetized through newsletter sponsorships. I get inbound emails from tech companies asking to sponsor the newsletter. I recently sold one advert for $200 to an AI company.
In September 2023 I sold 4 newsletter ads for $999. So if you are good at newsletter ads, you can probably make $1k-$2k from newsletter ads each month.
I'm happy to give you a free copy of my Monetize Your Newsletter course if you buy No CS Degree.
I've also made $275.35 from Beehiiv ads in the past 12 months (this would have been more if I sent the newsletter more regularly) You can also make more by doing newsletter sales directly.
In the past it's also been monetized by coding bootcamps sponsoring articles with their successful alumni.
Also, there used to be a job board nocsok.com which I folded into the main No CS Degree website. So it could work as a job board.
I've never accepted guest posts but I get a lot of requests from companies. So you could also monetize this way.
How much does it make?
In all honesty, I've neglected this project for a while so it's not made much money in recent years. It's made $18,329.28 from Stripe payments since 2019, which you can see on the new Trust MRR website from Marc Lou
There's also over $1,368.84 from affiliate links to WesBos coding courses:
I made $749.27 from the AlgoExpert affiliate scheme. Unfortunately, the company closed down that affiliate programme a while ago.
I also made over $1,048.58 from promoting the ZeroToMastery courses.
There were also some bank transfer payments from UK bootcamps that don't show up in Stripe. I sold a few job board listings which didn't go through the main No CS Degree Stripe account so that's another $396.
Recap:
• Newsletter ads and bootcamp-article sponsorships: $18,329.28
• Non-Stripe UK bootcamp sponsorships: $2,000 (roughly)
• Wesbos affiliates: $1,368.84
• ZeroToMastery affiliates: $1,048
• AlgoExpert: $788
• Job board postings: $396 (roughly)
• Beehiiv newsletter ads (past 12 months): $275.35
So it's made around $24,205.47
If you're serious about buying, please reach out to pete@highsignal.io
What are the costs?
I use free analytics software so the only costs are sending emails (Beehiiv), blogging software (Ghost) and the domain (Namecheap)
• Beehiiv: $100 per month
• Ghost: $31 a month
• NoCSDegree.com domain: About $10 a year
You could cut down on the costs a lot by putting everything into Ghost, Beehiiv or Substack. It doesn't really need to be split across different software. Also, you could save money by paying for the software annually instead of monthly.
Past 12 months of revenue + costs
Revenue
$700 in newsletter ads
$77.66 in affiliates from Wesbos coding courses
$19.31 in affiliates from ZeroToMastery coding courses
Total: $796.97
Costs
$372 for Ghost
$1200 for Beehiiv/Kit (roughly)
Total: $1,532
So yeah, it's made a loss the past 12 months. If I'd just used Ghost for blogging and emails, it would have made a small profit.
Also, bear in mind I've done virtually no work on this for a year or two. I've just kept it alive as a passion project but now it's time to sell.
Website traffic
No CS Degree got 2,300 visitors and 3,200 pageviews in the past 30 days
I've always just used organic marketing channels like social media and white hat SEO. There are long-tail keywords that No CS Degree ranks for that have brought in lots of traffic despite the articles being old. I've never bought backlinks or done spammy stuff. Most traffic to the website is from Google so it's a cheap website to run. If you can do SEO, you can grow this site more.
Here's my website traffic for the past 12 months. I've published a handful of blog posts and basically spent no time on the site and it still got 27,000 visitors over the past 12 months.
The power of SEO 😀
In its heyday it got around 15,000 visitors per month
Demographics
According to my public Simple Analytics dashboard, 26% of website visitors in the past 12 months were from the US and 10% were from the UK.
Newsletter demographics
I have signup forms for Beehiiv and Ghost. In the last month I passively got 69 email subscribers to my Ghost account.
Here are the top 5 countries represented:
Germany: 17 🇩🇪
UK: 10 🇬🇧
India: 10 🇮🇳
USA: 7 🇺🇸
France: 3 🇫🇷
69.5% of this sample of email subscribers are from North America or Europe.
The 3 people who reported to me that they had found jobs through my jobs board emails were from the UK.
Again, I don't know a lot about the ages of visitors but since it's tech, I'd say it's most likely to be people in their 20s and 30s, with a few other older people.
Conclusion
I think there's a lot of potential here, especially with the 9,475 email subscribers. My last email got a 37% open rate and a 4.72% CTR.
The website needs some love and attention but with a domain rating of 39, you're starting from a great position in terms of SEO.
To recap, there are a few good revenue routes:
• Use it as a strategic acquisition for your tech product
• Use it as a hiring tool
• Buy it to promote your coding or AI courses or bootcamp
• Monetize with newsletter ads
• Make it a paywalled job board
• Make it into a directory of coding courses
• Paywall the content more
If you're serious about buying, please reach out on pete@highsignal.io
I'm open to offers but looking for 5 figures in USD
My email is pete@highsignal.io