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Pete

I'm Pete, full time Indie Maker, founder of No CS Degree and No CS OK, AMA ⚡️

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I’m from Edinburgh, Scotland and I am working full-time as an indie maker. As I am a self-taught developer often looking for inspiration from other programmers without degrees, I made the No CS Degree blog so I could interview people like Wes Bos and Lydia Hallie and find out how they were successful without a Computer Science degree. I’ve recently made a job board for developers without degrees to solve my own problem as I’d seen job adverts that were great until the final line requiring a degree which I think is becoming irrelevant as more coders do bootcamps or teach themselves. I made $198 on my first day and both products got to #1 on Hacker News and in the Product Hunt Top 10. I’m here to answer questions about no-code, launching products, social media, building mailing lists, creating good habits and writing newsletters people actually open.

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Hey Pete! I see that you have built and launched a number of products, but seem to now be 100% focused to the No CS platform. How do you decide when it's time to move on and try something new? How do you measure success/failure with your products? Thank you!
Pete
@anthilemoon Good question! I like to make and launch my products fast so really if it's not making money after a month or two and there isn't any traction growing I will stop it and move on to something else. Sometimes as well if it's not something that I would use any more I will stop. I stopped being a nomad so it didn't motivate me to work on Nomad Flights any more. In terms of the No CS platform I think there is a lot of space in this area so I'm looking to dominate it just as Pieter Levels has done with nomads/remote working. So it makes sense for me now to stay focused on this area. Plus, as I have a growing niche audience it makes sense on making things that will appeal to them.
Andrey Azimov
How many products you've made before NO CS Degree? What was your journey?
Pete
@andreyazimov I had to look on my PH profile but it's actually 9! Only 3 made any money (well, one made $5!) So I've now made 11 products in just over 2 years.
Michael Novotny
Hey Pete, can you talk about what part of building, and actually launching a product was the most challenging for you. And is there a trend of challenges you found launching your products?
Pete
@michaeljnovotny Hi Michael, thanks for the question! To be honest, the building and launching is usually the easy part. It's the making money which is hard! For No CS Degree I already had quite a few interviewees in mind from the WIP Telegram community.
George Stan
Hello Pete, thank you for the AMA. I have a few questions: 1. About creating good habits. If you have an agenda and are meticulous about how you waste your time, I'm curios how did you get the discipline to do it? Was it one day change, or it took a while. Mainly some advices in having a better discipline about work hours, procastination etc. 2. How did you learn about startups, did you read books? did you listen to podcasts. etc Sorry for my bad english, I'm not a native speaker.
Pete
@georges72201109 Thanks for the questions! 1) I realised it's just easier to do a little every day as then it becomes automatic and you don't have to think about it. I can recommend the book Atomic Habits. It definitely was a gradual process. Also, I just learned to do difficult things first in the day as then you have it out of the way and you feel better. Hard things also usually take longer than you think so do them when you have lots of time and energy. 2) I mostly just followed people like Pieter Levels on Twitter. You could buy his book Make but apart from that you don't need to buy any books. I recently got into the Indiehackers podcasts and I like them. But really get a twitter account and ask people lots of questions! Like you are doing now :) Also, just observe what successful do - repeat what works for them and avoid their mistakes. I often go into Twitter and search @pieterlevels and whatever subject like "press" and then I see every time he has talked about press.
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen
@petecodes - No CS Degree is awesome. Congratulations. I would like to know what is the best way to keep your job board updated all the time.
Pete
@ebrahimkhalil Thanks mate! I should automate it with a web scraper tbh. At the moment it's manual. Look out for the scraper tools launched on Product Hunt.
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen
@petecodes - thanks. i guess it is a case of doing things that do not scale etc. good job keeping it updated. looking forward to see future versions of NO CS Degree and No CS OK. keep shipping, mate
Rebecca DeForest
hi Pete - you say you are a self-taught developer, so that means you write code correct? Or are you building products without writing code? If you write code, what is the no code in reference too?
Pete
@acceberann I do a bit of both. For the blog, I use Ghost and I have customised it with CSS and JS. The job board actually runs from a google sheet - see sheet2site.com made by @andreyazimov but I've made CSS change to that too. I've built other websites completely from scratch with code though. I made Ski Resort List which was like a bad version of Nomad List for skiers. I'm learning Node at the moment but I like making no-code sites to test ideas rather than spending ages building something nobody wants
Theo Paul
Hi Pete, great stuff as always. What keeps you inspired and fresh to keep moving forward and building? Also, what is a key indicator that tells you when it is time to start a new project or to keep pushing with an existing one? Is it a gut feeling or does the data collected from these allow you to make informed decisions. And as an aside, what is one thing you’ve struggled with and overcome this week? Thanks for taking a look. Theo
Pete
@theopolis Great questions! As a self-taught dev I like that I am solving my own problems and doing something that people find useful as well! Of course, I am working full-time on my own products so I'm naturally motivated to work hard out of basic necessity. I'd usually give a project a couple of months and if there is no revenue or enthusiasm from the market, I'll cancel it. You can't be sentimental about it - I stayed working on Nomad Flights way longer than I should have done. I managed to walk into an office unannounced and pitch my job board to a recruiter so I was happy to overcome nerves of doing that.
Max Shash
Hi Pete, thanks for AMA. I have 1 questions for you: 1. Do you use any deployment automation tools? What is your stack now? Thanks!
d̲waiter
Good morning, Pete.   About a year or so ago, we here at Dwaiter developed a code free landing page builder.  We had this feeling that there were a lot of businesses, not for profits, and/or individuals who could utilize a landing page but had limited or no coding skills.  In reviewing some of the other landing page builders available, we did not see where the ease of use of these existed, so that lead to our development of Flauntly. Now that this have been in existence for a year or so, we wanted to get feedback and suggestions on the product.  Yesterday, we posted to the "Share your product here to get support, feedback, users" thread on Product Hunt for feedback.  This morning, when we read this thread where you mentioned "no-code" and product development, we wanted to reach out to get feedback and suggestions from you on the product and on any possible improvements that we could make.   Please check out Flauntly here :https://flauntly.com  Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Zeev
Hey Pete! I'm the Founder of Wasavi, I don't know what's your definition of 'successful' but I sure am fitting the 'No CS' category ;)
Sandy
are you still active here?