Codewell

Jumping back to 2018.

Back in 2018, I had dabbled enough with basic frontend (for the sake of communicating better with devs in my FT job) that I felt comfortable turning any design into an actual website. The code itself wasn't the cleanest, but it did the job; however, I always struggled finding projects to copy to practice my frontend skills. Queue Good Code, the first iteration of Codewell. I set up a basic HTML and CSS website, launched a few paid templates on Gumroad, and started Marketing on Reddit.

A fully fledged SaaS.

Good Code was a success, sort of. It made a few sales and was first on a few big subreddits, but I needed real development help. A previous colleague liked the idea and jumped right in with me to build what is now Codewell. We spent around 2 months building our MVP, no unnecessary features, just the basics to have a functional product that people would still enjoy using and would benefit our target audience.

Within 2 months, we had a fully up and running website. That actual people were using on a daily basis, and it felt surreal at the time.

The very first $$$.

Prior to launching Codewell, I had built up an audience on Twitter, and had a waiting list with over 200 people from Reddit and other platforms. On launch day, I tweeted that Codewell is now officially live, and sent out an email to people on the waitlist. Within minutes, we had our very first sale. A few minutes later, another one. By the end of our launch day, we had a whopping $56 in monthly recurring revenue. That felt even more surreal, but was great validation.

Codewell meets experiments.

To better optimize our conversion rates, we ran tons of tests, tried to better understand who our target audience is, and much more.