Codédex Update - January 2025

Community Revamp. Seed round tranch. And the best month yet. 📈

Author

Sonny Li
February 07, 2025

Hi Codédex Investor community,

Hope your year is off to a fantastic start!

We’re stepping into 2025 with serious momentum. Codédex just had our best month ever in terms of signups and revenue, surpassing all previous records. We’re growing fast, shipping even faster, and making big moves to redefine how ppl learn tech skills.

Seed Round Update

Last week, we kicked off conversations for the first tranche of our seed round to accelerate growth. We’re happy to announce that we’re already secured $229K of our planned $300K, with room to go a bit over. 🙂

Excited to welcome onboard:

  • Katelyn Donnelly & Eric Lavin (Avalanche VC)

  • Ben Spring (Co-Founder & CEO @ TryHackMe)

  • Hustle Fund (another check)

  • Three additional angels

With that, we also have a brand new deck and blurb:

Bye bye, pre-seed deck. You’ve been good to us.

Our Blurb

Codédex makes building tech skills more fun, collaborative, and immersive than your favorite video game. Our mission is simple: Empower the next 1B technologists with skills of tomorrow.

  • 📈 277K+ users, $218K run rate (+20% last month).

  • 🏆 GitHub Universe 2024 Award, strong validation from the dev community.

  • 👥 Ex-Codecademy, Schoolhouse, Stepful (YC 21). Taught at Columbia & NYU.

  • 💰 Raised $1m pre-seed from Hustle Fund, Worklife, NP-Hard, Transcend + angels (Crunchyroll founder, Codecademy CTO, Meta Head of Product).

Asks: If you know someone who could be the right partner that can take us to the next level, hit me up! Happy to meet via Zoom or in-person in NYC for coffee or boba.

Key Metrics (MoM)

  • Total Registered Users: 277,368 (+12%)

  • MAU: 32,405 (+47%)

  • MRR: $9,834 (+8%)

  • MR: $17,150 (+20%)

  • Run Rate: $217,500 (+19%) 📈

Note: Codédex Club is $96/year or $12.49/month. Annual subs are added to MR.

January Highlights

Product & Design

  • 😱 Shipped a new On-Platform Community.

  • 🔔 New Notifcations system.

  • 😍 New Pricing Page: Added pricing grid and sunsetted Club 4 Life tier.

  • 🏡 Shipped Worlds waiting room for a better joining experience.

  • 🧹 33 papercuts shipped + 30 bug reports fixed.

Curriculum

Marketing & Community

We ship every week. View our Weekly Changelogs here.

Product Demos

😍 Community Revamp

The Jackie + Asiqur power duo keeps making waves, now revamping our On-Platform Community. We updated the feed algorithm, cleaned up the messy UI (that I originally designed -.-), and introduced a sleek, mobile-responsive navigation that’s way more on-brand. Oh, and did I mention short-form videos? Take a look.

If Tech Twitter + Discord + Reddit had a baby, this would be it.

🔔 Notifications

What’s a social platform without a great notifications system? You can now receive likes, comments, and replies on any page on Codédex. As I always say, we’re in the business of motivation — and sometimes, a little cheer or virtual high-five makes all the difference in your learning journey.

💸 Pricing Page

Revenue has always taken a backseat in our OKRs — but it’s time. We sunsetted Club 4 Life tier, added a pricing grid, and updated the Wall of Love, and the impact was immediate: paid signups jumped 20% from December to January (160 → 194).

I’m like pretty much convinced Jackie is the best product designer in this space. 👩🏻‍🎨

Data Nuggets

We had our best month ever across all metrics. 29,208 new signups in January alone!

While seasonality may have come into play, comparing past Januarys:

  • January 2023: 7,541 new signups.

  • January 2024: 8,800 new signups (+17%).

  • January 2025: 29,208 new signups (+232%). 🚀

We’ve done the hard part of building an engaging, word-of-mouth product, now it’s time to start shift more focus to retention and revenue.

No words needed. We are growing.

Competive Space

Codédex now boasts one of the highest customer ratings in the market. Our community-first approach is proving to be a game-changer.

So… What’s Ahead for February?

  • 💰 Fundraise!

  • 🚀 Ship “Builds” deployment feature (Codédex watermark for viral growth).

  • 🚀 Ship Community / Project Showcase page.

  • 🚀 Ship Community / Leaderboards page. (Figma)

  • 🚀 Ship Community / Events page.

  • 🤑 Run 2-3 monetization experiments.

  • 🤖 Ship 2 new AI features: “infinite course” + code eval.

  • 🦠 Launch Node.js course (user requested!).

  • ☕️ Publish Java Chapter 6 and Checkpoint Projects.

  • 🧋 Release Boba Talk episode #10.

Some already completed, since it’s already February 7th:

  • 🔥 Kicked off Roast My Resume February Monthly Challenge for CS students and recent grads. Goal: Drive 1,000 new signups and 500 community posts.

  • 👯 Kicked off UGC Creator Program with 8 creators to 5x IG/TikTok reach.

  • 🤝 Met with GitHub on a six-figure partnership (BIG announcement next month!).

  • 🏡 Host live Town Square event with Jovanay Carter (ex-Google Recruiter).

Customer Quotes

Absolutely in love with Codédex. ❤️

I absolutely love the community and what Codédex has built — monthly challenges, questions of the week, and the incredible courses.

Codédex’s team is doing an outstanding job, and it really sets it apart from other learning platforms. There’s so much heart and passion here; it’s truly inspiring.

Proud to be a member of Club 4 Life!

Iana (1/20/2025) Trustpilot

Codédex has become a true reference in the coding community.

It turned out to be the key [for me] to falling in love with coding. Their exercises, challenges and projects are really fun and they are always trying their best to bring the us the best content possible, and as fast as possible.

They also host hackathons (3 already), which are perfect ways to meet other fellow devs and win awesome prizes (+ have fun because the themes are so crazy).

You can definitely create an account with your eyes closed, as it's by far the best code learning website / community I've ever had the chance to be a part of.

Alan (1/14/2025) Trustpilot

Final Thoughts

One last snap for the whole Codédex team. 🫰 Despite the hurricane of shenanigans in the news, we’re heads down building something truly special that the world deserves.

Let's make February our biggest month yet.

— Sonny

P.S. One final tweet for the send off.