Codédex Update - March 2025

Status update: We're default alive. 🥲

Author

Sonny Li
April 05, 2025

Hi Codédex Investor community,

We did it — we clawed our way out of the trenches and are officially Default Alive. 🥲

Last month, we hit another inflection point, and growth is off the charts. 670K unique visitors came to our website in March. $25K MRR and $46K MR and expect the growth to continue.

The engine’s on and we’re off to the races.

Seed Round Update

Currently in due diligence with a few VCs. Some are doing personal reference and customer calls this week. If they say yes, great. Otherwise, we keep building – with more conviction than ever.

We’re on track to hit profitability in 4 months and $1.5M AR by year-end without more funding. Likely higher if we improve our retention even slightly.

Key Metrics (MoM)

  • Total Registered Users: 500,745 (+53%)

  • MAU: 156,170 (+202%)

  • MRR: $24,809 (+98%)

  • MR: $46,360 (+150%)

Run Rate (with GitHub deal): $656,320 🔥

Note: Codédex Club is $12.99/month. New annual subs are added to MR.

Product-Market Fit

PMF is often described as an elusive milestone that’s difficult to quantify, but when it happens, it’s unmistakable. This past month, we’ve experienced it firsthand.

Our growth metrics show hockey-stick curves across all the right charts. What once felt like pushing a boulder uphill now feels like being pulled by momentum. We’re no longer second-guessing ourselves.

Customers started coming to us instead of the other way around. They use Codédex, love it, and tell their friends about it. The feedback shifted to urgent demands for more content/features and faster updates. The market is responding loudly and enthusiastically, and we’re ready to meet that demand head-on.

DAU/WAU/MAU

Stripe Data (not including PayPal)

We did the hard part: building an engaging, word-of-mouth product. Now it’s time to double down on retention, the key to raising our growth ceiling.

When I joined Codecademy in 2017, we were actually around these numbers. So the next phase of Codédex is my jam. Everything feels oddly familiar. Exciting. :)

March Highlights

Curriculum

Product (Eng & Design)

  • 🤖 Relaunched Code Evaluation for Python Ch. 1-2. Now at 98.6% accuracy.

  • 🗳️ Shipped Checkpoint & Final Project submission. 

  • 👀 Implemented # views tracking for Builds. Set us up for an analytics dashboard.

  • 🌎 Updated localized pricing and added Brazil 🇧🇷, Chile 🇨🇱, Vietnam 🇻🇳. 

  • 😵‍💫 Shipped 28 papercuts & fixed 46 bug reports.

Marketing & Community

March Lowlights

On the flip side of our recent growth, our OpenAI API usage, Mailchimp, and Amplitude bills nearly doubled in March. And that’s not all:

  • Intercom: 1,069 new support tickets.

  • Project Reviews: 1,151 new submissions.*

  • Bug Reports: A spike in issues, especially around payments and 404 bugs.

To top it off, the Chinese Firewall now blocks our account signup. I was born in Shanghai, so this one hits close to home. My guess? It’s likely tied to our growing on-platform community.

Still, these are good problems to have.

*We initially embraced human project reviews to follow YC’s “do things that don’t scale” mantra. But the levee is starting to crack. We’re rethinking our processes to scale more sustainably and keep up with demand.

Final Note

To the whole Codédex team, cheers to a phenomenal March, with some team members working around the clock (sometimes at 5 am) to keep the site up and running.

Even though last month went completely nuclear, it was really the culmination of two and a half years of hard work, persistence, and focus of this small-but-mighty team.

Let’s stay locked in and aim to break even by the end of Q2, so we can continue to push the frontier of online learning and build the platform the world deserves.

- Sonny

P.S. If you have any questions, ask in the Team AMA!