Katt Risen spent years as a self-described lurker on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers and Twitter, dreaming of building her own internet company but stuck on the fact that she could not code. After a no-code bootcamp she shipped a small chatbot called No-Code Guru, and when it got acquired in August 2022 her announcement tweet blew up far beyond her few hundred followers. The flood of likes, comments and DMs told her there was an audience hungry for exactly this kind of story. Within thirty minutes she had set up a Substack, picked a name off the top of her head, and grabbed a free logo. No-Code Exits was born.

Over the next two years she published 75 issues, each one profiling makers who reached their first dollars using no-code tools. Her edge was a deliberately narrow focus: not a general no-code newsletter, but specifically the path from zero to revenue. That micro niche helped her stand out in an already crowded space. Just as important was the work after hitting publish. She republished issues to Indie Hackers, Medium and Reddit, posted teasers and tagged makers on Twitter and LinkedIn, set up cross-promotions with publications that shared her readers, and stayed genuinely active in no-code communities. The audience grew past 10,000 and eventually reached 11,400 subscribers.

Money came from a mix of sources rather than one clean model. She sold two info products ($19 and $50), ran a paid build challenge with a partner, and sold sponsorships that started as $50 classified ads at 1,000 subscribers and grew into multi-placement packages. Affiliate links were mostly not worth the paperwork. In total No-Code Exits brought in around $33,000 over its two years. Katt is candid that the sponsorship side held the most upside but drained her, because the constant outreach and selling around click rates was simply not work she enjoyed.

The decision to sell came from life math, not failure. Revenue had been slipping as she poured time into a newer project, kept freelancing, and raised two toddlers. The solopreneur dream of working whenever she wanted had quietly turned into working all the time. After getting pricing advice from newsletter exit experts she listed at $42,500 (a 2.5x multiple of trailing revenue) on marketplaces like Duuce and Acquire. A single tweet surfaced several conversations, and one stood out: Jeremy Redman, founder of the free Zapier alternative TaskMagic, wanted to move fast, keep the newsletter running, and even pay her to keep writing it. He offered $35,000. They signed on 10 August 2024 and the assets and money changed hands within days.