How Florin Pop made 65K from iCodeThis

Meet Florin Pop from Romania.

Florin learned to code at around age 18 and slowly after got into freelancing. This was mostly for fun but he felt it was a nice bonus when he got paid to make some simple websites for his clients.

After college he went back to freelancing for a few years and while learning React he got a remote job as a React developer.

After 2 years he left the company to pursue another new passion: blogging. He started to write coding tutorials and slowly built an audience on Twitter (now X).

Read Florin’s story below to find out how his entrepreneurial mindset eventually lead him to launch his own SaaS iCodeThis. A tool which provides coding challenges that are designed to improve your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills.

The story told by Florin Pop

Starting out

At the end of 2019 I jokingly made some videos and posted them on YouTube. I started to like it and in 2020 I made it my mission to get to 100,000 subscribers, and I did (in March 2021). Currently I’m at 170K plus YouTube subscribers.

I also wrote an ebook and made a coding course along the way. In the past few years I’ve been dabbling in the world of indie hacking, building a SaaS - iCodeThis.

What is iCodeThis?

iCodeThis is my first SaaS. It’s a platform for developers to learn how to code by actually building projects, not just watching tutorial after tutorial and doing nothing.

The focus is on taking action. See demo of the app below.

Building and launching

I started building the app in December 22. I actually also launched in December 2022 - only a week or so after started working on it 🙂 A friend helped me with backend development.

iCodeThis used to be my full time job during 2024, but now (2025) I work on to other projects as well

The first users and paying customers

After launch it took only 4 days to get to 100 users - because it has a generous free tier and I have an audience (primarily X and YouTube) to promote it to.

It took about 6 months to get to 100 paid customers since I only launched the paid version after 3.5 months.

Currently I have 55k members on the platform out of which almost 900 have paid for one of the pro tiers which are pay once - own forever;

• PRO Gold / $89

• PRO Platinum / $199

The icodethis.com website gets about about 10-15k unique visitors per month.

Marketing

As mentioned, on the marketing side I had the benefit that I could leverage my existing audience. I think my main struggle was to convince people to purchase a PRO tier.

I mainly leveraged my audience on X and YouTube (examples below) to get people to try out the app.

I also had some affiliate partnerships with other YouTubers that helped significantly.

As an example I reached out to YouTuber Kevin Powell and offered an affiliate deal. Keven accepted and made 2-3 videos and integrated iCodeThis within them - example below.

Where to find Florin Pop

• X

• YouTube

• florin-pop.com

• icodethis.com

Florin is also working on another project now which is a mix of a SaaS with a community for indie hackers called Indie Action. Check it out!