How We Went From £9K to £150K a Month

In June 2025 CodeSpring was making about £9,000 a year. By January 2026 we were doing £150,000 a month. That's a ridiculous jump, and people always ask how it happened, so I want to write it down while I still remember the details.

The short answer is that I stopped trying to improve the main product myself and started building separate tools alongside it. I call this "horizontal vibe coding" and it's probably the single best strategic decision I've made.

Some context on where we started

When I came back from Greece in mid 2025, I had clarity on what CodeSpring should be but the product itself was rough. I'd built the whole thing using AI, which is to say I'd never actually written code myself. I'd describe what I wanted to Claude or Cursor and they'd write it. It worked well enough to sell subscriptions, but the codebase was a mess.

By October 2024 we'd scaled to £46,000 a month, still with me doing all the coding this way. That's when I brought on Harsh as the first proper developer and we started rebuilding everything from scratch with actual engineering practices. By January 2026 we had two developers, two support staff, and we'd hit that £150K mark.

The big insight

Here's what I learned the hard way: once your codebase gets big enough, you can't keep using AI to make changes in the core. One change breaks something else, especially when you've got multiple people working on the same code. It becomes a mess.

But what you CAN do is use AI to build completely separate tools that make your main product better. Things that sit alongside it rather than inside it.

The knowledge hub experiment

The best example of this is a knowledge hub I built in six days. The idea was simple: take all of the course content we'd made for CodeSpring (dozens of tutorial videos with transcripts), feed it into an AI, and let customers ask questions in plain English. So instead of watching hours of videos to figure out how to do something, you just ask "how do I connect CodeSpring to my project?" and get a step by step answer with links to the relevant videos.

The clever thing about this is that it did three things at once. It made CodeSpring much easier for customers to use, which reduced the load on our support team. I filmed the entire six day build process and turned it into a YouTube series, which drove awareness. And the tool itself was built in a way that I could package it up and sell it separately if I wanted to.

One project, three benefits, and none of it required touching the core product.

What changed in six months

The numbers tell the story pretty clearly:

When I was in Greece in June, we had £9K in annual revenue, it was just me, the codebase was held together with tape, and the only way I could get customers was through my personal social media. By January I was managing five people, we had a proper engineering team rebuilding everything professionally, a working advertising funnel bringing in customers automatically, and the product had grown to the point where we could build a whole course platform on top of it.

The biggest shift wasn't the revenue though. It was my role. I went from being the person who builds everything to the person who spots opportunities and builds new things around what already exists. That distinction matters more than anything else.