Kourosh is a self-taught developer who is making $6k a month from his apps while working full-time. Keep reading to find out his tips for learning to code in 2025, how he learned programming and how he is making money while working a 9-5.
Can you tell us what you’ve achieved so far as an entrepreneur?
So far, I've built two startups. The first one is called MeetWaves.com, and it's a community analytics tool. The second one is called UseVoicy.com, a speech-to-text tool.
I started Waves during university, and it was the first product I ever built. In the beginning, we were creating micro-communities for students based on their interests. A user would fill out a short form, then we would match them to five or six other people in a WhatsApp group chat. We would close each group chat after three or four weeks.
That picked up really, really quickly. We grew to 1,000 users without any marketing within weeks. Then companies heard about this, and we received inbound requests from real companies asking us to build these micro-communities for them.
We told them that we had software to do this, which we really didn't, so we closed our first contract for about 2 pounds—just by essentially faking it—and started monetizing.
My YouTube channel, MyChannel, is about capturing subscription payments for it, and I started that in February of 2025. So far, we are nearly at $2,000 in MRR, and it's slowly growing.
How did you learn to code?
During COVID, I was extremely bored and I was looking for things to do. And I picked up this huge Python book just to learn how to write code.
Back then, I mostly wanted to learn coding to write trading algorithms because I was studying finance and that was really interesting to me.
So I picked up the Python book and I spent two, three months reading it.
At the same time, though, I was building the Waves platform, and even though it was mostly built in Bubble, a no-code tool, it still required us to write some real code every now and then when we wanted to do fancy stuff.
But I was still pretty much a novice back then.
The time when it truly took off for me was when ChatGPT originally came out. I wanted to use it a little bit for code, but it just wasn't good enough back then.
But I still wanted to code something real, so I decided to sign up for a Scrimba course.
And Scrimba (affiliate) is this platform that gives you an IDE within the browser, within the video course, and it was awesome.
So I learned the basics of HTML and CSS, and then JavaScript, and then React.
And that gives me a good enough foundation to actually write code and understand the code that I'm writing with AI.
On my TikTok account actually, the video that has the most views, around 150,000 now, is a video of me telling people exactly what I did to learn how to code well enough to be able to write code with AI effectively.
That basically means learn HTML, learn just the basics of HTML. Then, when it comes to CSS, continue the course until you learn Flexbox.
If you want to go really hard, learn until you learn Grid.
And when it comes to JavaScript, learn everything the course tells you until you finish Promises.
After Promises, I think you don't need the JS course anymore and you'll be in a good enough place to actually code with AI.
What tips do you have for learning to code in 2025?
The biggest tip I have for people learning to code in 2025 is a specific prompt, actually. The saved prompt that I have within my cursor ID is: whenever the AI gives me the code, I ask it to explain the code to me.
And I don't mean explain what the code does, but also explain the syntax and the methods it used.
And it is incredibly important to me to always read the explanation so I'm not just copy-pasting stuff, but I'm also learning it while I'm doing it. And that is the thing I recommend everyone to do.
The easiest way to not learn how to code and build a bad platform at the same time is to just copy-paste code all the time.
What’s a common mistake you see newbie founders make?
I don't think newbie founders understand how much more difficult it is to create distribution than it is to build a good product.
With Waves, the only thing that I focused on was building a good product. And to be honest, we definitely had the best product on the market when it came to community management tools.
But ultimately, we lost the race, not because our product was bad, but because our distribution was bad.
Not enough people were hearing about us. We weren't making enough sales. And if we made more sales, we would have gotten more feedback, which would have allowed us to create a better product.
So it's a cycle and we clearly missed out on the distribution bit of it.
Why did you start Waves?
I built Waves because I was building a community during my university days, and it was incredibly difficult to find any tools that could help you manage that community.
During that time, it was also COVID, so there was a community boom happening, and everyone was building something in community.
So, it just made sense to us to also build a community management tool that I would use myself for my community.
How did you first get people to use Waves?
When we built Waves, we reached out to around 100 community managers. We got them on calls. We asked them about their problems. And we used that as market research.
And at the same time, of course, we found people who were willing to beta test this tool for us.
And by the time we released the first version, we instantly had 20, 30 different communities using it.
So the early distribution of us was really good, and we mostly grew through word of mouth from there and a bit of SEO.
How did you get the idea for Voicy?
My dad was visiting me in London, and at the same time, I had a stomach infection which put me in the hospital for a day or two. My dad is a workaholic, so everywhere we go, he brings his computer with him. And while I was in the hospital bed, not able to do anything, all I could hear was him typing.
And my dad is an extremely slow typer. And I just thought there must be a better solution for this.
At the same time, I was also starting to use ChatGPT's dictation functionality, and I was blown away by the accuracy of the transcription.
So the idea came from me loving ChatGPT's dictation and seeing how slow some people are at typing.
How do you handle your businesses while working at Tiiny Host?
I've always been building businesses on the side, and to me, it's very straightforward.
I work my normal hours at Tiiny Host, and then when my working day is done, I close my Tiiny laptop and I open my Voicy laptop.
Of course, whenever a customer reaches out to me throughout the day and asks me for a bug fix or for a call to understand what their issue is, I can just jump on that call. And that is a privilege from working at Tiiny Host because Elston, the founder, is also an indie hacker and he also built his company while working another full-time job. So he understands, which I really, really appreciate.
Previously, when I was working at a larger company that was more corporate, I had to be a little bit more sneaky about it. But I love working at Tiiny Host because I have this freedom.
What are your future plans for your apps?
We don't have any major plans for Waves. It just grows in the background, and we enjoy it. We're not planning to sell it, but we're also not planning to grow it massively.
For Voicy, I don't exactly know what the plans are for the future. I can absolutely see myself selling it at some point when growth starts to become slower.
But while I'm still enjoying working on it, I have no reason to sell it.
I'm in a very lucky position where I don't actually need the money that comes from Voicy to be able to survive.
And it's more of a passion project at this point.
The MRR that it makes is a nice bonus.
But to me, it really feels more like a hobby that I'm extremely dedicated to.
Where can people find out more about you?
Mostly on Twitter and Linkedin.
