Serial entrepreneur Pieter Levels on building in public and living as a digital nomad
Cheeky Pint · 9 Jul 2025
Source: https://share.transistor.fm/s/16e68596
Transcript: https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/cheeky-pint/serial-entrepreneur-pieter-levels-on-building-in-public-and-living-as-a-digital-455620/ (via OpenNash Podcasts, machine-generated)

I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe because it's almost like the patient is so sick. Never waste a crisis. The problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right? It's hard to stay in between. I also work really hard because I tweeted like, I think 125 ,000 times over 10 years, so it's like 40 tweets a day. You've contributed so many brain cells to spending time on X.

Pieter Levels, one of the most prolific indie hackers and digital nomads, whose businesses now do more than $3 million in revenue, and it's just Peter working on them. Cheers. I think you are maybe the most prominent indie hacker. Nomad List got to $700K in ARR. Remote OK has gotten to $3 .4 million in revenue. Photo AI got to $600K in ARR. And these are all just you. These are not startups that you have started. These are just Peter Level's productions.

You're also the vanguard of the digital nomad thing, and so you've lived in more than 40 countries and 150 cities?

Yeah, I think so. I've mostly just been working on my laptop for the last decade, traveling around, just making stuff, making little creative projects that I needed to solve my problems. And then most of the time, nobody else needed that problem solved. But a few times it worked. And then, I mean, I use Stripe a lot, right? When Stripe came to Holland, back then I lived in Holland, it was 2014, I think. then I was like oh shit now I can start making money and that was the year I started making money when I was a kid I think I was like 12 years old I was making websites too and I wanted to charge money on the internet and

I remember signing up to world pay I think it was world pay and it was a giant contract was in America and I live in Holland and I asked my dad to sign for it and my dad read the whole like contract and I was like you're liable for damage up to $100 million I mean it's like what am I signing for like no dad you don't understand like I need to make money on the internet just sign it and he signed it and we faxed it we faxed it to america and i had a merchant account and i never sold anything yeah luckily maybe because otherwise we would be liable for damages i feel

like this is a common thread amongst entrepreneurs of doing getting their parents to help them with things they shouldn't do patrick at one point got a demo of like a sun microsystems workstation remember these were like very high-end uh workstations and he just filled out the form and like you know got them and you know they came with a truck and they unloaded it and he was playing with it and I just remember the Sun MicroStations rep was calling the house and they were like is Mr.

Collison interested in continuing with a purchase and our mom was like Mr. Collison is doing his homework and you need to stop calling me and they hadn't realized that he was like 12 years old at the time. Amazing. Did you try to monetize projects before you started building them?

No because so what happened I was I was making music and I was DJing I was organizing like nightclub nights in Holland and UK and stuff. of drum and bass music. You're Irish, you know, drum and bass. Like drum and bass, most people don't really know, but British people know, Irish people know. So when YouTube started monetizing videos, I was uploading my music already. So I was one of the first YouTube monetizing people, and I was like number one or number two in Holland for a while in the top channels.

But the thing is, I started making money, like $1 ,000, then $2 ,000, then $8 ,000 per month, a lot of money, and I was in university. So it seems like you've done well on this,

kind of being a person on the internet. How much of a partisan are you on the topic of the indie hacker approach? Because obviously, most of tech doesn't run on the indie hacker way. You're building multi-million dollar revenue businesses all by yourself. Do you think way more people should be doing the indie hacking thing?

I mean, I think the internet makes you partisan, right? So I don't think I've been partisan much, but I think... Until you got on X. Yeah, X does help with it. But you have to understand, In 2014, when I entered the startup world, there was barely any indie, there was no indie hacking, there was no bootstrapping almost, except Patrick McKenzie, who you know well. You would find investors, you would raise money, you would grow fast, you would hire a lot of people, you'd get a big office, remote didn't exist, remote work.

So compared to that, like what's possible now, there's different alternatives that's possible now. And you can make a lot of money with this. I don't think you can become a billionaire. Maybe we will see that in the future.

So you think for talented engineers who have a commercial brain and who are good at product, they should at least seriously evaluate the path of just building their own successful products on the internet like you have?

Yeah, I think you should, look, what I hate most about VC stuff is when you see people burn money. You probably hate this as well. A company of no users raise $50 million, $100 million, and you're like, what is this product? Like, it doesn't have any traction. And it's just hype. We've all seen these startups, and they just disappear. And I think it's much more interesting to, maybe you guys did the same with Stripe, but validate first and build a business first.

See if you get traction. Like, get to 50K or 100K a month. No, look, I'm with you.

Despite the fact Stripe has obviously raised VC, we just started writing code. We got our first paying customer way before we raised any money for the business. And then it just kind of grew and grew and grew. And it's a little bit different for a company in the financial services space that you need to be well capitalized.

Yeah, but this is the thing. So it's natural. It's kind of organic, right? Even if you raise money, you did it in an organic way. And you only raise more when you see the growth coming. Have you ever been tempted to raise for one of your projects? No, but a lot of VCs have been in my DMs and they want to invest. And I think now, because now I'm financially independent, I made a lot of money.

Now I could do it because now I'm at a point where it sounds fun to play with other people's money. But also in a serious way, it sounds fun to go to a bigger thing. I mean, that's something you typically say after you've been in a week in San Francisco, right? You start talking like this. But I'm not convinced yet, but I think it would be fun, for example. But the problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right?

It's hard to stay in between. You can't make $10 million a year. You kind of need to make $100 million a year. You kind of need to become a unicorn. That's difficult because the odds of that happening are not super high. It's a few percentage maybe. So most people don't get there, and they do spend like five years or I don't know, seven years of their 20s on that. And that's something where if you would be an indie, you would have a $10 million a year company.

And you have 100 % ownership. That's amazing.

You have so much money. You're saying as a VC-funded startup, you're kind of locking in the expectations for your company in advance as to what's successful and what's not. And it's quite liberating to just start building things. Peter Level's enterprises broadly is making $3 .1 million a year. And you've launched 70 projects? Yeah, probably more, you know, because I don't want this list, but it's like my pin tweet. You've launched so many that you lose track, but it's like 70.

Do you shut them down if they're like becoming too small to be relevant?

I try to keep a lot of them running. I like to keep the internet history existing. Like it's sad to see all these websites disappear, you know? Yes, yes. I keep them on my server running.

URLs shouldn't break.

No, yeah. One project that still runs on Stripe is go effing do it. I don't know if I can curse, but go fucking do it .com. where, for example, you want to quit smoking. So you write, I want to quit smoking, and the deadline is like, or I don't want to smoke. And the deadline is like 1 December 2025. And you have to enter the email of your friend, and he checks it. And then you enter your credit card with Stripe, and it creates a customer, and it doesn't charge the customer yet.

And you set a price, so for example, $100. And then on 1 December 2025, your friend gets the email, did he smoke the last time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he says yes or no. And if it's yes, you get charged, and I get the money. And that product still works. And it still makes, I think, like $50 a month. And I didn't change the code in 10 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. PHP, you know? Yes, yes.

Still runs. So part of what you're doing is you're creating all these businesses that have actually pretty long lifetimes as well. Who should try the digital nomad thing? Who does it appeal to?

I think anyone. It doesn't matter if you're 20 or 70 or whatever. It's so interesting because you change as a person also. But I think digital nomad is so cool because leaving your own country, which I did the first time. I did a study exchange program. I went to Korea in 2010, I think, from university. And I was like, this is a completely different world. I'd never left Europe before. I went to France, Italy, but there's neon signs.

Faraway places. It's crazy. This changed you on such a fundamental level going to the other side of the world. It's amazing. And it's way safer than you think. Usually nothing happens. And I've never been robbed except in my hometown. It was a burglary. So in 10 years of digital numbering, nothing ever happens. So yeah, I think it completely expands your horizon. There's nothing I can recommend as much as people just go travel. And don't be scared, man.

Just like, there's always people who help you. If you don't speak the language, you can use your arms and like... How did you make it not be lonely, not knowing anyone? It was extremely lonely. It was like, I was like, this is amazing. And then you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture, your home country. And everything's fine. People are nice. but you're like, it fundamentally removes your foundational culture at some point. It starts...

You become untethered. Yeah, untethered. That's it. And you have to rebuild that up. And that's a psychologically taxing process. It takes some years. Yes. And what have you learned from patio11? Dude, amazing guy. Like, what inspiration. So you have to go in the time machine back in 2013 or even earlier. I'm reading Hacker News in university. And I read two types of articles. I read, we're raising $40 million for our startup. Back then, Hacker News was full of raising.

It was like special. Now you don't see it anymore. Now it's more tech. And you'd read like, Patrick McKenzie, I made $60 ,000 this year with Appointment Reminder, this site, which is like, he would go to hair salons, I think, and then sell his Appointment Reminder website. And he would write - It just reminded people to show up for their appointments. Yes, like with SMS. It was like, it was amazingly simple. It was amazing. And I would read this post.

It was like, this is amazing. This guy, like 60K a year. That's big. Like, we need to do this. So seeing somebody making a cool, honest business, and another guy like Youngfook, John Youngfook, he was a few years after Patrick McKenzie, but he was also traveling as a nomad in Singapore and Asia, and he was well-dressed, and he was making a beautiful sass. And I was impressed that they were making honest, cool, clean businesses. And I want to do the same thing.

One thing I was reflecting on is the fact that you are now a big brand in a way, the brand of Pieter Levels. where, well, now think about it. You sold $50 ,000 of pre-orders for your book. Before you had written any of the book, you just said, I might write a book and buy it here. And you got $50 ,000 of sales. And so, to what extent does the recipe now work because you are launching these products?

And, you know, if someone else was to build the flight simulator or if someone else was to write the book.

Yeah, I've seen these replies too. That it wouldn't sell as well. Yeah, man, I think it's, of course, part of it. But I also work really hard because I tweeted, like, I think 125 ,000 times over 10 years. so it's like 40 tweets a day. You've contributed so many brain cells to spending time on X.

Are you getting a lot of ChatGPG referrals? Yes, people talk about this.

Amazing, yeah. So ChatGPG, so I've seen the growth. ChatGPG a month ago was, so if you have to Google traffic, that's like 100. ChatGPG was like four, so 4%, and now it's 20%.

Wait, in the last month, ChatGPG has gone from 4 % to 20 % to your traffic?

Yeah, so it went 5x, and I checked other websites, it's the same story. And I think it's beneficial for me because it's very hard for me as a solo person to do SEO stuff. And I hate SEO stuff. I just want to make a cool product and a cool website with a nice title and whatever.

You talk in your book about automation being really important for making the indie hacker recipe work. Because I guess if you get drowned in operational work, you're not going to be able to do multiple projects, you won't do so many shots on goal, everything like that. And so how much has the automation of your business tasks improved over the past 10 years, if at all?

Man, it's been amazing for me.

Okay, what have you automated?

So for example, Nomad List, it's like this big, it's a big website. You can visit, you can find a place to live and work remotely, but you can also join the community, you can pay for like $100. You join a community of like meetups, chat group, all this stuff. This chat group was like hell to maintain. It was, I mean, you know from communities, so much drama. I've had crazy stories. But they are content moderating the community now?

So exactly. So it was very hard for me to moderate this stuff. And it was very hard for me to be impartial. Yeah. So you have like politically different sides. And I feel I'm kind of in the middle, kind of neutral. But the moment you ban one side, they're like, oh, you're this, you're that side. And so with GPT, it's actually neutral. It's really good. I write down the rules of my chat group. And it's 40 ,000 people.

And it doesn't ban anymore. It just mutes people for like a day or 10 minutes. Like the debate moderators and the presidential debates. Yeah, they mute it. Yeah, exactly. So that's it. So like, I can either hire people or I can just use GPT API. I don't like hiring because I need to manage people. And I don't really like managing people because it's not my thing. I like to create things.

Well, in your book, you recommend that people build for their own understanding of the problems they have. Shouldn't you make an investment product? You and Warren Buffett basically have the same views, which is a lot of money managers and kind of wealth management products are very bad because they're charging you very high fees to invest in bad things. And actually what the vast majority of people should do is buy a simple index, maybe the S &P 500 or the MSCI World or something, and then just leave the money there and don't touch it, and especially don't sell it during drawdowns.

Yeah, so Vanguard. Exactly. But Vanguard already does that. Yeah, but there aren't good products for Europeans, I feel like. That's like less common. We buy them via Ireland. Sure, you do. But again, I feel like, if you wanted an idea for the next business, I think good investment...

There's a lot of money in there. Good investment products for Europeans. But then you increase the price. It's a problem. Like if you resell a Vanguard ETF that has 0 .07 fee per year.

No, you need large scale to make it work. Maybe that doesn't fit with the IndieHack or Phelan.

No, I think it's a cool idea because it helps people get richer and wealthier.

Yeah, and you know there's this home country bias in stock purchasing where people in Germany buy German stocks. This is crazy.

I talk to my parents.

They're buying the Dutch stock market probably.

No, and I'm like, you need to buy S &P. They're like, no, we're not going to buy in America. We're going to buy Royal Dutch Shell. I'm like, come on. And they have all their money in Shell, like in oil. and then have you seen Tesla like electric cars now and they're like no it's not gonna happen yeah you know so yeah I think index is very important I think look if you make money like as India or as even as a VC founder like it's very important to not spend all this money because you're you have a limited time in startups to make money I think like and put this money in the market and and it doesn't have

to be only America like I always talk about Asia and it's very hard to benefit in Asia from the mark from the economies rising because the public markets not as efficient as in the US. So you should definitely have S &P 500, but definitely you can look at other ETFs in the rest of the world. I've got some China. Always never doing well, but at some point I'll be right, you know? So yeah, it's very important to invest your money well.

And most people don't know personal finance. You don't get it in school. You save money, but your money, your cash disappears the moment you have it.

Yes. Are you one of those people

who hacks the thermostat when you get to a hotel room? I've tried, but I've never succeeded. I've watched the YouTube videos. And there's always some different model Siemens.

I think they're wise to such people. They make it hard to override them now. This air conditioning problem is such a big problem. We need people in the comments to teach us how to override the hotel thermostats. Because the ones that are set to 72 degrees Fahrenheit or 22 degrees Celsius in Europe, that should be a...

How many times do you get back to Europe? Often, right?

Often, yeah.

It's a massive problem.

The European hotels and air conditioning, it's not a good situation.

No, but it's like, it's Airbnb too. Like my friend went to an Airbnb in Italy and it said, don't put it below 25 degrees because of regulation. It's like, this is unacceptable. And all the studies show like, look at like Likon U in Singapore.

They need really cold. Like the sleep quality gets so good. Yeah, we're talking about European air conditioning. You've talked about the EU accelerationism movement. Hwas, what is required for EU accelerationism?

So I think it was two years ago, one year ago, I saw Beth Jaisels who's Guillaume Ferdin he made EOC which is like effective accelerationism which is like let's accelerate America again like it's been a very depressing time especially with COVID and let's look at the benefits of technology and AI for the future and I thought that's amazing we need to do the same for Europe so I did EU slash OC like let's do this for Europe because Europe is the same kind of like depressing kind of down vibe about the future and I understand because there's a lot of problems it's not an easy life for a lot of people so that got a lot of traction and um

i crowdsourced this like bug board where everybody could submit their idea how to save europe how to fix europe and like tens of thousands of people submitted ideas and then they upload each other's ideas and stuff i think number one is just like remove the regulatory burden for new businesses yep um and there's other stuff like remove the cookie banner and stuff and i hope it will be easier in europe to run to start a business run a business as easy as it is in america yes i think there's so much nobody nobody doubts the european talent or the intelligence like it's cool smart ambitious people but they're like they're getting there's a ceiling for them they can't go higher

because it's they're getting pushed down by governments by regulation and it's like what are you doing like european countries like you have amazing people you could compete easily i think there's kind of two things one is where

the regs are just bad and the second is where the regulations are not standardized where places where you know employment law is really annoyingly different across european countries and so if you're a 10-person startup and you employ people across europe it's actually really cumbersome whereas in the united states that's quite easy yeah so the problem of europe is um it's very

funny you have all these different countries and the you have kind of the left side of the political spectrum are like not very pro-business they're more for regulation and for protecting people and understand the climate change and stuff. And then you have the right side, which is pro-business, but they're also nationalists. But the problem is, what we need is pro-business and federal Europe. You need to be pro-Europe, and that's not nationalists. You need to be pro-business.

So it doesn't exist. So it's like, where do you start? I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe now, because it's almost like the patient is so sick. Never waste a crisis. Yeah. Finally, Europeans are kind of like, like maybe we should do something like two years ago when i would tweet about this they said yeah stop talking bad about europe like it's going great here yeah and now they're like okay maybe we need to do something what would you highlight as the ideas that need fixing i think i think the problem is if there's not a lot of opportunities in europe for people to to get jobs or start businesses then they're going to look

down on americans getting rich with these big businesses because they're jealous. Europeans are jealous. And you need to change this idea that business is bad, that getting rich is bad. Getting rich is simply a representation of your added value to the world economy in most cases, of course, as edge cases. Generally, the money in your bank account is how much value added to society. And in Europe, that completely does not. They really think different. In America, you get much more respect for being an entrepreneur.

But I would say, don't be afraid of money. Money is a tool in this world to change the world. If you were running Stripe, how would you fix it? I think it's going really well recently. I think it wasn't going well after COVID. There was a few years where things were getting, the API was getting more and more complicated. We all complained about it. It felt like it was being run by engineers, not by people who actually use Stripe.

Like illogical defaults on the API. One time I had this bug and it was from the Stripe API because it changed and it didn't create a customer anymore. Everybody was a guest. I was like, why would I want people to be a guest? I cannot even curate them as a customer anymore. Those kind of things. But now it seems much better and it seems to be like sanity has returned. But it's scary and it must be scary for you because you're running a big company.

It's very hard to manage a company from small to big and become like corporate. Of course, you're always corporate because you need to do B2B sales. becomes more corporate but you need to keep this the original stripe mentality of like was simple right stripe js it was one line of code you would add to your page and you had a payment button you know keeping that is so important keeping the original soul of the company and i think you're doing a great job because essentially i don't want to go into stripe do anything i want to go there to see how much money i make and i want to go back to my coffee and code a little bit like

i see all these new features for example striving like workflows and stuff and i think it's very cool but i don't have time to do this stuff yeah because it's not that important for me.

I think our perspective is you should be able to get started with anything instantly. You shouldn't even need to integrate an API. You should just be able to send a payment link or something like that. Exactly, that's amazing, yeah. No, I'm always saying to people that generally people will not even want to start by integrating the API. They'll want to start by sending people to a hosted page. Yeah, that's what I do now,

like a payment link, yeah.

But you will over time get to, we think, the workflow engine is really cool because if you want to build something complex, you don't have to build yourself. But if someone is starting with the workflow engine, then something's gone horribly wrong.

I think the challenge is exposing them slowly to all the stuff that's possible.

Exactly. Last question, if we're back here in five years, will things be kind of similar where you've worked on a bunch of projects that are working really nicely? Will things be different where maybe you've sold a few other projects? Maybe you've started a VC-funded startup and raised $1 billion from Southbank? That would be like... Exactly. But I'm just curious, what does the next five years hold?

Man, I have no clue. It would be so funny if you become a VC. I've been starting to invest... Maybe you become a VC? No, I'll be starting to invest. And every time I invest, I feel like bad. Because I feel like a faker, you know? But I can invest in Cursor, for example. Like, very nice. That seems like that will do OK for you. Well, who knows? But yeah, it's fun to. I think you need to be neuroflexed.

You need to be a little bit flexible with your neurons. And you can change your ways a little bit. And it's interesting to try different stuff. But yeah, I'm really enjoying life with my girlfriend now and it's we're still traveling a lot. It's fun And we meet all these cool people here and like I want that to continue and I'm just very happy. I'm everyday grateful to be able to live this life and it's so good.

So thank you Thanks for coming back. Thank you for having me