Serial entrepreneur Pieter Levels on building in public and living as a digital nomad

0:00I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe because it's almost like the patient is so sick. Never raised your crisis. The problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, like you kind of need to go big or bust, right? It's kind of, 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. Yeah, so long. It's spreading time on ex. Peter Levels, one of the most prolific indie hackers and digital nomads. His businesses now do more than $3 million in revenue, and it's just Peter working on them.

0:33Cheers.

0:37I think you are maybe the most prominent indie hacker. No Mad 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 Levels 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, there's nobody else needed that problem solved.

1:20But a few times it worked. And then I used to try it a lot, right? Like when Sharipe 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. It was in America. And I lived in Holland. And I asked my dad to sign for it. And my dad read the whole like contract. And I was like, your label for damages up to $100 million.

1:51I mean, it's like, what am I signing for? Like, no, dad, you don't understand. I need to make money on the internet. Just sign it. And he signed it. And we fixed it. We fixed it to America. And I had a merchant account. And I never sold anything. Luckily, maybe, because I was, we would be liable for damages. I feel like this is a common thread among entrepreneurs of 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. Oh my god. Remember, these were like very high -end workstations. and he just filled out the forum and got them.

2:22And 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 used to have calling me and they hadn't realized that he was like 12 years old at the time or whatever. Man, amazing. Did you try to monetize projects before you started building them? No, because. So what happened, I was making music And I was DJing, I was organizing like nightclub nights in Holland and UK and stuff.

2:53And drum -based music. The drum -based, you know, drum -based. Like, drum -based, most people don't really know, but British people know, Irish people know. So when YouTube started monetizing videos, I was uploading my musical radio. 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 top channels. But the thing is, I started making money, like $1 ,000 and $2 ,000 and $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 the partisan are you on the topic of the IndieHacker approach?

3:28Because obviously, most of tech doesn't run on the IndieHacker way. You're building multi -million dollar revenue businesses all by yourself. Do you think way more people should be doing the IndieHacker thing? So I mean, I think it makes you a partisan, right? So I don't think I've been partisan much, but I think... Until you got an ex. Yeah, that's how the but you have to understand 2014 when I entered kind of the start of world There was barely any indie there was no any hacking there was no bootstrapping almost except Patrick Mackenzie You know, well, you would you would find investors you would raise money you would grow faster with higher -level people You got a big office remote didn't exist right remote work so Compared to that like what's possible now there's different as alternate as possible now And you can make a lot of money with this.

4:13I don't think you can make 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 in the internet. Yeah, I think you just look what I hate most about PC 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. It will see me start ups and they just disappear.

4:47I think it's much more interesting to, and 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. You know, despite the fact Stripe is obviously raised VC, we just like started writing code. We got our first paying customer way before we raised any money for the business. Wow. And then just kind of grew and grew and grew. And it's a little bit different for coming to 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?

5:16Even if you raised money, you did it in an organic way. And you only raised 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, like 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, you know? But also in a serious way, it sounds fun to go to a bigger thing. There's something you typically say after you've been in a week in San Francisco, but I'm not convinced yet, but I think now when we're 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?

5:57It'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, like 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 twenties on that. And that's something where if you would be an indie, you would have a $10 million a year company. And you'd have to invest in ownership. Yeah. It's amazing. You have so much money. You were saying as a VC fund, let's start up, 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.

6:35Peter level's enterprises broadly is making $3 .100 million a year and you've launched 70 projects? Yeah, probably more, you know, because I know what this is but it's like it's like you've launched so many that you lose track but it's like the 70 and do you shut them down if they're like becoming too small to be? No, so I keep a lot of them running. I like to keep the internet history existing like It's sad to see all these websites disappear. Yes. I keep them on my screen. You were on it. You were on it shouldn't break. No. Yeah. One break that still runs on Stripe is goal -epping do it. I don't know if I can curse, but go fuckingdo it .com.

7:08Where, for some reason, you want quit smoking. So you're right, I want to quit smoking. The deadline is like, or I don't want to smoke. And the deadline is like one December, 2025. And you have to enter the email of your friends, 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 he said a price, so for example, $100. And then on Wednesday, December 25, your friend gets the email, did he smoke the last? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he says, yes or no. And if yes, you get charged and I get the money. And a price still works.

7:38And it still makes, I think like $50 a month. And it's been, I didn't change the code in 10 years. A Feech B, 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. Yeah, yeah. Who should try the digital nomad thing? Who did the Pielta? So I think anyone, 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 it's 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, and from university, and I was like, this is a completely different world.

8:14I never left Europe before. I went to France, Italy, but there's neon signs, and it's like... Powerful places. 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. Like, using nothing happens and I've never been robbed except in my hometown, the burglary. So in 10 years of development, nothing ever happens. So yeah, I think it's completely expensive 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 will help you. If you don't speak to the language, you can use your arms and like, Like how did you make it not be lonely, not knowing anyone?

8:49It was a treatment lonely. Oh, okay, just while I was like, No, it was like, I was like, this is amazing. And then you get, you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture, your home country. And it's, every is 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, take some years. Yes. And what have you learned from how do you 11? It's an amazing guy like what inspiration so you have to go in the time machine back in 2013 or even earlier I'm reading hackenews in university and I read two thousand articles I read we're raising $40 million for a startup back then hackenews is full of raising It was like special now you don't see it anymore now it's more tech and you'd read like better McKenzie I made $60 ,000 this year with a poor met a reminder This site which is like he would go to hair salons.

9:44I think and then sell his appointment or minor website And I was and he would remind the people to shop for their Appointment And I would read this post of like this amazing this guy like 60k here. That's big like we need to do this So seeing somebody making a cool like honest business and another guy like young folk John young folk He was a few years after Petra 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 like, I was impressed that they were making like honest, cool, clean businesses. And I wanna do the same thing.

10:17One thing I was reflecting on is the fact that you are now a big brand, the brand of Peter levels, where when you 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 were launching these products and 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, it's, man, I think it's, of course, part of it.

10:50But 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. Yeah, so like, spending time on X. Exactly. Are you getting a lot of chat GPG referrals? Yeah, people talk about this. Amazing, yeah. So, I've seen the growth. JetGbT a month ago was, so if you have to Google traffic, that's like 100. JetGb was like four, so 4%. And now it's 20%. Wait, in the last month, JetGbD has gone from 4 % to 20 % of your traffic. Yeah, so it went 5x. And I check 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.

11:28And I hate SEO stuff. I just want to make a cool product. And a cool website with a nice title and whatever. You're talking your book about automation being really important for making the IndieHacker recipe work. Because I guess if you get drowned in operational work, you're not going to be able to do multiple projects, you'll end up in many shots on Google, 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 about the automation? So for example, no medlist, it's like this big website.

11:58You can visit, you can find a place to live and work remotely, but you can also join community can pay for like $100 to join a community of like meetups, chat group, all this stuff. This chat group was like hell to maintain. I mean you know from communities so much drama, I've had credit stories. If the air content moderation in 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 they don't like the moment you bend one side they're like oh you're this your dad's side and so with GPT it's actually neutral like it really it's really good you right I write down the rules of my chat group yeah and it's 40 ,000 people and it's it doesn't ban anymore it just mutes people for like a day or 10 minutes or like the debate moderator is in the presidential debate yeah it's just muted right exactly so like I can eat or hire people or I can just use GPT API and I don't like hiring because I need to manage people and I don't really like I manage people because I, it's not my thing.

13:01I 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 very 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, especially don't sell it to a drawdowns.

13:29So Vanguard. Exactly. But Vanguard already does that. Yeah, but there aren't good products for Europeans. I feel like That's like less common. You buy them via Ireland. Okay. You see that. Yes. Sure. You do. But again, I feel like you know if you want an idea for the next business I think good investment. Love money in there. Good investment. Love money. But then you increase the price It's a problem like if you resell a Vanguardity app that has 0 .07 fee per year. No, you need large scale to make a world Maybe that doesn't fit with the indie hack or F -log. No, I think it's a cool idea because it helps people get richer and wealthier Yeah, and you know this is home country bias in stock purchasing where people in Germany by German stocks.

14:01It's crazy. I talk about Paris. They're like, they're buying the Dutch stock market, probably. No, and I'm like, you need to buy S &P for 100. They're like, no, we're not going to buy in America. We're going to buy Royal Dutch Shell. They're 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 going to happen. Yeah. So, yeah, I think indexes are very important. I think, look, if you make money, like as India, I mean, I caress even as a VC founder, like it's very important to not spend all this money because you have a limited time in startups to make money, I think, and put this money in the market.

14:35And 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 economies rising because the public market is not as efficient as in the US. So you should definitely have SAP for 100, but definitely, you can look at other ETFs in the rest of it. 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 most people don't have personal finance Like they don't you don't get in this school, you know You save money, but your money your cash disappears.

15:04Yes. The moment you have it. Yes Are you in those people who hacks the thermostat when you get to a hotel room? I've tried we've never succeeded I've also YouTube videos and it's always some different model Siemens, you know like I think there why is to such people like they make it hard to get her to override them now Aconditioning 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 like 72 degrees Fahrenheit or 22 degrees Celsius in Europe, I mean, that should be a... I mean, how many times do you get back to Europe, like often, right?

15:34Often, yeah, yeah. It's a massive problem. The European hotel is in air conditioning. It's not a good situation. No, but it's like, it's Airbnb, too. Like my friend went to 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 you're actually a pretty cold. I need really colds. Like this is probably gets so good. We're talking about European air conditioning. You've talked about the EU accelerationism movement. What is required for EU accelerationism? So I think it was two years ago. One year ago, I saw Beth Jaisels, who's a Guillaume Ferdinand.

16:12He made E -Oc, which is like effective accelerationism, which is like, let's accelerate America again. Like it's been a very depressing time, especially with COVID. with the 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 OCC. 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 I crowdsource this like, box board where everybody could submit their idea how to save Europe, how to fix Europe.

16:45And like tens of thousands of people submitted ideas. and they upfo the Chateau de Chateau's and stuff. I think number one is just like remove the regulatory burden for new businesses. And that's all the 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. Yes. As easy as it is in America. Yes. I think there's so much, 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 they're getting pushed down by governments is very regulation.

17:19And 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 % 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 with Europe is, it's very funny. You have all these different countries and the left side of the political spectrum are like not very pro -business, they're more for regulation and for protective people and understanding the climate change and stuff.

17:58And then you have the right side which is pro -business, but they're also nationalists. But the problem is what we need is like pro -business and federal Europe, you need to be pro -Europe. And that's not nationalists, any 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 raised your crisis Yeah, like like Finally people are finally your pins are kind of 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.

18:32Yeah, 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 get jobs or start businesses, then they're going to look down on Americans getting rich with these big businesses. Because they're jealous. European's 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.

19:13And in Europe that completely does not, they really think different. They make 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. There was every, it felt like it was being run by engineers, not by people who actually use Stripe. Like illogical defaults on the API, you know?

19:50Like 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? Like I can't, I can't even curate them as a customer anymore. Those kind of things. But now it seems much better and it seems to be like sanity as 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 not become like corporate. Of course you always corporate because you need to be to be sales because you need to keep the original stripe mentality of like simple, right?

20:25Stripe JS was one line of code you would add to your page and you had a payment button. And you know, keeping that so important, keeping the original soul of the company, and I think you're doing great job. Because essentially, I don't wanna go to Stripe do anything, I wanna go there to see how much money I make, and I wanna go back to my coffee and code a little bit, like I see all these new features for company Stripe and like workflows and stuff, and everything's very cool, but I don't have time to do this stuff. Because it's not that important for me. I think our perspective is you should be able to get started with anything instantly.

20:56You shouldn't even need to integrate an API, you should just be able to send a payment link something like that. I'm also 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 hosting page with everything they That's what I do now, like a paper link. 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 going to hardly go out. Yeah. I think so the challenge is exposing them slowly to all the stuff that's possible.

21:22Exactly. The 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 for maybe you have sold a few of the projects. Maybe you've started a VC fund and started up and raised a billion dollars from South America. That would be like, you know, exactly. But I'm just curious, what does the next five years hold? Man, I've no clue. It would be so funny if you become VC. I've been starting to invest. Maybe you become a VC. No, I've been starting to invest. And every time I invest, I feel like I feel like bad because I feel like a faker, you know?

21:54But like I invest in a cursor, for example, like very nice and that seems like that will do okay for you. Who knows, you know, but yeah, it's fun to, I think you need to be neuroflex, you need to be a little bit flexible with your neurons and like 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 go for 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.

22:31Thanks for coming by. Thanks for having me.