Peter Levels the founder of Nomad List, Remote | OK and Hoodmaps. He travel to work from anywhere, bootstrap side projects into open startups and only own what fits in gis backpack. He also made 12 startups in 12 months.

Projects

Nomad List

Nomad List is a site dedicated to the rising trend of digital nomads. It lets people find the best places to go based on their preferences like internet speed, cost of living, weather and safety.

The site launched in 2014. Exactly 5 years later, he launched the fifth iteration of the website.

It is an is an Open Startup, which means it operates fully transparent and shares its metrics, like revenue and traffic. You can check out the stats here.

He has shared his experience building and growing the site.

Hoodmaps

Hoodmaps is a crowdsourced map to divide cities up into hipsters, tourists, rich, normies, suits, and uni areas. He created it public, recording the entire process on Twitch and Twitter. He documented the experience at Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit

He created a Twitter thread about how he got the startup on Reddit’s frontpage.

Remote | OK

Remote | OK is the biggest remote job board on the web with over 25,000 remote work positions for digital nomads, remote workers and people who work from home.

Peter wrote a comprehensive post about the website at How I built Remote | OK and launched it to #1 on Product Hunt. He also shares the product revenue at Indie Hackers.

Remote Workers

Remote | Workers is a new site that lets people create public worker profiles for themselves which remote companies (and recruiters) can then browse and message if they’d like to hire.

He shared the inspiration behind the product and Product Hunt.

He has also been sharing updates about the website on Twitter.

By day 27, he had almost 2,000 users and about 100 recruiters.

By day 45 the website had been live for 2 weeks. The monthly revenue was at $2,420 with 3814 profiles.

IdeasAI

In August 2020, Peter built a startup idea generator with GPT-3. It is powered by OpenAI. It uses an autoregressive language model with deep learning to generate new product and business ideas.

It was the #3 Product Of The Month on Product Hunt.

This thread shares the best startup ideas as voted by his Twitter audience.

QR Menu Creator

Peter shared how he came up with and developed the idea in a Twitter thread. He was road tripping in Portugal and noticed that a lot food venues now required patrons to scan a QR code to see a menu. Many of these codes took people to a self-hosted page on the restaurant’s site. He decided to create a solution that would help non-technical business owners or those without a website.

Within 9 days, the website was hosting 170 menus.

12 Startups In 12 Months

In 2014, Peter announced that he was launching 12 startups in 12 months. He shares his process at How I build my minimum viable products

Play My Inbox

Play My Inbox collects music links from your inbox and streams them to you. Peter wrote an introductory post about the launch and followed it up with a debriefing.

Go Fucking Do It

This project focused on getting people to commit to their goals. People had to set a goal and a deadline. If you didn’t make the deadline, you had to pay. He wrote an introductory post at My 2nd startup: Go Fucking Do It, set a goal + deadline and if you fail, you pay. The website raised $30,000+ in pledges in less than a month and someone offered to purchase it.

Others

My 3rd startup: Tubelytics, the real-time dashboard for YouTube publishers

GIFbook, the first animated GIF flipbook

Financial Progress:

I passed $50,000 in monthly revenue as an indie maker (February, 2018)

$1M annual run rate (May, 2019)

Growth trajectory over 7 years. These numbers are when he hitting these milestones in monthly revenue, NOT those monthly amounts all year.

Mental Heath

Peter has been very open about his experience with an anxiety disorder. He wrote about his symptoms and techniques for managing them at How I cured (most of) my anxiety.

In 2013, he moved to Bangkok in an attempt to reset his life. Two months after returning, he started experiencing severe anxiety. Part of that reason was due to a toxic and unsupportive relationship.

Features

In 2018, he was awarded Product Hunt’s Maker of the Year

Pieter Levels makes $600k a year from Nomad List and Remote OK

Turning side projects into profitable startups (PRESENTATION)

Ditching the office to work in paradise as a “digital nomad” has a hidden dark side Quartz Article

Interviews

Interview on Product Hunt Radio