How Pieter Levels Makes $2.7M/Year With 0 Employees

[Music] Are you intimidated? Why are you? He said he took a run before this because he was nervous. Now, no, because I’ve been on a lot of podcasts, but like they’re usually kind of small, you know. It’s like I see you guys as like Joe Rogan for business, so it’s like there’s one step but wow, above is like Joe Rogan, and then there’s you guys, and then below it’s like, yeah, I don’t want to dis all the podcasts I’ve been on; they’re amazing, but you know, like this is like a level, so uh, but it’s good, you know. I mean, computer levels, so. And you also don’t know what Sam might ask you, because Sam might just come out of left field and be like,

But that’s the thing I was thinking, like Sam is like, he’s not a regular uh, interviewer, you know. He adds some crazy [ __ ]

So wait, me first of all, I I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know if we—first of all, it’s not just me, it’s you too, Sean, that asks weird stuff. But also, I don’t think we asked that weird questions. I think we asked the questions that everyone’s thinking.

No, that’s true, but I mean, you’re not just—man, like you know—there’s—yes, man podcast where like they just—it’s kind of like a fan thing. Obviously, that’s not you guys. You have real [ __ ], real questions, and that’s—I think it’s more interesting as well.

Can we—Sam, can we share the thing you were just telling us in Slack? Can I share that on here, on the pod?

Yeah. Which one? The Sampar strategy for networking. This is um, you know, you can go to Harvard, you can go to Stanford; you’re not gonna learn this one, like, you know. It’s a very small little tweak, but it’s just so Sam that it just is awesome. So if you’re—if Sam wants to hang out with you, he’ll text you just like a normal person would, but—and he doesn’t need to even know you; he’s just like interested in you. Maybe—maybe it’s a cold DM, maybe it’s a text message, maybe he got your number from somebody else, like, “Hey, it’s Sam, uh, you know, I’m in San Francisco,” but instead of saying, “Wanna hang,” Sam will just go, “I’m in San Francisco, let’s do this.” He sent me some [ __ ] that I won’t say out loud, but yeah. But I think it worked.

Yeah. So Sam, what—what is this, and why does it work so well?

It’s like a phrase, like, you know, like people will be like, uh, you know, “I [ __ ] with that guy,” like, “I [ __ ] with Drake,” I like Drake. It extends from that, and I just say it, and people—they reply. I don’t know, I just—yeah. This particular one, I—it was a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company who I’m friendly with; I just said, “What’s up? I’m in your hood, let’s—” Andy goes down when—like, it worked out. It’s amazing. And now—so normally we try to play cool, but we’ve actually been chasing you, Peter. We’ve been—we’ve been talking about your projects. We’ve been being like, “Hey, we gotta get this guy in the pod.”

Sam is a fan of you for sure. I would say I am less of a fan than Sam, but I am a—that doesn’t mean I like you; it’s just I’m more in the closet about it, whereas Sam is very open. Sam’s like, “This guy’s amazing! This guy’s like an artist!”

Thanks, man.

This guy’s got great hair.

And you do have great hair, so it’s all true. And now we finally got you here, and it was hard, I think, right? Because you like—don’t—you don’t schedule or something like that? Like, I mean, it—it—like, it looks like being an ass, right, on Instagram if you do that. But I—like you guys, I would get so many DMs, and they’re all like—I mean, generally they’re very low-quality DMs, right? Like, “I want to collaborate, but I don’t want to invest,” I don’t want to—people want something from you. I think it’s like being a hot girl in the club; like people want something for you, but they don’t want to invest the time to actually get to know you, or—you know, you feel like an object, and I don’t like to feel like that, and I want to—um, spend more time with, you know, like with my friends in real life, with uh, my girlfriend, or something. I want to spend time on—in the gym, you know, on my health and cooking food, and—and that kind of stuff, go for walks, and uh—I think because I—because I’ve been doing this for 10 years, like startups—like eight years, and now I get the money is going well, so I don’t really need to do any calls anymore, any DMs, so I’m just trying to create a more chill life, and I’m not an [ __ ]; it just means like I don’t have time to—met—to reply to everybody, so I close my DMs, and—and then people get really angry on tweets; they’re like, “Why don’t you—why you close your DMs? Are you arrogant?” and stuff. So I wrote a blog post, like, kind of explaining my day and my routine and what I do in the day, and that I don’t really have time, if I do all the things I do now, to also DM everybody, reply everybody, and do calls and stuff. Um, and that’s pretty much the argument. Or even—let’s give the context, so let’s explain who the heck you are. So uh, your name is Peter Lovells. You’re known on um, Twitter as levels.io, right?

Yeah, that’s the uh, that’s the right way to say it.

I saw you a while back. I’m just gonna say some interesting things about you. I believe that you can correct me if I have any of these wrong. I believe you publish how much you make every year, and in fact, it’s in your Twitter bio. In your location, there’s like a meter that’s like your road to three million a year.

Yeah.

And it says 2.7 million, so your meter is almost all the way filled up. Um, you build a bunch of random small projects, usually around some things you like or believe or your lifestyle, which is kind of a nomadic lifestyle, so I believe—I think you—you—you hop around, or you don’t have like a home base, so you live—you know, you could be like in Bali, and then you could be in the Netherlands, you could be a different place all the time, and you make these small websites or apps, and it says in your bio that you have 13 million monthly active users. Um, and I’ve—I remember seeing you because you did a community, like a—like a nomad community, a Slack community really early on, like Slack had just come out, and I was like, “This guy’s like charging 10 bucks,” I think it was 10 bucks a month or something to get into this thing. I was like, “He’s got like a thousand people here. Wow, this is actually—this guy’s making good money doing this,” um, like just by making a Slack group. And you just do a bunch of small experiments like that. Um, that’s what I know.

Sam, what did I miss? I’ll give Pe—Peter—let me give like the outsider’s perspective that’s a little more holistic. So basically, there’s two things that are interesting to me: the first one is your businesses, which actually are the least—the lesser of the two interesting things. So you have roughly five or—s—yeah, you have seven different businesses uh, ranging from Nomad List, which makes uh, 2.1 million dollars in the last 12 months; that’s a—that’s a a job board. You have another job board called Remote OK that’s making 115 dollars a month. You have Read Mate—Read Make, which looks like it’s like an ebook—something like that.

Yeah, it’s like an ebook.

Yeah, yeah. 60k a month. Then you have got like a bunch of really—you’re seeing these numbers because he publishes them. Where do you publish these? He publishes all of them on like the—the URL—go to his Twitter profile, and we’ll let you talk, sorry Peter, in a second, but go to his profile—go to his Twitter profile, and then like click off, and it’s like uh, “open revenue” at the very bottom. But I’m reading off of our notes, so—and then you have like a QR menu creator, then you have like an inflation chart which doesn’t seem like it makes money, but tracks uh, inflation, and then you have Rebase, which is a platform to help people become a citizen of uh, Portugal, help them relocate to Portugal.

So what’s the—first part is those businesses—like I said, you have those that are interesting. I would narrow it down to say you have a series of job boards for nomadic or remote work that are pretty profitable, but the second thing that’s even more interesting is the way that you do these things. So you do a few things that are interesting. The first thing is I think you’re the only full-time employee, right? And you use a team of contractors. And second of all, you have this weird personality that’s very embedded in everything you do, so that’s kind of like my big intro of what you do. I could see a website and I could know you built it without you having an about page, which is kind of clunky, right? It looks a little—

No, it’s like—no, but it doesn’t have a nice way—I guess.

Yeah, it’s another designer.

Yeah, no, I think it’s an accurate description. Um, it’s like—like I’m not very nomadic anymore; like I’m slowly settling down, right? But I started very nomadically; I was like moving around every month. Um, I started like in 2014; I started nomading, and I uh, went to all these places, and I started building these apps, these little websites, little products to validate, and I remember—I mean, I told the story so many times, but I was following Patrick McKenzie—patio11—on Hacker News—famous Hacker News guy—and now he works for Stripe, and he would do—he would share his revenue on his blog about all his little products he made, and it was like appointment reminder for barbershop, so you got to SMS just before your appointment, so you don’t forget it—that kind of stuff. And I was really inspired, like, “Okay, this is not like some big VC-funded guy; he’s just like an indie guy was just on his laptop kind of building stuff,” and I kind of mixed that with the nomad thing, where like building from your laptop, from your backpack, moving around. I think also getting inspired from different places, because if you move around, you—I mean, I know Sam moves around a little bit as well—uh, your life becomes very unique because you meet different kinds of people, you—you’re in different kinds of places, you see different kinds of products, like in shops—like if you’re in Asia, you see some futuristic [ __ ] you don’t see in Europe and America, and all that stuff kind of—it helps for inspiration for creating products in some indirect ways as well. Um, so that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing, and I think it’s—I’ve been trying to be like radically honest. Like I know this—this American guy who pushes the radical honesty movement, um, so I’m trying to do that in my personal life; I’m trying to do it on the internet. I’m not perfect, but I’m trying to be as honest and open as possible uh, because I don’t like this fake corporate stuff, and it’s because I started business administration, and I have a master’s degree in it, so I know all the management consultancy [ __ ], you know. I’ve been there; I’ve done that. I know that’s where my friends work; I know investment bankers, and I hate that—that a lot of that world where it’s like fake and not real, and I uh, want to be very open and honest, and I think it’s also a little bit of a European thing—not to slack off Americans; I love America—but like um, in Europe, people are very uh, a little bit more direct and a little bit more uh, straightforward, and uh, I think that comes across in my—in the stuff I do a little bit.

So what’s the total size of all your—of all your projects in terms of top-line and bottom-line revenue? And isn’t it true that you’re the only full-time person, and how many contractors are you using?

Yeah, so I have one customer support contractor, part-time—Isabelle—and she works for all my projects. Um, and I have a moderator for the Slack group, because dude, Slack groups—they—there’s some drama in there. Like I’ve had some crazy drama in these Slack groups, in communities, so you need to have a moderator; you need to have rules, and you need to have a—you cannot just automate this moderation away. Like I tried that, but you need a real person there to—you know, check on messages and stuff. Um, and then I have a DevOps guy; he’s my best friend, Daniel, and he uh, works kind of like a—SLS—SLA—like a service level agreement, where if the server goes down, he gets a message, you know, if I’m sleeping or something, he brings it back up. But the problem is—never was down anymore; like it doesn’t—we haven’t really had that for years, so—um, he does security updates and stuff, you know, like because I have a VPS; I don’t use Amazon; I use a VPS on DigitalOcean and Linode. Um, and he kind of keeps that stuff safe, you know, so that’s good.

And how big is the business—top playing—I’m sorry, how big is the business?

Um, so Remote OK, the job board, it’s the biggest business; makes the most money. Normally—this is starting to grow, though; it’s like—it’s past, I think, 100k this month—100k a month. Um, so almost like a million-dollar business. Um, Remote OK—1.6 million a year, I think. Um, and Rebase is a new business; it’s an immigration agency, so I want to help remote workers immigrate to countries that want to attract remote workers with like, you know, beneficial tax stuff. Uh, Portugal is one of the first ones to do that. Um, so those are the three businesses really make money, and the rest doesn’t really make money a lot—like the book makes like, I think like 4k a month, so—

But everything you do is part of one flywheel. So I’ve looked at your kind of like system, and I’ve looked at a bunch of people because I got into a little pickle where I was like, “God, I’m doing so many things, and I want to do all these things; I’m interested in all these things, but [ __ ], you know, am I going to be able to juggle five different things? I got a podcast; I have a VC fund; I have my e-commerce business; I have a newsletter business; I have um, you know, I don’t even know what else—course business; I got—I got another [ __ ], right?” So it’s like uh, “Am I going to be able to do this?” And what I saw that you did—I—like I have this kind of like mental model of a solopreneur, and a solopreneur—nobody’s actually solo; everybody’s got like a little support team around them that’s like helpful—some—some in a big way, some in a small way—but basically it’s like somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit—builds a successful business and lifestyle around that, and what I noticed was that you had this formula, which is—I don’t know if it’s intentional or unintentional, but I’ll say it out loud, because here’s my—my read of your business: it’s basically you—ha—he starts with the red pill. So a red pill is like, you know, that scene in the Matrix where Morpheus is holding out a blue pill, a red bull—he’s like, you know, “Do you want—do you want the truth, or do you want to—you take the blue pill, you could just go back to your normal life, just as everything was; you could forget this ever happened,” and Neil’s like, “No, I need to know the truth. What’s the truth?” He takes the red pill, and basically it’s like every great solopreneur, I think, starts with one truth. So like uh, Tim Ferriss’s truth was basically that like the nine-to-five work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like effing broken, and you don’t need to do it that way; like you could work four hours a week and live like a millionaire. And so that was like Tim Ferriss’s red pill, and yours was basically like this idea of being a nomad, a digital nomad, um, which was like, “Hey, yeah, you don’t have to—you know, prescribe to the—subscribe to the normal way of living; you pick a—a place that’s where you are from; that’s where you live, and you pay—you just kind of stay where you grew up, and like—and you go to an office every day, and like you have to wear shoes and whatever; you’re like, ‘No, I wear flip-flops; I walk around on beaches; I just kind of go wherever I feel like, whenever I feel like,’ and I carry a little like backpack, and that’s my life.”

Um, yeah, so you start with the red pill, then you—be—then you create content around that red pill—says you’re talking about that lifestyle and sharing everything from like, “Hey, people always ask what I keep in my backpack for the day; here’s what it is.” It’s like—yeah, there’s every bit of content you can come up with that’s like poppy, that’s like fits that red pill. So then you be—that—big—gives you authority on that subject, so you become like a authority. And so, you know, Pomp became an authority around Bitcoin, and Tim Ferriss became an authority around life hacking, and you’ve become an authority around nomadism, and then you take that, and then you basically spin off one of many businesses that can come up with it, but every one of those business—either it’s a big money maker, or it’s just another funnel and more content, more new audience that’s gonna like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that you are like talking about. And so it—even though you’re doing six things, they’re all actually part of one flywheel, and every one that you do is gonna feed it, either because it’s gonna give you a bunch of cash that lets you fund this lifestyle in a bigger and better way, or it’s gonna give you new content, new stories, new things to be known about um, that fit that lifestyle as well. That’s how I see it. I’m curious, is that a good—is that—traffic—is really accurate?

And my thing started when I was—I was blogging, just like you said; I was blogging about like nomading, um, but I was blogging for my mom, because back then you had like travel bloggers—like 2013—and I was going to travel, kinda, and nomad, and I wanted to—you know, every place I went, I wrote a little—I was—this city to live in and stuff, and what happened—all the crazy [ __ ] that happened to me, and my mom was reading that. Um, but I wrote it in English because my mom was obviously Dutch, but I was like, “Okay, she can read English, so it’s maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff—more audience,” but it wasn’t like super like a big idea; it just kind of happened. And then those blogs started showing up on Hacker News, and I started writing more about like bootstrapping startups as a nomad in—in Thailand or something, or in Asia, and those started going on Hacker News really high, and I think that was the time—it was like 2013, 2014—there was a time when I noticed that um, the developers in San Francisco worked for all the startups; they also were realizing, “Okay, maybe I can start doing this remotely,” because remote work was not cool back then, and nobody was—not cool back then, because you had the Tim Ferriss wave in 2008; it’s like the first nomad wave, but there was—I love Tim Ferriss—but there was something about the—the followers there and the—the business that were created—they were kind of like—like shady; there was a lot of shady [ __ ] I met—I came across in Asia, in Thailand, like Americans and Europeans—it was like a lot of brain supplements and [ __ ]—like—do it—

Yes! Yes! Dudes.

Yeah, drug dealers, online directories, and like spam daxing, and like—they’re still shady [ __ ], but less, and I was like, “I really hate this shady [ __ ]. I don’t feel like part of the scene. Uh, I think it would be cool to make it more like uh, you know, mainstream, like reputable businesses, reputable jobs that do it.” Um, so I kept blogging about it, and it kept taking off in Hacker News, and uh—and you’re right, I think—and then I went on Twitter, and I think I kind of organically—people started following me, and then a lot of people went nomad; a lot of my friends went nomad because I was blogging, and they became my friends now. Um, and yeah, and then I started all those businesses, and—but I think it’s—it’s not like some—it sounds very like a constructive—it’s not a master plan.

No, it’s not a master plan; it’s very organic, like uh—I kind of try—I’m like user zero; I try to build stuff for myself, and I always have like—I have like new ideas—like there’s just like you said—red build—there’s like something that’s a discongruence in society and what I’m thinking, and most people then think like, “Okay, there must be wrong—something—there must be something wrong with me,” but I think like arrogance—I think there must be something wrong with society; maybe this is like a new thing, so I’ll try and make a little website about it, like inflation—like three years ago or two years ago, I was tweeting about inflation, like, “This shit’s gonna go crazy with all the fat printing money,” and everyone’s like, “Nah, inflation is fine. Stop—stop whining about it.” I’m like, “No, I’ll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are higher,” so I made this inflationchart.com website that shows the inflation numbers are really high—turned out to be true, kind of, now. So yeah.

That’s all great. What—what uh, technology are you using to build those sites, because they all do look alike, and you seem like you can spin them up like really quickly?

Well, that’s really funny, because I get a lot of criticism for the technology I use. I use PHP because that’s the language I knew, because I was making a blog, like—right—like WordPress, so I knew PHP a little bit, so I was like, “Okay, I just need to write with the language I know, because I don’t know under other languages,” and I did that, and then I use JavaScript, and I use jQuery, so everybody starts laughing now because jQuery is like way pass—a—but I still use it because it’s so easy to—you know, make a button, bind an event to it, age exterior to the server to the PHP script, does something with the database, sends it back, and it works for me really well, and I think it doesn’t matter what you use, but as long as you use something that’s really fast um, feedback loop and iterative loop, where you can really quickly develop—like I can make a new button in like, you know, 20 seconds, and deploy to the server; it’s really fast. And I know other developer friends of mine use a very big stack—all those—you know, Kubernetes and all the stuff—all these keywords I don’t really know—and for them it takes sometimes like, you know, an hour or maybe even days to deploy a new feature, and I think what we learned from startup and lean startup is that the customer feedback loop has to be very difficult to be very fast, iterative, so you can really quickly change stuff, and it also makes your customers really happy because they see something—they have a problem or a feature idea; you can really quickly build it, and then they see it, and that’s—I mean, if you want happy customers, that’s how you get it—you make something for them; they’re like, “Oh my god, I influenced this product!” And uh, yeah, so that works for me. So very—very simple stack.

We won’t laugh at you, because not because we’re nice; we just—we don’t know anything about—I don’t know what jQuery is, neither does Sam; I mean, nobody these days. You’re safe here; we’re too dumb to—to call you out on any of your technical—

Nice. Nice. It’s a good podcast. What do you—what do you think—what do you think this whole—your whole thing’s worth? Because if you go—okay, so depends—if you do 5x—sorry, Sean—go to his like sites, and you could see like it’s like something/open; it’s usually like the website/open, and then like it says like so many stats—most of which, honestly, are kind of useless—but it’s just like—it’s cool. Uh, it’s like, you know, like how many—seventy percent of them are like, you know, the equivalent of like a step counter; it’s like uh, it’s like, “Oh, how many DMs did I get today? How many uh—”

No, I don’t need it.

No, you do. You have it, but it’s collective—it’s like DM sense—you know, it’s collective events.

Yeah. But for example, I’m on nomadlist.com, which you said—yeah, I think your biggest one—/open, and on it you see the revenue chart; you see, you know, CO2 removed from the atmosphere; you see the full P&L; you see a bunch of other things, and one of them that you see is my—okay, so 73% profit margin—your team says 0.78, so I guess that’s like part—part-time—

Yeah, like full-time equivalent—like FTE.

Yeah. And then plus 492 bots—what is that service?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh, he has the valuation, too. He is—if you scroll down, it says we sold for—I mean, it’s not super accurate; I did business, but it’s the PE ratio of public companies that are similar in industry, and I try like sync it to that sometimes. Um, but the—dude, it completely depends on the multiple somebody’s going to pay for it, right? Like uh, have you seen those—those are extremely low—

No, I’ve sold nothing. I’ve been in selling processes with previous guests on your podcast, you know, so uh, but it kind of bounced off. I’m just a lot of—I think I’m just going to guess it was Andrew Wilkinson, because he loved Manchester United—

Yeah.

Because he loves job boards—that’s just a guess; I can’t say anything. But—80—I signed any—80% of the acquisitions they bounce off, right? So right now I’m like—I don’t really care. Uh, I like that I have cash flow, and my life is nice and—but I—until recently—I was really like—until like a few years ago—I was like obsessed by the selling, because you build a startup like in the movie—like Social—well, not the movie Social Network, but in big movies about startups, they’re like, “Oh my god, grow big and sell, and you’re a millionaire!” But then if you become millionaire yourself with your cash flow, you’re like, “Okay, why does it matter, actually?”

Well, let’s actually talk about that, because what’s interesting about you is you have a few that you could sell, so like Remote OK and Nomad Lists are both pretty cool. Have you calculated like how much money you want and how long it’s going to take you to get there via cash flow, and if it’s better to like—well, why don’t I just sell one, and I can get like an eight or ten million dollar lump sum, but then I still—on this other one that’s making like—yeah, three million dollars—I mean, have you thought—have you done that math? And—and what are you—

The thing is, most of my revenue is profit; like the margins are really high, especially Remote OK; it’s like—it’s like 94% margin uh, pre-tax, so it’s very high. Um, so I’d say 10x after—thanks—gets interesting. I think the problems with bootstrap companies—you usually get three, four, five x uh, profit or revenue, which is too low for me; it’s like—I can—I might as well wait three years or four years and sit in this chair, and the sites will probably keep running because they’re fully automated, and I barely need to work on them; they kind of just keep going. It’s like heavily automated—really heavy—heavy—it’s just that I won’t build new features anymore then, and the site will start looking a little bit old because you know, design trends change, but generally it will keep running, so it doesn’t make sense for me to—

Sell for you know, 5x or 4x. If I might as well wait, and also, like, normal, this is like my baby. So if I sell it, uh, they're gonna [ __ ] it up. I already know, because they always do. Um, like, let's say a big, a big remote startup buys it. Okay, I know VC fund remote startups are cool, but they're also going to be bought by big boring companies later, like corporate companies, right? And they're going to shut this [ __ ] down. They're like, and this is my contribution, this is my life's work; it's like a legacy. So, uh, remote, okay, I care less because it's a job board; job is not very interesting. But normally, this is like this whole movement and culture, and and there's like tens of thousands of people on there, and my friends are on there, and it's like this work of love, you know. And um, so yeah, it's hard; it would be hard to sell that because people are going to [ __ ] it up.

Are you the largest? Go ahead, Sean.

Well, one thing I was going to say, you tweeted out something that said a 10-year overnight success, which I think is a common, uh, uh, idea that most people don't, don't realize; which is, by the time you hear about something, you don't know the 10 years of kind of toiling and tweaking and iterating that it took before the big kind of breakthroughs happen. My life was the same way. You know, I started my first startup when I was 20, 21, and I made my first million by the time I was 30 or 31, right? Like it wasn't, it took 10 years, and um, and you know, and then, and then every year since then a bunch of great stuff has happened, but like it took a long time to get that breakthrough.

I was looking at your chart, Sam. I don't know if you saw this tweet that he has, but the chart basically shows, I think you start the sum of all my revenue together in one chart.

Yeah, yeah. It's all your revenue from all your projects, all together in one chart, and it's looking like it's like, I don't know, 2012 or 2013 start, and basically, if I go all the way up until, let's call it 2019, you're at maybe 600, 700k and per year in revenue, and only in the last like, like kind of the pandemic boom, you know, let's say 2020. From 2020 you went from under a million dollars to 2.5 million a year, right? So you, two, yeah, x, and you like it's because it sounds amazing. Wow, this dude's making almost three million a year. It's like, yeah, but he's also been building that momentum and stacking these assets, and it just really took off, and which I'm guessing is like pandemic fueled; a lot of people wanting to be nomads, and like you were there to catch that wave; you were the guy ready to catch.

Yeah, but now he, this was coming like, right, this was like, I did this presentation in 2015 where I predicted there would be one billion remote workers in 2030, and everybody laughed at me, and I was like, even in the comments, like YouTube comments were like, this is ridiculous, whereas your sources is [ __ ], and then, confident happened, and it suddenly seems very reasonable. And but nobody could have seen this coming, and I had no idea; I was actually kind of like thinking like, you know, of it, or what exactly, but it kind of like it, if you look at the chart, it's kind of like, you know, it doesn't really go anywhere, and I was like thinking, okay, this is [ __ ], like I, I tried, I tried everything to make it grow, and sometimes it grew, and sometimes it didn't, but generally it wasn't very, it wasn't like a VC startup where like, well, it looks like there's these p, there's these run-ups and then a plateau and run-up in a plateau, which is, by the way, that's how all progress actually looks if you zoom out.

And I remember that like during 2014 when I first moved to Silicon Valley, there was a small group of people like you, this I think when you created that first Slack community that was like, nah, being a nomad is the way to go, and um, yeah, but those people were like freaks, you know, they were, they were very yes, and but there were some people who took the red pill at that time. I think Steph Smith, who was just also worked at the Hustlers, she met you in I don't know, Indonesia or something like that, because um, she had, I think probably during that more like that time period, 2014, 15, 16, something like that, she was one of those people that defected, then whereas now there's like another wave, and like if you look at kind of like any lifestyle movement, it happens this way; it starts with like very, I could take crypto; it starts with the, the cypherpunks.

Exactly, you're right. Yes, they don't, they hang out in cryptography forums, and they took the pill first, yeah, and then came, you know, the next, the developers, then came the, the finance bros, and then it's the same with the next music, like music genres, like hip-hop, like early hip-hop, and I come from electronic music, so drama-based music, it was my previous career, like music producer; it's the same thing, like EDM taking off in the US in 2009, 2010 with dubstep; that's what broke EDM and U.S., that kind of stuff; it, you like these, these movements, these scenes are almost dead, and then suddenly something happens, like, right, and it's so unpredictable, you have no clue what's going on; you can only surf it. So I think the metaphor of surfing is very accurate; it's better to serve these waves in general. I think life, just surf waves, stop trying to control it, uh, just serve it, and kind of like, you know, pivoting, like pivoting startups into that's pretty much just serving, like steering the surfboard over the waves, because you cannot, you cannot control the market at all, you cannot control society at all.

One of the things that bothers me about the this indie hacker movement is, well, I, I just, I really, I really like it; I like it, but in general, what I don't like about it is like people think pretty small, so they're like, uh, you know, like there's, it's kind of related to like the FIRE movement, which is like, oh, I just want to save a little bit of money so I can make 40,000 a year in passive income, and and I'm like, oh, that's cool, like getting your first step is cool, but like that can't be it with life; like you have to like, you know, you're going to want more, you want to do more things and contribute to society, and with a lot of these indie hackers they kind of come up with silly stuff where it's like a small widget that they sell for four dollars a month, and they hope that they can get to a thousand dollars a month, and I'm like, man, that's like neat if you're just starting out, but I think that this could be bigger, and you're actually one of the few people that I've seen go harder; you know, you're going harder on this.

Um, are there any others like, do you think I'm going harder on it?

Like, well, your numbers are bigger, like it's like, like it's, it's substantial; like your numbers are nice already, and it could be survivor bias, right?

Well, yeah, definitely, but I still think that there's a mindset of like, um, like, for example, your Twitter bio thing says your meter is going to three million; I would say most people who are indie hackers and makers and kind of like the, the sort of tinkerer community, they don't even have their meter to their, their meter, you know, initially is going to start much lower, sixty thousand or seventy thousand a year. Yeah, and maybe yours did too, but then you like, oh, cool, I filled up that meter, I leveled it up, so what was your like initial goal, was it like making enough to not need a job, or where did you start, when did you get more ambitious?

So I, I mean, back when I started, I had a YouTube channel for this electronic music I was making and stuff, and I was making like a few thousand dollars from YouTube AdSense, so I had some runway, uh, some cash flow to live off of, travel off and work on mini startups, but it was very fast; it was shrinking because of the competitive, like the copyright claims on YouTube in 2012 and stuff, so it was pretty much becoming like below a thousand dollars a month, um, but uh, so I had that cash show, but to go to your question, I think it's a power law; like you always have a few people in a scene who will make more money or get more successful and stuff; also there's a delay effect; I started in 2013 or 2014. All these indeed, this indie scene didn't really, it wasn't cool until maybe I think 2018 or something, 2017. So these people that are going into it now, they're just starting kind of, and I think the widget thing is interesting because you said it's only a widget, uh, if you make one feature really well that solves like one problem, you can get some customers and you get some cash flow, and then you can build a second feature, and you can slowly scale up, uh, to a bigger, to a real business, to real product toolkit, right? And then I think another thing is you don't see a lot of people with multi-million revenue because they will quickly raise PC, like once you pass a million dollars a year, they will switch to, okay, let's go big, let's go become a billion dollar company, and I think I'm the exception; I'm like, I don't want to be building another company; I'm fine, like, like this kind of chill, um, and that's why you don't see those people a lot, because I do know them and they quickly disappear, like this app we're using now, uh, Riverside, I think is raised PC now, started bootstrapped, and then I think Oprah Winfrey used it, and because it's my friend Nandov, he makes it, he's like, dude, overwhelmed for you, so I'm like, oh my god, this is crazy; he's like, yeah, I think I'm gonna raise PC; I'm like, okay, yeah, you should do that, uh, because they think this is like, this could be bigger than just a few million, right?

So you tweeted something out the other day that's related to this; you go, not sure if people realize it, but if your app does twenty thousand a month on revenue, you're probably already a millionaire; twenty thousand dollars per month times twelve months, assume you could sell for, let's call it four or five multiple; yeah, that's a million dollar selling price, right? You're sitting on a million dollar asset, and when you put it that way, I think that sounds, and it is, way more achievable than this idea of like, I got to build a million dollar business; like I don't know, I don't, do I have the big idea, whatever, but getting something to 20 to 30,000 a month in revenue seems approachable, right? It's approachable, and that's kind of awesome; I think that's an amazing, like a, like you didn't, all you did is you said something that was true out loud, and I think if more people heard that, that's why I'm kind of bringing it up here; I think if more people heard that, that is a pathway to a millionaire status that does not require like winning the startup lottery of like inventing the next big thing or working and saving and, you know, paying your crazy W-2 taxes for like, you know, 15-20 years to get the same, same outcome.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, and I think it's, it's reachable, especially if you think about high automation, very high margins; so software business, you, you're not going to hire a big team of 10 people immediately; you work with part-time contracts, like I do, and you keep your margins very, very high, because then you can sell for 5x, right? Then your revenue is almost your profit, so it's the same. Um, yeah, I think 20k, brainstorm or business together that could get to 20k, so what's an idea that you, you're not currently building, but you thought of, because I'm sure you're an idea guy, and you think, uh, you can make a website that does x, or you could make Nomad Lists for this other niche, or you could make, you know, um, the, the immigration one for this other thing, so what's a business, let's brainstorm a business together; what's a business that you think could get somebody to this millionaire status?

Dude, I think what's, man, it's like, again, this is so personal, so I've been living, like I used to live in hostels, right, in like dorms in 2014; I didn't have money, shared with six people, like crazy. Then I started like private rooms in hotels, then the rooms got a little bit more luxurious because I had more money, and then I started discovering like apartment hotels, and it sounds like [ __ ], but it works so well with remote work. So I mean, I was part of the hotel right now in Europe on the beach, and there's a kitchen.

What's an apartment hotel? What does that mean? Sorry.

Apartment hotel is essentially a hotel, so full-service, furnished, nice interior hotel room, but you also have a kitchen; you have a bedroom; you have a living room; you have it, you know, it's very big; it's pretty much like an Airbnb, but you pay per month or per night or whatever; you pay per month.

Well, you can pay for a night, you can pay for a month; it's just like Sean, um, it's like that guy or whatever; yeah, it's like Sonder, and it's like all, uh, I forget the other one; the guy was supposed to come on the podium, canceled.

You did one of these in Nashville, right, or something where you're like, this is awesome, it's working.

Yeah, it's like a, it's basically just an apartment that you can rent for five days, and they're pretty cool; I do, I do them all the time. The problem that I've experienced is within New York, it's like 10 grand a month, and it's like 600 square feet, so that's why I tend to go Airbnb, but I'm in smaller, less expensive cities; you can get like a thousand square foot place for like six thousand a month, and it's just, it's basically, uh, an apart, apartment building that has one floor or all floors dedicated to Airbnbs.

Yeah, the problem of Airbnb is that I've noticed the quality is very, very high; there's a big range of quality, and there's problems; there's no daily cleaning; it feels too much like, um, unexpected, like you don't know what's gonna happen; the water stuff might break; if things break here, you just get a new apartment, right? And I've done this in Europe, and I've done this in Asia too, in Thailand, and I spend about, you see, two to three k, three and a half k, so it's a lot of money; it's more than normal rent, but the cool thing is that it, it solves a lot of problems you have in your daily life, um, because it's surface and stuff, and it's, it's a huge thing in Asia; it's a huge thing in, in Southeast Asia, even in Korea, Taiwan and stuff, so I think that's going to be bigger because of remote work, because you have remote workers, even with families with kids, and you don't want to live in a hotel, or a hotel room is very depressing; like I go insane in hotel rooms; it's just like a bed, and you can barely walk around the bed; there's no space; I need to cook food; I need to buy steak from the local butcher; I need to cook it with broccoli and spinach and with my friends and stuff, and you can do it in an apartment hotel, and I think the, if you target, it's a high-end market, I think of remote workers that make a lot of money, like 200k or 100k, something; if you target them, you can make a lot of money because it's, um, service furnished.

So what would you build? You'd actually build an apartment hotel, or you'd build a digital product? That's a big question, because I, I'm a software guy; I don't wanna, I don't wanna own stuff; I don't wanna have all this; I don't even wanna buy land; I don't even want to buy a house; I want to be able to be a consumer, a customer of these kind of things, right? But I wanted long term; I want to be able to rent for like six months, you know, or 12 months even; I want to be guaranteed to stay. So we, uh, my wife and I are like, we're at the point where we're gonna start having kids soon, and I live, not like you entirely, but a little bit where we spend, we spend half the year one place, half a year at the other place, and what we're going to do next year is just rent, do a 12 month, month lease in New York, and just not be there all the time, but I'm looking to rent all of my furniture, and I've been looking at a place where I was like, all right, I just want to like book this one place, and I want to pay someone like three grand a month, but they have to show up before I arrive; they've got to completely set it up, yes, and it's gonna be 100 furnished for me, and I've been looking at these, and there's a few startups in the space that are doing furniture rental, and furniture rental is not popular right now, and I tell people all the time, I'm like, I just want to rent all my furniture; I don't want to own any of it, and they, they think it's nonsense, and they think it's crazy, but if you run the math, it's significantly, like it's about the same in terms of price, but in terms of headache, I think it's a thousand times better, and that's another.

Yeah, yes, yeah. So it's, it's all about the headaches, so if you can afford it, you can reduce the headaches of ownership, and ownership, uh, it sounds so privileged though, but whatever, it ownership is a big hassle; [ __ ] breaks all the time, and if you are like, if I spend my time on my laptop building on these apps, it's probably better use of my time than managing all this, this stuff, and if a company can specialize in, you know, managing this stuff and renting it to you, it's much better. I think that's a real, you're on point; that's a real business, and um, imagine you can go to a website, you can say like, okay, you can choose different sets of furniture, different interior stuff, paintings on the wall or whatever, and you can just click, and you arrive, and it's already done for you, like you said. I think that would be really interesting.

Uh, yeah, what, what else? Yeah, things that you're interested in, either kind of niche categories or things in your lifestyle that you're like, huh, I do this lifestyle thing differently than people; this could be, you could build a business around this. I think that the biggest problem with the digital nomad thing is that there's a, maybe it's a good big podcast just to say that, uh, there's a perception that people travel really fast, and I have the data that they don't travel fast; they travel like every few months, or even, I think the average is seven months now; it's very slow. So the, the word digital nomad is, it's a horrible word, of course, we have so many connotations, but it's mostly remote working people who want a little bit of a different life, want to see different places a little bit, um, you know, they have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, they have kids, even this family is doing this as well; moving around every week doesn't really work; being very slow is big, and if people are more aware of that, they can find a lot of products built for this long-term slow-mad market, which most of us are; we're mostly slo-mats, and I'm a little mad, also.

Slow-mads, yes. Think about education, think about like homeschooling is taking off also because of remote work, uh, if I have kids, I, I don't know if I want to put him in a regular school, maybe, you know, Elon Musk builds his own school; that's kind of cool, but you can do things in a different way, and like now it's still very, we're still niche, like this remote work thing is still niche; it's going to get only bigger; there's only going to be more, more people doing this once physical jobs get automated, so um, if you make products, I have no specific product, but if you know, if you build products for those people, that's a high-end market of like tech workers that are most.

So if you don't, but you said that you don't own stuff, or you, you kind of said like you don't like owning stuff; you said that you, you said that you don't want to own real estate, so if you're making two and a half million dollars a year in profit, this is a question that Sean always asks that I'm stealing it, which is, what do you do with your money then?

Yeah, so I'm heavy in ETFs, um, I read a blog post by what's his name, the guy from Google that does SEO, and he's like, I just put everything into in ETFs, so Vanguard ETFs, S&P 500, um, but also I'm heavily invested in Asia because I believe in Asia; I believe in the future; I know the West, there's a lot of things about Asia that are good, but it's very, I still think it's very futuristic, and um, I also invest in crypto, like I hold Bitcoin and Ethereum, um, it's always scared to say those things on the podcast, right? But it's all like very secure and stuff, so it's not exactly the most shocking thing to us; every tech guy, every tech girl is crypto.

Yeah, exactly. But I, I mostly, you're actually not allowed to have that haircut if you don't own like three.

Yeah, you can't have a high fade with like long top hair, yeah, yeah, if you don't own three.

Um, I spend about like four, five k a month or something; that's it. So most of it is just, uh, I do need to pay tax, but after that, most of it goes to, you know, ETFs and stuff. It's scary to invest now because it's a scary time, but generally I'm like, I want to do this for 20, 30 years in ETF invested and stuff, and sometimes stocks, but my, I did a benchmark, my S&P 500 ETF outperformed all my stock decisions over the last two years, so I'm stupid, just like most people.

Sean, you want to tell them what you did recently? What?

Oh, selling with your stocks.

Yeah, yeah. So I sold, not everything, but pretty much everything; sold maybe 70, 80 of the stocks that I hold, um, I get that, I mean, yeah, but yeah, I'm scared; they always say like, don't try and time the market, so I'm like, okay, I'll just sit and just crash with the, you know.

Why didn't you do that? Why don't you just like chill?

Uh, two reasons: one, I didn't want to risk a margin call because I borrowed a little bit against my stock portfolio, but, and you know, to what I felt was extremely safe, and it's still safe, but I was like, ah, look, if this drops another, you know, 20, then all of a sudden I'm having a headache that I don't want to deal with; I don't want to have to deal with freeing up a bunch of cash just to buffer this, so I was like, I noticed that every morning I was waking up and I was checking it, and I was like, okay, logically I know I'm in pretty good shape here, but the stress of having to think about this is taking away from my, like, you know, my day-to-day quality of life; it's like, that's the opposite of what I want money to do; I don't want money to give me stress; my money's supposed to take away my stress.

So what did you do with the money? The opposite, what did you do with it? Where is that?

It's in cash right now, um, like I might do something like, whatever, some short-term, you know, fixed incomes type stuff, but like for now I was like, again, I don't care; like I don't need the two percent; I needed the peace of mind, and so that was the first thing; the second thing was, I thought, what will I regret more? What do I believe more? Do I believe that this is the bottom, or do I believe that this is kind of like, actually thinking that this is the bottom, you know, six months in, and that it's all going to get better soon, but basically like there's three paths: either it gets better now, it stays, this is about the bottom, but we stay here for an extended period of time, one, two, three, four years, or it has further down to go, and I basically thought that it getting things going up soon seemed like the least likely thing; like I would, I would actually be betting against that heavily, and so I thought, okay, I have nothing to lose here in terms of upside because I just fundamentally don't think that stocks and everything's just going to go ripped back up again, and we're all going to pretend like, you know, that was it; we just had a few months of pain, and then it all went right back up, and, and remember things go, things are all green again. So I thought, either it's gonna be flats, boring and sideways for a period of time, or it's gonna go down more, and I thought, well, in either case, then I won't regret being in cash because a, I don't have to sweat it every day; I don't have to think about it every day, and b, I'm there's no, I'm not losing anything during, you know, by doing this, and so that was my thought process, and I figured, okay, there's going to be these little bear market rallies, so just sell at the top of the next; so that's what I did; everything rallied five percent, I just sold, and I kept like, I don't know, twenty percent still in the market, and I just put, left the other eighty percent in, uh, and you know, not thinking about it, cash, but I held my crypto.

That's good. Yeah, are you guys mostly invested in the American, uh, stock market or worldwide?

Yeah, like you said, I believe in Asia; I'm like, yeah, I believe in Asia too, but I don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about; how do I go invest in Asia, and where would I invest? I don't even know what, what does that mean? Are you buying the equivalent of like an ETF for like Japan or something? What are you doing?

Dude, I had a Vanguard ETF China, and then suddenly disappeared from my broker app, and I'm like, what the [ __ ] is happening? And I get this message; they're like, Vanguard left China in March or something, because they were like, this is too crazy; I don't know.

Got something like, yeah, no, privatize, or did something, made private companies public or something.

Yeah, no, they, they [ __ ] Jack Ma for sure; there's a lot of weird [ __ ] happening, but I still think I should be invested in, in those markets, and uh, um, have I told you about the Jack Ma thing, how it's crazy that the third richest man in the world that they were trying to was like, hey, dude, shut up, and he's like, yes, sir; they just took Jack Ma. My brother-in-law calls me like, so we had one moment where like a month in when people started noticing Jack Ma's missing, and my brother-in-law in the car one day was just like, where's Jack Ma? Like if he was in the car, but he's like, bro, why aren't we talking about this? He's like, where's Jack? And we just started laughing, like, how crazy is that that Jack Ma is just not, like, what if you just couldn't find Elon Musk because he said something, you know, that that Biden didn't like, like, that the idea is crazy; they did it with the tennis player too.

Yeah, I saw that. My brother-in-law still calls me; he'll be like, he'll just call me out of the blue; it's been like a year now; he'll be like, yo, where's Jack Ma? And then he'll hang up, and like, that's the whole call; it's so great; you just feel like he's yelling, where is Jack Ma? But dude, that's the thing with Asia and China; like all the stuff is accurate; there's some crazy [ __ ], um, but the other thing is also accurate that there's, there's lots of happening in, in Asia, and I think in the West, in Europe and America, we have a blind spot because we...

Get so much information that's negative about Asia, especially about China, and I'm I'm not a China spy or something. My friends call me China spy because of that, but I think it's a blind spot, a little bit in the West. Uh, we're gonna miss out on, you know, I mean, China is gonna be the biggest economy in 2030, I think, by GDP. It's already the biggest economy, people pitching power parity or something, um, ignoring that, just you know, because there's a lot of arguments why we should ignore China, but it sounds like a blind spot in the West a little bit to me.

Do you uh, er, what, well, I'll do it, we'll do an easy one. Do you act, you like tweeted out your calendar and it was like free for a week or something like that? And I know Sean and I I I kind of like that sometimes. I don't like that because I'll do that for three days and I'm like, oh my god, I'm so bored. It are you, is it real that you just don't plan in anything?

Yeah, so this is the only plan thing, and it gives me stress because I'm like, oh [ __ ] this summer's coming up, um, but I mostly like I spend my days like I live with my friends, so my friends are my neighbors now. So I brought all these nomad friends to Portugal and Europe, and we kind of live together. A lot of a lot of them are in the city near here, whatever, everyone's kind of near, so we just have like dinners outside and we cook food and the sunset on the beach and just this nice chill life that I never had because I was alone in hotel rooms. I had friends, but they were always around the world, and now they're all kind of here, so I mostly do that. So I don't want to do calls about like, because what am I going to call about? Like I like having calls with you guys. What am I going to call with other people about? Like new business, I don't know.

Don't you get bored? Like, no, because I can I because I work on my websites, right? I open my make coffee, I make open my laptop, meet my friend, and we code a little bit together, make a new feature, um, you know, then you go to the gym, we go to sauna, uh, we go swim, uh, that kind of like, but that's very reason, right? This kind of chill life and I don't get bored as long as I ship a little bit on my websites, I don't really get bored. You're like the only rich person.

So basically, it's almost always the truth that no matter how hard you try, the more income that you make, your life your lifestyle gets inflated, uh, maybe sometimes not as much, but then other times a ton, and like I was like, oh, I'm gonna fight it. Like I can't imagine spending more than ten thousand dollars on a car or whatever, and then you make more income, you're like, uh, whatever, who cares. Um, you said you spend four or five thousand dollars a month. You're one of the few people that has acknowledged that your lifestyle actually doesn't seem like it's been it's it's not, no, at all. It's 100 on purpose, like it's very um, incidentally sometimes you spend more, right? Like last month was the hotels were really booked, so we had to pay a lot of money, but now it's chill again. Um, I think it's on purpose because I try to follow like last one was like 10k or something. That's still that's where you know we're in Lisbon, you're making three million dollars a year, yeah, but paying 10k for a hotel is ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense, like it should be the max like two or three k for me personally, but I've seen a lot of people um do that lifestyle inflation because I know from corporate, from again from studying business, I know the management management people and stuff, they get paid more and they get golden handcuffs, right? And they can't leave. A lot of my friends are like that, and I don't want that to happen to me. I mean, can't have it to me, but you get what I mean. Um, and I know that material goods don't really make me happy, so I buy a new shirt or something, or I buy a new iPhone, within two weeks I'm used to it, and there's studies on this, there's like research about this stuff, like if you buy a new car, even if you get married after six months, you're the same happiness. If you buy a house after six months, same happiness. So if you know that stuff, you know that okay, you don't really need to spend money so much, you don't need to buy stuff essentially, and um, generally it will probably make you happier.

Do you what do you think you would want to spend more on? Let's say that like you know, food, like good food, like organic, uh, you know, free-roaming, I mean it's cliché like Joe Rogan, right? But free-roaming grass-fed cow beef, you know, that are happy animals, organic vegetables, uh, you know, that kind of stuff, like not goods, you know, experiences, right? It's on purpose, I do this. What what are some of my experiences that you think are worth the money? What, sorry, what are some experiences that are like worth the money that you know? When most experiences? No, so that's yeah, you're right. So man, you got me like you're trying to find like stuff, right? Yes, I fly business guys because no, exactly. I'm done with uh, I I can't sit. I only do it long haul, and I only fly like I flew only once in the last 16 months, and I flew business Qatar, really nice, and you can lie down and sleep and stuff, but that's about it, I think. And you notice one thing I noticed like I was in Bangkok in this luxury kind of apartment hotel stuff, but it was a little bit too luxury for me, you know, and I was there for a month, and you start noticing that you don't meet as much interesting people. Like I met one instant person who had this giant wheat farm, the biggest wheat farm in Thailand, because I just legalized it. It was kind of cool, but generally it's a very different, it's more like a socialite kind of Paris Hilton audience, you know, but in the hostels you would meet crazy people, you would need backpackers, but also like researchers and entrepreneurs and fledgling entrepreneurs, you know, you met generally more interesting people because you were more uh in those areas, and I found the problem. Yeah, sorry, did I tell you about, did I tell you guys listen to this, Sean? Did I tell you about Sam Corkos from Levels, Level other Levels? Uh, what's the oh yeah, I know. Yeah, Levels. So the the Levels Health, the thing that goes in your arm. So this guy, so he raised, yeah, that's right. He raised uh, so he has a startup that makes eight figures in revenue. It's worth I think it was 400 million dollars. So let's just say that he's worth 150 million on paper, not real on paper. He came over to my house and he was with his girlfriend, and she made a comment like joking like, oh, you know, he always gives me a hard time because it takes me forever to pack, but that's ridiculous. I only had this one carry-on, and I was like, well, how long does it take you to pack, Sam? He goes, oh, I don't pack. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, he had a drawstring bag. You know what a drawstring bag? It's like a bag that like where you can get these at conferences. Yes, he had that's all he had was that bag, and he goes, well, you see, I only own the clothes that I'm wearing right now, which is a white t-shirt, a pair of pants, socks, underwear, and shoes. I only own that plus another pair of underwear, a jacket, and uh, this bag and my laptop, which I have right here on me. That's literally the only thing that I own.

Wait, what? He goes, yeah, I've been doing I've been doing this for like eight years now or something like that, and I only live and like I do what you do. He's like he does what you do, Peter. He lives in um, like these Airbnbs and hotel-style setups, and he's been doing it for years, and that's all he owned, and I thought that was the craziest laundry every day. I don't understand how is he? Well, I was like, I was like, so I was like, well, what if you gotta go to a funeral? What if you have to do this? He goes, well, I just go to a thrift store um when I need to go and I buy stuff and then I just bring it back, and he does it partly out of I think this is my guess, he does it partly out of um, like convenience of not wanting to worry about stuff. I also think that there's like a philosophy, like a very philosophical thing going on here, because it's like extreme, but have you ever heard of anyone, Peter, being that crazy dude?

Yes, actually, like in 2014, I was in Chiang Mai, and it was an Australian guy who would fly from Australia to Thailand to Chiang Mai with only his MacBook Air and the clothes he wore and not even a bag, and he would buy everything he needed on the spot, and he would be there for like two or three months, uh, and he would donate the clothes he wore to charity, and then he would fly back to Australia with his MacBook Air in his hand. I was so impressed. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Well, I can see the clients hold history, calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a test from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot, grow better. That see that's cool. I would do that because I think that actually adds to the experience of traveling, like traveling fully light and then when you get there, so yeah, find what you need and then giving it away when you leave, like I'm I'd actually get down with that, but like I I rotate to underwear and I put my underwear in my bag. No, but I think it comes down to philosophy, and I do think it sounds pretentious, but I don't care. Uh, it comes down to constraining your life in a certain way. I think constraints are good in creativity in life and stuff, and um, it makes you focus on the really important things in life for you personally. It must be different for everybody, you know, for me that's like, you know, girlfriend, friends, health, food, you know, happiness, all that stuff kind of and and creative work, meaningful work, very important. Like I need to be able to I need to have something to do in my day. I need to feel like I'm contributing something, like Sam said. And uh, so what do you own? So I have a backpack, I have a rolling suitcase though, like a small one, um, I have clothes, I have an iPhone, MacBook Pro, uh, I have a toothbrush, um, you can name all the things you own, right? I have two Stadia control controllers, like gamepads, you can use Stadia here. It's kind of cool, um, yeah, that's about it, I think. I mean, I mean, I have like backup phones and stuff because you know, two-factor authentication stuff, but it's not, you think you're gonna do this? You mentioned you could talk about your family or not if you want, but do you think you're gonna do this when you have kids? So what does doing it mean? Because I'm mostly settled down, I'm also in one place, I'm just like trying to not by doing it as in uh not owning stuff. I mean, like I I think your life is cool, but you have to acknowledge that this alternative in the sense of like you know, one percent of those, but yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I think it's interesting that like the stuff I do may or may not become a thing because a lot of things I did eight years ago now are normal, right? So it might be that the things that who cares become, I mean, if you're happy, who cares? If be oh, no, it's not about me. It's more like yeah, it's more like it might become nature. Um, I think uh, I think even if you have kids, you can do it in an alternative way. You can uh, you know, you can go to thrift store, get like secondhand toys or something, secondhand clothes, that kind of stuff, but it all doesn't have to be this so consumerist and and buying and you know, I mean, it can we can do it in a different way, and um, I'm just trying to figure out like how how I yeah, I want to do that, and we've trying to focus on yeah, a nomadless style, red pill before briefly, which was um, my I forgot what it's called, Sam. Do you remember the name of like the zero-waste project or the zero the zero project or something like that? So basically, my wife told me about this. She was like, yeah, you know, there's like uh, like in the city in the little town we live in, there's uh, like this Facebook group, and what they do is it's just like it's like a barter, it's like oh, it's not even a barter economy, it's like a giving economy. So it's like if you have stuff, you just give it into the giving circle, and other people can take it out, and then they can give stuff in. It's basically like oh, your kid, I think it's a lot around kids stuff, like my kids grown out of this, but that's it. It doesn't make sense, right? Yeah, like Craigslist randos, it's like yeah, amongst this trusted group of people who buy nothing, the same thing, but the Buy Nothing Project, yeah. Um, and I think I might have butchered exactly how it works. Sam, do you do you know a little bit how? Well, it's just the idea of like um, instead of like reduce, reuse, recycle, it like for like consumer or for like plastic and [ __ ] they're like, no, no, let's just like uh, reuse, we're gonna reuse everything. So instead of buying a new toy, we're gonna go get one for free, and then we're gonna give away when we're done. It's just a mindset, and then there's uh, there's a bunch of companies in the space, but the big one is like this uh Buy Nothing series of Facebook groups. We're just like, I'm gonna give away, I'm giving away these children's clothes, come get them. Yeah, I think I mean it's that's nice, like it doesn't make any sense. You have a baby and it grows out of its clothes every month or something or every two months, so why would you buy everything new if you can ask your family for clothes they already wore, whatever, right? It makes more sense to me personally, um, yeah.

Who do you want to be like? Who do you who do you admire and who do you want to be like? Because like the reason why people buy [ __ ] for their kids is because they want to have they want their kids to have Jordans so they look cool for other people because they want to impress other people. Who do you want to impress and who do you want to be like? You think like who do you look up to? Um, I I like Derek Sivers. I don't know if you know Derek Sivers. Yeah, he's uh, tell me about him. Who is he? He's um, he started a company called CD Baby in the 90s, I think, or in early 2000s, and which was like one of the first uh indie kind of music distributors where you could send your music as any uh musician, and they would press the CDs for you, and they would send it to your customers and stuff, and and they also know on Spotify and stuff, and he sold it for 30 million dollars. I interviewed him for my best first thesis, actually. He's really nice guy, like the most nice guy in startups, I think, and he's very he writes a lot, he writes a lot of books now. He's very philosophical, also kind of nomadic. He's been in like living in Singapore, he lived in New Zealand, lived in U.S. and stuff, and he's very um, if you go to his website like dereksivers.org, surface.org, I think he writes very much kind of same concepts that I talk about, like um, about simple life and and uh, yeah, it's hard to describe him, but I think that's a very inspirational guy to me, and I don't really need to impress. I think I want to impress my parents just but they're already happy with me, so it doesn't really matter. I want to um, I want to try and stay have like a stable, you know, happiness because I've been depressed a lot. I've been anxious, I had like especially when traveling, you go crazy in these, you know, in hotel rooms alone, like um, traveling can can it brings you very deep into your own self and stuff, and I think the most important of me is to impress myself by just you know, being stable and and having a stable happy life with with people around me and uh, yeah, like kind of wholesome life, you know, and that's my, what part of your life are you not impressed by for your either yourself or Derek Sivers or if any if any of those people right you just mentioned like the lifestyle you mean? Yeah, what part of your life is not at that point where they're you you feel like it's not impressive in that way that that like, well, like I want to have a family too, like you guys, uh, and that's what I'm working on, um, and yeah, that's like that's more of a focus now, you know, like pretty easy, by the way, you just got to do one thing. I'll tell you to find the right girlfriend, you know, and then you need to see if they're not crazy, you need to like connect and all this stuff, and I think uh, yeah, that's that's it. Don't um, dude, Sean, you have a yeah, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. I wanna hear what you say. No, I mean, like a little bit like you say like like I think about Elon Musk every time Elon Musk presents something, you're like, oh [ __ ] like that's so cool. Like why am I building shitty internet websites? This is my only life I have. I'm gonna die. I should do something bigger, but then I have to like bring myself back to like, no, it's cool. You're doing okay. Like doesn't really need to be bigger, but I mean, everybody wants to make like space rockets, I guess, but it's just so hard to do that, you know?

Sean, you um, you have a you have a dog, right? A little dog? Yep, I've got a big dog. How do I love? Yeah, yeah. So you like animals? I love owning animals, like big aggressive-looking dogs. That's what that's my thing. It's like I'm a weirdo. How do you live this the the I want to live a little bit more like you, it's and I can do it uh a now because I have a little bit of money, so I can just like pay for fancier Airbnbs that are pet-friendly, and b I can only do it basically in America. Doing this lifestyle abroad with an animal, even in America, I drive. You either have to fly private or you have to drive most places. Um, I drive most places. How do you how do you live this life with an animal? I don't have animals, but I want them. I had I had two cats with my ex-girlfriend, and it was actually interesting. We went to in Bangkok to this this luxury apartment hotel, and they were cat-friendly, and it was like this, you know, high society of Bangkok people with cute cats and cute dogs and Asia. All the dogs are small, they like small dogs. I like big dogs too, like you, Sam, but uh, and they walk around in the hotel, and it's super cute, and they have like cats and dog ice cream and stuff and food, and they have little like a little beds for them to sleep in and stuff, and everything is serviced, and that's another big market, I think, you know, tech people with pets and stuff, they want to travel as well.

Dude, Sean, have you looked into have you guys looked into flying in America with an animal? So basically, if you're why do you think I don't go places? Dude, your animal's under 20 pounds, right? Yeah, she is, but like that also means like she's not like tough enough to do all this stuff, like we're like, oh god, how's she gonna handle this experience, um, you know, of going on a seven-hour flight or whatever. Yeah, but she she's the dog's able to so like in term I don't I don't know if she's physically able to, but she's allowed to. You could put it in a carrier and put it on your lap or like in the above whatever the suitcase thing, and if you have an animal that's above 20 pounds, who's putting their dog in the above thing? You can put your dog down. I don't know, dude. It's like it's like putting a blanket over a it's like putting a blanket over a bird cage. It's I I don't know. That's just what you put it underneath. You you put it underneath there, whatever you [ __ ] do. I don't know. I don't have one of these things, but uh, that's what they say on the directions when you look online, but uh uh, like if you have an animal above 20 pounds, you cannot bait, you basically cannot. This whole emotional support animal thing that's kind of nonsense, it's kind of getting phased out. You cannot bring an animal, a dog on a flight. I I'm always amazed that for popular routes they don't have like a once a month or twice a month animal-friendly. It's gonna happen. It's absolutely gonna happen. It's a huge growing market, I think, because a lot of something rich people are not having kids, sorry, right? I was gonna say I read something that one airline is like being like, yeah, we'll fly pets, like I think they do a lot of pets in the cargo or whatever because most airlines have been phasing that out, and one I think it's Southwest, I forgot which airline, some airline is making bank because they take all the pets, and uh, it was like a differentiator. It's like, you know, bags fly free, but it's like, hey, we let you fly your pet, and everybody else is saying no nowadays. Man, I think you can do it. You can. I think it's all about slow matting, so if you do if you move like every let's say every six months, it's not that bad for the dog or the cat, uh, and you you give them a stable life in where you arrive and not too much chaos and stuff. I think it's okay. I think it's not okay if you keep moving like every week or every month. This might be a little bit stressful for the dog and the cat, right? But six months, like yeah, it's okay, and especially if you get a tweet, you had a great tweet. It was if you don't have a dog in your profile picture on Twitter, are you even trying? It's a growth hack. It's the biggest growth, right? Sam has one, right? You have a Facebook picture, I think. Uh, yeah, you can guys use this on Tinder, right? This was a dinner dating trick, like you you because they swipe right for the dog, not for you, but they still swipe right. So yeah, I've noticed there's like two hacks when I was single. If like if I ever walk around with like a niece or a nephew or like a kid, uh, that's like an automatic door opener to meet women, and then the other one was having a a an aggressive but nice-looking dog. It's like doors, I'm all they're disarmed, we're good, you know? And why does that be aggressive, but aggressive-looking but nice? Is that one of those things where it's like dog owners look like their pets, and so if your dog looks a certain way, they'll think that about you. They want to heal you, you know, like women want to heal you sometimes. They're like it's like seeing a guy with like a sleeve tattoos who smokes cigarettes in a tattoo under his eye who like you know, just wants to like spend time and cuddle, you know, like it's like so it's really good. It's you know, you're you're you're eclectic. I don't know. It just works. Don't ask me. Uh, that just works. Yeah. Um, so dude, I love summer yet dogs, by the way, the big white polar bear dog, right? And I think it's very strange, like it's it's so fluffy. It's like that's a very Asian move of you. That's they're very popular in Asia, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen him here too, yet, but yeah, what are some is there anything that people assume about your life and your lifestyle and your businesses, uh, that you like, for example, with the Hustle as well as Sean's Milk Road, a lot of people are like, oh, that's it, it's just a [ __ ] newsletter. You just write these these words, and you just hit send. That's so easy. Anyone can do it, and it's like, well, no, it's actually like a user acquisition play, like you gotta know how to do that, and then it's also like you're just not good at writing, like you have to be good, and that's just talent. You either have it or you don't, and so that that's like some misconceptions about our businesses. What about yours? Is there anything that um people always assume and you're like, no, because like people can anyone can copy you?

Yeah, I think generally people think that every uh website or app or company they're a customer of that it's more simple than actually is because you can't see behind the hood, and it's actually way more complicated than you think because there's so many edge cases in every business that you need to code like if statements for or build like little scripts for special features. It's much more complicated, and I think people realize that when they start because people always clone you, right? Like they make a copycat of your website, and somehow doesn't take off because they've been able to copy the outside of it, the aesthetic kind of, but they don't know what's happening under the hood, so it's um, it's much more complicated. Like, dude, a job board is much more complicated uh than you think, like um, [ __ ] how do you explain this? There's so many little parts that you know, especially companies want, they want, you know, invoices for every little thing. They add the price is dynamic, that kind of stuff. I I changed job post pricing based on how many people post jobs on my site, for example. There's so much stuff happening behind the curtains that you don't see. Yeah, it's much more complicated. I was thinking about the misconception about yeah, sorry. And a lot of your stuff is automated to where like you don't have to be involved. It kind of runs itself. You said everything's automated. I think 99.99 and to post on your job board, it ranges from a hundred to a thousand dollars, I think, whatever the huge range. For sure, yeah, yeah. How would you for the like I'm I'm tinkering with something that costs many many thousands of dollars a year. Is there how would you figure out how to do that? Like and so in my head, I'm like [ __ ] I gotta hire a bunch of sales people. That sucks. Do you think that you could automate most things even that are high-ticketed items?

Oh, for sure, dude. I sell job post bundles for like 50k via Stripe, which is like amazing for me to me like I'm like, how do you do that? That works. So you make a page called Buy Bundle, and you have the this you can go to remoteokay.com/buybundle, and you'll see like a slider where you can make your own bundle and get a discount based on it, and it's all automated, and you add your credit cards, and then you pay, you know, 50k or 40k whatever. And how many people do that? Oh, yeah, it's it's like a lot of it's like 30 of the revenue, I think, bundles. No [ __ ] So someone's use yeah, using a debit card or whatever for 50k. Yeah, dude, these company cards, this is what this is lagging information. People don't know the company cards have been upgraded, I think, because they're using it for much more these days. Really? Like it's a lot of money, and I have no idea, like I never thought like I don't I'm not hiring people. I don't know how this works. I just tried.

Like, okay, maybe I think companies ask me, like, "Can we buy a few job posts for in the future?" I'm like, "Okay, I'll make this thing," and a lot of companies use this. So you figure out the features that people want based on, uh, talking to them, of course.

Dude, I'm looking at the sales pages by bundle, so by 25, 25 jobs is $22,000. You do something interesting on your sales pages: you just pack it with information. That's totally the right move, but you pack it with text. Like, you use icons to kind of break it up; the emojis. Yeah, I use emojis a lot. Yeah, no, it looks like a circus, right? But it kind of works. It's not like well-designed, right? It's not like minimalist design; it's just like I just add stuff every day, and it just keeps growing, but it works.

Kind of what's the biggest purchase someone has made? I can scroll up. I got to jump through it. I got another call. I got, I gotta run too, Peter. This has been amazing.

I gotta go.

Yeah, nice to meet you, Sean. See ya. What's uh, what, what has been the biggest purchase that you've had? This scrolls all the way up to $150,000. I think 50k or something around 50k, maybe 49. But that happens, that happens a lot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is crazy. Yeah, I'm working on this thing, and like it's like 10k a year, and I'm like, "Oh, man, I'm gonna have to like get on the phone all the time."

Yeah, seeing you is quite inspiring, but I get annoyed if I, if I need to use like, I want to use these uh, location service APIs to figure out where are people traveling to, for example, and it's always like you need to do a sales call, you need to like contact us and stuff, and I get so annoyed with it, and I know people on Twitter get annoyed with it that they can't get a price directly and sign up, you know.

Um, yeah, I think it's much easier to do like this, like a sales flow. Um, I think it's easier. I would argue maybe for me it's easier for you, but I would actually argue there's there's a world where it's not as effective, though, because I would, I'm in the same boat as you. I don't want to have to do all this crap, and I'm not naturally a salesperson. But when I hired a sales team, and uh, they, they shockingly were shockingly good at drumming up demand, and I remember a cool podcast with the founder of Squarespace, I think it was, and he was like, you, he's an engineer, he's like, "I don't want to leave my room. I don't like talking to people. I like freedom," and he goes, and he goes, "The biggest one, a huge mistake I made was I looked down on salespeople, and I looked down on this like type of pricing where I think I got to get him on the phone," but he was like, "I looked down on it, and I was wrong. It was effective. They dr, they created demand for a product," and that surprised me most. So like, yeah, I don't know, I think so. I think you're right. I think my problem is that it's, it's been, it's very hard to meet good salespeople or to find them, and it's unclear for me how I, how I can hire them, and um, you know, I, how can I rate a person to hire them uh, as a good salesperson? I don't know what's a good salesperson, and I, I've never done outbound, almost never done outreach and stuff, um, and I'm scared that if I hire salespeople, I need to manage them, and then you know, they might [ __ ] up, they might start spamming everywhere in LinkedIn, and then it becomes like a screenshot thing on Twitter, like, "Look, Peter Levels is spamming with his website," and stuff that might turn bad.

And I think you're right, if you get the right salespeople, it can work. I just, I'd never been able to, you know, find those people. It just matters what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for happiness and a well, if you're opting for happiness and like a good life, do it your way. Your way is working really well. If you want to like grow at a certain rate per year and you want to really push it, I, I do think a salesperson is, is you do need a sales team, but that's not what you're optimizing for. You're optimizing for freedom, so and happiness.

Yeah, and I also think that there's this, there's different types of companies. For example, there's companies that ask for a lot of forms, like they want like a W-8 form, like all these US IRS forms and stuff, they want you to sign everything, they want you to sign an NDA, and and there's some companies that just, you know, enter their credit card on Stripe, and it's done. And it's different customers, and the customers that ask for a lot of questions on email, they generally convert less for me, they pay less money, and they are more of a hassle to, you know, do customer support for and stuff. Um, so you also, you get different types of customers. If you do it all automatically, you get more kind of modern customers that are easier to deal with, I think.

Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about?

Um, no, I think, I think we, maybe transparency. Like, the reason I'm so transparent is uh, um, I think it's very, like I said, I think it's very important to, to, to be honest and to, to show other people that you can build a, a nice indie company like this, um, by sharing every like ups and downs of it, um, and instead of because everybody else is only sharing like the good things and the "We're growing so fast, and we're hiring, and we're funded," and blah blah, and I think it would be cool if we did business in a maybe in a more wholesome way where we uh, you know, share everything and share the ups and downs and uh, yeah, maybe not grow super, super, super big, but more in a, you know, wholesome manner.

I like that, but I have a few critiques. The first is, yeah, I think that if you're high, so you remember Buffer, so Buffer uh, they did the whole stick, they did it even more extra, well equally as extreme as you, I would say, but they revealed one of my inspirations for sure, yeah, but they revealed everyone's salary, and they did that. Yeah, I think they did it as a marketing shtick. They did it because they're like, well, like, you know, like our product's okay, it's good enough, but like let's come up with a cool shtick so we stick out, and it aligns with our philosophy. It's great, and it worked really well for them, but I actually think that it probably hurts them after a while. It's really hard to do that after 100 or 150, I don't know what the number is, some amount of employees, because you're like, "Dude, I don't want my [ __ ] all out there," and when, if I was you, like I don't like, like when we sold our company, I didn't exactly reveal how much I made because I'm like, "Man, I don't want to be a target. I don't want people to take advantage of me. I don't want to be judged in a particular way. I don't want that type of attention," so I'd rather just say like round whole numbers instead of like exactly.

No, there's a real, there's a real security risk for sure. Yeah, like you don't want to talk about where you are right now.

Yeah, yeah. Part of it is because, yeah, for sure, 100. Yeah, yeah, 100. Part of the downside, but at the same time it's a marketing, it's maybe it's agrees with your, with your life philosophy, and also it's a pretty sick marketing stick. Like, yeah.

Thank you. Yeah, I think it's all, it's hard to stop it because I've been doing it for so long. It's become part of my identity. It would be hard to like hide all this stuff now, and they're like, "Where did this open page go? Like, why are you not sharing anymore?" I'm like, "I'm just done with it now," um, you know. Yeah, and I don't think it's, it's this recurring marketing machine that I think is a big part of why uh, my businesses work became successful and why I got a lot of audience on Twitter. It's because of this. I cannot deny that. So it's very hard to quit that, right? Once you've been doing it for so long.

Yeah, that's why I'm nervous about even doing it in the first place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's kind of like a, I haven't gone hard on YouTube or any other social platform because I'm like, "Oh, I don't want a commitment," uh, like you gotta keep up. I wanted to do YouTube as well, and I have the same problem. Yeah, I'm like, "This is gonna be a new recurring like activity I need to do every week. I need to upload a video, make a video."

Yeah, I think there's a world where you could do seasons, you know, like a TV show has a season. I think there's a world where you could do seasons and do quite well, but uh, the majority of people do it like regularly, and I'm like, "Oh, man, I don't want to get on that treadmill." That's scary. No, I think it burns you out. Like, look at all the YouTubers burning out. It's uh, they all bail. Extreme. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's extreme schedule.

Yeah, I think this is my, I think it might be interesting if I just sit in front of the laptop like this, and I just tell the stuff I, I know and I think, and instead of writing it down and just making like little videos. Uh, Derek Sivers also did that. He makes little videos about small topics, you know, five minutes, explain something in the next video, and so Alex Formosey is doing it, uh, the guy on our pod, he came on our podcast, Alex Formosey, he's been doing it lately, and he loves it, and he, and it seems, it seems like a lot, kind of a lot of work, but not that much work. No more work than this podcast, and I don't consider this podcast to be too much work, um, but it works well. But uh, dude, thanks for coming on. This has been fun. I uh, I hope you, you will come on more often, and we'll do a little more brainstorming this time.

Yeah, there was super fun. Thanks for having me. Yeah, hopefully we didn't, you, you said you were nervous because we were going to ask you.

No, but no, I don't think we asked anything because we didn't ask anything crazy.

Yeah, cool. There's not much to ask when you tell everyone on the internet about everything you do. Yeah, this is always when the good part of the podcast starts, right? Because you end it, and then like the, the real [ __ ], hopefully not the real stuff, I hope, was, was going on the whole time. It was great. Um, yeah, dude, thanks. This is awesome. Um, pimp out your stuff, so it's at Levels. Yeah, it's a twitter.com/levelsio, so l-e-v-e-l-s-i-o, um, and there's all the links for my websites there, so you can click from there. Thanks, dude. Thanks for coming. [Music] You