What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. I'm here with Peter Levels. He's a man who needs very
little introduction, but I'll do one anyway. You're the founder of Nomadlist, sort of the
hub for digital nomads. You're the founder of Vermodo-K, the biggest remote job board
in the world. And you're probably the primary inspiration for IndieHackers itself. And I
think it's been like four years now. Yeah, it's been four years since you've been on
the show. So this is your second time. How's it going? I'm great, man. So nice to see you
again. It feels like a century. It feels like we spoke last, like 100 years ago. It's great
to see you, man. I heard you've been living an offline life recently. So that's really
nice to hear. I've been super chill. I've been much less of a workaholic than I've ever
been in my entire life. And it's honestly, it's like disorienting. Because like, what
do I do with myself? Like, what do I do? And like, it's hard to like find hobbies and stuff
because they sometimes don't feel like as meaningful as like doing like a crazy all
in startup or being super passionate. I'm like, I guess I'm gonna collect a lot of plants
and like water them. But I'm like, maybe I'll get back into it. So nice. Yeah. I know exactly
the feeling you're talking about. Yeah. I've been trying to slow down as well, repeatedly
over the last few years. But I don't know, man. It goes in cycles, right? Like you, yeah,
you go in these work times and then you feel like burned out. You're like, Oh my God, I
feel too much. And then you want to relax, but then you get bored because you've done
real life and real life also gets boring after a while. So it's like this endless dance,
right? Yeah. Yeah. You just switched from one to the other. Although you're like, I
don't view you as like a cyclic person because it's like, what were you talking about last
week? You're like, Oh, I've, I've realized that I've shipped for a thousand days straight
on work in progress community. So it's like a literally not a single day in the last thousand
days. Have you missed? Yeah. And that's like, that's real consistency. You know? Yeah. I
feel like I've had that for like maybe 34 years. I read that from probably like age
eight to age 34. And then just like, wait, from age eight to age 34, you've been working
nonstop. Basically. AJ was like, I want to go to, I want to get an MIT. And then I was
like, work super hard. A brief step. And I was like, I want to become a professional
Starcraft player. And then I realized like, I wasn't as good as all the Koreans. And then
back to just working and then graduating college, startup grind, and then eventually indie hackers
and grinding on that. And then like, yeah, six months ago, this first time, like, what
if I just chilled out? Yeah. I think I'm exactly the same actually. Yeah. It's something like
from like seven or eight. Yeah. Like you want to, that's already when the ambition started
for us, I guess. Yeah. It's kind of like, what's the meaning of all of it? Right? Like
are you, are you driven by like some outcome that you're trying to achieve by being so
ambitious or is this like a thing that you just have to do for its own sake? You know,
like even if you weren't making any money or you weren't becoming famous because like
you have so many projects that are so successful that make millions of dollars, that you have
tons of fans are tweeting constantly. Like, is that the point? Yeah, I think it's a really
good question. And I think we're in a very similar situation where you probably don't
do it as much for the money anymore. Cause you probably were quite financially stable
and you generally want to do it for, uh, because you like the process. You like to do something
with your day. Like you like to wake up for something and you like to have this daily
challenge where like something doesn't work. And, and, or there's like a competitor who's
trying to take over who's getting better than you. You want, you know, you want to have
a goal in each day that and that goal can spend for weeks and months, right? But you
want to have something you're working towards to. And, and I feel like I've spoken to a
lot of people that are also that are not in startups and don't have their own business
and stuff. And a lot of them are really happy. Uh, some of them tell me that they miss that
kind of that thing we have, like this meaningful, like pursuits, this probably unhealthy. It's
not completely healthy. I think it's a mentally unhealthy pursuit because a lot of people
want to do it, right? They want to get into business or startups, but it's really mentally
taxing I think. And you need to be a little bit. It's an obsession for it. Like, I mean,
if you want to win, you need to be obsessed. Like look at Elon Musk, right? He's completely
obsessed. He can barely keep relationships going. So it's, it's not that really methodical,
but like, uh, it does give you, it gives you some kind of like meaningful, uh, thing that's
different and like watching Netflix, you know? Yeah. I don't know. I think, I think like
meaning often comes from doing things that are hard. Like if you're doing something that's
entirely hedonistic and it just feels good the whole time, it's hard to ascribe it meaning,
even if it's like helpful, but when there's like a part of it, that's like a little bit
self sacrificial and you know, it would be easier to do something else and you're still
doing this. I think it forces you to dig and like try to find some deeper reason why you're
doing this thing. That's hard. And that's often like where you discover meaning. Yeah.
And the, and the hedonistic aspects like foods or sex or whatever, uh, they're, they all,
you adapt to them really fast, right? Yeah. Like if you don't have them, you want them,
you're hungry. If you have them, you're like, okay, this was nice. And then you open your
laptop again and you're like, let's, let's go make something right. Or, uh, I don't know
if you're a painter, you start painting. So I think because of the frame of the problem
keeps changing and it's like perpetual, it never bores generally because the problem
never ends, which is also the tiring part of it. You're like, you know, when is this
business going to end? Like when is it, when I do, I reach the goal because you know, musicians,
they always finish an album and then they're done. They can do the tour and they're done.
And it feels really nice. Like I used to do that. And with, uh, with a startup with business,
you keep going. Like when does it end and when you sell, right? When you exit, but
well, you've done like, what, like, I think you had another tweet where you're talking
about like how many projects that you shipped and you said that, yeah, I calculate it was
like 70 or something. Yeah. More than 70 projects. You said only four out of 70 plus projects
that you ever did made any money and grew, which means that you have something like a
95% failure rate and a hit rate of only about like 5%, which is crazy in a way. Yeah. Like
how much of your success with all the projects do you think comes from like just being this
relentless shipper, which almost no one is like almost no one has like 70 projects. They've
really tried to ship. Um, and how much of it comes from being like a strategic mastermind,
you know, having the right business strategy because you have a pretty like solid business
background and education too. Well, this is obviously biased, but I do get tired from
the, it's like the current side guys in America where it's like everything is locked. If you're
successful, it's locked. It's completely your upbringing and your background. And I do think
that's a part of it is like definitely like some percentages, like maybe 40 or 50 or something.
But what you see from this example, you need to keep trying for loads of times, like 70
times or more, a hundred times, and you might get a few successes. And if you try once,
it's not probably not going to work cause you, the odds are not there. And I mean, I'm
not a mathematician or a statistician, but I do believe that if you keep trying something,
you can somehow, you don't change the odds, but you keep playing the odds. And there's
must be a statistical fallacy in this, but I do think your rate of maybe getting success
gets higher. I think when you keep trying. Yeah. I think so too. Cause I mean, you're
building skills and stuff. It's like, it's not like you're just rolling the same set
of dice. It's like you're rolling the same set of dice, but now like you're a little
bit better at like really like figure out the physics of the dice cause you've failed
a bunch of startups. So you're like, okay, don't do that mistake again. Or I really don't
like these types of projects. That's exactly the solstice problem I had. Like if you increase
the skills, you're the odds next time will be better. And, uh, and that builds up and
it adds up. And, and also I guess network, right? Like I don't have a network. You, uh,
you probably have more network than me. I'm just on Twitter mostly cause I'm like fully
remote around the world and stuff. So you also increase the people, you know, and like
you get more known so you can, you know, tweet about stuff and then people DM you like, Oh,
we'd love to, as a company, we'd love to use your product or something. That also helps.
Right. Yeah. You just keep occurring advantages. And so I guess maybe the, like the thing to
do is to try to figure out how to put yourself in a position where you can do 70 plus projects.
Cause I don't think everyone can do that. Like maybe they don't have the motivation or
they don't have like the financial like sort of freedom and independence do that. But like,
yeah, if you can keep doing that, eventually you will have one or two wins. Yeah. I think
if you're in university, that's like, that was for me, the main time where I did like
so many projects and there was a great time because in Holland you get like $250 a month
for free from the, from the government back then. I think like they call study financing
and you don't have to pay it back and you can borrow some money from the government
too for really low rates. And, uh, and you're pretty much just doing lectures, right? You're
going to university and all the time you have apart from that, I think it's the same in
American college. Like you can work on, you know, side projects. I think I probably spent
my college years partying mostly the first couple of years. Yeah, me too. Yeah. It's
like, I'm going to do, I'm going to do startups and just like trying to do random startup
stuff because it was a big mix. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have so much time. It's like, and
like, that's the perfect time to, to, to start a lot of stuff. And, uh, you mentioned this
like this sort of like pervasive attitude. And, um, I think maybe it's just the United
States. I don't know. Cause I haven't traveled in years, uh, where it's kind of like everything
you do is luck, right? And no matter what you do, you can't be proud of what you've
done because you know, it was only a result of your privilege or upbringing, your parents
money or whatever. And like, that is kind of like a demotivating, like, I don't really
like that perspective because like, even if it, let's just say, hypothetically speaking,
it's true. Like what's the result of saying that, right? It doesn't necessarily motivate
anyone to work any harder. It just motivates everyone to just give up. I think it's like
kind of like 100%. Yeah. It increases bitterness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it increases bitterness.
Maybe it increases compassion. I think it's like kind of the ideal thing about it, but
it decreases like, I think motivation. Cause it's like, well, if you weren't born to a
good circumstance, you're fucked. You might as well give up. And if you were, you have
no reason to push hard and work on anything because you, you know, you can't be proud
of it. Yeah. 100%. I dunno. Sometimes I feel like it's hard for people to hold like two
ideas in mind. And it's like the two ideas I think you want to hold in mind is like having
compassion for people who came from backgrounds where it's just harder to succeed, but simultaneously
having like optimism that like you still can make it, you know, like that optimism is pretty
important because without it, like you're saying like, what is little, why would you
even try if you didn't think it was possible? Like you need some degree of optimism and
like sometimes I feel like that's missing, you know? Yeah. I think it's missing in a
lot of parts in America. I think where you see it is in Asia though, in Asia, like where
I spent a lot of my time, it's the ambition is insane and Asia has all of its own problems
for sure. But there's this massive ambition to get ahead, get wealthy, get successful
that you don't see in, in America, especially I think lesser and less or so. And we should
kind of not go into politics too much, but look at all the hate Elon Musk has. I think
it's, it's, it's quite crazy because he wants to bring us to Mars and works his ass off
to do this. And yeah, he's the richest guy on earth, but he doesn't even spend his money.
He doesn't spend enough like a lavish life. He just sleeps in the factory and he does
so much stuff. Obviously there's some bad things probably in the factory. I don't, I
don't know, but this seems like a net benefit guy to society and gets a lot of slack for
just getting us to Mars. So I think that's kind of another strange, you know, data point.
Do you feel like you get that kind of reaction from people? I mean, you're like, you're way
more active on Twitter than I am. Like you're tweeting about everything that you're doing.
And so you got a lot of fans and like people who follow like what you're up to, like you
publish your revenue numbers or stuff. People know exactly how much money you make. Like
it's easy to put you like in this rich guy category. Do you get like, you know, obviously
like on a smaller scale, like the same kind of criticisms that someone like Elon Musk
gets?
Yeah, I think I had it a few years ago. I started aggressively muting people and I had
this robot, which if I mute a person, they would also remove them as a follower. So they
would be like shouting into the void and, and they would obviously be monitoring what
I tweet because they followed me, but then they wouldn't notice that it automatically
removed them as a follower. So I slowly like removed hundreds of these people. And I honestly,
I don't really get that anymore. I hardly get, and it's, it's really cleaned up everything.
It really helped. And I don't want to block. I don't like blocking so much. I mean, obviously
I've blocked in the past, but generally the replies I get are quite positive these days.
So it really got a lot better. I don't know if it just got better for me or for everybody,
but yeah, it's funny. Cause it's like when you block people or you're like removing people,
it's like you're kind of creating your own echo chamber, which is a hundred percent.
You want to quote bad thing with the internet. You don't want to create an echo. You want
a variety of opinions, but it's like, well, how big of a variety do you want? Like, do
you want to sign up every day and see a bunch of haters? Like not really.
If people are hostile, like it can really get to you, you know, that like, uh, the,
you always remember the hateful comments and, and you, you can have 99 good comments and
you always remember the haters. So it's, it can be psychologically texting. If you're
working really hard on something and you just get all these negative comments. So I agreed
with this echo bubble though, but I don't mute, like I tried to not mute, you know,
with negative, uh, replies. I try to mute like, really like the, the, the hater kind
of comments. Right.
There's another topic that I think is interesting essentially because you're like, you know,
your pretty level, you travel all over, like you've like kind of your finger on the pulse
of like what's going on internationally. Like I have no idea like how ambitious are people
in Asia compared to how people are in Europe or I have no idea, you know, I'm just like
kind of stuck in my bubble. Uh, so like you're living in what you're in Thailand right now.
Like what do you see in Thailand? You know, what motivated you to move to Thailand and
you're also doing this new project rebase that I sort of intentionally tried to learn
very little about so I can learn about it from you.
Yeah. Yeah. So I live, I actually live in Portugal now. So, uh, during COVID happened.
I mean, COVID is absolutely terrible. Uh, two years ago I was in Asia too. And with
you know, Andre, we also had on the podcast, uh, Mark, you know, Mark from beta list and
stuff and COVID started happening Asia. So I flew back to Holland. I stayed with my parents
for like a few, I think five months or something. And then I started traveling again with Mark
because, uh, we were not, uh, tax residents in Holland anymore. We're not residents anymore.
So if we stayed over six months, we'd become a tax resident. We didn't want to do that.
So we had to leave. So we went on a road trip to Europe and we ended up in Portugal and
it was very, very, like I'd never been in Portugal. I'd heard kind of Portugal, like,
you know, but if you're European, you know about Spain and Italy and stuff, but you don't
really hear about Portugal. It's like a small country next to Spain, you know, it was COVID.
So you couldn't really do a lot of stuff. So we, we ended up in like a seaside village
near Lisbon, which is the capital. And we lived there and every day we'd go for walks
on the beach. Um, and you know, we'd have some coffee and we just kind of work from
there. And I started also meeting other like a nomad people kind of from Bali who'd also
moved to Portugal and stuff. And I started seeing, Oh, this is like a, kind of like a
thing that's happening because of COVID Asia's closed now. So a lot of people are moving.
We would go to Bali in the winter and stuff are now going to Portugal and stuff and Spain
and Mexico. And a lot of Americans would also go to Mexico, for example. So anyway, I'm
in Portugal and I'm meeting all these people and they're all saying like, yeah, we're also
becoming residents here. I'm like, why would you become a resident here? They're like,
well, cause we're nomads. So we, we have this problem. Where do we pay tax? Because we're
always moving from place to place and we're never a resident anywhere. And like, you know,
it's very difficult. So these people were becoming residents in Portugal. They were
becoming real like Portuguese residents and setting up their base kind of and paying tax
and becoming part of, you know, Portugal culture. Cause there's, there's not much you could
do with COVID. You could still, you cannot really travel much, especially not, not to
Asia, Asia is still kind of closed. So I tried to, I tried the same thing. I became a Portuguese
resident and now I live there and I ran my own place in Lisbon. I have a lot of friends
there and since I've been there, like it's been exploding like crazy. It's a, it's very
often like number one, the nomad list. I didn't change anything. It's just what it is. It's
a lot of people are going there.
So as a Portuguese resident, do you just don't pay, you don't pay any taxes to like, like
you're Dutch, so you're not paying any taxes to the Netherlands.
I mean, European governments, Western European governments are very strict. So if you, if
you want to not, if you want to leave your country, you really need to leave and stay
away. You know, America's just as strict. America's more strict even with the international
tech stuff. But if you say like, okay, I'm going to nomad, your home country is always
going to tax you. And unless you say like, yeah, don't live in my home country anymore.
I'm going to live somewhere else. So yeah, it's Portugal is a great base for that. And
a lot of nomads have been doing that. So yeah, I built a website about that, which is called
rebase.co, rebase.co, which is the first, it's kind of inspired by Stripe Atlas. I mean,
you've kind of worked for Stripe. So you know, Atlas very well. Stripe Atlas is like a service
to create a company online really easily. So they kind of make the whole process of
creating a company much more easy with large and stuff. And I did the same thing, but for
immigration. So I smoothed out the whole immigration process to move to Portugal, showing all the
benefits of Portugal. And yeah, that's been taken off now as well. So yeah, it's interesting
to me the way that you work on projects, like you're talking about musicians, the like,
you know, put out an album and it's like this very final thing. And now they're done with
it and they can just sort of like go on tour. And like with me and any hackers, for example,
like I've never had anything like that. Like I just continued to work on any hackers as
this monolithic thing. But you have like all these different projects. Like you have no
mad list. I think it's like ADHD maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're like, okay, don't that on
the next thing. So you get some of that, like that hit of like I finished maybe, but like
are you ever really finished? Like, could you work rebase into nomad list? You know,
they're so related. They're both about digital nomads. Like why make a separate project?
Why not just be like, okay, here's another branch of nomad list. Honestly, I think the
separate projects, they launch better, right? Because if you make a sub page on any hackers
or nomad list, people are like, I made a sub page, but it's not really, it's not really
a new business. Oh, but if you call the new business with a new domain name and a new
landing page, people are like, wow, this is like, it's new. That's also marketing, right?
And you can always integrate it later. So I think it's kind of like a trick, but I think
this is a, it's the same for Moto K or Moto K started as a page on nomad list, like nomad
jobs. But then I realized like 90% of remote work jobs are not nomads. They're like people
that just like stayed home moms or stayed home dads. They're, they just want to have
a work from home job, right? So I split it off into its own website. And I think here
this is the same case because this seems to be targeted at people that are kind of at
the end of their nomad journey. Like they've been around the world for like a few years
and they're like, okay, this is unsustainable or at least it's in a legal way, in a tax
way. And I want to build up a little bit of a base so I can still travel, but I have this
Portugal thing and I live here and I get like healthcare, for example, from Portuguese government
and I pay tax. And yeah, and I think that's kind of what it is.
Yeah. I'm reading through the list because you have a list of like benefits for why people
sit in Portugal. Like the first one is the McDonald's in Portugal has the Royal Deluxe
and the big cheese to double. I put that in as a joke, but then I accidentally deployed
it to GitHub. So, and now it's on there. Zero percent tax on foreign income, zero percent
tax on crypto, zero percent tax on wealth. So this is all like very attractive for like
entrepreneurs who are like, okay, I'm trying to make money and build something like this
seems pretty like a pretty good place to go. Yeah. And I think it's, to Americans, it's
very similar to like, like the climate is very similar to California, but it's also
very similar to like Miami and Austin, how they're attracting people from California
right now. It's very the same concept. Like Portugal is attracting people like also Americans,
but also like, you know, Dutch people, Germans, UK, Denmark, Sweden, those kinds of people
where it's, it's colder temperature, you know, and Portugal is warmer and they have these
benefits and yeah, and they need foreigners, you know, they need, they need this income.
Another part of your website, you talk about how Portugal, Portugal is still recovering
from the 2008 financial crisis and experiencing a massive brain drain. And in 2021, they had
the largest population decrease in the last 50 years. And so there's sort of an dire need
of foreigners. And I've seen like the same thing in like certain cities in America, just
like I did this road trip last year, I guess a year and a half ago where I was just driving
around and like, whenever I wasn't in like a really big city center and I would talk
to people, it was like pretty obvious, like, oh, there's a lot of brain drain, you know,
like the most, the most talented, ambitious people just left, you know, they didn't stay
here. And a lot of times the places were really nice, you know, they were beautiful, the food
was good, the weather was good. But like in terms of like, if you wanted to be, you know,
a nomad or so you wanted to be surrounded by this kind of energy of other ambitious
people, like that wasn't there for you. So there's no reason to go. And it seems like
Portugal's got like the best of both. It's like beautiful. But despite the brain drain,
like you for some reason, you got all these people sort of collapsing and coalescing in
this one place.
Yeah, but you hit the nail on the head. This is not like it's, it's, it's loads of places
that can do this. Like US is super ahead with remote work, they were before. And they're
ahead with this migration also, because you see, for example, in America, US ski resorts,
snow resorts are sold out everywhere. Off season now, like Pat Wells told me this, because
his I think his friends work at a ski resort and people are moving into ski resorts just
to snowboard all day and work remotely. You know, they work a little bit, they have breakfast,
and then they go ski and it's it's amazing. You see people move to like, I think Tulsa
Oklahoma, they pay $10,000 now for you to move there. So cities are trying to attract
people countries are trying to attract people, remote workers, Balaji on Twitter, I don't
know if you know him probably, you know, I'm very famous on Twitter, he talks a lot about
like the network state and the nation state. He talks about it in a very, very rational
way. I'm a big fan. And I like that. I see it more in a like more like informal way,
like people just want to live in cool places, where they have a nice balance between work
and private, you know, just like going outside going for a walk in nice clean air on the
beach, for example, if that's your thing or going skiing or whatever, if that's your thing
and the all the places you saw on this road trip, well, a lot of them can can do this
because if they have fast internet, if they they're usually very affordable, because there
has been a brain drain, right? There's been, yeah, exodus of people. So yeah, all these
places have opportunities to attract remote workers, I think.
So do you think this will be like, you know, you're doing the same with like rebase. I
mean, I guess your sort of business model is like, you're charging people to like basically
help onboard them to set up the residency and to help them file their tax return. It's
kind of just like doing like, like, you know, you have no idea how to be a digital nomad.
We're just gonna do it for you. All the paper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want to like copy
paste that to other places too?
Yeah, so I've been polling Twitter because Twitter is really good for research now. And
I've been asking like, where do you where do you people want to move next? Like, what's
interesting for you? And people say like Dubai or Spain, Mexico. Yeah, it's mostly it's mostly
Mexico Dubai, Spain, I think. I mean, Thailand, Bali, but I think the problem with the place
in Asia for Europeans and Americans is just too far, especially for Americans, Asia is
just too far to settle down for a long time, maybe when you're retired or something. But
Americans are okay with settling down somewhat in Mexico, I think. And maybe some other parts
of Latin America, like Colombia, Medellin, for example. And maybe you also see a lot
of Americans in Portugal, you see a lot of Europeans in Portugal and Spain and stuff.
So those are kind of places that seem more realistic. And like, I love Thailand, I love
Asia. The problem is, it's still hard to kind of integrate or what you call assimilate here
as a foreigner on the long term. It's just it's very difficult. How's it how's it like
on the ground in Portugal right now with like lots of different sort of entrepreneurs and
nomads moving there? Like, are you hanging out with them? Are you guys working in spaces
as like, is it social? Yeah, I mean, Lisbon is super social. It's so social that you walk
on the street, you go for coffee and somebody shouts like, hey, Peter, and you walk there.
And that's how I met some people. And then at the same night, we went to a house party
outside on the roof. So it was COVID safe, kind of. Yeah, yeah. So it's super easy to
meet people. It's kind of like the people like we know, you know, kind of tech people,
but also artists, you now have the crypto people moving in from Webtree and stuff.
Like there was a big crypto conference, I think recently. So it's a really eclectic
mix of like artists, entrepreneurs, crypto tech, very interesting mix, like really, really
kind of like 1920 pairs, I think people sometimes compare these places to like the Sorbono and
the cafes where people would write artists and stuff. And yeah, I'm looking at your like
this, like you've got this sort of moving picture of Portugal to you, like like kind
of a mini looping video in the top left of rebase. And it's like beautiful. It looks
kind of like the Bay Area, almost like this like beautiful Bay and it's like red bridge.
It looks like San Francisco. It has the same bridge, right? Yeah. I'm like, is that, is
that, is that the Golden Gate Bridge? Like, no, it's like the same bridge. It has the
same trams. Like it's insane. It has the same Hills. It's literally San Francisco in Europe.
It's insane.
It's smart for you to put that image there. It reminds me of like, uh, one of the reasons
why Airbnb, like, you know, they could sort of figure out early on that like the pictures
are so motivating. You see this like really beautiful place. Like, ah, shit, I gotta go.
I'm looking at this. I'm like, yeah, you want to get a video to Portugal? Yeah. Yeah. Just
because of this like picture, it's like, looks good. Yeah. I'm adding music next to the video.
So that's going to increase. Actually, I have data on this because I launched rebase as
a type form just to test like a year ago. And I love type form. There's nothing as type
form, but it was kind of like a black, uh, color type form with white letters like, do
you want to move to Portugal? Something. And then you could fill out the text and it didn't
really work. It wasn't many signups. So I think you need this whole design-y vibe. It's,
it's quite an intense, somebody told me it's quite an intense step to move to a country.
You want that to be kind of comfortable and you know, you can't, not going to do it on
a type form. So yeah. It's like, if you, if you have a fancy restaurant, you got to have
clean floors, a good storefront. Otherwise people don't trust your kitchen. You know,
if you're doing some sort of a crypto project and it's an exclusive, you know, yeah, or
something, dude, you need to be sleek and cool. Maybe like a dark background, maybe
a little cryptic. You're trying to get somebody to like move somewhere or stay in a place
that needs to be like bright and look really happy and clean. And I'm not very good at
design. So it's like, that's, I start very functional. So, so it took me a while to get
to this point. Yeah. So you said like rebase went viral on Twitter. Give me like, give
me like the sort of, I guess, Andy Hacker, like breakdown of like, okay, how did you
come up with the idea? How did you like launch it? How did you like grow it to where it is
now?
Yeah. So I made this, uh, I was working on this landing page and of course it's like
true fashion. It wasn't done of course, but it was already online and it already kind
of worked. So, um, I made a photo of me sitting on my bed, uh, working on it with my left,
like just like I'm sitting here in bed with my laptop and rebase being open. And then
I wrote the tweet, like POV, building an immigration as a service startup. And then everybody
started retweeting it and they asked the URL and I gave the URL and then everybody starts
signing up and then suddenly I had like a thousand retweets on some other retweet and
it was everywhere. And then, you know, at that point, you probably had the same thing
the actors, like where your friends start sending that their friends sent something
that you made and then, you know, it's viral, you know, and I had that. And the last time
I had that was with Nomad list and it was eight years ago or something. So I was like,
wow, it took eight years to go viral with a startup again. You know, that's crazy. I
didn't realize it was like that big. Like you talk about like having like the 70 plus
startups that you started and like four of them have succeeded. Like rebase is really
like a standout among those 70. It's the biggest since Nomad list. Yeah. Yeah. This is one
of those four. Yeah. So it took, took like ages to make something again that's like successful
and like making money. So I've been building so much stuff between that, that didn't work.
So it's, it feels like, you know, you want to have, you have like a, you still got it,
you know, that feeling like, come on, I'm going to show them because everybody's saying,
oh, you just, you've made a project once. It was successful. It's been eight years ago.
Like go away. Feels nice. Okay. So you tweet it. It just goes viral. Like that's it. You
just had to tweet it and like it was the right product to the right audience. And yeah, but
I tweet loads of stuff that doesn't go viral. Like I, I tweet all the time and it doesn't
go viral. So it's, I cannot predict what works and what doesn't. So again, it's the odds
thing, right? It's like, I didn't know this was such a thing. It's hit like a vein. It's
like a consistent thing you've always done. Cause even when you were first starting, like
you did that blog posts, 12 startups in 12 months and your whole philosophy was like,
I'm just going to do a lot of stuff, you know, and I'm not going to a hundred percent count
on any one thing working. But if I try a lot of stuff, you know, maybe one thing will work.
And like here you are 10 years later, same thing, you know, like no matter what it is,
you're still on Twitter. You're promoting it to your audience. You're super hyped about
it. If it fails, you just seem to not care. You just be one to the next thing.
I know. It's not so weird. Yes. Pray and pray, right? Like I don't, I don't see people on
your Twitter like, Hey, what happened to that one thing you start? What happened to like,
we'll make chat. People just forget, just forget. Yeah. Yeah. Just forgets about your
failures or whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Unless you post about it then. Yeah.
But I don't think it's the only, like, this is a problem. People start thinking what you
do or what you say is like the only way. I don't think it's the only way. Like you see
so many other people do the slack founder, like butter, Stuart Butterfield or something.
Yeah. He made slack. He made slack. And then before he made flicker, I don't think he made
that many projects. He made two games or something. And both games became a startup. Like flicker
was a video game and became flicker. And then slack was a video game as well became slack.
So I don't think everybody does the same thing. I think it works for me.
I think one of the reasons that you're so popular is because you're like crazy, like
vulnerable and like transparent. You just share everything, but also like what you're
doing right now, you're just like excessively humble. Like, Oh, I'm like, you know, I'm
not that great. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like really inspiring. You know,
like, it's like when I first started reading your stuff, I'm like, okay, if Peter can do
it, like I can do it because you're so humble about all this stuff. And like, I know behind
the scenes, like you are really thoughtful. I don't know whatever. But I think like, never
somebody's just getting started, like the approach that you've taken of like, try a
lot of stuff, be okay with the fact that like some of it's not going to work out. A lot
of it's not going to work out, but like keep trying to let that discourage you. And like,
hey, you don't have to be like some sort of mad scientist genius, you know, like, I think
that's just like, probably the most approachable thing for most people. And I think that's
why it's like really inspirational.
I have to be like that. Because when I started, it was I was looking up to all these people,
and they looked like gods to me, like they knew everything. And they they could make
these websites and these startups and these building teams and like hiring people and
raising money and all this stuff seemed like magic to me. And I was like, I can never ever
get to that skill level ever. I barely can code. I barely I didn't know how databases
work and stuff. So so I think you need to, I think the nicest thing to do is to show
that you're that I still don't really know what I'm doing, because it makes it accessible,
like you say, it brings more people into it. Because the worst thing I see with developers
and especially developers, engineers is the gatekeeping, right? Like, where it's like,
oh, you need to do you need to code things in a certain way. And you need to do this
in a certain way. Or, you know, but there is no certain way, of course, you can just
do whatever you want, as long as it's legal. And you can ship a startup and and and the
most cool thing in creative creativity, like new projects are built with these weird creative
constraints where, because you don't know how to do things properly, you do it completely
wrong, but it still kind of works. And it ends up very different, because the processes
are different. And that's you see that in art, you see the music, everything you see
in startups to where your design might be really bad, but that might become aesthetic,
you know, like brutalist or something, right?
Right, right. Yeah, like, you got your own very unique design, where you're like, okay,
I'm not gonna do a bunch of images and stuff. But like, I really like emojis. And so you're
yeah, yeah, emojis in it. And it's like very distinctly Peter levels.
Yeah, but it's because I'm too lazy to figure out I can set how they work. So I just use
emojis, you know, exactly. And now like a lot of people copy you. But when I see that
I'm like, Oh, they're biting off like pure level style, because like, you're the first
person I saw you did this. So you have this other stat on your rebase site, you say rebase
now helps this is nuts. rebase now helps 9% of all people who moved to Portugal. So every
year, six years in saying Portugal, that's like the most ridiculous that I've ever seen.
Like you're like, a major part of this entire country is like import of like new citizens
or residents.
Yeah, this is super weird. So I didn't realize this until I I was like, there must be like
half a million people migrating to Portugal every year or something. I never really thought
about and then I Google it was only like 50,000 or something. And then I realized, okay, if
I do like some like 400 a month, or 500 a month, that's almost like 6000 a year. That's
like, you know, over 10% or something. Yeah. And I was like, wow, this is insane. I didn't
know that. And like, so nobody's moving to Portugal. And now everybody's moving to Portugal.
Because this website is and I do it from a laptop. I don't even you know, I don't have
an office. It's just the whole thing is weird to me, too. Yeah, it's like, it's nuts. I
feel like the government should be like reaching on talking to you. Yeah, but governments are
so hard to talk to. I mean, imagine B2B enterprise sales, but times 10. It's like, it's impossible.
I tried, I tried talking to governments, they didn't even reply. So I give up like, I'll
just make my websites and they can email me if they want. But yeah, I'll just use the
laws that they create to for my business. But yeah, there's some cool stories I heard.
Somebody tweeted, or I saw it, I think there's people from Venezuela now that are trying
to get out of Venezuela, because Venezuela is like a disaster now. And they're trying
to move to Portugal and they're using rebates for it. And there's like four Venezuelans
now in the database that are using it to move to Portugal. So that's like, that's like next
level cool, because you're helping people, you know, change their life to move to Europe.
It's cool. How does the product actually work? Like I'm like, so I click the start now button.
So you enter this form with all your legal data and stuff, income sources, I think. And
so I essentially what it is, because I'm not a legal firm. It's like legally sensitive
territory. You're you cannot, like, I'm not a lawyer. So I shouldn't do law stuff, but
I can resell, I can refer legal services. So I have lawyers that I refer you to that
are good. And they know how to deal with the types of people that I attract, like remote
workers, and they help you through the process. And I get a commission on the amount of money
that you spend. And but I'm not a legal firm, I just resell. And I think Stripe Atlas, like
I talked to the Stripe Atlas had a product, I think, and he said they do something similar
because I, I was always thinking, ah, you must hire all these lawyers and stuff. And
actually, I don't think they do. They do kind of similar. But I think they do it nonprofit
because they're just doing it to like Stripe wants to increase the like amount of businesses
on the internet, right? It's like the mission. But I think they operate in a similar way.
You just resell to high quality lawyers that are trusted. And so it's a very strange.
So at any point, do you like collect payment? Like, is there like a Stripe, like, you know,
payment on your website?
Yeah, after, yeah, after you fill out the form, there's a Stripe checkout, and you pay.
And then there's a dashboard where I've used Stripe a lot. Like I use Stripe for KYC. So
know your customer. So the moment you've paid, you get into the dashboard where you need
to do KYC with Stripe identity. So Stripe identity is a service on Stripe, where you
can upload your passport. Stripe checks it for me kind of, and then I don't need to see
the password. So it stays safe at Stripe. But it tells me, okay, this password is verified,
this person is real, and it's, you know, KYC, you know, your customer. And that also makes
it legal for the, for the lawyers and stuff as KYC.
And so then you get the money, and then people who sign up, basically, I guess you contact
the lawyers on their behalf, and then you pay the lawyers, but you keep your commission.
Yeah, so it's like, I get, I keep the commission and the lawyers take the money that comes
after. So it's, it's quite a simple business model. I can change the business model maybe
later where I take more of the commission from the lawyers, but I wanted to keep it
like super simple and easy, just to see if it would have worked, you know, and it works
now. Yeah, right. Yeah. And I bet you're making like a decent amount of money from this, because
it's like, okay, if you're getting 500 people a month signing up, you know, and these aren't
like, this is not like a $5 a month to-do list app that you're selling to people. It's
like, you know, over 200, it's a, it's a giant move people are making with their life. Like
they're used to paying a lot of money for this kind of stuff. And so it's like hundreds
of dollars, you know, that you're making per person who, who joins.
I think right now it's something like 30, 40, 50K. The problem actually is that the,
there was too many, like this lawyer was used to getting like, I don't know, like 50 customers
a month. And suddenly I brought him like 400. So they were just huge bottlenecks. So I needed
to email these people like, okay, it's going to take a little bit longer because it's been
going viral and too many people signed up. I closed the signup for a few times as well.
And now they've been hiring more people. They've been hiring five more people. We were there,
they need to train them now for the back office and stuff. So they're also growing now. So
it's kind of cool. Yeah. Also since I guess the last time we talked, you hadn't even started
remote. Okay. So it's not like the biggest remote job. So not only is like rebase talk
taking off, but like in the last four years you have this other project that's now making
I think millions of dollars and is like huge. And so like, you just like keep having like
hit after hit and then between those hits, like a bunch of failures that nobody remembers.
But it doesn't matter. Let's talk about remote. Okay. Cause it's all, I mean, it's kind of,
it's all in the same vein, right? Nomad list and like, you know, your digital nomad, remote.
Okay. Like get a remote job, you know, rebase, like relocate to Portugal, like you're sticking
into your wheelhouse, but they're just different aspects of it. And they become like these
huge projects. So like, what's the story behind remote? Okay. Yeah. So, uh, I started it as
like I said before, like nomad jobs, like I was, I built nomad list first. And then
after a few months people were like, okay, is there a remote jobs we can do as nomads?
And back then remote jobs weren't even big yet. It wasn't like a big thing. And there
was still a lot of stigma against remote work. This was like 2014, 2015. I remember Buffer
was pushing remote work really hard. Uh, a few other companies, I think automatic from
WordPress were pushing it. Yeah. And so those were the ones hiring Zapier two, but it wasn't
a big thing at all. And so I built this job board, Nomad jobs, and then I spun it off
as remote. Okay. Because I realized quickly, like I said before that, uh, most remote jobs
are not for nomads. Most people are not nomads. That's like 95% of the remote job market is
not nomads. It's just normal people that are want to work from home, for example. So, um,
I spun it off as remote. Okay. And the first year it didn't even make money. I think it
was just, I was aggregating a lot of, uh, jobs from non remote job boards. Cause there
was not really a lot of remote job boards except mine, but there was classic job boards
which had remote jobs and they would be located in remote Oregon. So remote is a city in Oregon
or a village. So I would just take those jobs and then put them in on my side. There was
a real big problem back then. And this kind of started growing. I started charging like
$1 for a job post. So companies started directly posting on my side as well. After a few years,
like it made, uh, okay money. But then when COVID happened, like everything changed, it
was like, like, if you look at the revenue charts, it's like on remote, okay.com slash
open. It's, um, it just goes up radically. Basically 2020, it just took off as you're
actually changed. And then they also like 2021, like around like March or April just
took off again, like all different. Yeah. And, and I didn't do much stuff. That's the
weird thing. So I think Sahil from Gumroad said tweeted this once that it's all about
like the market, like you think you're doing it, but the market is doing it. And as long
as you're in the market, you will benefit from the market. And I think this is super
true. Like suddenly remote work is, is mainstream now. Like, I mean, we were pushing for it
for years. We were tweeting about it relentlessly. Like the road works, the future and nobody
believed us. And then suddenly just a worldwide pandemic and everything changes. It's insane.
It's like, how do you predict this? You cannot predict this. And it's also, it's also grim
because it's a really bad thing. A pandemic is like a lot of people died, millions of
people died. And it's good for your business. It's a very strange feeling. Yeah, it's strange.
I've seen it so much on any hackers where like, like most people in an interview have
tech businesses and like, if any category of business did well during the pandemic,
it was online tech businesses. And it is like this weird juxtaposition between like, well,
it's hard not to be happy when your business is doing well, but it's also like, damn, you're
like happy that like essentially this like worldwide tragedy occurred. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
No one would like, you know, we could all go back and no one would want the pandemic
to happen. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's not good. And it's, uh, just like wars have changed
society, right? Like society changes, I think very slowly and then very radically, right?
Like revolutions happen, like spikes. And yeah, it's cool that things change, but, uh,
right. Well, it's cool that you're so consistent with your projects because when things change,
like, you know, there's some chance that some of your projects will be moving with the zeitgeist
and some might not, but really all you need is one or two and remote. Okay. Like obviously
remote work, the humongous now it's like huge. I'm looking at the job board right now and
it's like you have like seemingly like hundreds or thousands of posts on your job board. It's
like gotta be the, I mean, it's the number one remote job board. So you just beat out
all the other remote job boards. Yeah. Just became the number one remote job board like
this month. Uh, I mean, but again, I also don't know how I did that. It's just, it just
kind of happens. I have no, I have no clue. I think what I did recently helped. I, there
was this whole trend of like, uh, I woke up, I drink coffee and I was browsing Reddit and
it was this meme that went viral about, uh, like a South Park meme. Like if you want me
to apply for this job, then, you know, tell me what salary it is or something. I forgot
the joke. I'm so bad at jokes, but it was like 50,000 upvotes. Like people want job
posts with salaries. So I was like, okay, this, this is obviously again, like a society
thing. Like everybody thinks the same about something. So this needs, this is a cultural
moment. So I started tweeting about this meme and I was like, okay, maybe I should just
require companies to show salaries on the site. Like not just optional. Cause I had
it on the site. It was optional. So I'm like, okay, let's just go to the, you know, to my
code editor and make this input type textbooks required. And I check it with JavaScript if
it's required, if it's filled in or not. And, and immediately I started getting the emails
from the companies being angry. Like, um, we don't want to share our salary and blah,
blah, blah. And I was like, yeah, but come on. And I was just fighting with them over
email. And meanwhile I was tweeting about it as well. And, uh, that it was really hard
to do this because like big companies that pay like, you know, $20,000 for a job post
bundle, like 10 jobs at the same time or more. And uh, and they were trying to get out of
not showing salaries. And then in, I think it was February, uh, this year, Colorado,
I think the state of Colorado made it a law to require a salary job posting to show salaries.
So I was like, okay, now it's not just my thing. It's actually a law. So I can say like,
okay, if you hire remotely worldwide, Colorado is included. So you need to do this legally.
And that helps a lot like having it as a law. And then also I think in, in other countries
and stuff, all the job seekers were more happy. And, and I think then also you started seeing
more traffic because people want to see salaries when they apply for a job.
It's like in a way they, uh, like these things that the internet is like that you think would
come with the internet, like transparency. Okay. You have so many people on the internet.
There's so much more competition. Ultimately things should get more transparent or like,
you know, the sort of like, like distribution of people geographically. Okay. Anybody can
work from anywhere because of the internet. So you should see people spread out and yet
it's taken like 30 years to get to this point, you know, where we're starting to see some
of these things happen.
It's, I think the strangest parts with remote work was that in, I think 2014 there was entire
San Francisco tech, like VCs and startup owners were fighting against remote work. And it
was weird for me because I was like, this is the center of tech. These people make the
big internet companies, which is the internet. It's like a virtual concept and they cannot
work remotely. They cannot accept that you can work from around the world that we have
internet to just connect with each other like we do now. And it's so weird. I was, yeah.
And so bizarre. It's just as weird, like how like uneven like the distribution of technology
is too. Cause I remember like 2004 playing world of Warcraft as like a 17 year old and
like we were basically living in the future. We were always on, you know, basically the
discord of the time and we would be on team speak, which would be like a giant, like,
you know, audio chat, like clubhouse or something. And it'd be like 40 people and they were distributed
remote all over the world. And they had different little jobs as part of like our guild and
we'd be on every night like talking. And that was like 2004. And yeah, like that was like
a video game, you know, and that wasn't just me. That was like millions of people doing
that, you know, and now it's like 15, 16 years later, people were just sort of just catching
on to this stuff. I was in quake two clans. We were already doing this. We were already
in the metaverse as well. So yeah, yeah, it took a long, long ass time. And I'm looking
at your graph for remote. Okay. Like even remote. Okay. It took a long time. Like, okay. The
very beginning of your revenue graph is like 2015. And so I was looking at today and it's
like, okay, you're at like $1.4 million a year run rate. Like that's huge. You know,
like it's job boards, like printing cash, but like, you know, for many years your revenue
run rate was like, you know, $10,000, $20,000 30. I mean, it was, it was good, but I was,
I was convinced it was going to kind of stay there. And for a while it stayed there. It
was the kind of like, you know, like this, I remember being feeling like, kind of like
mad about it in like 2016, 2017, because it was just, nothing was growing. It was kind
of like going like this and nomad list was the same. It didn't, didn't grow. And I was
like, okay, this is it. I mean, just be happy. You know, you've made, it's still a lot of
money. It was like, I guess like 500 K a year or something. So half a million year was still
a lot of money, but I was like, okay, maybe it's not going to grow much more. And, and
then COVID. Yeah. You know, at the end of 2016, so I'll just read some of the numbers
at the end of 2016, uh, remote. Okay. It was making $30,000 a year at the end of 2017.
So this is like three years and you're making $82,000 a year. So now it's like a pretty,
you know, like okay salary. And then in 2018 grew quite a lot. It's making like $200,000
a year. And then at the end of 2019, right before the pandemic is making almost $300,000
a year. So like it grew to like a pretty sizable amount, but like compared to the last couple
of years, that's like, that almost looks like just like flat on the graph. Like you can't
even see it. It looks like no growth. And the first two years definitely look flat on
the graph. You're putting so much effort into the site and like, it's kind of like, yeah,
you're not seeing a lot of like, you know, reaction in terms of the revenue and the effort
you're putting in and that's when people quit like the first couple of years where it's
flat. Yes. They always quit the first five years. And the reason I didn't quit was because
I was in music before I was in German based electronic music and I quit after like five
years. And then I remember the people that started at the same time as me, they continued
and they went for like a whole decade, like for 10 years, they became world famous. They
became like in that scene in the music scene that became world famous DJs. And I gave up.
So I gave up too fast. I think with music and I didn't want to do that again. So like,
I'm just going to do this for 10 years, at least, and see where it ends up. And I think
it's a 10 year rule or something like 10,000 hour rule, right? Like you need to do something
for a very long time to, to get good. I think it's 10 years is a, it's a really long time,
but it's a, it's a good time to see if you can get something somewhere because you've
done it over and over and over and over and over. And yeah, you really understand the
industry kind of after that time, I think. What do you think you understand about like
launching these products and building startups that you sort of accrued from probably spending
at least 10,000 hours on the, over on the staff over the past decade? I think the biggest
mistake that people make is that the only focus should be your user and the customer
and how you make them happy. And it doesn't have to be like very special. It has to do
a basic function, like really, really well. Like Nomad list tells you, if you have specific
preferences where to live, like I want to live in a warm place in January in, in Europe.
Okay. It will tell you that exactly. It's a very simple problem. And it, it solves that
problem very, very easily, very fast. And remote, okay. You know, you say, I need a
remote PHP job. Okay. You can find that really easily. And this amount of salary and this
company information, blah, blah, blah. And it's very simple, but it does everything that
the user wants in what I think is the best way a user wants it. And you see all these
other websites, they look too good. They have too many gradients and they have, they're
too aesthetically pleasing. There's too much focus on all this stuff. And I think that's
like a red flag for me almost. It should be function over form. And like Joni Ive is a
good example, uh, with Apple, right? The Apple designer where he made these Mac books the
last five years, like 2015, I think 2017 to 2020. He made the worst Mac books that existed
because he chose form. Yeah. He's a good guy, but he chose, he chose form over function.
And now you see the new Mac books are function over form again. Like they have SD reader.
I know. It's amazing. It was got it here. Yes. I just have it here. It's awesome. I
hated my old Mac book. Yeah, me too. And we paid so much money for this, this shit book,
but now it's good. I think that's the point. Like, like function over form should be the
key in business. Like you need to solve this problem really easily. And that almost again
makes it more accessible for more people too, because you don't need to be again, a designer
or a big developer. You need to solve something in a very basic way, but you need to solve
it. And a lot of apps don't even solve something. They just look good and they don't even, right?
I mean, a lot of them don't even have a problem. They're solving in the first place. So you
know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, with startups, even with like the bootstrappers
now, there's like, there's kind of a scene, you know, like on Twitter or in Silicon Valley,
like, you know, and it's like, I think it's really easy to get caught up in the scene.
You're trying to impress the gatekeepers and trying to impress your peers instead of like
talking to your customers. Exactly. All right. We've talked about nomad list, remote, okay.
And Peter's other projects. There's still a ton that I want to talk to Peter about.
And so listeners, this is a two part episode. You can find the second part of this conversation
in next week's episode.