What's up, everybody?
This is Court London from AndyHackers.com, where I talk to the founders of profitable
internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of how they got to where they are today.
Today, I'm talking with Peter Levels, the founder of Nomadlist.
Finally.
Peter, I'm so glad to have you on here.
Thanks for having me on your podcast.
Do you know you are the first person that I ever reached out to to interview for Andy
Hackers.
I did a big one with myself and my girlfriend, and then I reached out to you, I DM'd you
on Twitter.
Yeah, and it took a while, yeah, it took a long time.
Yeah, well, I think your first response was like, I don't do interviews anymore.
Like, oh, that's great, sounds like a cool site.
No, because it was getting really crazy, and I had a lot of interviews where, and I think
it's a common thing now, you have an interview, and then the journalists, they rewrite the
entire thing you said, and it happened to me so many times, and then the article was
really maybe not positive, or it just changed my answers, and I was like, that's not what
I said.
And then I got really burned out from doing interviews, and I was like, well, why do I
need journalists or podcasts?
I'll just write a blog post, and then I can control what I'm saying, you know?
Yeah, I think it's, people are always trying to spend a narrative around whatever it is
that you say, because they need to raise the stakes, they need to get more eyeballs, and
so like, whatever you say.
Well, they need to get page views, right?
And the truth is very boring, and if you go on Twitter and you follow everybody, you see
that the truth of startups is mostly boring, where you just, you ship things, right?
Like we're shipping, and every day we make a small feature that's boring, and only the
sum of it sounds interesting, but it's a daily boring thing, so that stuff doesn't sell on
the media, right?
Yeah, it really doesn't.
I mean, you need to be like backstabbing somebody, or you need to be like going down in flames,
or you need to like have some sort of like fiery, passionate belief, like you can't just
be doing the normal thing, otherwise you're going to change what you say.
Yeah, but that's why I like indie actors, because what you're doing is really special,
they're telling transparent true stories, they might be negative or positive, but they're
definitely real, because they're, you show all the data and stuff.
I think that's what, I think you like were doing that well before indie hackers started
too, because I think the reason that I created Indie Hackers was in large part reading like
the comments that you would leave on Hacker News, and the stuff that you would post on
Twitter where you would just say like, here's what's going on behind the scenes, or here's
how I felt when this happened.
So Nomad looks like huge inspiration for Indie Hackers in a lot of ways, and I think that's
why I was like, all right, the first person I got to get on here is Peter Levels.
So you didn't do the interview, but then you said it would be okay if I like kind of clipped
together in my own interview.
So I went around finding things that you'd said.
Dude, I sound so arrogant, but I'm not arrogant, but it's just, you get a lot of, you get a
two now, you get so many DMs, and it's just insane, and you need to, because if I answer
everything like, oh sure, let's do it, I won't be able to ship anymore, and I go bankroll.
Yeah, exactly.
You got to keep your eye on the ball.
I mean, I didn't think you were arrogant at all, I was just happy that you let me do the
interview, like this fake interview with you, and then when I launched, you were the most
effusive person.
You were like, this is awesome.
And maybe that's because the interview was clipped from your blog post, so it was your
actual words rather than the contortions of a journalist.
I don't know, my whole personal philosophy is Indie Hackers pretty much.
I'm not asking, it's just true, it's just exactly that.
Well, you are certainly one of the most inspiring Indie Hackers out there for me, and I think
for a lot of other people as well.
I wish I had prepared more for this podcast, we scheduled it kind of last minute, but on
the flip side, we also had months of preparation where we said that we were going to do it,
and we just hadn't gotten around to it.
But I'm sure we're going to have a ton of things to talk about, because you do a ridiculous
number of things.
I think probably the best analog to you is Mubs, Mubshar Iqbal, who's another prolific
maker.
Oh, I love Mubs, yeah.
He's a great guy, I had him on the show.
He's more prolific than me.
He's nuts, he's like releasing a new project every other week.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Product Hunt finished there in November Hackathon about a month ago, and I think he had four,
maybe five different entries to this one hackathon.
It's insane, and I feel strong composition with him.
He's a really nice guy, and he's the number one product on Maker.
He shipped 44 products, he has I think 25,000 upvotes, and I'm like, I don't know, I'm like
number eight or something, and then I want to be number one because I'm competitive,
so I told Mubs I'm going to ship 10 products, so I get about 10,000 votes, and then I'll
be bigger than you.
And he's like, well, what do you think, I'm not going to ship anything anymore, so I think
now we have a competition going.
You might have to sabotage him.
Yeah, he's just, he's so fast.
I mean, he was Product Hunt's Maker of the Year last year, and I think you had the title
of the year before that.
But the primary difference between the two of you guys, in my mind, is that for Mubs,
this is more of a hobby.
So he comes home from work, and he builds things for fun.
He doesn't really charge for them, whereas you are primarily focused on building revenue-generating
businesses.
So you charge for pretty much everything that you make, and I consider you more of a prolific
bootstrapper than a prolific maker.
I don't know if that's the best way to describe you, but it's kind of how I envision it.
How would you describe yourself?
I think Mubs does some studio, like for startups, he does work for them.
It's really cool.
No, but for me, it's like, I was working at a call center, a really shitty job.
For me back then, and I had to sell these financial products to people, and I didn't
really like it, and I knew I didn't want to do that kind of job again.
So for me, it's always been, I need to make money to pay my bills, or I won't be able
to do what I want to do, right?
And I don't really want to work for other people.
I don't want to get instructions for other people, because I'm too stubborn.
I usually think, generally, that I think it better, or something, that my opinions is
... Because, of course, it's my opinion, so of course it's better, for me, at least.
So I'm just a very stubborn person, and in that respect, it's very hard for me to work
for other people.
It's also very luxury, and it's a privilege, right?
So I need to make money.
I need to charge people for money, because I'm not raising venture capital.
So that's why I'm always triggered when people on Twitter say, well, how dare you charge
money for your website?
It's like, come on, man.
I'm working nonstop, like all every day I'm working on my website to make it better.
I make every little pixel, a little button, a little image, and video, and I make everything
and do the marketing.
So come on, man.
Let me charge.
I'm like a corner store, and I charge for these sandwiches.
Please pay for them when you like them so I can continue making them.
Yeah.
I think it's funny.
People on the internet have this classic attitude of they're just so used to getting so many
things for free from, I don't know, VC-funded companies put out things for free, and other
people on the internet do open source stuff for free.
Facebook, Google.
Yeah.
And so they're like, everything should be free.
And then one person's making something, and it's like, actually, I'm going to charge you.
And honestly, you get a lot of complaints, but it also works out surprisingly well.
I know you're doing very well from a lot of the things that you've made, and you've got
a huge fan base of people who are more than happy to buy the stuff that you've made.
And I think...
No.
And it's like, let's just be honest.
It's loads of money.
It's like, the revenue is, for me, ridiculously high.
I think for any person with a salary, it's ridiculously high.
And I save most of it.
And I'm not embarrassed by it.
I think it's really hard work.
And yeah, just charging people helps, and you always get hate for charging.
And I think that's one of the...
That's actually one of the big things for starting makers, like newbie makers, they're
really scared to charge.
It keeps coming up.
They like to make something, and they spend weekends on it as a side project.
And then when a lot of people start using it, they'll charge like $2 or $3, and then
they're like, no, no, no, you need to charge maybe $30 a month.
Because you can't even charge $10, because Netflix charges $10, but it's a billion-dollar
company, so it has a lot of high volume.
You're a small maker, you maybe need to charge $30 a month or $100 a month if it's B2B, right?
You need to pay your bills.
You need to pay your rent.
Come on.
And for whatever reason, people get it backwards.
So like, oh, I'm small, I can't charge more.
Well, it's the exact opposite.
Netflix can charge very little because they're taking advantage of economies of scale.
When you're tiny, you can't do that.
You have to charge more.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And what I learned in business school and what I learned there was the price is not
about the cost.
You need to decouple price from cost.
What you put in as time is important, but what's more important is the value that a
user gets from it.
How do you change the person's life?
Does he save two hours of work every day?
Okay, what's her hourly rate?
$100.
Okay, you saved her $200.
Then you could probably charge $150, right?
Because the margin is then $50 for her.
It's like such an unnatural way for so many people to think.
And I want to get into that and talk about how you have put that to work and all the
different things that you've launched.
But let's introduce yourself to people who don't know who you are.
You've worked on a ton of different apps.
People might know you for one thing and not realize that you've made another thing that
they love and that they use.
So can you describe, I guess, kind of a breakdown of your life today?
What are the things that you've made?
What are the things that you're working on?
And if you don't mind sharing, what's the financial breakdown of how much revenue your
apps are generating?
Okay, so my main things are Nomad lists.
It's kind of like a database of cities.
I collected 1,000 cities in the world.
And I collected all this data about the weather and internet speed.
And I started because Digital Nomads, like I was Digital Nomads in 2013.
I wanted to travel and then I was working a little bit.
I was like, okay, which cities can I go to that have fast internet?
Because it was so important to have fast internet to work, right?
And where it's kind of warm and where it's kind of cheap because it didn't have a lot
of money back then.
So I made this website that's called Nomad lists and now it has almost a million users
a month.
The revenue is about, I get the range from 15,000 to $25,000 a month.
It's mostly subscriptions or like membership.
So you can join the website and then you have access to all these social features to meet
other Digital Nomads, remote workers, travelers.
You can put all your travels in a profile.
It's kind of like a social network for travelers and remote workers.
And then I have another website called remoteok.io.
I started that because I saw a lot of people around me.
They wanted to become a nomad or work from home or do remote jobs.
And it was very hard to find remote jobs back then because they were all dispersed on different
job sites like normal, regular, traditional job sites.
So they were like, okay, I'll just aggregate.
I use the APIs for the job sites to, you know, kind of like use it.
I wrote a function to see which job is actually remote and I parse some filter words or whatever.
And then I took the job, put it on my site and link back to them to that site so they
would get traffic.
And that worked really well.
Then I started selling my own job posts on remoteok.
And that makes about, it ranged from like 5,000 to $10,000 a month just from job posts
for people.
I have a lot of these, you know, side price that don't really make money.
Like I just released Hoodmaps, which is a neighborhood mapping app.
So people, like I was in Amsterdam and my friend was going to visit Amsterdam and I'm
from there.
So she asked me like, where should I go in the city?
And my problem was there's always people going to the tourist places in cities and they don't
really get an idea of the real city.
I was like, okay, I'll just draw you a map with colors.
Like this is a tourist area is red.
This is the hipster area is yellow and a senator and she said that was really useful because
I could find a place where to go and the areas were completely different.
I was in very local areas in the hipster areas and it was cool.
So I made that into an app recently and that works really well.
That's gets like, I think 400,000 users a month.
Yeah, it's just a cross-source map pretty much.
So I have all these little side products, but only normal listener, remoteok make the
real money.
That's a lot of stuff.
Most people will never build even one of those apps and you are like rolling them out.
It seems like every year you've got another thing that's like, yeah, over, over, I think
two or three years, but I made a lot of stuff that just disappeared because it just didn't
get any traction deck.
I think not nine out of 10 things didn't get traction.
I want to talk about like all your failures.
It's like my favorite thing to talk about what, what didn't get traction and why.
It's funny.
I think if I want to have more people on to just talk about what failed, but it's really
hard to do because people usually don't want to come on and just talk about a failure.
But what's what's easy is I want to talk about good things.
I also, I forget it because you forget when something is like painful or one of my biggest
fears was my first project.
It was called Tubelytics because back then I was a YouTuber.
I had like a music channel for YouTube and YouTube was paying me as one of the first
partners in Holland and Europe and I was getting like 1000 to 2000, 3000, $4000 a month just
from this music channel.
And it was German based music, like electronic music, but also house and techno and all these
European kind of genres.
But the problem was I had like 12 channels and I couldn't see the view count every day.
I had to log into every account.
So I was like, okay, I'll just scrape the API of YouTube and figure out like for myself,
you know, like how many views am I getting a day?
So the electoral house channel would get 20,000 views and then together all these channels
would get 200,000 views a day.
So I just wanted like a summer summing app.
So I made that.
Then I was like, okay, there's other, these YouTube networks were coming up back then,
these multi-channel networks and I was like, they can use it.
So I made it into a real app.
I spent way too much time working on it.
I spent like a year working on it.
I couldn't code so I learned, I knew basic PHP from WordPress, right?
From a, I had a WordPress blog before.
I mean, I wasn't like completely new, but I was definitely, I didn't know anything about
codes so like properly, you know?
So I learned like my SQL database and I made this analytics platform that would simply
just connect to the API and get all the views for every single video you have for all your
channels.
So I did it for my channel, the database would fill up in like a week or something with like
hundreds of thousands of rows and I was like, wow, that's a lot of data.
Then Vice emailed me, just said, that's a cool platform, can we use it?
Like Vice Media, like super big.
Yeah, that's huge.
Oh my God, it's happening.
So I enabled it for them and then I got like millions of rows in my database and my database
was stalling and my server was stalling and I had no idea what was happening.
And I started getting problems like on YouTube, you will have a few corrections.
So you'll get 50,000 views, let's say you start uploading a video on Monday, you get
50,000 views on Monday and then on the Tuesday, you get another 25,000 views.
So YouTube will only show back then the total views, which is 75,000 views, but then on
Wednesday, it would sometimes correct the views if you count to like, okay, there was
30,000 fake views.
So now you have 75,000 minus 30,000, which is, I don't know, whatever.
But the problem was I would have to show the difference, right?
But the difference would sometimes be negative because YouTube was correcting the data.
So then Vice emailing me like, why is this a negative view count on all our videos?
And I'm like, I don't know, like people are reverse watching now, it's a stupid joke,
but I didn't know and I did know because it was, YouTube wasn't giving me the data.
So I emailed YouTube, can you please give the daily view count data, sorry, we don't
support it.
So I thought maybe I can correct it with like data formats.
It was just, it all started going to hell from there.
Was Vice paying you for this?
Not yet.
No, but they wanted to pay, they wanted to try it out and then see if they could pay.
And then after like a month, they said, they just stopped responding.
I was like, okay.
And I didn't log in anymore.
So they obviously didn't like it.
And the funny thing is the guy who contacted me and used the device emailed me two years
later.
Hey, I was the guy for Vice using Tubelytics, that app.
Now I know you're from like 12 startups thing and like startup bootstrapping startup world.
And so we met again on the internet.
That's really cool.
It was like, it was total failure.
And I spent a year of my time on it, on an app that doesn't work.
So how did you feel at the end of that?
I mean, were you not discouraged?
Because I think a lot of people would be like, all right, I'm done.
No, I felt like, you know, when you shower, you think about stuff always.
For a year, I was only thinking about this app and you know, every day was like a new
problem.
It was just horrible.
And I didn't know how database works.
You know, every day I need to learn something new.
And I was like, okay, I'm just gonna do this.
And then after a year, I just gave up.
And then my YouTube started stopping to make money, like it started decreasing my revenue.
So my revenue was like, at peak $8,000 a month from YouTube ads, and then suddenly it was
like 1000.
And it was dropping like by about, I would say $200 a month.
So I knew that it would stop in about five months if we would go to the same rate.
So I needed to find a job.
So I started applying to jobs in Holland.
This was just after I had been traveling for a year, been Nomad for a year and I went back
and I was in my parents house, sitting in the dinner table at 4am with coffee on my
laptop, like the press and super anxiety, panic attacks and everything.
And my money was just decreasing and I was applying for jobs at Coinbase.
But I wasn't a good enough developer because I was still just like the shitty PHP developer
person that can barely do my SQL database.
So how can I help with a Bitcoin platform in 2000, or was it 2014?
And that's when I did the 12 stars thing.
I wrote a blog because I was blogging, I was travel blogging for my mom.
So I'd been travel blogging all my travels that year for my mom because she wanted to
read post photos.
Look, I'll just write a blog about this situation.
Like I need to build, I need to set a goal for myself because I knew my dad always said
when you're depressed, you know, if you're clinically depressed, obviously you need to
go to a psychiatrist, psychologist.
But if you're, if you were depressed at me is that you need to get a shovel from the
garden and you need to get some sand and then you have a mountain of, you just start digging
in the ground and you take the sand and put it on a little mini mountain.
I know the English word.
And then you put it back in and you keep doing that and then slowly you'll start feeling
happier.
So I was like, okay, I need to do something.
That was his point.
You need to do something.
I think most people in that situation, like you're kind of at a crossroads where you're
like, okay, well, one thing I can do is get a job where I know I'm going to actually make
money and yeah, I might have to get better at programming to get the job that I want.
And then the other side, you have this really risky decision, which is let's just keep doing
startups even though this one failed after working on it for 12 years.
How did you decide to take like the second path rather than like the more conventional
one?
Well, it wasn't even like SARS.
It was like I was blogging this thing and the title was 12 projects in 12 months.
And then for like a joke, I backspaced products and I said startups because it was around
the time that the word startup started changing a little bit on Hacker News, there was more
about talk about a little more talk about bootstrap startups.
Like I remember Patio 11, which is your friend.
Also he was my idol.
He's like the reason I'm doing all this.
He never acknowledged my existence, unfortunately, but I know you're close to him.
But he is my big inspiration.
Like super fanboy.
Anyway, so I was reading his post and there was bootstrap stuff.
So I was like, well, it kind of does like a startup, right?
So backspace is 12 projects and I'll just call it 12 startups.
And there was a smart press trick later.
I found out like that's something the press could write about.
From that point, that was like April 2014, like just my life just changed.
So what was 12 startups?
Like how did it work exactly?
So yeah, so it was a blog I wrote.
I was going to do one startup or one project a month, finish it, launch it, and just to
force myself to learn this startup thing, because I was so bad at it.
And then I knew, because I spent one year on this Tube Linux app and it didn't work.
So I was like, okay, I shouldn't spend so much time.
I should do a little bit more like lean startup stuff, just ship and deploy and launch and
validate.
And my idea was, and this was, I think this is definitely new, or my perspective on it
was new, validate by launching.
So you don't know if the app's going to work, but you need to launch it and then you know
if it's going to work.
And you need to understand that most apps won't work.
So that I knew.
So I was like, okay, then I'll just do a lot and I'll see what sticks, like throwing spaghetti
on the wall.
And then I started making one thing a month.
It's cool how you're building off of all this knowledge and experience.
What were some of the apps that you ended up making?
The first thing was Play My Inbox, which was my friends, we're always chatting, we're always
emailing each other songs.
So I would log into their email with a robot and I would download, I would check the URLs
and I would put it in a playlist.
And I launched that, I think it was in product count, but I didn't even know product count
back then.
So somebody launched for me.
It was okay.
Like a lot of music journalists started using it, it was kind of fun, but didn't make money,
right?
And I think the second thing was Giftbook maybe, which was like animated gifs on Flipbooks.
So I found a person in Malaysia who printed Flipbooks and said, okay, can I just send
you the frames of an animated gif, which I would cut it up in PHP and it would email
to him and then you would get some money.
I would get some money.
And it worked.
A lot of people got animated gif Flipbooks, but then it was such a small margin I gave
up on it.
There was GoFucker Do It, which was the first one that went viral, it was the app where
you set a goal and you put a price in it.
Like I want to quit smoking by one January, 2018.
And if I don't, I have to pay $50 and you enter your credit cards and that was the first
time I used Stripe.
Interesting maybe.
It was very easy to set up for a basic coder like me.
And then if, so there was a person who would check if you quit smoking or not, so they
would get an email.
Like your friend would get an email, did Kordland quit smoking on one January, 2018.
And your friend would be like, no, he didn't.
Okay, charge.
And I would do a Stripe charge on your credit cards.
But everybody always asks like, where does the money go to?
Does it go to the friend?
I was like, no, not to the friend because that would be subjective, right?
It would go to me.
I started making like a few hundreds of dollars a month, my first revenue from this GoFucker
Do It app.
It was really funny.
How did that feel?
Did you not, like, did you keep working on it or did you decide like, I'm done with this?
No, I just let it run and, but it was really funny and I was like, okay, interesting.
So maybe I make $300 a month from this.
Theoretically I could go to live in some cheap place and just, you know, get out of my parents'
house.
It was a little in my parents' house and it was getting more depressed.
I was like a small little town in Holland, it's very depressing for me, especially when
I was like 26 or something and I was like, okay, come on, I graduated already.
I need to, you know, after university, you can't live, well, you can live with your parents,
but I, in Dutch culture and maybe American culture too, it's not super normal.
Maybe it's getting more normal to live with your parents, but I didn't really want to
live with my parents.
I wanted to be in the world because I had just been traveling.
I like traveling.
I like to be outside.
I didn't want to go back to my small town, especially since I was living in Amsterdam
for eight years, studying there and stuff.
But I was happy.
So I was making money and then I kept shipping and it was really amazing, life changing moment
that I saw money in a Stripe account and then to my bank account, it was just like sigh
of relief, like, okay, maybe this is going to work out.
I think one of the most interesting things about your story so far is that you had this
conviction, before you even started 12 startups in 12 months, that most startups fail and
you told yourself that you would work on each idea for one month and that was it, whereas
I think most people put all their hopes and dreams and kind of like they put all their
eggs in one basket, they're like, this is my pet project.
It's got to work.
Absolutely.
That's the biggest mistake you can do.
I see it all the time.
I see it every single week.
Yeah, it's crushing because then like when the thing doesn't work out, then not only
you're a lot more surprised and depressed than you would have been otherwise if you
had believed from the beginning that this thing probably was going to fail, but you
also don't get to take as many shots in the end.
I mean, you were launching new products every single month.
If somebody quits after the first month or if they persist in working on the same doomed
project forever, they're not going to be in good shape.
But also a lot of people spend a lot of money, right?
Sorry, a lot of people spend a lot of money because they're not programmers or they're
not designers and they don't do everything themselves like me or you.
So they have to hire people and so they spend all their money or they raise money, right?
They spend all their money and then it doesn't work.
And like, what do you do?
I mean, that's it.
You're done.
You're out of money and hopefully you didn't hire anybody.
Your savings are gone, maybe.
Yeah.
It's a really hardcore situation.
When you run out of money and you're, what are you going to do now?
Okay, find a job.
Good.
Okay.
And then you're in a job again.
Now, how are you going to get back to where you were?
Yeah, it's tough.
Which is you want to run a company for you.
So it's really tough.
It's really depressing.
It's horrible.
Like we always forget that we talk about these maker things and starter things like it's
really fun always.
But these are life changing things, man.
This is the soul crushing, depressing.
This can destroy friendships, families, relationships.
Paying your bills is important.
It's a crazy thing.
If you can't pay your bills, it's poverty for a lot of people.
Like I have backups.
I could go to my parents' house and live there and they don't really care.
They just feed me.
They're just like, okay, you're back.
Okay.
Didn't work out.
Didn't work out.
Traveling the world, making money.
Well, just come back and we'll cook food for you and you can make coffee here and just
enjoy.
Use our Wi-Fi.
Like mom, dad, co-working space.
A lot of people don't have this backup.
A lot of people, they can't go back.
They need to make this work.
Dude, it's hardcore shit.
Yeah.
I think that's a really good point.
Like this whole, I don't know what the best word for it is.
Just like this difficult period where you're first trying to get off the ground and you
don't have a company.
You don't have anything that can sustain you.
And if you don't have that backup, like I never lived in my parents' house, but I had
been a programmer with a CS degree and it's like I just could always fall back on the
fact that I can get a job.
No matter what, I can take any risk because worst case scenario, I can get a job.
Maybe I have to leave San Francisco.
I can't pay overpriced rents, but I will be able to land on my fee.
And if you're not in that situation, then I mean, you're completely right.
It's way more stressful.
A hundred percent.
And I think we talk a lot about this like privately, but I think it's really good to
be aware of that.
What I don't think is that you should hate on people that I have a fallback to my parents.
I was just born.
I can't help that.
If you have it, be grateful for it.
It's really special.
And I think a lot of people that are listening now maybe are in that situation where they
have a job.
They want to be make or they want to do something themselves because it's very aspirational
podcast, right?
This whole scene is a little bit aspirational and so a lot of people make it work.
A lot of people don't.
I don't know what to say, but I would say I just completely respect how incredibly hard
it is.
It can be super hard.
Yeah.
And I've been there a little bit.
How did you, I guess, decide to move on from the last thing that you built that was, was
it go fucking fund it?
Go fucking do it.
Go fucking fund it.
That's funny.
You said fund it.
San Francisco is changing you.
I know.
It's kind of my brain.
We didn't do things.
We fund things.
That's it.
We just fund things.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
Well, I kept shipping stuff, right?
So around May, I'd been in Holland for like five months, like December to April or May.
So I heard about this coworker space in Bali called Ubudz in a place called Ubudz.
So I saw a video.
I was like, wow, this is like a bamboo coworker space with monkeys.
It sounds really weird.
Maybe YouTube, but if you're listening, HUBUD.
So I went there and I was like, okay, I'm going to continue this travel thing and now
I have this few hundred dollars so I can pay for a hotel, right?
But I had to keep shipping.
So I started making a new idea I had was I'd been traveling around these places mostly
around, back then mostly around Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, like Seoul, of course, Bangkok,
Chiang Mai, those places, Bali.
I was like, okay, these places are pretty cool to live for a while and you can really
focus on things because it's a very different life than in SF or Holland where, well, first
of all, SF is very expensive.
Amsterdam is also almost at the same level, very expensive.
So you can't eat out a lot, at least I can't back then, especially.
And the life I had in Asia was mostly just you're in the coworking space, you're working,
you get coffee, then you get some food.
Food isn't very expensive.
You get a like three dollar sandwich, you get two 50 US dollar dinner maybe.
So it could save a lot of money, like bootstrapping with this money from go fuck and do it.
The thing is, I wanted to see if there was more cities like this, more places where it
was like fast and tense, a little bit cheap and what is it?
Yeah, warm.
It had to be a little bit warm because I'm from Holland.
I don't really like the temperature in Holland.
I like it to be more like California temperature and it made me feel happier and stuff.
So I made a spreadsheet of templates I knew and then I shared on Twitter like, do you
know any other places that are cool like this?
Because literally nobody knew it.
There was no, there was no, like the digital nomad scene wasn't really existing so much
as now.
People didn't know remote work.
Remote work was literally hardly on Hacker News.
Digital nomads were definitely not on Hacker News.
And I remember in Chiang Mai, like the nomad hotspot now, there was only like 20 people
back then doing this stuff.
And we all knew Tim Ferriss, but it wasn't very, it wasn't a big thing at all.
Tim Ferriss had been in 2007 with this four hour work week, but it had kind of tapered
off this word, I think.
So I was like, okay, where can we go?
And there was some blogs that were talking about different cities, but it wasn't quantified
data.
So I made a spreadsheet, shared on Twitter and I was like, okay, maybe some people added,
but then hundreds of people started adding them.
There was, I think, over a thousand people added data, also about like the cost of living
and stuff.
And I was like, wow, this went very viral.
This is very interesting.
This is like, like an anomaly, this is not normal.
How did you get a thousand people to find this spreadsheet that you created?
Well I tweeted it and then people started sharing it on Reddit.
People started sharing it in, I don't know, where they were talking back then because
there was no real chats about nomad stuff, but I honestly have no idea.
It only got three retweets, but it somehow filled up.
And I also, I kept filling it up with more data.
I started Googling like cities and stuff.
I remember that one of the first we found out about was Medellin in Colombia, which
was, had the same kind of characteristics as Bangkok and Chiang Mai and Bali.
It was warm and cheap.
And then normal cities started showing up.
So San Francisco, Amsterdam, within a month it was very filled with data.
I was like, okay, this is cool, but we need to have this as a website.
So I made a table.
I just copied the data from the spreadsheet and I put it in the HTML table.
I found some photos of the cities and at first it was called technomad.io because it was
like a cool name because I hated the word digital nomad.
It was a horrible name.
And then I remember talking to Mark, Mark from BetaList, Mark Gulbirch, also Dutch guy.
And I asked him like, what do you think about the name?
Like should I do a technomad?
He said, no, no, maybe like a remote list, like BetaList.
I said like nomad list.
He's like, yeah, yeah, nomad list works.
So I made nomad list.
And then I went to product count because GoFundMe can do it with product count and I was like
big fan of product count and Ryan Hoover and stuff.
And I checked that logo.
It was a round circle with a P in it.
So I'll just do a round circle, but I'll make it more red and I put a backpack in it.
Or it was first like a world icon anyway.
And then I made it.
It was, I just copied product count layouts with cities and I kept, I've been copying
product count until today, just everything they do, but I do it for cities and I'm honest
about it.
I just, I tweet product count and Ryan Hoover and I think they like it, but yeah, super
inspired by them.
So I made this table, I made this website and then this is super funny.
I deployed it in tests on my server, right?
Like the NGINX config and stuff and the server config, but it wasn't live yet.
And then my server rebooted because Linode had, Linode, my hosting company had maintenance
and somehow the default, the server conflict got loaded and the site was suddenly up and
I had no idea.
Oh no.
And then I remember I was in Manila and I was like at this, we're having like cocktails
or drinks or something.
And I remember checking my phone and I started getting hundreds of tweets and I was like,
whoa, what's happening?
Oh God, I accidentally deployed my site.
And then I think Emil, this other Dutch guy, he submitted to product count and then I went
to number one.
And meanwhile I was drunk, right?
I was drunk at 4 a.m. in Manila in some taxi on my phone, like checking what the hell was
happening.
I was trying to tell to people in the bar, like, you know, guys, girls, look at this.
I don't know what's happening, but they didn't understand why this was like a very integral
key point in my life at the time.
Because I could see this is really like the sheet went viral.
The site goes viral without even me posting it.
It's insane.
I went to product count number one and I was like, oh my God, this is ridiculous.
It's going to change everything.
You know, what's cool is like the fact that you're so prolific and you're launching all
of these startups.
Because I mean, at this point you've launched at least four or five products out there.
And I think that experience makes it much easier for you to tell when something is really
catching on.
Because a lot of people are stuck in a situation where they don't know like, should I keep
working on this?
Is this working?
Is it going to work?
Or should I move on to the next thing?
But if you've done like five things and one of them is way better, you're like, all right,
this is clearly on a different level.
I should stick with this.
Dude, that's completely it.
It's and it's intuition.
I really believe in intuition a lot and you know when something is special.
It's just like when you see a boy or girl, whatever, and you fall in love, right?
You're like, okay, I know this, but it's not always accurate, but I know this might work
out, right?
It's same with when something like this goes viral, like, oh my God, this is completely
crazy.
And I remember I woke up the next day and Twitter was full of messages.
I got all these emails.
I think then I went on Hacker News the same day or that week and then it went also number
one there.
And it was, dude, the site was nothing.
It was like an HTML table with cities and the cost on it.
It wasn't even special.
And if you launch something that's so not special that goes like this, you're like,
oh, maybe this is not about the product.
Maybe it's about the trends.
And it's like, okay, so maybe this digital nomad trends is finally moving from where
it was, which was like Tim Ferriss four hour work week, a little sleazy, I think, internet
marketing, virtual assistants, bullshit scene, to be honest, that's what it was towards Hacker
News people, right?
Hacker News people were the remote developers, engineers, people that are just doing really
cool shit, right?
That's changing people's lives, it's cliche to say, but it's true.
They're making like these giant apps that are all over the world being used, like Lyft,
Uber, Facebook, Google, whatever, Apple, right?
It was arriving there.
So it wasn't ready in 2007 yet, and I think it wasn't ready because of internet speeds
and a lot of stuff.
Now it was finally ready.
I think the financial crisis of 2008 had something to do with it, like this delay effect of like,
okay, I know, we want to have a different life maybe.
How much were you thinking about this stuff back then?
Like were you putting in a lot of thought to figure out what is...
I was.
I was thinking a lot about it.
I was thinking a lot about it because I remember blogging about bootstrapping startups in Asia
back then and it kept going on Hacker News.
Like people, me or people, I think other people also were submitting my posts and it kept
going on the front page of Hacker News.
So I was like, okay, this is definitely something Hacker News likes, and Hacker News, to be
honest, and this sounds very arrogant, but Hacker News is always ahead of trends about
three or four years from mainstream.
Like Bitcoin, Dropbox, well Dropbox, they were negative about it, right?
And it turned out to be fine.
Always when something's happening, my mainstream friends are going to talk about it within
three years and my mom and dad are going to talk about it within five years, to be honest.
That's just how it works for me.
So I was like, okay, if Hacker News likes it, this is going to be a thing.
So I need to like, you know, how do you call it, like go full on this project?
So I went and I think I launched a few more 12 stars, but I didn't finish the project,
to be honest, in that year at least.
I finished it, I think by now.
I think I've launched by now 12 projects.
But back then I was like, okay, I have two choice, or I leave the site kind of like basic
and not maintain it.
That would be super stupid.
But then I can continue to 12 stars.
So I went 100% on that project and I just started like adding data, adding features.
I knew I needed social features because I read something.
If you want to keep people coming to your website, you need to make the site sticky.
So you need to either ask them for their email or you need to have like social features that
they sign up, right?
I didn't know how to make a login form or user database stuff.
It was really hard.
So I was like, okay, Slack was coming up back then.
So I was like, okay, I'll just use Slack.
And I made a Slack group and I started inviting my friends.
And then that grew within a month, grew to like 500 people and then 1000 people.
And I kind of connected to the website, but really shitty again, it hardly worked.
It was like a tie, it was a tie form.
And then I remember getting spammers on this Slack because everything was free.
So I charged $5.
And with tie form, you can add a Stripe box really easily.
So they would pay money and then the spammers were gone, right?
And then there was more spammers again.
So I charged $25 and then $50 and then I think $99.
So I kept charging more.
And then suddenly I was making money from GoFuckingDoIt and I was making money from Nomadlist.
And it wasn't basic money.
It was starting to pass $1,000 a month.
I was like, oh my God.
And it kept growing.
So I was like, okay, this is super, super simple because if there's more users and they're
going to pay, then I could maybe get this to like $2,000, $3,000 and I have like income
salary.
It will be amazing.
And it happens.
And then it happened way faster than I thought.
And then how long did it take?
Well, this took a few months, but I remember the first week of Nomadlist launching, I got
an email from Matt Mottewag, the founder of WordPress, WordPress.com at least.
And he said, can we sponsor the website?
And I said, sure.
So he was like sending me a few thousand dollars a month.
So immediately that started making money as well.
So now I had memberships, I had a basic sponsorship.
So now I was like maybe $3,000 a month or something, you know, and it was great.
That's crazy how fast you got to that milestone.
And I think it's interesting because you had this huge launch in Hacker News, obviously
your Twitter was blowing up.
It was just this tremendous start, like this tremendous launch out of the gate.
And for a lot of people, that's where it ends.
You know, they get like a lot of traffic and it just dies down and they can never get it
back to where it was.
But you were able to keep it sustained.
How'd you do that?
Yeah, but the key part is adding social features, I think.
If I didn't, the site was gone.
So it was the community forum really that helped you capture all that traffic that you
had gotten during launch.
Absolutely.
Like I have 900,000 visits a month now.
Only 200 people pay and sign up a month.
So it's like zero, zero, zero, zero, something.
It's very low.
But those people give money, which makes me, keeps me working on the websites.
Also they talk about it and they tell other people to join.
And also there's, you know, there's a concept of lurkers, you know, Reddit, like I think,
what is it?
99% lurk.
I think it's definitely true.
So on social platforms, there's a lot of lurkers and there's a few content creators or, you
know, people that post forum topics, like, you know, in any arc, it's like, you must
have ratios on this, data on this.
How many people post a forum thread and how many people watch?
Yeah.
It's like the vast majority are lurkers just reading stuff.
Yeah.
So based on that, I think you got to add sticky features and like what I would have done different,
I would have programmed them myself, but maybe it wasn't that stupid because that would have
taken too long time.
So I needed to immediately make it social.
Oh, it still took, I think a month or two or something to add slack and stuff.
Is this something that you like spend a lot of time looking at metrics and measuring exactly
like what parts of, of Nomad list are sticky and have high retention or is it more like
gut feeling?
I know I need social features, so I'm just going to put the best social features that
I can think of.
And this is something that you've kept doing since you launched Nomad list, or is it kind
of just upfront you put in, put them there and then since then you haven't had to do
much in that area.
Well, I used to check a lot of analytics and now I hardly, and this is funny because I
think I spoke to Mark from beta list and he also hardly checks it and it's just gut.
I realized that I don't want to make a website for like, everybody, I just want to make a
site that I would love to use, which means you have to do choices that are against what
people say.
So you might decrease your page views, but you just make a cool website.
And if you follow all these metrics, not necessarily, but kind of, you will make things format.
I don't want to make a site for metrics.
I want to make a site for humans, you know, and that comes from like, I was a musician
before this.
And if you make a song that everybody likes, well, sorry, that's a really shitty song generally.
But maybe not, maybe, you know, like Justin Bieber is kind of a good song, but in general,
I want to be the indie artist and I want to make really, like I want to make radio ads
kind of music.
That's weird.
And before that, like it's ahead of the curb and it's edgy.
I want to make a radio ad type website where it's just like, why is this site so weird?
But it works.
Okay.
And then, you know, like, how can you see it in the analytics?
If you follow the analytics, then you're going to always be maybe behind because maybe in
two years, it will go down, but you don't know why.
Maybe mine will go up because my gut was right.
Because I was like the Hacker News gut, which is always three years ahead.
I don't know.
Maybe it's arrogant, but maybe it's true.
Yeah, I think also it's much better if you have a handful of people who really love or
hate what you're doing and have a ton of people who are lukewarm about whatever it is that
you're building.
That's it.
It's better to have all these haters as well.
You're totally right.
But I think what I did do is I would launch features and I would look at the database
or something.
Like, okay, are you people adding, like I added the trips feature or people plan trips?
I was like, okay, are people actually adding their travels to this?
And they did.
And now it's a really big part of the product of Nomad List.
So I definitely, I test the features.
Yeah, and it's also cool that you are a Nomad List user yourself.
I mean, you're a digital nomad and you started this entire thing because you were traveling
and you wanted to know what the best places to go were, which gives you a lot of insight
into what features to build, especially compared to somebody who might just be working on this
who doesn't really travel and live that lifestyle themselves.
No, totally.
Yeah.
I feel like, you know, like patient zero, I feel like Nomad's number zero and the site
has to be great for me.
And I think that's a very good question and integral part of like making bootstrapping
stuff that you, it's better to make things for yourself and solve your own problems.
It has limitations as well, but it means you're the expert at your own problem.
And I see so many people, the majority of people are trying to solve other people's
problems.
And I've tried that too, the hardly works for me because I don't know the problem.
And it's as bare as this that last year I went, I was living in Holland for a while
in the summer and I forgot, I forgot what Nomading was and what was important.
And I, I kind of made the site worse.
And then I started traveling and I was like, okay, this site is unusable on mobile.
And why are these buttons here that are not important?
I want to know, like I'm literally standing in middle of nowhere now.
I want to know where's the place to work, where's the hotel, where's this and this?
What's the price of this?
And I, so I changed the website again to fit my needs again.
Yeah, exactly.
So being the customer of your own product, dog fooding is so super important for me.
That's such a good hack.
It's like, I wish, I wish I could do that more easily with ND hackers is it's like I
made ND hackers for similar reasons to help me solve my own problem.
It was really to help me come up with an idea for something to work on and help other people
do the same thing.
And then it's like, once I got something to work on, you know, it wasn't the ideal user
anymore for a long time until I built the forum.
No, and it's a traditional fall for companies that they forget what they were, who are they
making things for?
What's their audience?
Like, why could you see so much with PC funded startups?
They start with like, okay, like Nomads, for example, if no one, this would be PC funded.
And then if you see would call me, we didn't like month to say, you know, Peter Nomads
is a small market, you need to go for the general travel market.
And I'm like, well, dude, like I didn't even validate Nomads market.
It's month two.
And then he's like, no, you got to go into all these different verticals.
And you know, after trees, I'm like selling furniture or something just too, too broad.
And it's insane.
So don't do that, you know, like, like, make it for yourself.
Well, let me ask you, how do you keep your eye on the ball?
Because the entire time you're building your company, you're gonna run into snags, you're
going to run into issues where you want to grow, and maybe something's holding you back,
or you might change as a person, you know, so how do you make sure that you're always
building Nomad list for yourself?
That's my biggest fear, to be honest, because in terms of Nomads, I'm a different Nomad
than I was the first month, right that I did it like 2014 in April, I was, I was so naive
and but but also like, exhilarating, everything was was was exciting and stuff.
And now it's still amazing for me, but it's more like, like, now I want to stay in places
pretty long, like I want to stay three to six months, or maybe, you know, nine months,
I don't know, I just want to, I want to have more of a base, maybe.
It's not just about age.
It's about like, I know how it is to travel every two weeks to a different continent.
And it's ridiculous.
Like, it's really, it sounds cool, but it's ridiculous.
You sit in airplanes, and, and everything kind of starts looking the same.
And that's not the point of travel.
So for example, that's the difference from me four years ago.
And the question is, who are my users?
Is it me?
Or is it these new people?
And I kind of need to focus on both, but it's not sure.
So that's, it's a big challenge, man.
How do you know?
Are you like, are you just talking to people in your community?
Are you like doing surveys, you just tweeting stuff out and seeing like what the reaction
is?
Absolutely.
I talk a lot to people like I mean, because if I go to a coworking space in a Nomad spot,
I will get recognized, which is really funny, and they'll be like, Oh, I love the website.
I use a lot.
And I'm like, Yeah, but what do you really think?
Like, what do you don't like about this is like, honestly, like, these buttons are ridiculous.
Like, you need to change them like, okay, cool.
What else?
And they'll be, I'll just try and get the negative stuff.
Importance, fair importance, most important.
Get the fanboy stuff, fangirl stuff out of the way and just like, okay, what's bad about
the website?
What do you hate?
And why are you not using it?
A lot of Nomads, they're like in body for them.
They're just not using it.
Why are they not using it?
Do they?
They've already found their spot.
Like, there's people saying you're like, okay, I don't need your website, because I'm already
in a coworking space where I meet friends and people and stuff, which is one of my size
goals, right?
I'm like, well, this is a very good point.
Like, maybe that's better, right?
But yeah, you have to talk to people and also solve your own problem.
But yeah, it's hard.
It's pretty cool.
Because you're in like a good like industry where it's like, maybe even a little bit easier
to talk to people because traveling is like, on one hand, it can be really lonely.
But on the other hand, it's kind of social if you have these meetups with people who,
you know, are nomad list users, and they go to Bali, and they want to meet other people
like them who are also nomads, you can just go literally talk to people face to face,
whereas like so many other people launching businesses will never once talk to a customer
face to face.
Absolutely.
And no, I remember Patio 11, he was, he made an app called Appointment Reminder, right?
Yeah.
And he would go into barbershops, and he would say, hey, what's your biggest problem?
You know, I don't know if I could, if I had the guts to go into a barbershop and like
ask all these, they were like, what are you, what are you doing here, man, get your haircut,
or you get out like, what if for me, it's easier.
And you know, what's also interesting, like, you need to be sure that the local knowledge
you get is, it's very different than the internet knowledge.
But people say the internet is way, it's a lot of hate, but it's also way more honest
and real.
And you know, Reddit, they upvote like the highest, like the most important thing they
say maybe about your websites, they will be like, no, but this is no, but this sucks and
on Reddit, and then the top photo is like, yeah, this and this and this sucks.
While in a coworker space, like, or real life, you would, it would be way more nuanced.
But there's probably a lot of truth in both.
And I think more truth in the Reddit top comment, which says like, Peter, why, why is this wrong
with your website?
You know, it's so radically honest.
People are afraid to offend you in real life.
So when they see you in person, they'll be much kinder, which is nice on one hand, but
then you kind of have to filter and be like, okay, what do you really think?
Yeah, but then the opposite happens on the internet.
They're like, you are terrible person, I hate you.
And then you meet them real life.
And they're like, you know, sorry, I said that, but I had six coffees that day, I was
raised.
But um, but I can understand the hate.
I mean, on the laptop, you're different on the computer, we're different.
So let's talk about travel for a second while we're on the subject of meeting people abroad.
How do you get so much done while also living this digital nomad lifestyle?
I mean, I have this image of you on a jet with your laptop open, cranking out features
on the plane and being super productive and meeting people.
Whereas when I'm traveling, I get very little done.
I'm completely discombobulated, the process of having to constantly pack things up and
unpack them makes it hard for me to get work done.
So I'm curious what you do to counteract that.
No, I mean, me too on the plane, I first of all, I hate flying, and I feel horrible and
I feel sick after and it takes me about seven days to get to normal, to be honest, like
I'll usually four days, but something like that.
I think the misunderstanding, which is very radical, is that nomads or me, they travel
a lot.
Like I don't travel at all a lot, I might even travel less than you.
Definitely in the beginning, I would fly like from, you know, like every few weeks or something.
And now it's just, it will, I'll prefer it to stay in place for months.
So it means that I will fly, like I just flew from Holland to Bali in Indonesia.
And this was like a month ago.
It took like a few days to recover and then I've been shipping solidly, like I've launched
Nomad List 3.0 here and I've been shipping solidly from here and yeah, it's fine.
It's exactly like normal life.
And I think we need to get rid of this, this idealization of travel, like fast travel is
absolutely terrible for you.
Holiday travel, where you just go someplace for seven days is, come on, it's fine.
I understand why it is because especially in America, people work, like what do they
get?
Like a week?
Like my law in Europe, it's much more, two weeks, yeah, in Europe, I think you get like
six weeks.
The problem is that, you know, when you finally feel like recovered, you have to go home again.
That means a lot of people, they will try Nomad stuff and they will do it really fast
and then say like, okay, it doesn't work for me.
Like I'm not feeling psychologically stable, I don't feel physical stable, you know, you
go crazy.
So my advice would be what I do is I stay longer in places.
Yeah, I've never done the long vacation thing, but honestly, that sounds like the right way
to do it.
Yeah.
Another thing that I've heard you say that was actually pretty cool is I think you were
giving some sort of talk about how to be a bootstrapper or how to get like a startup
off the ground and you were talking about ideas and how one of the cool things about
traveling is that it kind of gives you more ideas because you're seeing all sorts of like
different things, unique experiences that other people aren't.
So you know, people in San Francisco might be all reading the same books and blogs and
having the same conversations about the same cultural events and they're like, man, I can't
think of a unique idea, everything I think of is already taken.
But when you are traveling and visiting these like, you know, far away places in Bali or
South Africa and you're interacting with all these different peoples and cultures, suddenly
you have a lot more material to work with in terms of being creative.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I learned this in business school, I think where there was a word called like international
arbitrage.
And it's a very broadboard, but you can also apply to products where like my friend, he's
British, but he was he's Hong Kong ethnically.
So he would go to Hong Kong a lot.
And he said, you know, in Hong Kong, the biggest selling thing now is a little doll, tiny doll
to wrap your headphone cord around of your iPhone.
I was like, yeah, of course, it sounds super logical.
Why don't we have that?
Or what's now slowly starting to come here is like, I have a ring on my iPhone, a metal
ring that sticks on my on the back of my phone, and it makes me never drop it.
And I don't have a case.
I just have this ring.
I've been getting New York and America, I think in Europe.
So that's an it's called just an economic advantage of information you have over other
people in your country or your area that that they don't have because they haven't traveled.
And it's weird to me how slow information will spread sometimes or like not spread at
all.
Like I kind of expect it to just be instant, but it's not absolutely with the internet.
Yeah, it's like if people have a good idea somewhere, I expect it to catch on everywhere
else, but it doesn't know but I think it has to do with culture because it so.
For example, a phone ring on the back of your phone, you will you might see it on Reddit
the same day as Japanese people see it.
But you will not like it because it's not your culture isn't ready for it yet.
It might take three years and you're like, now I get it.
You know, that kind of stuff.
And the stuff you can get from South America, the stuff in America, like when I visited
just LA and like things like specific small things are completely different than in the
rest of the world.
The whole vibe is different.
So you can I can take that to Europe, for example, if I have a product or if I have
a service, a famous executor of economic product arbitrage is Rocket Internet.
I think you know them.
It's a German company and they're famous and I'm not super big fan, but that's economic
arbitrage.
They would copy American product ideas, big startups, and they would start doing it in
Europe and then in Asia and South America getting inspired by different surroundings,
but also specifically seeing different products and services and then bring it to your country.
It's a famous way for entrepreneurs to get successful.
Another one that I can give an example of, singers in Europe, I grew up with all these
pop singers that were singing Dutch songs and then I recently realized that they were
all singing the same songs, but in different languages with the same instrumentals.
That kind of stuff.
It's just like taking stuff from different countries and you know, and if you stay in
the mainstream of your own country or your own area, you will never realize that.
And you're also going to find it, I think, much harder to solve your own problems.
I hear this all the time.
People say, oh, I just can't come up with an idea.
I don't have any problems to solve, you know, I don't have any problems worth solving in
my life.
And it's like, yeah, because you're living the same life that everybody around you is
living, which means you have the same problems that they have, which means it's likely that,
you know, someone thought of solutions to these problems a long time ago and you're
late to the game.
So, you know, then it becomes hard because you have to be super creative and find something
that no one else is doing or be way ahead of the trends or have like some sort of specialist
knowledge to come up with an idea.
And the more the more the same you are, the more homogenous you are, the less competitive
advantage you have economically, because you will be the same.
And economics and capitalism is based on the idea that you have a different shading product.
If you make the same product, and I see this every day, you will not have a different shading
advantage.
And then you ask them, like, why is your startup different?
And they say, well, we have this, and it's like a small detail, like our blog post editors
is better.
That's not a different shading advantage, it's probably going to change everything.
You need a significant product differentiator to be successful, I think.
And you don't realize that when you're the same.
You really don't.
And I think a lot of people are in the situation where they know what their goals are.
You know, they know that they want to be a successful business owner.
They know that they might not ever want to have a boss again, or maybe they just want
the freedom to work on something of their own choosing that they love, even if it doesn't
pay as much as their regular job, but they get stuck in this whole idea phase where it's
like, okay, well, what next?
You know, what do I even work on?
I don't have any good ideas.
Besides the stuff that we've talked about, like, is there any other advice that you have
or have you ever been in a situation where you've struggled to come up with ideas?
Like, how are you so confident in coming up with one idea every month for 12 months?
Well, one idea was I had a Trello board back then with different idea lists, or different
lists of ideas.
And I would have like, super early random weird ideas, and then, okay, this might work
idea, and then planning to ship it, and then shipped it, and then it was failure or success.
So literally, like, it was no matter this was techno math, so it was it was a Trello
card back then, and go fucking do what's in there.
And now it's more like in my brain.
And also, I have less time to ship different different ideas now.
So I have a few I have a better eye, I think, to see what works for me as an idea, what
doesn't.
But back then, I had no idea at all.
So I would just write every idea I had in a list.
And I would do that every day, almost, there would be something that you can't really be
judgmental about your baby babies, your ideas, just got to put them in the list and see maybe
it takes like a year or two to brew on it, maybe your subconscious will change a little
bit and then finally work when you need to collect all these ideas.
And it's a discipline, man, getting ideas is discipline, like seeing your surroundings
and finding problems, and seeing, can we solve this, that's, that's a skill, you can learn.
I think the same thing.
I think a lot of people have this whole wait for inspiration to strike mindset, which is,
does that really work?
Like, how often does inspiration just strike you?
I think that's kind of the Hollywood narrative that isn't exactly realistic.
I think it's much better to be very deliberate about deciding what you're going to work on
and very deliberate about identifying opportunities, so just come up with better ideas.
I mean, you and your Trello board, that's a perfect example of being deliberate.
I actually kept an idea notebook for years that I would never really read, I would just
write in it when a new idea came to me and when the time came for me to actually work
on something new and I was reading this idea notebook, I had to basically throw the entire
thing out because all the ideas were terrible because I never really took the time to refine
them.
So I think you get a lot more mileage if you're very deliberate about doing this and you're
going over and iterating on these ideas and prioritizing them and reading them and working
on them actively.
And then the thing is, like, you need a lot of different, you need to do this, well, if
you do want to do it my way, you need to have a lot of ideas and most will not work out
and be less arrogant about your ideas.
I see this arrogance of, no, this is our start-up, this is going to work, our product is much
better, it's great, and don't be so arrogant, man, validate and see if it's true, otherwise
you don't know anything.
And generally, most things won't work out, it's just, come on, it's the same with dating.
Talk to most people, they won't become your girlfriend or boyfriend, it's normal, right?
You were too used to things working out.
Yeah, I think it's one thing to hear people talking about how most start-ups fail, how
most relationships don't work out, but then when your start-up fails, or when you get
dumped, then it's a whole different feeling.
Yeah, so it's like an illusion, absolutely, it's like hypnosis, like an illusion that
you think, I think, and this also applies to relationships, you need to know that if
you're in a relationship, maybe it's not going to work out.
Same with start-ups, same with everything in life.
Maybe nothing is, sure, you can't be too confident.
So do you have a checklist?
If you're going to work out an idea, how do you decide whether or not it's worth working
on?
Do you have a list of criteria, like, okay, I've got to analyze the size of the market
and see if this idea is big enough?
Or this has to be an idea that I really love working on?
Or maybe it has to be related to a nomad list in some way?
Or maybe you don't even use a checklist?
Well, no, I think it's intuition, it was intuition in the beginning.
So now, what switched after these 12-star stuff was that I knew that I could make money
from stuff, and I didn't want to do non-monetizable side projects all the time.
I wanted to make stuff that generally I could easily monetize, because I needed money.
So I filtered it on that.
So point number one for you is that it absolutely has to make money.
No, I mean, it doesn't.
But if your goal is to pay bills, yeah, of course.
Yeah, for sure.
Don't kill your babies.
And generally, every website, mostly, you will be able to find a way to make some money,
right?
But your time is limited.
A lot of people are trying to make things work on their savings, right?
They have like 12 months to make something work to become a maker or startup founder,
and then they know the savings are gone.
So if your time is limited, try and focus on stuff that is at least a little bit monetizable,
because you need the money, right?
If you're doing it as a hobby side project, which is great, I think it's amazing.
It's like creative expression for sure.
Then, of course, it doesn't matter.
It depends on your priorities.
I like what you were saying earlier about how Nomad List is really a clone of product
hunt.
It reminds me of that quote about how good artists copy and great artists steal.
And I think what you're really doing was stealing from product hunt.
I think to copy something is really just like to copy the surface level details.
You know, you're not really going deep.
But if you steal something, you're really taking it and you're making it your own.
And what you're doing is taking product hunt's features and making them your own on Nomad
List and making them apply to digital nomads.
And what's funny is that I did the same thing to Nomad List with Indie Hackers.
Like Indie Hackers is really Nomad List in disguise, and people don't really know this
because it's not obvious on the surface, but...
That's amazing.
It looks much better than Nomad List, I think.
Thank you.
That's beautiful.
Like the business model or maybe just the strategy behind Nomad List I think is so cool.
And when I first saw it, the reason that it inspired me was because I figured, hey, I
think this could be applied to a whole bunch of different ideas that aren't just Nomad
List.
And it's cool to have you here now because I can actually run these thoughts by you and
you can tell me if my analysis is off.
But I think for any topic that people really care about, where it's also hard for them
to do research, you can do all of that research for them and put it in one place and essentially
create a site like Nomad List or Indie Hackers.
And it's going to look different depending on what the topic is.
So with digital nomads, what you made was a grid of cities with numerical data that
makes it easy to compare one city to another.
With Indie Hackers, it's a list of interviews with entrepreneurs who've already done what
you're trying to do.
And Product Hunt is just a daily list of the newest products.
And I think from an outside perspective, they all look very different, but it's the same
underlying principle of just taking data that people really care about and compiling it
and putting it into a useful format all in one place.
And then phase two is once you have all this traffic, is you build a community around this
information or around the people who are interested in this information.
This is something that you did very early on with Nomad List with your community forum
and your ability to get people to contribute to the actual data and rankings.
And then phase three is once you have this community of people who all care about the
same things, you build related products that they'll also find valuable, which is again
something that you've done a really good job of with Nomad List.
And I think Product Hunt has really done the same thing.
And again, I think what's great about this is that anybody can follow the strategy so
long as they pick the right topic and they figure out a valuable way to compile and display
that data.
No, that's golden ass is like 10 out of 10 points.
It's super spot on.
And I think, yeah, not a lot, not enough people realize this.
And also I think this is a very interesting, again, like I did economics and this is economic
theory because this is the gaps that Facebook isn't filling, like Facebook is a giant social
platform, right?
They can't do niches very well because you have these Facebook groups about startups
and to be honest, they're all terrible.
Your Facebook groups about Nomads and they're all like spam and self-promotion garbage.
Facebook groups are generally not so great.
And you have a dedicated website, which Facebook doesn't have the resources because they don't
care about Nomad List revenue.
That's not just like peanuts for them, right?
But for me, it's a lot.
For a billion dollar company, they don't care.
And they can't invest a lot of effort into making a site like this.
So there's an opportunity even with big corporations dominating the internet, right?
Like Netflix, Facebook, Google, whatever, to fill these niches.
Yeah, small potatoes for them.
They need it.
Like normal people need these, they need any hackers, they need Nomad List because there's
nowhere else, right?
And I think that's economic explanation of what's happening, which means that there's
a niche for, and probably we don't know, but there's a niche for horse farms or whatever,
or horse tables, or coffee cup designers, or latte art.
Of course there are.
And there's entire, maybe they're bigger than any actual Nomad List, you don't know, because
you can collect all the people from the whole world in one niche to one website with a forum,
with a chat, with some data about the products or the topic, and that's it.
Yeah.
And also the cool thing about it is that you can pretty much do whatever it is that you're
interested in.
Like if you are an avid underwater basket weaver, then you probably spend a lot of time
on the subreddit for underwater basket weaving, and you probably know a lot about that topic.
Or if you're a digital Nomad, you can look at the Facebook group, the Facebook groups
that exist for digital Nomads, and say, okay, why do these groups suck?
Is it because they don't have the right audience or the right people, or is it because you're
not providing anything of value?
I mean, you can't really in a Facebook group create a database of cities with like cost
data and internet speed like you did with Nomad List.
Exactly.
How are you going to do that?
Post a picture?
Like it's very hard, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And because you know a lot about this particular topic, you can go out and build your own custom
format and you can present the data in a way that's way more useful than anyone will ever
be able to do with a Facebook group or whatever proprietary format they're using.
That's it.
Yeah.
But to be honest, like two decades ago, it wasn't different.
Like 1996, you had all these forums, I think, and websites about topics.
It's always been this way.
It's just more modern now.
And now we call them maybe startups.
But I mean, honestly, we're just making websites, right?
Sometimes they're bought by big companies like yours, you know, but you know, startups
are just websites or web apps, and they do something.
It just it looks really flashy now.
But it's the same thing we were doing in 1996.
I'm glad you bring that up about like the startup thing, because we're really we're
building websites and we always want to make the things that we're working on sound flashier
and bigger and more impressive and better than they actually are.
I don't think a related topic to this is with code.
Programmers do this all the time.
If you don't unit test all of your code, if you aren't using this framework or this language
or this methodology, then you're not a real programmer.
I mean, I don't know how many times you hear people spewing this toxic bullshit.
And it's funny because you are like, the exact opposite, you will use whatever it takes to
get the job done, you'll use PHP, you'll use SQLite and production, you'll do whatever
it works.
You don't care about being quote unquote, a real programmer.
Where does that mindset come from?
And how did you become that way?
Well, because I didn't have a choice, because I was like a WordPress script kitty.
So I didn't and then nominally started taking off.
So I needed to learn the codes while something was taken off.
So if I would have said, okay, guys, I'm going to take six months off to go to this React
JavaScript bootcamp, and then I rewrite the whole website, come on, it will be gone.
So I didn't have any choice.
So the constraints, this is important, I think keyword is constraints of creativity and constraints
of expression made me like this.
And this is, I think, one thing you said was wrong, like I don't, I'm not religious.
I'm just teasing maybe, but I'm not religious against all these new JavaScript frameworks
and hip stuff.
I might sound like it.
I'm just saying like, they're attacking us, or they're attacking me for using basic technology
that's runs most of the internet PHP runs most of the internet's websites, to be honest.
And it works fine.
So I'll just tease them like, okay, well, you know, react to some framework where it
takes 60 lines to write Hello World, which is really funny for me, but it doesn't mean
you shouldn't use react, you should use whatever, I think whatever works for you.
And this comes from like, art as well, like, when you see a beautiful, you know, when you
see a cool startup, and you talk to an engineer, like, what's the stack you guys are using?
Like, what's it or girls?
What's what's going on?
Like, do you use react or this?
If you go to an artist of an exhibition, like paint, paint artists, do you go in and the
first thing you ask is, which paint for us to use?
It's an outrageous question.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
Why would you?
What does the paintbrush have to do with it?
It just doesn't matter.
Right?
It's about the artists.
It doesn't matter.
It's a medium.
Every, all most languages come from, well, they all go to assembly, right?
Like this computer called binary, it will compile to the same zero and once.
So why are you asking about this?
Isn't it about what's in my mind, and what I'm trying to express here.
So I see it more like an artistic way, where it really is not important, it's which technology
you use and this religious, I think it's biological, but this religiousness about technology stacks,
which is hilarious, it's outrageous, it's absolutely ridiculous.
And the only thing I, the only exception I see here is when you build a spaceship like
Elon Musk, I would definitely make sure it's safe and you use the right technology stack
for it.
Like if you build a giant enterprise app, it's definitely, there might be advantages.
But if you're like a solo maker or a small team, come on, what does it matter?
Make sure your site is secure, like do a security review, but stop being so religious about
technology stacks.
Use whatever works for you.
I think it's toxic actually, because it's, there are things that help people and inspire
people to start things.
You tweeting about how you launched hood maps and got to the front page of Reddit or patio
11, writing about how he's knocking on doors and selling his app appointment reminder.
People probably start a lot of startups that they otherwise wouldn't have and get the courage
to start by hearing these stories.
But at the same time, there are these other like negative forces where, you know, you
might have haters on Hacker News who flame everyone who makes anything that's not exactly
to their standards.
So you might have developers who are religious, who are like, I've created this toxic environment
of like, you need to have the absolutely perfect code before you can start.
And then people who might have otherwise started a company now won't start it because they feel
like they need to go to get a CS degree before they can start anything or that everything
they do has to be perfect.
So I think you're one of the more inspiring people because you make it very clear that
you don't have to do everything perfectly to succeed.
And like, you're really good at, I think, honing in on what is worth focusing on.
It's not like you can build a startup by just ignoring everything.
Some things matter.
No, it's definitely matters.
But I also like to make myself look like more of an idiot than I am.
I'm not that stupid as I look like on LinkedIn.
I make myself look stupid to show how if you're stupid, you could also do it because I do
use stupid technology.
But yeah, it needs to stop.
And I think it is toxic and it's very toxic to new people.
My brother tried to learn web development and he asked people like what to use.
And I said, again, like use whatever you know, a little bit like and he knew a little bit
of JavaScript and PHP, but he said, no, I'm going to learn Meteor because everybody says
I need to learn Meteor.
This was a few years ago and Meteor was hot.
He went into this rabbit hole for two years, I think.
He came out.
He had shipped nothing.
But he could talk a lot about, I don't know, event bindings and all these weird terms and
stuff and front end, back ends merging.
But it wasn't the goal that he set in the beginning, which was leave them to ship an
app or products.
And I think that's very dangerous.
And yeah, let's not keep new people out.
You need to be inclusive of and welcoming of new people and come on, man, let them write
whatever they want to write and make whatever and be a little bit nice about it.
And don't be so religious because it's very, very, very toxic.
And you know what the worst is that people hating are enterprise engineers.
You're not individual makers.
They're not startup teams.
Generally, startup teams know makers as well.
They know how hard it is.
And they are usually tech stack ambiguous, is the enterprise engineers.
And maybe they're listening.
And if you feel like this, you know, change your toxic behavior, please.
Because enterprise is different than what we're doing.
It's a different world with different rules.
I mean, in that situation, your job, your job is to code, like the whole goal is to
write code.
Whereas when you're starting a company, it's like it's a means to an end.
Yes, exactly.
They have a specification and a team, my spec changes every second.
Because I reload the page and I don't like the button.
So put the button somewhere else.
That's a different specification of what we want to do.
And come on, you need to see, like, I'm not telling, I'm not telling Comcast how to code
or how to ship, right?
You Comcast, you need to ship faster for Verizon.
This is incredibly slow shipping.
No, I'm just doing my thing.
So enterprise is near, let me do my thing and let everybody do their own thing.
And it would be good for more people coming in.
And it's amazing if more people come in, we need more indie makers and more indie products.
I think it's very healthy.
And it's literally the metaphor of having a corner coffee shop.
Next to Starbucks, they exist, there's a lot of them.
We need more corner coffee shop, internet businesses.
I couldn't agree more.
I think a big part of what you're doing with your blog, and especially with your Twitter
account is you're inspiring people.
You're getting more people in to build these corner shops, these corner coffee stores on
the internet.
But at the same time, you've built this huge audience for yourself.
And it can serve as a distribution channel.
So when you launch a new product, you can drive a ton of traffic just by tweeting about
it without having to rely on getting press or getting to the top of product hunter hacker
news.
And I think the way that you tweet is so distinctive.
Like you have this free flowing style, it's very carefree and very informal that a lot
of people don't have, and the result is that your followers are more engaged, you get more
tweets and more likes than other people with similar follower accounts.
And I wonder how much of your strategy is carefully considered, because you mentioned
earlier that you kind of dumb yourself down sometimes to make it obvious to people that
anybody can do this.
But other than that, do you have a Twitter strategy or is this just you being you?
Yeah, I don't know, I never understood Twitter.
I was in this like, I'm now in co-working space in Bali, and there was a girl last year
who said like, anyway, we exchanged contacts on Twitter and stuff, and she followed me
to why you have a lot of followers.
And then she asked me, like, what's your social media strategy?
And I, you know, my brain kind of crashed, like, I cannot compute this question, what
do you mean strategy?
What do you just write what you think?
And I was like, Oh, maybe the rest of the world does differently, because I don't really
have a goal on Twitter.
No, people do not write what they think.
People self-censor.
Yeah, no, exactly.
And we know people around us that self-censor a lot, and I mostly don't censor.
I literally just, I think what happens is I order three coffees in a day.
And about a 2.4 coffee, I start raging about things or, you know, not just raging, but
also positive raging and thinking like, okay, like this week I was using Tinder, I was like,
this app doesn't work because I have all these matches, but I'm not meeting them.
So I'll tweet like, okay, Tinder 1000 matches, doesn't work.
I never met anybody.
What's going on?
And then everybody retweets it.
And then maybe next week I'll make a dating app about it, you know, based on this tweet.
That's kind of how I think.
So I'm constantly thinking about stuff and then I'm putting it on Twitter.
So my Twitter is like my brain.
It's very public.
I've tweeted my meltdowns where I had relationship breakups and I was crying and I was drinking
beer and crying.
And I don't know, it's just I want to be a little bit transparent because life is very
ups and downs.
Right.
And I think that has like, I listened a lot to Joe Rogan and he talks a lot about transparency
and honesty that the future will be open and we, it will be very hard to keep secrets in
the future because of data leaks and hacks and stuff, right?
And I think that's already happening where it's easier for me to mostly not have secrets
and just be transparent and open about what I think.
It's a really interesting way to look at it, you're just getting out ahead of this inevitable
trend toward none of us having any privacy whatsoever.
I think it's absolutely inevitable.
And like my goal is not to have a following, like I do think there's a narcissistic element
to it.
Like I'm a little bit narcissistic, so I like having attention on me and it's not always
good, right?
But it's mostly just like I'm dumping my brain on the internet and you know, I get a lot
of haters, like there's a lot of stuff where I shouldn't have dumped it, but I did.
And I was, it showed my weakness of character.
Like last year I was, I was people attacking me, I was attacking them back and it wasn't
nice.
And then I've tried to be nicer this year, I think it's working.
But yeah, you know, I think transparency is great, but I think mostly don't have a social
media strategy.
Just be yourself.
And I don't think that works on Facebook.
I don't think it works on Instagram, but it definitely works on Twitter, being yourself.
A lot of us, I think get anxious about being ourselves online because it feels shitty for
random strangers to hate on the things that you've shared, especially if they're personal
things.
I personally will get defensive if people will say negative things about an app that
I built.
And an app is among the least personal things you can share when you're actually sharing
your opinions about how the world should work, or you're sharing your personal information
or health information or relationship news, like that's how do you deal with, with anxiety
and how do you deal with maybe the fear of people criticizing the things that you say?
I think you need to understand that it's a platform.
And I have a good example.
I was doing YouTube.
So I was a drama based DJ and I would upload my mixes and I had a press photo, which looked
like a trans DJ in Europe, like it looked really bad, like really me in a white blouse.
And then it just with a headphone, it was so cheesy.
But the biggest thing, I had 5 million views and there were 6000 comments.
And there was about 600 comments about my eyes that my, like they said, wow, he looks
like a hammerhead shark.
Wow, his eyes are so far apart that they almost fall off his head.
Or I think he has peripheral vision and all this stuff.
And I was so shocked.
So I started looking at my eyes in the mirror.
I was like, and then with my roommates, we measured up my eye distance between my eyes.
And it was, it was pretty further than normal, so I got pretty insecure about that.
But the point was that it took a few months of being insecure, but then I was like, okay,
yeah, far apart.
Cool.
And they said, well, that doesn't hate me.
They just think I look like a hammerhead shark.
So maybe that's my thing.
You know, like make, make the hate your thing.
And they're probably right.
It's just, it's maybe everybody who's already thinking is about you.
And now they say it.
So it's the same with Hacker News.
Hacker News is so hardcore hateful, but you should read those comments because there's
something there that's true.
I think like they don't have any text, but it's true probably in their definitely in
their perspective.
Right.
So for me, it's therapeutical because I will share something about my life or my, my apps
or whatever.
And I see good and bad comments and I can't hide behind anything, right?
I can't, because it's like my whole mind is on the internet.
So I can't.
And you know, when you do excuses, like you have a lot of, we all have excuses about why
we're not shipping, why we're not, um, talk to that boy or girl, why we're not cleaning
our room, whatever.
You can't have excuses when you put everything, you dump everything on the internet because
everybody was like, Hey, why didn't you clean your room?
Hey, why don't you talk to that girl boy, right?
It makes it actionable suddenly.
So, and this is a psychological concept, I think, where the first step to resolving your
curing your problem is admitting it, right?
So I think tweeting is like that.
It's kind of like that app you made go fucking do it, except instead of being motivated by,
you know, the idea of not losing your money, you're more motivated by thousands of people
shaming you because you didn't do what you said you were going to do.
Totally.
And everything is a feedback session, right?
Every single action, your tweet, your post is feedback.
Yeah, it is.
And I think you learn more from people on Twitter, much faster than you do over other
channels like email or something where it just takes so much time between.
Oh, so slow.
Yeah.
It's so slow.
Whereas on Twitter, you're having this real time back and forth conversations.
And you can also include a lot more people at the same time.
Absolutely.
And I believe in the crowd.
Like, I think the crowd knowledge is so powerful.
Like, especially if, like, I know I think I have almost 40,000 followers.
So some are listening and, uh, the crowd together knows very well what's going on.
So doing a Twitter poll with 40,000 followers, like last week we tried to predict the Bitcoin
price.
I don't know if it's true, but they predicted like $27,000, you know, hoodmaps is all crowd
based.
Nomad list is crowd based.
It's crowd knowledge, like Wikipedia, man, it's crowd based mostly.
So don't under, like you shouldn't, I think you shouldn't trust asking your friends, necessary
for advice.
Always.
You should, you should definitely trust the crowd because like, uh, Paul Graham and then
why comment?
They always have a blog.
And then at the bottom it says, thanks for the feedback, like John, Susan, Eric, whatever.
I'm like, interesting.
Why not just the feedback from everybody immediately?
You know, like why is that?
Why is the launching a blog post a feedback moments?
It's already too late.
They're not going to add it.
They're not going to just co-write with the crowds.
Yeah, that's pretty fascinating.
Like I wrote my book with the, on Google Docs shared and everybody wrote with me wrote the
book.
So I like that, that kind of way of doing things like crowds.
I really trust and love the crowds.
Speaking of Twitter, you got a lot of questions, uh, this morning from people on Twitter, a
lot of which was about your book, you know, what's up with makebook and it's something
to ask.
Is it going to be outdated by the time that it's released?
Yeah, no, it's, it's my biggest failure is this book, but it's, uh, it's not a failure
because it's a great book and it's going to be out at Christmas and it's finally done.
Oh nice.
I didn't realize it was so close.
No, but I'm, I'm really embarrassed about it because it's, it's, uh, it's not how you
do things.
It's not how you do a pre-order thing.
Um, the deadline kept getting extended because I, it's very hard to write a book properly
because it's completely different from making a startup where you can change the version.
You can keep changing it.
A book is permanent pretty much.
So I need to make sure it's really good.
And then also I was running these companies while doing this.
I was, I've been running companies for two years and a book, it just falls to a lower
priority thing.
And it's really, and I don't know, it's really bad.
It feels bad for me because it's like offending to these people that pay for it.
But the thing is what, what's the good thing about it that I have learned all this new
stuff.
I've, I've done the whole chain of making a startup from idea to building, to launching,
to monetize, to growing, to now automating, like Nomad is automated, Remote-O-Case automated,
Good Maps is automated, they run themselves now.
Which means I can, I can write about the entire chain.
And maybe if I exit, if I sell the company before Christmas, I even have the exit part
covered.
But I don't think we're there yet.
There's another question from somebody on Twitter is, is like, what's your end game
here?
Do you want to automate everything and then just retire?
You know, do you want every website that you build to be completely running on its own?
Or are you just doing this more to like free yourself up to work on new things?
Well, I was going to take a few months off in like from one January, because it's been
like a, like, I don't know, it's hard to explain, it's been like a whirlwind from something
like April, 2015, when I started traveling to now it's just been insane, like it's been
like this more stuff happens in these last four years than in 27, 26 years before that.
It's just ridiculous what happened.
And so I think you need a few months off, where I'm just like forced not to use the
computer or something, but it's very hard to sit still.
And I think retiring is very stupid, because you get to just you need a goal, you get to
press like you need to have a family as a goal, or you need something you need something
to do in your life, you can't just do nothing, you can't just sit, it's gonna kill you, like
people they retire, they get heart attacks, because it's just terrible.
So I want to work on I want to keep working on new stuff.
And the stuff I work on is a lot of 3D stuff, for example, I scan my whole parents house
and make it made it a VR 2D object, for example, the kind of hacky stuff I like, I like hacking
again, like in the beginning, I could just sit for hours and days working on something
that didn't have a monetizable goal.
I want to get back to that like this pure creativity where you just don't care, you
just make.
I know you've automated already a huge part of no bad list.
But how confident are you really that you can automate the entire thing?
Is there any part of you that's afraid that once you walk away, the website will crash
and burn, or that something better will come along and require you to come back and update
it again.
And the reason I ask is because I think the ability to walk away to put your website on
autopilot and have it still generate revenue, it's kind of like the whole four hour work
week holy grail.
And yet I've talked to so many hundreds of people who started businesses and very few
successfully done that.
And so I wonder what your biggest fears are around that if you have any fears at all.
Yeah, I think the four hour work is ridiculous, because again, working is important.
It's a mini, you need meaningful expression in your life, whatever that is, even if it's
volunteer work, for example, I'm going to try it as an experiment.
I want my friend Daniel Lockyer, he's a kind of DevOps guy, and he will be already kind
of maintains, like he gets alerted to service down and he fixes quickly things if I'm not
there, for example.
But yeah, it's a big question, like how are you going to like, is a product ever complete?
Like, can it be done, like VC back companies say, no, the product always has to grow bigger
and bigger.
But what if this is a corner coffee shop where I already have the coffee machine that's working
fine.
I have a person who can maintain the coffee machine, the customers keep coming, it's a
growing market, you know, can it work, and that will be the question next year.
And I mean, there's a good chance I'll come back to product development.
But to be honest, I think this is the side I've always wanted to build.
This is everything I needed, it's got countries, cities, regions, it's got planets now, it's
got co-working spaces, coffee shops, it's got the whole scale of geography, you know,
it's got everything there to be a digital nomads, you don't even have to pay for it.
It's just all the data there that I ever wanted.
And I make decisions on it as well.
And you can always go deeper and add more data.
But generally, like, I don't think maybe that's the right decision.
Maybe I shouldn't add any more features, maybe this is done.
And that's a very rare thought I see in people.
You know, when I had Tobias Van Schneider on here a few months back, at the end of the
episode, I think the trend that I saw and how he kind of carried himself as a founder
is that he was very much a contrarian.
He just did things sometimes to push people's buttons or to be different.
And I ended up working out a lot of the times because he would make products that are very
unique and differentiated.
And when I look at you and what you're up to as a founder and a bootstrapper, and I try
to oversimplify Peter Lovell's down to one thing, I think it's what makes you unique
is that you're not afraid to take a leap, you're not afraid to fail and to fail very
publicly.
And you actually use that possibility to your advantage.
So you'll tweet publicly about everything that you're working on, whether it's Makebook
or Hoodmaps or Nomadlist, and you kind of use the public scrutiny to hold your feet
to the fire and make sure that you're motivated to do the things that you say you're going
to do.
Or even before that, with 12 startups in 12 months, you were blogging about what you were
working on well before it was successful, and you had no idea if it was going to turn
out all right.
And you even have, I think, the number one comment on the IndieHackers forum.
A while back, somebody was asking a question related to mental health.
They're basically asking how they can overcome the fact that they don't have enough confidence
to really launch something new.
And I think that anxiety affects a lot of founders who aren't sure what they're going
to do if they end up failing.
And your response was that you are a big fan of exposure therapy.
You force yourself to confront the thing that scares you the most, and it's horrible, and
you're afraid, and it sucks.
But then later on, you can look back at that experience and say, you know, I survived that.
And so maybe whatever I'm facing now is a little bit less scary.
And I think that really exemplified who you are as a person.
But there's a big problem with that, because exposure therapy is very scary.
Like it's literally, it's the fastest way to solve your fear.
But it's the most, it's, that's, but you're scared.
That's the whole problem.
So you fix your problem by going into your problem.
But it's, it's terrible, right?
It's terribly scary.
And that's why nobody's doing it.
So instead of, so what fear does, I think, you see this in a lot of areas, like, again,
dating is a big one, but people start, this is a very good, very good example.
This is this scene, and I don't really like it.
The pickup artist scene, it started like 10 years ago, I think it died out, but it was
a very good example of people that are so scared to approach boys or girls, I think
generally girls, that they would try and read forums and pay money for courses and read
theories and stuff about how to do it.
When actually, no, just you woke up to a human, you talk to them, and maybe they like you,
maybe they don't.
That's it.
It's very simple.
But it's very scary, I know, because it's rejection.
You know, I'm not super great at it either, but there's, fear has a way to steer you away
from the problem.
And because the, you know, it's like least resistance, the least resistant path is not
to fix your problem, but read about it, read about solutions, not actually do them, buy
courses, get coaches and mentors, e-studies and startups too, don't actually build a startup,
but just read about it.
And that doesn't help, I think, generally doesn't really help.
I mean, definitely, if there's a clinical problem, you need to go see a doctor, right?
But generally, like with startups, you just need to ship and then the action will give
you the information.
And for me, the startup world is very like a metaphor, like, you know, like a swimming
pool?
There's a lot of people standing next to the swimming pool, there's like two swimming,
actually, and they're just like, shutting up and swimming.
And the rest is like, talking like, hey, man, like, how do you, how do you swim?
Like, what happens?
And all the guys are like, well, I think, like, I've heard somewhere, I've read somewhere
you need to like, move your arms, and then all the guys are like, no, no, no, you don't
need to move your arms, you need to like, actually use your legs to stay afloat and
every, and then one person's like, did anybody ever swim here?
Like, well, those two are swimming, but we're not, but you know, I've read a lot about it.
So yeah, and then there's another person just jumping in.
And they'll just learn to swim while jumping in, just because otherwise you die.
And the same startups, if you don't make money, well, you go bankrupt.
So the easiest way is to jump in the pool and try not to drown.
Yeah, and I think the upside here is that unlike swimming, well, don't get me wrong,
if your startup fails, it's going to suck, you're going to feel that for a long time
and it's not a good feeling.
But you're not literally dead.
It's not the end of the world.
You're not going to drown.
And that's it.
That was one shot.
You can't go back and do it again.
It's a little extreme.
Yeah, but the next time around won't be as scary because you did it.
It's a very, I have very extreme metaphors, yeah.
Same thing with Twitter, you know, if you're trying to build an audience, like, and you
put your personal stuff out there and you give it a shot, and like someone says something
negative about it, you're going to live to tweet another day and now you're a little
bit stronger.
Yeah.
I think what you have is a swimming pool metaphor.
Then you have the swim, what do you call the swim guard, the swimming pool guard and
the lifeguard.
Yes, this big stick where you can, the lifeguard, sorry, and you can use the stick to catch
you up and then you can swim a little bit more and slowly learn it.
And I think you do have that with starters as well.
And when you got to jump in the pool, man, you can't just wait your whole life standing
next to the pool.
You're watching, like, if you want to swim, you got to swim, you got to jump in.
All right.
And so maybe we'll end on a more positive note rather than talking about anxiety and
such.
And let me ask you to picture, you know, maybe one of your followers or maybe an indie hacker's
reader out there who's considering getting into business.
And they've heard this whole episode, they've heard our advice about, you know, just jumping,
but you know, maybe they're still stuck.
What is your biggest, you know, thing that you would say to someone in that situation?
And how do you think they can get over the hump and actually start their company?
Well, this sounds really stupid, but it's the same thing I said before, like, you need
to do it.
And it sounds really basic, but you need to get in the pool or get on the bicycle and
just try and you will fail and you will keep failing and then you will keep, keep, keep,
keep failing.
And then one day it might work.
Maybe not my work, but I think you're reading about it.
Although India, sorry, that's India can be very inspirational, but there's a time and
place for any hackers, which is I will give you 10% of your day you can be in any hackers,
but I want you to ship for 90% of that day when you're working, right?
Like you can't, there's something called startup porn and you can't read too much and listen
too much, too many podcasts.
You got, you can't replace action with, with consuming media about startups.
You have to act, which is developing, making, and I would also advise do it yourself.
You know, doesn't everybody's hiring, you don't have money for it.
Just do it yourself.
Things are not that hard.
You don't have to be like, if you want to buy, learn to buy a school, you don't have
to be Lance Armstrong.
You don't have to be the best.
Just, you know, don't fall.
That's the good enough.
You know, I'm not very good designer.
I'm very average.
I'm not a very good programmer.
I can do everything in a little bit.
I think generalism being a journalist is great, but yeah, don't be inspired and then do and
don't just get caught up in this whole vicious cycle of inspiration and talking about stuff.
But we need to, we all need to do more things and be less, be less scared.
Just do.
I cannot agree more.
I need to do more things myself.
Anyway, Peter, thanks a ton for coming on the show.
We had like a super long episode.
Hopefully you don't have too many things that you're late for.
Can you tell people where they can go to find out more about you personally and about all
the different projects that you're working on?
Yeah.
My main website is called Nomad List, that's N-O-M-A-D, list.com, that's my main website.
My blog is levels.io and on Twitter, my username is levels.io and, you know, I tweet everything
as I said.
It might be fun.
It might be intense, but at least it's real.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks a ton for coming on the show.
Like there's probably like a hundred questions.
People in the audience wanted to hear that we didn't get to, but like maybe I can have
you on another time or maybe you can like, part two, or maybe you could come co-host
the show sometime.
I think that'd be pretty fun.
Yeah.
Is there going to be Anyacres video at some point?
Man, that's just so much work.
Like I think there could be, but I would have to outsource as much of that as possible.
Yeah.
I'd love to be on Anyacres video, the first episode.
Anyacres TV.
Oh, I'll remember that.
And the TV episode one Peter levels.
Next time you're in SF stuff.
Thanks for having me, man.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Yes, for sure.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation and you want a really easy way to support
the podcast, why don't you head over to iTunes and leave us a quick rating or even a review.
If you're looking for an easy way to get there, just go to ndhackers.com slash review,
and that should open up iTunes on your computer.
I read pretty much all the reviews that you guys leave over there and they really help
other people to discover the show.
So thanks a ton for your support.
In addition, if you are running an internet business or if it's something that you'd
like to do in the future, you should join me and a whole bunch of other founders on
the ndhackers.com forum.
It's a great place to get help with pretty much any problem that you might encounter
while growing your business, like how to come up with an idea or feedback on a product that
you're working on.
I try to spend a couple hours a day just answering questions and giving people feedback and getting
to know everyone.
So I really hope to see you there.
That's ndhackers.com slash forum.
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.