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

**Pieter Levels** (0:00)
I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe, because it's almost like the patient is so sick.

**John Collison** (0:04)
Never raise the crisis.

**Pieter Levels** (0:06)
The problem is, if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right? It's hard to stay in between. I also work really hard because I tweeted, I think, 125,000 times over 10 years, so it's like 40 tweets a day.

**John Collison** (0:18)
You've contributed so many brain cells.

**Pieter Levels** (0:20)
Yeah.

**John Collison** (0:21)
Spending time on X. Pieter Levels, one of the most prolific indie hackers and digital nomads, whose businesses now do more than $3 million in revenue, and it's just Pieter working on them.

**Pieter Levels** (0:33)
Cheers.

**John Collison** (0:37)
I think you are maybe the most prominent indie hacker. Nomad List got to 700K in ARR, Remoto K has gotten to $3.4 million in revenue, Photo AI got to 600K in ARR, and these are all just you. These are not startups that you have started, these are just Pieter Levels productions. You're also the vanguard of the digital nomad thing, and so you've lived in more than 40 countries and 150 cities?

**Pieter Levels** (1:04)
Yeah, I think so. I've mostly just been working on my laptop for the last decade, like traveling around, just making stuff, making a little creative projects that I needed to solve my problems. And then most of the time, nobody else needed that problem solved, but a few times it worked. And then, I mean, I use Stripe a lot. Like when Stripe came to Holland, back then I lived in Holland, it was 2014, I think. Then I was like, oh, shit, now I can start making money. And that was the year I started making money. When I was a kid, I think I was like 12 years old, I was making websites too. And I wanted to charge money on the Internet. And I remember signing up to World Pay. I think it was World Pay. And it was a giant contract, it was in America, and I lived in Holland. And I asked my dad to sign for it. And my dad read the whole contract, and I was like, you're liable for damages up to $100 million.
I mean, it's like, what am I signing for? I'm like, no dad, you don't understand. I need to make money on the Internet, just sign it. And he signed it, and we faxed it to America. And I had a merchant account, and I never sold anything, luckily maybe, because otherwise we would be liable for damages.

**John Collison** (2:07)
I feel like this is a common thread amongst entrepreneurs of getting their parents to help them with things they shouldn't do. Patrick, at one point, got a demo of a Sun Microsystems workstation. Remember, these were very high-end workstations, and he just filled out the forum and got them and they came with a truck and they unloaded it. He was playing with it. And I just remember the Sun Microsystems rep was calling the house, and they were like, is Mr. Collison interested in continuing with a purchase? And our mom was like, Mr. Collison is doing his homework, and you need to stop calling me. And they hadn't realized that he was like 12 years old at the time.

**Pieter Levels** (2:42)
Man, amazing.

**John Collison** (2:43)
Yeah. Did you try to monetize projects before you started building them?

**Pieter Levels** (2:45)
No. So what happened, I was making music and I was DJing. I was organizing like nightclub nights in Holland and UK and stuff. German based music. You're Irish, you know German based. Like German based, most people don't really know, but British people know, Irish people know. So when YouTube started monetizing videos, I was uploading my music already. So I was one of the first YouTube monetizing people, and I was like number one or number two in Holland for a while in top channels. But the thing is, I started making money, like $1,000, then $2,000, then $8,000 per month, a lot of money, and I was in university.

**John Collison** (3:19)
So it seems like you've done well on this, kind of being a person on the Internet. How much of a partisan are you on the topic of the Indie Hacker approach? Because obviously, most of tech doesn't run on the Indie Hacker way. Where you're building multimillion-dollar revenue businesses all by yourself. Do you think way more people should be doing the Indie hacking thing?

**Pieter Levels** (3:40)
So I mean, I think the Internet makes you partisan, right? So I don't think I've been partisan much, but I think...