Have you heard of a guy who had launched 12 startups in 12 months? The guy who to this day, has built over 70+ products while backpacking across the world.
Yes, I am talking about Peter Levels.
He makes all his money while living a nomadic lifestyle. He has traveled to dozens of countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. But did you know his journey started with a simple spreadsheet?
Out of his 70+ projects, only a few turned out to be successful. According to him almost 95% of everything he ever did failed, except a few hit projects.
- RemoteOK → ~ $1.6M/year
- NomadList → ~ $1.2M/year
- ReadMake → ~ $60k/year
- PhotoAI → ~ $624K/year
- InteriorAI → ~ $480K/year
- TherapistAI → ~ $48K/year
Let’s get into this amazing founder story.
Just a quick reminder, here is a link to my Medium list which includes all founder stories I have written to this date. Thanks
How this all started
In 2012 Peter graduated from university with a Master’s degree in Business Administration and Entrepreneurship. Pieter launched his first business entirely by accident.
While in college, he started uploading his electronic music mixes to YouTube. He grew the channel Panda Drum & Bass Mix Show to 100k+ subscribers. Now, other DJs asked for their mixes to be featured on the channel.
Screenshot of YT channel
The channel made enough money from Ads to support him. But he didn’t like being tied to Google’s YouTube machine. So he decided to change the way he was doing things.
In 2013, he sold most of his belongings and flew to Thailand. It took him a while to complete any real work. The fear of his project failing drove him to spend a long time perfecting it.
In 2014 Peter came back to Europe, to get rid of fear and depression.
Pieter began the 12 Startups in 12 Months challenge to ensure that he followed through on his ideas. His breakthrough came on the 4th startup.
The first 3 projects were called:
- Play My Inbox
- Go Fucking Do It
- Tubelytics
For NomadList, his 4th project, Pieter wanted a list of cities that were suitable for his nomadic lifestyle. Instead of creating a website first, he made a public Google spreadsheet to collect the initial data. His tweet went viral among remote workers and nomads.
‘’I was slightly stunned by the response. Apart from filling in all the data, people started adding columns for different indicators’’,
— Peter during an interview
He built the first version of NomadList from all the data he crowdsourced. Peter later launched an MVP in less than a month. After getting some initial traction, he started to monetize Nomad List.
Ideas creation and marketing
Peter does not believe in conventional marketing. But in truth, he is one of those marketing geniuses. Look at the ways he promotes his startups.
He bought a billboard in front of Apple’s headquarters in San Jose to promote his startup.
Did a giveaway of $10,000 to a random person who retweeted his tweets to promote his startup RemoteOK. And guess what?
He got 8k+ retweets on this tweet. Possibly more than 2M impressions (crazy marketing tactics).
Screenshot of tweet
After launching Nomad List, it brings in about $1.2M in ARR.
Growth index of Nomad List
RemoteOK, the 7th project in the series, is a job board for remote jobs. These are mainly programming, web design, and development jobs.
RemoteOK is Pieter’s largest business bringing in over $1.6 million in ARR.
Growth index of Remote Ok
How is Peter doing
Pieter is someone who kept at it even after so many of his projects failed. Can you replicate his success in 2024 with simple ideas like his? Probably not.
But, the lesson here is building, new opportunities come. Better ones.
In recent times, Pieter worked on a lot of cool stuff in AI, like:
- PhotoAI
- AvatarAI
- InteriorAI
- TherapistAI
- AplicantAI
Screenshot of X profile
Peter is a genius indie entrepreneur who loves to make products, promote them creatively, and live a nomad life. He is seen online posting photos from Hong Kong one day and tweeting from Thailand the next.
He is now an inspiration for people who want to make it big in life.
Story lesson
Peter’s story is one of those stories that give us an important message, that success is all about iteration.
And the other aspect of this story is, how many of us are in life succumb to survivorship bias. Peter most projects failed but we see only the ones that succeeded.
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