Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP - https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr - https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talk to Pieter Levels (@levelsio - https://twitter.com/levelsio) about being a solopreneur who makes nearly $3M a year with no employees while living a nomadic lifestyle.

Also, want $5,000? Check out the My First Million Clips contest (https://www.mfmpod.com/p/clips/).
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Links:
* Nomad List - https://nomadlist.com
* RemoteOK - https://remoteok.com
* BuyNothing - https://buynothingproject.org
* Derek Sivers - https://sive.rs

📧: Sign up for The Hustle Daily Newsletter: https://mfmpod.link/lm7
🎙️: Download Our Podcast:  https://link.chtbl.com/fzCWM-H6 
A podcast where we brainstorm new business ideas based on trends & opportunities we see in the market. Sometimes we have famous guests, and they do it with us.
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Show Notes:
(00:00) - Intro
(01:32) - How Sam gets in touch with people
(04:50) - How much Pieter makes
(12:20) - How to become a hit solopreneur
(17:55) - What Pieter uses to build
(21:23) - Building to earn vs. building to sell
(24:09) - How movements grow
(28:20) - Thinking big as a solopreneur/Indie Hacker
(31:55) - Businesses that could earn you $20k a month
(40:45) - How Pieter spends and invests his money
(46:40) - Why Pieter believes in Asia
(50:34) - What Pieter spends money on
(59:30) - Who Peter admires
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He said he took a run before this because he was nervous.

No, because I've been on a lot of podcasts, but like they're usually kind of small, you know, it's like, I see you guys, it's like Joe Rogan for business.

So it's like this 1 step above is like Joe Rogan.

And then below is like, yeah, I don't want to diss all the podcasts I've been on, they're amazing.

But you know, like, this is like a level.

So, but it's good, you know, I'm big fans.

So, and you also don't know what Sam might ask you because Sam might just come out of left field and be like.

No, but that's the thing, I was thinking like Sam is like, he's not a regular interviewer, you know, he asks some crazy shit, so.

I don't know if we, first of all, it's not just me.

It's you too, Sean, that asked weird stuff.

But also I don't think we asked that weird of questions.

I think we asked the questions that everyone's thinking.

Like, You know, there's Yes Man podcast where like, they just, it's kind of like a fan thing.

Obviously that's not you guys, you have real shit, real questions.

And I think it's more interesting as well.

Can we, Sam, can we share the thing you were just telling us in Slack?

This is, you know, you can go to Harvard, you can go to Stanford, you're not gonna learn this 1.

Sam has this habit where if, like, you know, it's a very small little tweak, but it's just so Sam that it just is awesome.

So if you're, if Sam wants to hang out with you, he'll text you just like a normal person would but and he doesn't need to even know you.

Maybe, maybe it's a cold DM, maybe it's a text message, maybe he got your number from somebody else.

Be like, hey it's Sam, you know, I'm in San Francisco, but instead of saying, want to hang, Sam will just go, I'm in San Francisco.

Dude, he sent me some shit that I won't say out loud, but yeah, but I think it works.

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

It's like a phrase like, you know, like people will be like, you know, I fuck with that guy.

And I just say it and people, they reply.

I just, this particular 1, it was a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company who I'm friendly with.

And now, so normally we try to play it cool, but we've actually been chasing you, Peter.

We've been being like, hey, we gotta get this guy on the pod.

I would say I am less of a fan than Sam, but I am a, I, that doesn't mean I like you.

It's just, I'm more in the closet about it.

This guy's got great hair and you do have great hair.

Because you like don't do you don't schedule or

Like, I mean, it like it looks like being an ass, right?

I mean, if you do that, but I like you guys, I would get so many DMs and they're all like, I mean, generally, they're very low quality DMs, right?

Like I want to collaborate, but I don't want to invest.

I don't want to, like people want something from you.

I think it's like being a hot girl in the club.

Like people want something from you, but they don't want to invest the time to actually get to know you or, you know, you feel like an object and I don't like to feel like that and I want to spend more time with, you know, like with my friends in real life, with my girlfriend or something.

I want to spend time in the gym, you know, on my health and cooking food and that kind of stuff, go for walks.

And I think because I, because I've been doing this for 10 years, like startups, like 8 years, and now I get the money's going well, so I don't really need to do any calls anymore, any DMS.

So I'm just trying to create a more chill life.

It just means like I don't have time to reply to everybody.

So I closed my DMs and then people got really angry on tweets, they're like, why don't you, why you close your DMs?

So I wrote a blog post, like kind of explaining my day and my routine and what I do in a day and that I don't really have time if I do all the things I do now to also DM everybody and reply everybody and do calls and stuff.

And that's pretty much the argument for it.

You're known on Twitter as LovellsIO, right?

I'm just gonna say some interesting things about you.

I believe, now you can correct me if I have any of these wrong.

I believe you publish how much you make every year.

And in fact, it's in your Twitter bio, in your location, there's like a meter that's like your road to 3 million a year.

So your meter is almost all the way filled up.

You build a bunch of random small projects, usually around some things you like or believe or your lifestyle, which is kind of a nomadic lifestyle.

So I believe, I think you hop around or you don't have like a home base.

So you live, you know, you could be like in Bali and then you could be in the Netherlands.

You could be a different place all the time.

And you make these small websites or apps.

And it says in your bio that you have 13 million monthly active users.

And I've I remember seeing you because you did a community like a like a nomad community, a Slack community really early on, like Slack had just come out.

And I was like, oh, this guy's like charging 10 bucks.

I think it was 10 bucks a month or something to get into this thing.

I was like, he's got like a thousand people in here.

Wow, this is actually, this guy's making good money doing this.

You just do a bunch of small experiments like that.

Peter, let me give the outsider's perspective that's a little more holistic.

So basically, there's 2 things that are interesting to you.

The first 1 is your businesses, which actually are the least, the lesser of the 2 interesting things.

So you have roughly 5 or, yeah, you have 7 different businesses, ranging from Nomad List, which makes $2.1 million in the last 12 months.

You have another job board called Remote OK, that's making $115, 000 a month.

You have ReadMake, which looks like it's like an ebook, something like that.

small- You're seeing these numbers because he publishes them.

He publishes all of them on like the, the URL, go to his Twitter profile and we'll let you talk.

Sorry, Peter, in a second, but go to his Twitter profile, go to his Twitter profile and then like click off.

And it's like a open revenue at the very bottom, but I'm reading off of our notes.

So, and then you have like a QR menu creator.

Then you have like an inflation chart, which doesn't seem like it makes money but tracks inflation.

And then you have Rebase, which is a platform to help people become a citizen of Portugal, help them relocate to Portugal.

So what's the first part is those businesses, Like I said, you have those that are interesting.

I would narrow it down to say you have a series of job boards for nomadic or remote work that are pretty profitable.

But the second thing that's even more interesting is the way that you do these things.

So you do a few things that are interesting.

The first thing is, I think you're the only full-time employee, right?

And second of all, you have this weird personality that's very embedded in everything you do.

So that's kind of like my big intro of what you do.

I could see a website and I could know you built it without you having an about page, which is

It's like, like I'm not very nomadic anymore.

I started like in 2014, I started nomading and I went to all these places and I started building these apps, these little websites, little products to validate.

And I remember, I mean, I told the story so many times but I was following Patrick McKenzie, Patio 11 on Hacker News, famous Hacker News guy.

And now he works for Stripe and he would do, he would share his revenue on his blog about all his little products he made.

And it was like appointment reminder for barbershops.

So you got to SMS just before your appointment.

So you don't forget it, that kind of stuff.

And I was really inspired like, okay, this is not like some big VC funded guy.

This just like an indie guy was just on his laptop kind of building stuff.

And I kind of mix that with the nomad thing where like building from your laptop, from your backpack, moving around.

I think also getting inspired from different places, because if you move around you, I mean, I know Sam moves around a little bit as well.

Your life becomes very unique because you meet different kinds of people.

You see different kinds of products, like in shops.

Like if you're in Asia, you see some futuristic shit you don't see in Europe and America.

And all that stuff kind of, it helps for inspiration for creating products in some indirect ways as well.

So that's pretty much what I've been doing.

And I think it's, I've been trying to be like radically honest, like I know this American guy who pushes the radical honesty movement.

So I'm trying to do that in my personal life.

I'm not perfect, but I'm trying to be as honest and open as possible.

Because I don't like this fake corporate stuff.

And it's because I studied business administration and I have a master's degree in it.

So I know all the management consultancy bullshit.

You know, I've been there, I've done that.

And I hate that a lot of that world where it's like fake and not real.

And I think it's also a little bit of a European thing, not to slack off Americans, I love America.

But like In Europe, people are very, a little more direct and a little more straightforward.

And I think that comes across in the stuff I do a little bit.

So what's the total size of all your projects in terms of top line and bottom line revenue.

And isn't it true that you're the only full-time person and how many contractors are you using?

Yeah, so I have 1 customer, support contractor, part-time, Isabelle, and she works for all my projects.

And I have a moderator for the Slack group because Slack groups, there's some drama in there.

Like I've had some crazy drama in these Slack groups in communities.

So you need to have a moderator, you need to have rules, and you need to have a, you cannot just automate this moderation away.

Like I tried that, but you need a real person there to check on messages and stuff.

And then I have a DevOps guy, he's my best friend, Daniel, and he works kind of like a SLA, like a service level agreement, where if the server goes down, he gets a message.

If I'm sleeping or something, he brings it back up.

But the problem is it never goes down anymore.

Like it doesn't, we haven't really had that for years.

So he does security updates and stuff, you know, like, cause I have a VPS, I don't use Amazon.

I use a VPS on DigitalOcean and Lineout and he kind of keeps that stuff safe, you know?

It's the biggest business, makes the most money.

Normally this is starting to grow though.

It's like it's past, I think 100K this month, 100K a month.

So almost like a million dollar business.

Remote decay is 1.6 million a year, I think.

And Rebase is a new business, it's an immigration agency.

So I wanna help remote workers immigrate to countries that wanna attract remote workers with like, you know, beneficial tech stuff.

Portugal is 1 of the first ones to do that.

So those are the 3 businesses really make money.

And the rest doesn't really make money a lot.

Like the book makes like, I think like 4k a month.

So, but everything you do is part of 1 flywheel.

So I've looked at your kind of like system and I've looked at a bunch of people because I got into a little pickle where I was like, God, I'm doing so many things and I want to do all these things.

But shit, you know, am I gonna be able to do this?

And what I saw that you did, I have this kind of like mental model of a solopreneur and a solopreneur, nobody's actually solo.

Everybody's got like a little support team around them.

Some in a big way, some in a small way, but basically it's like somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit build a Successful business and lifestyle around that and what I noticed was that you had this formula Which is I don't know if it's intentional or unintentional, but I'll say it out loud because here's my read of your business It's basically You have you starts with the red pill So the red pill is like, you know that scene in the matrix where?

Morpheus is holding out a blue pill, a red pill.

He's like, you know, do you want the truth or do you want to take the blue pill?

You could just go back to your normal life just as everything was.

And Neil's like, no, I need to know the truth.

And basically it's like every great solopreneur I think starts with 1 truth.

So like Tim Ferriss' truth was basically that like the 9 to 5 work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like effing broken and you don't need to do it that way.

Like you could work 4 hours a week and live like a millionaire.

And so that was like Tim Ferriss's red pill.

And yours was basically like this idea of being a nomad, a digital nomad, which was like, Hey, yeah, you don't have to, you know, prescribe to the, subscribe to the normal way of living.

You pick a place that's where you are from, that's where you live, and you pay, you just kind of stay where you grew up, and you go to an office every day, and you have to wear shoes and whatever.

You're like, No, I wear flip-flops, I walk around on beaches, I just kind of go wherever I feel like, whenever I feel like, and I carry a little backpack, and that's my life.

So you start with the red pill, then you create content around that red pill.

So it's you talking about that lifestyle and sharing everything from like, hey, people always ask what I put, keep in my backpack for the day.

It's like, there's every bit of content you can come up with that's like poppy.

So then you, that bit gives you authority on that subject.

And so, you know, Pomp became an authority around Bitcoin and Tim Ferriss became an authority around life hacking.

And you've become an authority around nomadism.

And then you take that and then you basically spin off 1 of many businesses that can come up with it.

But every 1 of those business, either it's a big moneymaker or it's just another funnel and more content, more new audience that's going to like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that you are like talking about.

And so even though you're doing 6 things, they're all actually part of 1 flywheel.

And every 1 that you do is you're going to feed it, either because it's going to give you a bunch of cash that lets you fund this lifestyle in a bigger and better way, or it's going to give you new content, new stories, new things to be known about that fit that lifestyle as well.

I'm curious, is that a good, is that true?

And my thing started when I was blogging.

Just like you said, I was blogging about like nomading, but I was blogging for my mom.

Cause back then you had like travel bloggers, like

And I was going to travel kind of and nomad.

And I wanted to, you know, every place I went I wrote a little, how is this city to live in and stuff.

And what happened, all the crazy shit that happened to me.

And my mom was reading that, but I wrote it in English cause my mom was obviously Dutch, but I was like, okay, she can read English.

So it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff, more audience.

But it wasn't like super like a big idea.

And then those blogs started showing up on Hacker News.

And I started writing more about like bootstrapping startups as a nomad in Thailand or something or in Asia.

And those started going on, the hacker is really high.

And I think that was the time, it was like 2013, 2014.

There was a time when I noticed that the developers in San Francisco working for all the startups, they also were realizing, okay, maybe I can start doing this remotely.

Because remote work was not cool back then.

And nomading was not cool back then because you had the Tim Ferriss wave in

It was like the first nomad wave, but there was, I love Tim Ferriss, but there was something about the followers there and the business that were created, they were kind of like, like shady.

I came across in Asia, in Thailand, like Americans and Europeans.

Drug dealers, online drug dealers, and like spam dexing and like, there's still shady shit, but less.

And I was like, I really hate this shady shit.

I think it would be cool to make it more like, you know, mainstream, like reputable businesses, reputable jobs that do it.

So I kept blogging about it and it kept taking off on Hacker News.

And then I went on Twitter and I think I kind of organically people started following me.

A lot of my friends went Nomad because I was blogging and they became my friends now.

And yeah, and then I started all those businesses.

But I think it's not like some, it sounds very like a constructed-

And I always have like, I have like new ideas.

Like there's just like you said, Red Pill, there's like something, there's a dis-congruence in society and what I'm thinking.

And most people then think like, okay, there must be wrong, something, there must be something wrong with me.

But I think like arrogance, I think there must be something wrong with society.

So I'll try and make a little website about it.

Like inflation, like 3 years ago or 2 years ago, I was tweeting about inflation.

Like this shit's gonna go crazy with all the fat printing money.

And everyone's like, nah, inflation is fine.

I'm like, no, I'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are higher.

So I made this inflation chart.com website that shows inflation numbers are really high.

What, what, technology are you using to build those sites?

See all My First Million transcripts on Youtube

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