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

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Pieter Levels joins John Collison to discuss building successful online businesses as a digital nomad, thoughts on European accelerationism, and Pieter’s unconventional methods and philosophy as a bootstrapped founder making over $3 million per year.Full episode transcripthttps://cheekypint.transistor.fm/4/transcriptTimestamps(00:00) Intro(00:37) Pieter’s resume(01:33) Trying to make money online as a 12 year old(02:43) Being one of the first YouTube creators(03:18) Who should indie hack(04:31) What Pieter hates about VC-backed businesses(07:51) Who is digital nomading for?(09:15) Learning from @patio11(10:17) 125k tweets and the brand of @levelsio(10:59) Getting referrals from ChatGPT(11:43) What Pieter automates with AI(13:02) Investing and home country bias(15:05) Hacking thermostats(15:57) EU acceleration movement(18:34) Entrepreneurship in the EU(19:26) Pieter's reflections on Stripe’s API(21:21) Looking 5 years into the future

I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe, because it's almost like the patient is so sick. Never waste your crisis? The problem is, if you're a founder and you raise money, like 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 like, I think, 125,000 times over 10 years,

so it's like 40 tweets a day. You've contributed so many brain cells spending time on X. Peter 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 Peter working on them. Cheers. I think you are maybe the most prominent indie hacker.

Nomad list got to 700K in ARR. Remote OK 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 Peter Levels productions. You're also the vanguard of the digital nomad thing, and so you've lived in more than 40 countries and 100, Yeah, I think so. I've mostly just been working on my laptop for the last decade, right?

Like traveling around, just making stuff, making little creative projects that I needed to solve my problems. And then most of the time, nobody else needed that problem solved. But like a few times it worked. And then, I mean, I used Stripe a lot, right? 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 there was a giant contract. It was in America. And I live 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. Like, I need to make money on the Internet. Just sign it. And he signed it. And we faxed it. 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. 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 like a Sun Microsystems workstation. Remember, these were like very high-end workstations and he just filled out the forum and like, you know, got them and you know, they came with a truck and they unloaded it and he was playing with it and I just remember the Sun Microstation's 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 his job calling me.

And they hadn't realized that he was like 12 years old at the time or whatever. Man, amazing. Did you try to monetize projects before you started building them? No, because... So what happened, I was making music and I was DJing, I was organizing nightclub nights in Holland and UK and stuff. Drum and bass music. The drum, you're Irish, you know, drone bass.

Like, German bass, most people don't really know, but British people know, Irish people know. So when YouTube started monetizing videos, I was uploading my musical radio. 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 and $2,000 and $8,000 per month. A lot of money. And I was in university. 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.

Again, you're building multi-million dollar revenue businesses all by yourself. Do you think way more people should be doing the indie hacking thing? I mean, I think the internet makes you partisan, right? So I don't think I've been partisan much, but I think... Until you got an X. Yeah, X does help with it. But you have to understand, 2014, when I entered kind of the startup world, there was barely any indie...

There was no indie hacking. There was no bootstrapping almost except Patrick McKeown. who you know well. You would find investors, you would raise money, you would grow fast, you would hire a lot of people, you'd get a big office, remote didn't exist, remote work. So compared to that, like what's possible now, there's different, there's alternatives possible now.

And you can make a lot of money with this. I don't think you can become a billionaire. Maybe we will see that in the future, but. So you think for talented engineers who have a commercial brain and who are good at product, they should at least seriously evaluate the path of just building their own successful products in the internet. Yeah, I think you just, look, what I hate most about VC stuff

is when you see people burn money. You probably hate this as well. A company of no users raise $50 million, $100 million, and you're like, what is this product? Like, it doesn't have any traction. And it's just hype. We've all seen these startups, and they just disappear. And I think it's much more interesting to,

maybe you guys are the same with Stripe, but validate first and build a business first, see if you get traction. Like, get to 50K or 100K a month. No, look, I'm with you. Despite the fact Stripe has obviously raised VC. We just started writing code. We got a first paying customer way before we raised any money for the business.

And then just kind of grew and grew and grew. And it's a little bit different for coming in the financial services space that you need to be well capitalized. Yeah, but this is the thing. So it's natural. It's kind of organic, right? Even if you raise money, you did it in an organic way. And you only raise more when you see the growth coming. Have you ever been tempted to raise for one of your projects?

No, but a lot of VCs have been in my DMs and they want to invest. And I think now, because now, like, I'm financially independent, I made a lot of money. Now I could do it because now I'm at a point where, like, it sounds fun to play with other people's money, you know? But also in a serious way, it sounds fun to go to a bigger thing. I mean, it's something you typically say after you've been in a week in San Francisco, right? You start talking like this. But I'm not convinced yet, but I think it now will be fun, for example. But the problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or buy.

bust, right? It's hard to stay in between. You can't like make $10 million a year. You kind of need to make $100 million a year. You kind of need to become a unicorn. That's difficult because the odds of that happening are not super high. Like it's a few percentage maybe. So most people don't get there and they do spend like five years or I don't know seven years of their 20s on that. And that's something where if you would be an indie, you would have a $10 million a year company and you have 100% ownership. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's amazing. You have so much money. You're saying as a VC-funded startup, you're kind of locking in the expectations for your company in advance as to what's successful and what's not. And it's quite liberating to just start building things.

Peter Level's enterprises broadly is making $3.1 million a year. And you've launched 70 projects? Yeah, probably more, you know, because I know what this is this, but it's my pin tweet. You launch so many that you lose track, but it's OKC70. Do you shut them down if they're, like, becoming too small to be relevant? No, so I try to keep a lot of them running. I like to keep the internet history existing. It's sad to see all these websites disappear, you know?

Yes, yes. They keep them on my story running. URL shouldn't break. No, yeah. One project that still runs on Stripe is go effing do it. I don't know if I can curse, but go fucking do it.com. For example, you want to quit smoking. So you're right, I want to quit smoking.

And the deadline is like, or I don't want to smoke. And a deadline is like 1 December 2025. And you have to enter the email of your friend and he checks it. And then you enter your credit card with Stripe. And it creates a customer, and it doesn't charge the customer yet, and he set a price, for example, $100. And then on 1 December 2005, your friend gets an email, did he smoke the last?

And he says yes or no, and if yes, you get charged, and I get the money. And the product still works, and it still makes, I think, like $50 a month. And it's been, I didn't change the code in 10 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ph.P. You know, like, still runs. So part of what you're doing is you're creating all these businesses

that have actually pretty long lifetimes as well. Yeah, yeah. Who should try the digital nomadet? thing. Who does it appeal to? I think anyone, it doesn't matter if you're 20 or 70 or whatever. It's so interesting because you change as a person also, but I think it's so cool because leaving your own country, which I did, the first time, I did a study exchange program. I went to Korea in 2010, I think, and from university, and I was like, this is a completely

different world. I never left Europe before. I went to France, you know, Italy, but like, there's neon signs. Far away places. It's crazy. This changed. you on such a fundamental level, going to the other side of the world. It's amazing. And it's way safer than you think. Like, usually nothing happens. And I've never been robbed except in my

hometown, it was a burglary. So in 10 years of dealing with nothing ever happens. So yeah, I think it completely expands your horizon. There's nothing I can recommend as much as people just go travel. And don't be scared, man. Just like, there's always people who help you. If you don't speak to language, you can use your arms and like, how did you make it not be lonely, not knowing anyone? It was extremely lonely. Oh, okay. It just wild funny. No, it was like, it was like, I was like, this is amazing. And then you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture, your home country. And everything's fine.

People are nice. But you're like, it fundamentally removes your foundational culture at some point. It starts. You become untethered. Yeah, untethered, that's it. And you have to rebuild that up. And that's psychologically taxing process. It takes some years.

Yes. And what have you learned from Paddy Eleven? Dude, an amazing guy. Like, why inspiration? So you have to go into. time machine back in 2013 or even earlier, I'm reading Hacker News in university. And I read two types of articles. I read, we're raising $40 million for a startup. Back then, Hacker News was full of raising. It was like special. Now you don't see it anymore. Now it's more tech. And you'd read

like Patrick McKenzie. I made $60,000 this year with appointment reminder, this site, which is like, he would go to hair salons, I think, and then sell his appointment reminder website. And I was, and he would remind the people to show up for their appointments. Yes, like, it was amazing. And I would read this post. amazing. This guy, like 60K a year, that's big. Like, we need to do this. So seeing somebody making a cool, like honest business, and another guy, like Youngfuk, John Youngfuk, he, it was a few years after Patrick McKenzie, but he was also traveling as a nomad in Singapore and Asia and he was well-dressed and he was making a beautiful sass. And I was like, I was

impressed that they were making like honest, cool, clean businesses. And I want to do the same thing. One thing I was reflecting on is the fact that you are now a big, um, brand in a way, the brand of Peter Levels, where, well, no, think about it, you sold $50,000 of pre-orders for your book. Before you had written any of the book, you just said, I might write a book and buy it here, and you got $50,000 of sales.

And so, to what extent does the recipe now work because you are launching these products, and, you know, if someone else was to build the flight simulator or if someone else was to write the book? Yeah, I've seen these replies too. That it wouldn't sell as well. Yeah, man, I think, of course, it's part of it. But I also work really hard because I tweeted,

like I think 125,000 times over 10 years, so it's like 40 tweets a day. You've contributed so many brain cells spending time on X. Exactly. Are you getting a lot of chat GPG referrals to ask people talk about this? Amazing, yeah.

So chat GPT, so I've seen the growth. ChatGPT a month ago was, so if you have to Google traffic, that's like 100. Chachvd was like 4, so 4%, and now it's 20%. Wait, in the last month, in the last month. It's gone from 4% to 20% to your traffic. Yeah, so it went 5X, and I checked other websites.

It's the same story. And I think it's beneficial for me, because, it's very hard for me as a solo person to do SEO stuff. And I hate SEO stuff. I just want to make a cool product and a cool website with a nice title and whatever. You're talking to your book about automation being really important for making the indie hacker recipe work

because I guess if you get drowned in operational work, you're not going to be able to do multiple projects, you wouldn't do as many shots on goal, everything like that. And so how much has the automation of your business tasks improved over the past 10 years, if at all? Man, it's been amazing for me. Okay, what is you automated? So for example, Nomad List, it's like this big, it's a big website.

You can visit, you can find place to live and work remotely, but you can also join the community. You can pay for like $100. You join a community of like meetups, chat group, all this stuff. This chat group was like hell to maintain. It was, I mean, you know from communities, so much drama. I've had creative stories. Wait, if they are content moderation in the community now? So, exactly.

So it was very hard for me to moderate this stuff. And it was very hard for me to be impartial. Yeah. So you have like politically different sides. And I feel I'm kind of in the middle, kind of neutral. But they don't, like the moment you ban one side, they're like, oh, you're this, you're that side. And so with GPT, it's actually neutral.

Like it's really good. You write, I write down the rules of my chat group. And it's 40,000 people. And it's, it doesn't ban anymore. It just mute people for like a day or 10 minutes or. Like the debate moderators in the presidential debates. Yeah, same. They just muted.

it right. Exactly. So that's it. So like I can either hire people or I can just use GBT API. I don't like hiring because I need to manage people and I don't really like manage people because it's not my thing. I like to create things. Well in your book you recommend that people build for their own understanding of the problems they have. Shouldn't you make an investment product? You and Warren Buffett basically have the same views which is a lot of money managers and kind of wealth management products are very bad because they're charging you very high fees to invest in bad things. And actually what the vast majority people should do is buy a simple index,

maybe the S&P 500 or the MSCI world or something, and then just leave the money there and don't touch it, and especially don't sell it during drawdowns. Yeah, so Vanguard. Exactly. But Vanguard already does that. Yeah, but there aren't good products for Europeans, I feel like that's less common. With Biden via Ireland?

UCITS. Sure, you do, but again, I feel like, you know, if you wanted an idea for the next business, I think good investment... There's a lot of money in there. Good investment products for Europeans. But then you increase the price. It's a problem.

Like if you resell a Vanguard ETF that has 0.07 fee per year. No, you need large scale to make it work. Maybe that doesn't fit with the Indie Hacker. No, I think it's a cool idea because it helps people get richer and wealthier. Yeah, and you know there's this home country bias in stock purchasing where people in Germany buy German stocks. This is crazy. I talk with my parents.

You're like... Yeah, they're buying the Dutch stock market probably. Yeah, no. And I'm like, you need to buy S&P for money. They're like, no, we're not going to buy in America. We're going to buy a royal Dutch shell. I'm like, come on. And they have all their money in a shell, like in oil.

And then have you seen Tesla, like electric cars now? And they're like, no, it's not going to happen. Yeah. So, yeah, I think index is very important. I think, look, if you make money, like, as in the ACRAs, even as a VC founder, like, it's very important to not spend all this money because you're, you have a limited time in startups to make money, I think, like, and put this money in the market. And it doesn't have to be only America.

Like, I always talk about Asia. And it's very hard to benefit in Asia from the economy's rising because the public market is not as efficient as in the US. So you should definitely have as a P5 of 100, but definitely you can look at other ETFs in the rest of the world. I've got some China. Yeah. Always never doing well. But at some point, I'll be right, you know, so. Yes. Yeah. It's very important to invest your money well. And most people don't know, most people don't know personal finance. Like they don't, you don't get it in school, you know, you save money, but your money, your cash disappears the moment you have it. Yes. Are you one those people who hacks the thermostat when you get to a hotel room? I've tried.

I've never succeeded. I've also. I have. I also have. I've watched the YouTube videos. I've watched the YouTube videos. Yeah, yeah. And it's always some different model Siemens. You know, like... I think they're wise to such people, like, they make it hard to get to override them now. It's an air conditioning problem.

Yeah, yeah. It's such a big problem. We need people in the comments to teach us how to override the hotel thermostats, because the ones that are set to, like, you know, 72 degrees Fahrenheit or 22 degrees in Europe. I mean, that should be a... I mean, how many times do you get back to Europe? Like, often, right? Often, yeah, yeah. It's a massive problem.

The European hotels in air conditioning. It's not a good situation. No, but it's like, it's air and bees, too. Like, my friends. went to an Airbnb in Italy and it said, don't put it below 25 degrees because of regulation. It's like this is unacceptable. And all the studies show like

like Likw in Singapore. You need really colds. Like the sleep probably gets so good. Yeah, we're talking about European air conditioning. You've talked about the EU accelerationism movement. Quasse, what is required for EU accelerationism? So I think it was two years ago, one year ago, I saw Beth Jaisels, who's Gileadl,

Gileum Ferdon, he made E-Ock, which is like effective accelerationism, which is like, let's accelerate America again. It's been a very depressing time, especially with COVID. Let's look at the benefits of technology and AI for the future. And I thought, that's amazing. We need to do the same for Europe. So I did EU slash Ock, like, let's do this for Europe, because Europe is the same kind of, like, depressing, kind of down vibe about the future. And I understand because there's a lot of problems. It's not an easy life for a lot of people. So that got a lot of traction. And I crowdsourced this, like, bugboard where everybody could submit their idea how to save Europe, how to fix Europe. And like tens of thousands of people submit ideas and then they upfold each other's ideas

and stuff. I think number one is just like remove the regulatory burden for new businesses. And there's other stuff like remove the cookie banner and stuff. And I hope it will be easier in Europe to run, to start a business, run a business. Yes. As easy as it is in America. Yes. I think there's so much nobody, nobody doubts the European talent or the intelligence.

Like, it's cool, smart, ambitious people. But they're like, they're getting, there's a ceiling for them. They can't go higher because they're getting pushed down by governments by regulation. And it's like, what are you doing, like European countries? Like, you have amazing people. You could compete easily. I think there's kind of two things. One is where the regs are just bad.

And the second is where the regulations are not standardized, where places where, you know, employment law is really annoyingly different across European countries. And so if you're a 10-person startup and you employ people, people across Europe, it's actually really cumbersome, whereas in the United States, that's quite easy. Yeah, so the problem with Europe is, it's very funny. You have all these different countries, and the, you have kind of the left side of the political spectrum are, like, not very pro-business, they're more for regulation and for protecting people and they're the climate change and stuff. And then you have the right side, which is pro-business, but they're

also nationalists. But the problem is, what we need is, like, pro-business and federal Europe. Like, you need to be pro-Europe. and that's not nationalist, any pro-business. So it doesn't exist. So it's like, where do you start? I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe now because it's almost like the patient is so sick.

Never waste your crisis? Yeah. Finally Europeans are kind of like, maybe we should do something. Like two years ago, when I would tweet about this, they said, stop talking bad about Europe, like it's going great here. And now they're like, okay, maybe we need to do something. What would you highlight as the ideas that need fixing?

I think the problem is if there's not a lot of opportunities in Europe for people to get jobs or start businesses, then they're going to look down on Americans, getting rich with these big businesses. Because they're jealous. And Europeans are jealous. And you need to change this idea that business is bad, that getting rich is bad. Getting rich is simply a representation of your added value to the world economy. in most cases, of course, as edge cases, generally, the money in your bank account is how much value added to society. And in Europe, that completely does not.

They really think different. America, you get much more respect for being an entrepreneur. But I would say, don't be afraid of money. Like, money is a tool in this world to change the world. If you were running stripe, how would you fix? I think it's going really well recently. I think it wasn't going well after COVID. There was a few years where things were getting,

the API was getting more and more complicated. We all complained about it. It felt like it was being run by engineers, not by people who actually use Stripe. Like illogical defaults on the API, you know? Like one time I had this bug, and it was from the Stripe API because it changed, and it didn't create a customer anymore.

Everybody was a guest. I was like, why would I want people to be a guest? Like, I cannot even curate them as a customer anymore. Those kind of things. But now it seems much better and it seems to be like sanity has returns. But it's scary and it must be scary for you because you're running a big company.

It's very hard to manage a company from small to big and not become like corporate you know. Of course you're always corporate because you need to do B2B sales and becomes more corporate. But you need to keep this, the original stripe mentality of like it was simple right, Stripe JS. It was one line of code

you would add to your page and you had a payment button, you know? Keeping that is so important keeping the original soul of the company. And I think you're doing great job. Because essentially, I don't want to go into Stripe do anything. I want to go there to see how much money I make. And I want to go back to my coffee and code a little bit. Like, I see all these new features for,

I'm trying to try to make workflows and stuff. And I think it's very cool. But I don't have time to do this stuff. Because it's not that important for me. I think our perspective is you should be able to get started with anything instantly. You shouldn't even need to integrate an API. You should just be able to send a payment link something like that. Exactly. It's amazing.

Yeah. I'm always saying to people that generally people will not even want to start by integrating the API. They'll want to start by sending people to a hosted page. Yeah, that's what I do now, like a pay-bling, yeah. But you will over time get to, we think the workflow engine is really cool, because if you want to build something complex,

you don't have to build yourself. But if someone is starting with the workflow engine, that something's gone horribly wrong. I think so the challenge is exposing them slowly to all the stuff that's possible. Exactly. Last question, if we're back here in five years, will things be kind of similar,

where you've worked on a bunch of projects, that are working really nicely. Will things be different, where maybe you've sold a few of the projects? Maybe you've started a VC-funded startup and raised a billion dollars from South Bank. Exactly. But I'm just curious, what does the next five years hold? Man, I have no clue. It would be so funny if you become a VC.

I've been starting to invest. Yeah, maybe you become a VC. No, I'd be starting to invest. And every time I invest, I feel like bad, because I feel like a faker, you know. But I invest in Curator, for example. Very nice. That seems like that will do okay for you. Well, who knows?

But yeah, it's fun to... I think you need to be neuroflexed. You need to be a little bit flexible with your neurons, and you can change your ways a little bit. And it's interesting to try different stuff. But yeah, I'm really enjoying life with my girlfriend now, and we're still traveling a lot. It's fun.

And we meet all these cool people here. And I want that to continue. And I'm just very happy. I'm every day great. to be able to live this life and it's so good. So thank you. Thanks for coming by. Thank you for having me.