2022-09-18 21:24:00
TL;DR I created a new project called This House Does Not Exist which uses AI to generate modern architecture homes.
Just 2 weeks ago Stability AI open sourced their AI imaging model Stable Diffusion. It lets anyone generate images based on text. I think it's groundbreaking and revolutionary.
I think it's amazing this technology is immediately open sourced and put into the hands of anybody with a computer. OpenAI launched their text to image model called Dall-E but it was closed source and severely limited what you could generate.
For example it doesn't allow you to generate anything even remotely close to naked bodies, or sensitive topics. That's sad and against the ideas of free speech I think. Information wants to be free. Technology too. I stopped using Dall-E quickly as it felt unusable.
Meanwhile Stable Diffusion is fully open, hackable, and you can see everyone hack on it already. You can install it on your computer locally without using any internet server to generate images:
β¨ Here's how to generate A.I. images with Stable Diffusion on your MacBook M1/M2 in less than 30 seconds for free:
β @levelsio (@levelsio) September 2, 2022
- Upgrade MacOS to the latest version (top left π -> About This Mac -> Software Update
- Open Terminal app
- Install Homebrew from https://t.co/oW9NbyxhmM
π 1/n pic.twitter.com/0r5hxeCIOL
I played with it for days and generated lots of stuff. Of course first cute cats and Samoyeds:
I think nobody tells this but most people will spent about an hour generating NSFW images, just cause it's fun and exciting to see if it's possible. And because DALL-E didn't allow it. Then after a while, the weird four armed people with faces merged with hands gets boring and you switch to generate other topics.
I've always loved dreaming about architecture, in specific ArchDaily-style houseporn. Houseporn means "Houses you can fap to" meaning and there's a subreddit about it.
So I tried to generate houses. My first tries were pretty basic and not great, e.g. "modern house":
Then "modern architecture house":
I first thought it was Stable Diffusion, but then I learnt it's VERY important to write extensive paragraph-long detailed text, so called "prompts", to get what you want. The thing with OpenAI's Dall-E is that they pretty much write the prompt for you. If you enter "modern house", they'll add lots of text to make it look nice. With Stable Diffusion you need to do that yourself.
I tried to generate "a modern design villa in Bali", and it got a little bit better:
I then scoured Discord, Github and prompt-making sites to learn how to write good prompts. And after a lot of tweaking it started generating interesting houses:
I started realizing the prompts are the secret sauce here. Prompts are as important programming code if you're working with AI generative models. The computer is still stupid and it wants to know EXACTLY what you like to generate, in what style, at what time, with which details. If you give it all that it'll shock you what it can generate for you.
With my prompts improving, the houses I generated started becoming very beautiful:
I built a website around and inspired by the name of This Person Does Not Exist which is an AI that generates non-existing people, I called it This House Does Not Exist and launched it:
β¨ My new project is now live:https://t.co/HzGGlHq1Jf
β @levelsio (@levelsio) September 5, 2022
π‘ It uses A.I. to let you generate @ArchDaily-style modern architecture houses on-the-fly
If you generate any nice ones, reply them here pls π pic.twitter.com/zjIvMzTX4M
Within a day it showed up on ArchDaily, the site that inspired it:
I've since been improving it every day, adding different style houses:
Added π³ forest cabins to A.I. algorithm now in π¨π¦ Canada, π―π΅Japan and π³π΄ Norway after many ppl requested:https://t.co/lcPGMcrXfY pic.twitter.com/nGao8U6J4F
β @levelsio (@levelsio) September 6, 2022
I also added upvoting, so now there's a top ranking of the best houses:
I also used an AI text generator to generate house names and descriptions:
And added social media cards:
As well as tag pages like for houses in Bali:
And for the top voted house (and my own favorite too) I've asked an architect to model it in 3d:
I've asked a architect modeler to create a 3d model and AutoCAD plan for the top house on https://t.co/9CooH3NqaM pic.twitter.com/NHV9fvoxJ8
β @levelsio (@levelsio) September 8, 2022
In a week or so it'll be done and I will open source the model and AutoCAD. And it'll be the first AI-generated open sourced house!
It hasn't even been 2 weeks working with and making stuff with Stable Diffusion and it's been such a whirlwind already.
It's really commendable and amazing that the hardcore ML software engineers from Stability AI open sourced this model so that anyone can build stuff with it. I'm not a hardcore software engineer, but I am a builder. And so getting these new tools to build things with is just really fun for me. Thank you Stability AI! And I'm really excited about the next developments of this project and the spinoffs I have planned.
And hopefully in a few years you can visit me in my AI-created house, or any of the variations of it:
2022-07-14 23:55:00
Sam Parr has been trying to get me to come on his podcast for a year:
You'll have to come on.
β Sam Parr (@thesamparr) December 8, 2021
@levelsio DM me- lets get yo on
β Sam Parr (@thesamparr) December 14, 2021
Bruh Peter dm me
β Sam Parr (@thesamparr) February 17, 2022
yeah, @levelsio . when.
β Sam Parr (@thesamparr) April 27, 2022
I've asked @levelsio to come on the pod 5 times.
β Sam Parr (@thesamparr) June 8, 2022
He says yes but we can't lock in a date.
I love him. And I know you people want to talk to him.
So, I'm posting this to guilt him into joining us.
Brother, lets do this.
I was honored but reluctant because it's a video podcast so I wanted to get a good setup first, so it doesn't look like shit.
When I came back to Portugal, I got a Rode table mic arm and used my iPhone with Camo as a camera so I could finally go on.
It was really fun and different type of podcast to go on. Sam and Shaan are fast-paced and it's not just asking easy questions. Sam challenges you on your viewpoints which is good. Their reach is also very big, I call them the Joe Rogan of business podcasts. It's much more mainstream than Indie Hackers, and thus gets more viewers. The topics are less technical and more business/money-focused.
I like that they can appreciate my different style of doing business (and life), while not necessarily agreeing with it at the same time.
I hope you enjoy listening/watching/reading it!
Here's the video:
Spotify:
Here's a few clips:
Sam Parr (00:00:08):
Are you intimidated? He said he took a run before this because he was nervous.
Pieter Levels (00:00:13):
No, because I've been on a lot of podcasts, but they're usually small. It's like I see you guys as Joe Rogan for business, so it's like this one step above is Joe Rogan and then it's you guys. Yeah, I don't want to diss all the podcasts I've been on. They're amazing, but this is a level. It's good. I'm [inaudible 00:00:31]
Shaan Puri (00:00:31):
Big Pieter Levels. And you also don't know what Sam might ask you because Sam might just come out of left field and be like ...
Pieter Levels (00:00:37):
No, but that's the thing. I was thinking Sam is this not a regular interviewer. He asks some crazy shit.
Sam Parr (00:00:43):
Wait, me?
Shaan Puri (00:00:45):
Yeah, you.
Sam Parr (00:00:45):
First of all, I don't know if that's true. First of all, it's not just me. It's you, too, Shaan, that asks weird stuff, but also I don't think we ask that weird of questions. I think we ask the questions that everyone's thinking.
Pieter Levels (00:00:57):
No, that's true. I mean you're not yes men. There's yes men podcast where it's like fan thing. Obviously that's not you guys. You have real shit, real questions and I think it's more interesting as well.
Shaan Puri (00:01:09):
Sam, can we share the thing you were just telling us in Slack? Can I share that on here on the pod?
Sam Parr (00:01:13):
Yeah. Wait, which one?
Shaan Puri (00:01:15):
The Sam Parr strategy for networking. You can go to Harvard, you can go to Stanford, you're not going to learn this one. Sam has this habit where ... It's a very small little tweak, but it's just so Sam that it just is awesome. So if Sam wants to hang out with you, he'll text you just like a normal person would. And he doesn't need to even know you. He's just interested in you. Maybe it's a cold DM, maybe it's a text message, maybe he got your number from somebody else. He'll be like, "Hey, it's Sam. I'm in San Francisco." But instead of saying want to hang, Sam will just go, "I'm in San Francisco. Let's (beep)."
Pieter Levels (00:01:56):
He sent me some shit that I won't say out loud, but I think it works.
Shaan Puri (00:02:02):
So, Sam, what is this and why does it work so well?
Sam Parr (00:02:06):
It's like a phrase. People will be like I fuck with that guy. I fuck with Drake. I like Drake. It extends from that and I just say it and people, they reply. I don't know. This particular one night, it was a CEO of a multibillion dollar company who I'm friendly with. I just said, "What's up? I'm in your hood. Let's (beep)." And he goes, "Down. When?" So it worked out.
Shaan Puri (00:02:33):
It's amazing. So normally we try to play it cool, but we've actually been chasing you, Pieter. We've been talking about your projects. We've been being like, "Hey, we got to get this guy in the pod." Sam is a fan of you, for sure. I would say I am less of a fan than Sam, but that doesn't mean I like you, It's I'm more in the closet about it where Sam is very open. Sam's like this guy's amazing, this guy's an artist.
Pieter Levels (00:02:56):
Thanks, man.
Shaan Puri (00:02:56):
This guy's got great hair. And you do have great hair, so it's all true and we finally got you here. And it was hard, I think, because you don't schedule or something like that?
Pieter Levels (00:03:07):
I mean, it looks like being an ass if you do that, but, like you guys, I would get so many DMs. I mean, generally they're very low quality DMs. I want to collaborate, but I don't want to invest. People want something from you. I think it's being a hot girl in the club. People want something from you, but they don't want invest the time to actually get to know you or you feel like an object. And I don't like to feel like that and I want to spend more time with my friends in real life, with my girlfriend or something. I want to spend time in the gym, on my health and cooking food and that kind of stuff, go for walks. And I think because I've been doing this for 10 years, startups eight years, and now the money's going well, so I don't really need to do any calls anymore, any DMs.
Pieter Levels (00:03:56):
So I'm just trying to create a more chill life. And I'm not an asshole. It just means I don't have time to reply to everybody. So I close my DMs and then people got really angry on tweets. They're like, "You closed your DMs. Are you arrogant and stuff?" So I wrote a blog post 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 to everybody and do calls and stuff. And that's pretty much the argument for it.
Shaan Puri (00:04:24):
So let's give the context, so let's explain who the heck you are. So your name is Pieter Levels. You're known on Twitter as levelsio, right?
Pieter Levels (00:04:33):
Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:04:34):
That's the right way to say it?
Pieter Levels (00:04:35):
Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:04:36):
I saw you a while back. I'm just going to say some interesting things about you. 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 a meter that's your road to $3 million a year and it says $2.7 million. 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 a nomadic lifestyle. So I think you hop around or you don't have a home base.
Shaan Puri (00:05:11):
So you could be in Bali and then you could be in the Netherlands or you could be in 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 remember seeing you because you did a Nomad community, a Slack community really early on. Slack had just come out and I was like, "This guy's charging, I think it was, 10 bucks a month or something to get into this thing." I was like, "He's got 1,000 people here. Wow, this guy's making good money doing this, just by making a Slack group." And you just do a bunch of small experiments like that. That's what I know. Sam, what did I miss that's interesting?
Sam Parr (00:05:53):
Pieter, let me give the outsider's perspective that's a little more holistic. So basically there's two things that are interesting to you. The first one is your businesses, which actually are the lesser of the two interesting things. Yeah, you have seven different businesses ranging from Nomad List, which makes $2.1 million in the last 12 months. That's a job board. You have another job board called Remote OK that's making $115,000 a month. You have readMAKE, which looks like it's an ebook, something like that.
Pieter Levels (00:06:23):
Yeah, it's like and ebook. Yeah.
Sam Parr (00:06:25):
Yeah, 60K a month. Then you have got a bunch of really small ...
Shaan Puri (00:06:28):
Sam, you're seeing these numbers because he publishes them. Where do you publish these?
Sam Parr (00:06:31):
He publishes all of them on the URL. Go to his Twitter profile. And we'll let you talk, Pieter, in a second, but go to his Twitter profile and then click off and it's open revenue at the very bottom, but I'm reading off of our notes. And then you have a QR menu creator, then you have 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 him relocate to Portugal. So 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.
Sam Parr (00:07:13):
So you do a few things that are interesting. The first thing is I think you're the only full-time employee and you use a team of contractors. And second of all, you have this weird personality that's very embedded in everything you do. So that's my big intro of what you do. Is that accurate?
Shaan Puri (00:07:30):
Yeah, I could see a website and I could know you built it without you having an about page, which is the ultimate compliment.
Pieter Levels (00:07:35):
Because it looks clunky, right? It looks a little ...
Shaan Puri (00:07:37):
No, it's got an attitude.
Pieter Levels (00:07:37):
No, but this is in a nice way. Yeah, because I'm not a designer. Yeah. No, I think it's an accurate description. I'm not very nomadic anymore. I'm slowly settling down, but I started very nomadically. I was moving around every month. I started 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. I mean, I told the story so many times, but I was following Patrick McKenzie, patio11, on Hacker News. Famous Hacker News guy and now he works for Stripe. And he would share his revenue on his blog about all his little products he made. And it was a poignant reminder for barbershops so you got SMS just before your appointment so you don't forget it, that kind of stuff. And I was really inspired. Okay, this is not some big VC funded guy. This is just an indie guy who was just on his laptop building stuff.
Pieter Levels (00:08:32):
And I mixed that with the nomad thing, where 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're in different kinds of places. You see different kinds of products in shops. If you're in Asia, you see some futuristic shit you don't see in Europe and America. And all that stuff, it helps for inspiration for creating products in some indirect ways as well. So that's pretty much what I've been doing. I've been trying to be radically honest. I know this American guy who pushes the radical honesty movement, so I'm trying to do that in my personal life. I'm trying to do it on the internet.
Pieter Levels (00:09:15):
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 started business administration and I have a master's degree in it, so I know all the management consultancy bullshit. I've been there, done that. That's where my friends work. I know investment bankers and I hate that a lot of that world, where it's fake and not real. And I want to be very open and honest. And I think it's also a little bit of a European thing, not to slack off Americans. I love America, but in Europe people are a little more direct and a little bit more straightforward. And I think that comes across in the stuff I do a little bit.
Sam Parr (00:09:56):
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?
Pieter Levels (00:10:07):
Yeah, so I have one customer support contractor part-time, Isabelle, and she works for all my projects. And I have moderator for the Slack group because there's some drama in there. I've had some crazy drama in these Slack groups and communities. So you need to have a moderator, you need to have rules and you cannot just automate this moderation away. I tried that, but you need a real person there to check on messages and stuff. And then I have a dev ops guy. He's my best friend, Daniel, and he works a SLA, 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. We haven't really had that for years. So he does security updates and stuff because I have a VPS. I don't use Amazon, I use a VPS on DigitalOcean and Linode and it keeps that stuff safe. So that's good.
Sam Parr (00:11:03):
And big's the business top line and bottom line?
Pieter Levels (00:11:06):
Sorry, how big's the business? So Remote OK is the job board. It's the biggest business, makes the most money. Normally this is starting to grow, though. It's past I think $100K a month, so almost a million dollar business. Remote OK is $1.6 million a year I think and Rebase's new business is immigration agency. So I want to help remote workers immigrate to countries that want to attract remote workers with beneficial tech stuff. Portugal is one of the first ones to do that. So those are the three businesses that really make money and the rest doesn't really make money a lot. The book makes I think $4K a month.
Shaan Puri (00:11:44):
But everything you do is part of one flywheel. So I've looked at your 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." I'm interested in all these things, but am I going to be able to juggle five different things? I got a podcast, I have a VC fund, I have my eCommerce business, I have a newsletter business. I don't even know what else. A course business, I got another shit. So it's like am I going to be able to do this? And what I saw that you did, I have this mental model of a solopreneur. And a solopreneur, nobody's actually solo. Everybody's got a little support team around them that's helpful. Some in a big way, some in a small way, but basically it's somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a successful business and lifestyle around that.
Shaan Puri (00:12:36):
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 it starts with the red pill. So a red pill is that scene in the matrix where Morpheus is holding out a blue pill, red pill. He's like, "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, you could forget this ever happened. And Neo's like, "No, I need to know the truth. What's the truth?" He takes the red pill and basically it's every great solopreneur I think starts with one truth.
Shaan Puri (00:13:08):
So Tim Ferris' truth was basically that the 9:00 to 5:00 work in a cubicle for 40 years model is effing broken and you don't need to do it that way. You could work four hours a week and live like a millionaire. And so that was Tim Ferris's red pill and yours was basically this idea of being a digital nomad, which was like you don't have to subscribe to the normal way of living. You pick a place, that's where you are from, that's where you live and you just stay where you grew up. And 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 go wherever I feel like whenever I feel like and I carry a little backpack and that's my life.
Shaan Puri (00:13:54):
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 people always ask what I keep in my backpack for the day. Here's what it is. It's just every bit of content you can come up with that's poppy, that fits that red pill. So then that gives you authority on that subject, so you become authority. And so Pomp became an authority around bitcoin and Tim Ferris 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 one of many businesses that can come up with it, but every one of those businesses, either it's a big money maker or it's just another funnel, more content, more new audience that's going to get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that you are talking about.
Shaan Puri (00:14:43):
And so even though you're doing six things, they're all actually part of one flywheel. And everyone that you do, is it 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? That's how I see it. I'm curious, is that true or is that not?
Pieter Levels (00:15:05):
Yeah, I think it's really accurate. And my thing started when I was blogging, just like you said. I was blogging about nomading, but I was blogging for my mom because back then you had travel bloggers, like 2014. And I was going to travel and nomad. And every place I went I wrote a little. How was 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 because my mom was obviously Dutch, but I was like she can read English, so it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff, more audience. It wasn't super a big idea. It just happened and then those blogs started showing up on Hacker News. And I started writing more about bootstrapping startups as a nomad in Thailand or something or in Asia.
Pieter Levels (00:15:46):
And those started going on Hacker News really high. And I think that was the time, it was like 2013, 2014. There was the time when I noticed that the developers in San Francisco working for all the startups, they also were realizing 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 Ferris wave in 2008. It was the first nomad wave. I love Tim Ferris, but there was something about the followers there and the business that were created. They were shady. There was a lot of shady shit I came across in Asia, in Thailand, Americans and Europeans.
Shaan Puri (00:16:22):
A lot of brain supplements and shit like that.
Pieter Levels (00:16:24):
Dude, yes. Yeah, drug dealers, online drug dealers and spam decking. And there's still shady shit, but less. And I was like, "I really hate this shady shit. I don't feel like part of this scene." I think it would be cool to make it more mainstream, reputable businesses, reputable jobs that do it. So I kept blogging about it and it kept taking off on Hacker News. And you're right. And then I went on Twitter and I think organically people started following me. And then a lot of people went nomad. A lot of my friends went nomad because I was blogging and they became my friends now. Yeah, and then I started all those businesses, but it sounds very like a constructed ...
Shaan Puri (00:17:05):
It's not a master plan.
Pieter Levels (00:17:06):
No, it's not a master plan. It's very organic. I'm like user zero. I try to build stuff for myself and I always have new ideas. There's, just like you said, red pill. There's a discongruence in society and what I'm thinking. And most people then think there must be something wrong with me, but I think arrogance. I think there must be something wrong with society. Maybe this is a new thing, so I'll try and make a little website about it. Inflation three years ago or two years ago, I was tweeting about inflation. This shit's going to go crazy with all the fed printing money. And everyone's like, "Nah, inflation is fine. Stop whining about it." I'm like, "No, I'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are higher." So I made this inflationchart.com website that shows the inflation numbers are really high. Turned out to be true now.
Shaan Puri (00:17:54):
Yeah, that's great.
Sam Parr (00:17:56):
What technology are you using to build those sites? Because they all do look alike and you seem like you can spin them up really quickly.
Pieter Levels (00:18:04):
Well, that's really funny because I get a lot of criticism for the technology I use. I use PHP because that's the language I knew because I was making a blog, like WordPress. So I knew PHP a little bit. So I was like I just need to write with the language I know because I don't know other languages. And I did that. And then I used JavaScript and I use jQuery. So everybody starts laughing now cause jQuery is way passe, but I still use it because it's so easy to make a button, bind an event to it, age exterior to the server, to the PHP script, does something with a database, sends it back and it works for me really well. And I think it doesn't matter what you use, but as long as you use something that's really fast feedback loop and iterative loop where you can really quickly develop. I can make a new button in 20 seconds and deploy it to the server and it's really fast.
Pieter Levels (00:18:50):
And I know other developer friends of mine use a very big stack, Kubernetes and all this stuff, all these keywords I don't really know. And for them it takes sometimes an hour or maybe even days to deploy new feature. And I think what we learned from startup and lead startup is that the customer feedback loop has to be very fast, iterative so you can really quickly change stuff. And it also makes your customers really happy because they see something, they have a problem or a feature idea. You can really quickly build it and then they see it. I mean, if you want happy customers, that's how you get it. You make something for them, they're like, "Oh, my god, I influenced this product." So that works for me. So very, very simple stack.
Shaan Puri (00:19:32):
And we won't laugh at you not because we're nice. I don't know what jQuery is, neither does Sam. So we're not going to make fun of you. You're safe here. We're too dumb to call you out on any of your technical [inaudible 00:19:49]
Pieter Levels (00:19:49):
Nice. This is a good podcast.
Sam Parr (00:19:51):
What do you think your whole thing's worth?
Pieter Levels (00:19:53):
So if you do 5X ... Sorry.
Sam Parr (00:19:58):
Shaan, go to his sites and you could see it's something slash open. It's usually the website slash open. And then it says so many stats, most of which honestly are useless, but it's cool.
Shaan Puri (00:20:09):
Yeah, 70% of them are the equivalent of a step counter. It's like how many DMs did I get today?
Pieter Levels (00:20:20):
No, I don't have that.
Shaan Puri (00:20:22):
No, you do.
Pieter Levels (00:20:24):
But it's collective. It's like DMs sent. It's collective events.
Shaan Puri (00:20:27):
Okay, for example, I'm on nomadlist.com, which you said is I think your biggest one, slash open. And on it you see the revenue chart, you see CO2 removed from the atmosphere, you see the full P&L, you see a bunch of other things. And one of them that you see is 73% profit margin. Your team says .78, so that's part-time?
Pieter Levels (00:20:48):
Yeah, full-time equivalent, like FTE. Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:20:50):
And then plus 492 bots. What is that, servers?
Pieter Levels (00:20:55):
Yeah. So on the server you can do ...
Sam Parr (00:20:57):
Also, he has valuation, too. If you scroll down it says if we sold for whatever the multiple is.
Shaan Puri (00:21:04):
If it was 30X profit, this would be $17 million.
Pieter Levels (00:21:07):
So I tried to take the PE. I mean, it's not super accurate. I did business, but it's the PE ratio of public companies that are similar in the industry. And I try to sync it to that sometimes, but it completely depends on the multiple if somebody's going to pay for it.
Shaan Puri (00:21:19):
Have you sold any of these?
Pieter Levels (00:21:21):
[inaudible 00:21:21] multiples are extremely low. No, I've sold nothing.
Shaan Puri (00:21:23):
Do you want to sell any of these?
Pieter Levels (00:21:25):
I've been in the selling processes with previous guests on your podcast, but it bounced off.
Sam Parr (00:21:33):
I'm just going to guess it was Andrew Wilkinson because he loves ...
Pieter Levels (00:21:36):
Yeah, Schmandrew Schwilkinson.
Sam Parr (00:21:37):
Yeah, because he loves job boards. That's just a guess.
Pieter Levels (00:21:40):
I can't say anything. I signed NDA. 80% of the acquisitions, they bounce off. So right now, I don't really care. I like that I have cash flow and my life is nice, but until a few years ago I was obsessed by the selling because you build a startup in the movie Social ... Well, not the movie Social Network, but in big movies about startups, they're like, "Oh, my god, grow big and then sell and you're millionaire." But then if you become a millionaire yourself with your cash flow, you're like, "Okay, why does it matter actually?"
Sam Parr (00:22:10):
Well, let's actually talk about that because what's interesting about you is you have a few that you could sell. So Remote OK and Nomad List are both pretty cool. Have you calculated how much money you want and how long it's going to take you to get there via cash flow? Well, why don't I just sell one and I can get an $8 or $10 million lump sum? But then I still own this other one that's making $3 million a year. I mean, have you thought done that math and what have you ...
Pieter Levels (00:22:35):
Yeah, so the thing is most of my revenue is profit. The margins are really high, especially Remote OK. It's like 94% margin pre-tax, so it's very high. So I'd say 10X. After 10X it gets interesting. I think the problem is with bootstrap companies you usually get 3, 4, 5X profit or revenue share, which is too low for me. I might as well wait three years or four years and sit in this chair and the sites will probably keep running because they're fully automated and I barely need to work on them. They just keep going. It's heavily automated, really heavy, heavy. It's just that I won't build new features anymore then and the site will start looking a little bit old because design trends change, but generally it will keep running. So it doesn't make sense for me to sell for 5X or 4X if I might as well wait.
Pieter Levels (00:23:22):
And also Nomad, this is my baby. So if I sell it, they're going to fuck it up. I already know because they always do. Let's say a big remote startup buys it. I know VC fund remote startups are cool, but they're also going to be bought by big, boring companies later, corporate companies. And they're going to shut this down and they're like, "This is my contribution. This is my life's work." It's like legacy. So Remote OK I care less because it's a job board. Job board's not very interesting, but normally this is this whole movement and culture and there's tens of thousands of people on there and my friends are on there. And it's like this work of love. Yeah, it would be hard to sell that because people are going to fuck it up.
Sam Parr (00:24:06):
Are you the largest ... Go ahead, Shaan.
Shaan Puri (00:24:09):
Well, one thing I was going to say, you tweeted out something that said a 10 year overnight success, which I think is a common idea that most people don't realize, which is by the time you hear about something you don't know the 10 years of toiling and tweaking and iterating that it took before the big breakthroughs happened. My life was the same way. I started my first startup when I was 20, 21 and I made my first million by the time I was 30 or 31. It took 10 years.
Pieter Levels (00:24:37):
That's early, man. Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:24:40):
And then every year since then, a bunch of great stuff has happened, but it took a long time to get that breakthrough. And I was looking at your chart. Sam, I don't know if you saw this tweet that he has, but the chart basically shows, I think you start ...
Pieter Levels (00:24:50):
I think the sum of all my revenue together in one chart. Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:24:53):
Yeah, it's all your revenue from all your projects all together in one chart. And it's looking like it's 2012 or 2013 start. And basically, if I go all the way up until, let's call it 2019, you're at maybe $600K, $700K per year in revenue. And only in the last pandemic boom, let's say 2020, from 2020 you went from under a million dollars to $2.5 million a year. So you two and a half X'd because it sounds amazing. Wow, this dude's making almost $3 million a year. Yeah, but he's also been building that momentum and stacking these assets and it just really took off, which I'm guessing is pandemic fueled a lot of people wanting to be nomads and you were there to catch that wave. You were the guy ready to catch the wave at that time.
Pieter Levels (00:25:41):
Yeah, but no idea this was coming. I did this presentation in 2015 where I predicted there would be one billion remote workers in 2030 and everybody laughed at me and even in the YouTube comments were like, "This is ridiculous. Where are your sources? This is bullshit." And then COVID happened and it suddenly seems very reasonable, but nobody could have seen this coming and I had no idea. I was actually thinking ...
Shaan Puri (00:26:05):
Did you cause COVID or what?
Pieter Levels (00:26:06):
Exactly, with Fauci. If you look at the chart, it doesn't really go anywhere. And I was thinking this is bullshit. I tried everything to make it grow and sometimes it grew and sometimes it didn't, but generally it wasn't a VC star, where ...
Shaan Puri (00:26:25):
Well, it looks like there's these run ups and then a plateau and run up and a plateau. Which is, by the way, that's how all progress actually looks if you zoom out far enough.
Pieter Levels (00:26:35):
Exactly.
Shaan Puri (00:26:35):
And I remember that during 2014, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, there was a small group of people like you, this is I think when you created that first Slack community, that was like, "No, being a nomad is the way to go."
Sam Parr (00:26:46):
Yeah, but those people were freaks.
Pieter Levels (00:26:51):
100%, yes.
Shaan Puri (00:26:54):
But there were some people who took the red pill at that time. I think Steph Smith who also worked [inaudible 00:27:00] she met you in Indonesia or Bali or something like that because she had, I think, probably during more that time period, 2014, '15, '16, something like that, she was one of those people that defected then. Whereas now there's another wave. And if you look at any lifestyle movement, it happens this way. Take crypto, it starts with the cypherpunks.
Pieter Levels (00:27:23):
Exactly same. You're right. Yes, exactly.
Shaan Puri (00:27:24):
They hang out in cryptography forums and they took the pill first. And then came the next, the developers, then came the finance bros. And then came the next wave.
Pieter Levels (00:27:32):
It's the same with music genres, like hiphop, early hiphop. And I come from electronic music, so [inaudible 00:27:39] bass music was my previous career. Music producer, it was the same thing. EDM taking off in the US in 2009, 2010 with dubstep, that's what broke EDM in the US, that kind of stuff. These scenes are almost dead and then suddenly something happens and it's so unpredictable. You have no clue what's going on. You can only surf it. So I think the metaphor of surfing is very accurate. It's better to surf these waves in general, I think life. Just surf waves, stop trying to control it. Just surf it and pivoting startups into, that's pretty much just surfing, steering the surfboard over the waves, because you cannot control the market at all. You cannot control society at all.
Sam Parr (00:28:20):
One of the things that bothers me about this indie hacker movement is ... Well, I really like it. I like it, but in general what I don't like about it is people think pretty small. So it's related to the fire movement, which is I just want to save a little bit of money so I can make $40,000 a year in passive income. And I'm like, "That's cool." Getting your first step is cool, but that can't be it with life. You're going to want more. You want to do more things and you can contribute to society. And with a lot of these indiehackers, they come up with silly stuff, where it's a small widget that they sell for $4 a month and they hope that they can get to $1,000 a month. And I'm like, "Man, that's neat if you're just starting out, but I think that this could be bigger." And you're actually one of the few people that I've seen go harder. You're going harder on this. Are there any others like you?
Pieter Levels (00:29:15):
How do you think I'm going harder on it?
Sam Parr (00:29:15):
Well, your numbers are bigger. It's substantial. Your numbers are nice already and it's very clear that ...
Pieter Levels (00:29:21):
But it could be survivorship bias, right?
Sam Parr (00:29:25):
Well, yeah. Definitely, but I still think that there's a mindset of ...
Shaan Puri (00:29:30):
For example, your Twitter bio thing says your meter is going to $3 million. I would say most people who are indiehackers and makers and the tinkerer community, they don't even have their meter to there. Their meter initially is going to start much lower, $60,000 or $70,000 a year. And maybe yours did, too, but then you're like, "I filled up that meter, I leveled it up." So what was your initial goal? Was it make enough to not need a job or where did you start and when did you get more ambitious?
Pieter Levels (00:30:01):
I mean, back when I started, I had a YouTube channel for this electronic music I was making and stuff. And I was making a few thousand dollars from YouTube AdSense, so I had some cash flow to live off, travel off and work on mini startups, but it was very fast. It was shrinking because of the copyright claims on YouTube in 2012 and stuff. So it was pretty much becoming below $1,000 a month. So I had that cashflow, but to go to your question, I think it's a power law. You always have a few people in a scene who will make more money or get more successful and stuff. Also, there's a delay effect. I started in 2013 or 2014. This any scene, it wasn't cool until maybe I think 2018 or something or 2017.
Pieter Levels (00:30:49):
So these people that are going into it now, they're just starting. And I think the widget thing is interesting because you said it's only a widget. If you make one feature really well that solves one problem, you can get some customers and you get some cash flow and then you can build a second feature. And you can slowly scale up to a real product toolkit. And then I think another thing is you don't see a lot of people with multimillion revenue because they will quickly raise VC. Once you pass a million dollars a year, they'll switch to let's go big. Let's go become a billion dollar company. And I think I'm the exception. I'm like I don't want to be a billion dollar company, I'm fine like this, chill. And that's why you don't see those people a lot because I do know them and they quickly disappear. This app we're using now, Riverside, I think has raised VC now.
Pieter Levels (00:31:38):
Started bootstrapped and then I think Oprah Winfrey used it because it's my friend, Adav. He makes it. He's like, "Dude, Oprah Winfrey used it." I'm like, "Oh, my god, this is crazy." He's like, "Yeah, I think I'm going to raise VC." I'm like, "Okay. Yeah, you should do that," because they think this could be bigger than just a few million, right?
Shaan Puri (00:31:56):
So you tweeted something out the other day that's related to this. You go, "Not sure if people realize it, but if your app does $20,000 a month on revenue, you're probably already a millionaire." $20,000 per month times 12 months, assume you could sell for, let's call it, 4X or 5X multiple, that's a million dollar selling price. You're sitting on a million dollar asset. And when you put it that way, I think that sounds, and it is, way more achievable than this idea of like I got to build a million dollar business. Do I have the big idea, whatever? But getting something to $20,000 to $30,000 a month in revenue [inaudible 00:32:30]
Pieter Levels (00:32:30):
That seems approachable, right?
Shaan Puri (00:32:31):
It's approachable and that's awesome. All you did is you said something that was true out loud. And I think if more people heard that, that's why I'm bringing it up here, I think if more people heard that, that is a pathway to a millionaire status that does not require winning the startup lottery of inventing the next big thing or working and saving and paying your crazy W2 taxes for 15, 20 years to get the same outcome.
Pieter Levels (00:33:03):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's reachable, especially if you think about high automation, very high margins. So software business, you're not going to hire a big team of 10 people immediately. You work with part-time contracts, like I do, and you keep your margins very, very high because then you can sell for 5X. Then your revenue's almost your profit, so it's the same. Yeah, I think $20K is approachable. Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:33:29):
Let's brainstorm a business together that could get to $20K. So what's an idea that you're not currently building, but you thought of, because I'm sure you're an idea guy and you think you can make a website that does X, or you could make Nomad List for this other niche, or you could make the immigration one for this other thing. So what's a business? Let's brainstorm a business together. What's a business that you think could get somebody to this millionaire status?
Pieter Levels (00:33:54):
Man, again, this is so personal. So I used to live in hostel dorms in 2014, but didn't have money. Shared with six people, crazy. Then I started private rooms in hotels. Then the rooms got a little bit more luxurious because I had more money. And then I started discovering apartment hotels and it sounds like bullshit, but it works so well with remote work. So I'm in an apartment hotel right now in Europe on the beach and there's a kitchen.
Shaan Puri (00:34:21):
So what's an apartment hotel? What does that mean?
Pieter Levels (00:34:22):
Sorry. Apartment hotel is essentially a hotel, so full serviced, furnished, nice interior hotel room, but you also have a kitchen, you have a bedroom, you have a living room. It's very big. It's pretty much like an Airbnb, but it's ...
Shaan Puri (00:34:36):
And you pay for month or per night or what?
Pieter Levels (00:34:37):
Well, you can pay per night, you can pay per month. It's just like a hotel.
Sam Parr (00:34:42):
Shaan, it's like that guy who ...
Shaan Puri (00:34:42):
Sander or whatever?
Sam Parr (00:34:43):
Yeah, it's like Sander and I forget the other one. The guy was supposed to come in the pod, but he canceled last minute. What was his name?
Shaan Puri (00:34:49):
Sam, you did one of these in Nashville or something, where you're like, "This is awesome." There's a [inaudible 00:34:52] where everyone's working.
Sam Parr (00:34:54):
Yeah, it's basically just an apartment that you can rent for five days and they're pretty cool. I do them all the time. The problem that I've experienced in New York, it's 10 grand a month and it's 600 square feet. So that's why I tend to go Airbnb, but I'm in smaller, less expensive cities, you can get a 1,000 square foot place for $6,000 a month. And it's basically an apartment building that has one floor or all floors dedicated to Airbnbs.
Pieter Levels (00:35:22):
Yeah, the problem with Airbnb is that I've noticed is the quality is very, very high. There's a big range of quality and there's problems. There's no daily cleaning. It feels too much like you don't know what's going to happen. Stuff might break. If things break here, you just get a new apartment. And I've done this in Europe and I've done this in Asia, too, in Thailand. And I spend about usually $2K to $3K, three and a half K. So it's a lot of money. It's more than normal rent, but the cool thing is that it solves a lot of problems you have in your daily life because it's surface and stuff. And it's a huge thing in Asia. It's a huge thing in Southeast Asia, even in Korea, Taiwan and stuff. So I think that's going to be bigger because of remote work, because you have remote workers, even with families, with kids.
Pieter Levels (00:36:11):
And you don't want to live in a hotel room. Hotel room is very depressing. I go insane in hotel rooms. It's just a bed and you can barely walk around the bed. There's no space. I need to cook food, I need to buy steak from the local butcher. I need to cook it with broccoli and spinach and with my friends and stuff. And you can do it in an apartment hotel. And I think if you target, it's a high end market, I think, of remote workers who make a lot of money, like $200K or $100K, something. If you target them, you can make a lot of money because it's serviced, furnished.
Shaan Puri (00:36:42):
So what would you build? You'd actually build an apartment hotel or you'd build a digital product for ...
Pieter Levels (00:36:46):
That's a big question because I'm a software guy. I don't want to own stuff. I don't want to have all this. I don't even want to buy land. I don't even want to buy a house. I want to be able to be consumer, a customer of these kind of things, but I want it long term. I want to be able to rent for six months or 12 months even. I want to be guaranteed to stay.
Sam Parr (00:37:05):
So my wife and I, we're at the point where we're going to start having kids soon. And I live not like you entirely, but a little bit, where we spend half the year at one place, half the year at the other place. And what we're going to do next year is just rent, do a 12 month lease in New York, and just not be there all the time. But I'm looking to rent all of my furniture and I've been looking at a place where I was like I just want to book this one place and I want to pay someone three grand a month, but they have to show up before I arrive. They've got to completely set it up and it has to be 100% furnished for me. And I've been looking at these and there's a few startups in the space that are doing furniture rental. And furniture rental is not popular right now. And I tell people all the time, I'm like I just want to rent all my furniture.
Sam Parr (00:37:49):
I don't want to own any of it. And they think it's nonsense and they think it's crazy, but if you run the math it's about the same in terms of price, but in terms of headache I think it's 1,000 times better.
Pieter Levels (00:38:07):
100%, yeah. Yeah, so it's all about the headaches. So if you can afford it, you can reduce the headaches of ownership. And ownership, it sounds so privileged, though, but whatever. Ownership is a big hassle. Shit breaks all the time. And if I spend my time on my laptop building on these apps, it's probably better use of my time than managing all this stuff. And if a company can specialize in managing this stuff and renting it to you, it's much better. I think you're on point. That's a real business. And imagine you can go to a website, you can choose different sets of furniture, different interior and stuff, paintings on the wall or whatever. And you can just click and you arrive and it's already done for you, like you said. I think that would be really interesting. Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:38:51):
What are some other things that you're interested in, either niche categories or things in your lifestyle that you're like, "I do this lifestyle thing differently than people." You could build a business around this?
Pieter Levels (00:39:05):
I think that the biggest problem with the digital nomad thing is that maybe it's a good big podcast to say that there's a perception that people travel really fast. And half the day that they don't travel fast, they travel every few months or even I think the average is seven months now. It's very slow. So the word digital nomad is a horrible word. Of course it has so many connotations, but it's mostly remote working people who want a little bit of a different life, who want to see different places a little bit. They have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, they have kids even. There's families doing this as well. Moving around every week doesn't really work. Being very slow is big. And if people are more aware of that, they can find a lot of products built for this long term slowmad market, which most of us are. We're mostly slowmads.
Shaan Puri (00:39:50):
Slowmad. I like that. Nice.
Pieter Levels (00:39:54):
Slowmads, yeah. Think about education, think about homeschooling is taking off also because of remote work. If I have kids, I don't know if I want to put them in a regular school. Maybe Elon Musk builds his own school that's cool, but you can do things in a different way. And now it's still very niche. This remote work thing is still niche. It's going to get only bigger. There's only going to be more and more people doing this once physical jobs get automated. So if you make products, I don't know a specific product, but if you build products for those people, that's a high end market of tech workers that are remote.
Sam Parr (00:40:26):
So you said that you don't own stuff or you said you don't like owning stuff. You said that you don't want to own real estate. So if you're making two and a half million dollars a year in profit, this is a question that Shaan always asks that I'm stealing it, which is what do you do with your money then?
Pieter Levels (00:40:45):
Yeah, so I'm heavy in ETFs. I read a blog post by the guy from Google that does SEO. And he's like I just put everything in ETFs, so Vanguard ETFs, S&P 500, but also I'm heavily invested in Asia because I believe in Asia. I believe in the future. There's a lot of things about Asia that are good, but there's still things very futuristic. And I also invest in crypto. I hold Bitcoin and Ethereum. I'm always scared to say those things on the podcast, but it's all very secure and stuff.
Sam Parr (00:41:17):
It's not exactly the most shocking thing to assume that you own some crypto.
Pieter Levels (00:41:23):
True. Every tech bro has crypto. Yeah, exactly.
Shaan Puri (00:41:26):
You're actually not allowed to have that haircut if you don't own three [inaudible 00:41:29] you can't have a high face with long top hair if you don't own three.
Pieter Levels (00:41:36):
I spend about $4K or $5K a month or something. That's it. I do need to pay tax, but after that most of it goes to ETFs and stuff. It's scary to invest now because it's a scary time, but generally I want to do this for 20, 30 years in ETF invested and stuff. And sometimes stocks, but I did a benchmark, my S&P 500 ETF outperformed all my stock decisions over the last two years. So I'm stupid just like most people.
Sam Parr (00:42:01):
Shaan, you want to tell him what you did recently?
Shaan Puri (00:42:05):
What? Selling?
Sam Parr (00:42:06):
With your stocks.
Shaan Puri (00:42:07):
Yeah, I sold not everything, but pretty much everything sold maybe 70%, 80% of the stocks that I hold.
Pieter Levels (00:42:15):
I get that. I mean, yeah, but I'm scared. They always say don't try and time the market. So I'm like I'll just sit and just crash with it, let the whole thing go back up.
Sam Parr (00:42:25):
Shaan, why did you do that? Why don't you just chill?
Shaan Puri (00:42:29):
Two reasons. One, I didn't want a risk of margin call because I borrowed a little bit against my stock portfolio and to what I felt was extremely safe and it's still safe. But I was like if this drops another 20%, then all of a sudden I'm having a headache that I don't want to deal with. I don't want to have to deal with freeing up a bunch of cash just to buffer this. So I was like, I noticed that every morning I was waking up and I was checking it and I was like, "Okay, logically I know I'm in pretty good shape here," but the stress of having to think about this is taking away from my day to day quality of life. It's like that's the opposite of what I want money to do. I don't want money to give me stress. My money's supposed to take away my stress.
Sam Parr (00:43:10):
So what did you do with the money?
Shaan Puri (00:43:12):
[inaudible 00:43:12] opposite?
Sam Parr (00:43:13):
What'd you do with it? Where is it?
Shaan Puri (00:43:14):
It's in cash right now. I might do some short term fixed income type stuff, but for now, again, I don't care. I don't need the 2%, I needed the peace of mind. And so that was the first thing. The second thing was I thought what will I regret more? What do I believe more? Do I believe that this is the bottom or do I believe that this is actually thinking that this is the bottom six months in and that it's all going to get better soon? Basically, there's three paths. Either it gets better now, this is about the bottom, but we stay here for an extended period of time, one, two, three, four years, or it has further down to go. And I basically thought that things going up soon seemed like the least likely thing. I would actually be betting against that heavily.
Shaan Puri (00:44:04):
And so I thought, "Okay, I have nothing to lose here in terms of upside," because I just fundamentally don't think that stocks and everything's just going to go rip back up again and we're all going to pretend that was it. We just had a few months of pain and then it all went right back up and remember things are all green again. And so I thought either it's going to be flat, boring and sideways for a period of time or it's going to go down more. And I thought in either case that I won't regret being in cash because, A, I don't have to sweat it every day. I don't have to think about it every day and, B, I'm not losing anything doing this. And so that was my thought process. And I figured there's going to be these little bear market rallies, so just sell at the top of the next, so that's what I did.
Shaan Puri (00:44:47):
Everything rallied 5% and I just sold and I kept 20% still in the market and I just left the other 80% in not thinking about it cash. But I held my crypto. I didn't sell my crypto.
Pieter Levels (00:45:00):
That's good. Yeah. Are you guys mostly invested in the American stock market or worldwide?
Shaan Puri (00:45:06):
Yeah, like you said, I believe in Asia. I'm like I believe in Asia, too, but I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. How do I go invest in Asia and where would I invest? I don't even know. What does that mean? Are you buying the equivalent of an ETF for Japan or something? What are you doing?
Pieter Levels (00:45:17):
Dude, I had a Vanguard ETF China and then suddenly it disappeared from my broker app. And I'm like, "What the fuck's happening?" And I get this message, they're like Vanguard left China in March or something because they were like this is too crazy. So I had to buy a different ETF.
Shaan Puri (00:45:33):
[inaudible 00:45:33] privatize. They made private companies public or something.
Pieter Levels (00:45:36):
Yeah. No, they fucked Jack Ma, for sure. There's a lot of weird shit happening, but I still think I should be invested in those markets.
Shaan Puri (00:45:45):
Sam, have I told you about the Jack Ma thing?
Sam Parr (00:45:48):
How it's crazy that the third richest man in the world [inaudible 00:45:52] was like, "Hey, Jack, shut up." And he was like, "Yes, sir."
Shaan Puri (00:45:57):
They just took Jack offline. Yeah, my brother-in-law calls me. So we had one moment where a month in when people started noticing Jack Ma is missing. And my brother-in-law in the car one day was just like, "Where's Jack Ma?" He was in the car, but he's like, "Bro, why aren't we talking about this?" He's like, "Where's Jack Ma?" And we just started laughing. How crazy is that, that Jack Ma is just not ... What if you just couldn't find Elon Musk because he said something that Biden didn't like? That idea is crazy.
Sam Parr (00:46:24):
They did it with the tennis player, too.
Pieter Levels (00:46:27):
Yeah, I saw that. Dude, it's fucked up.
Shaan Puri (00:46:27):
And my brother-in-law still calls me. He'll just call me out of the blue. It's been like a year now and he'll be like, "Yo, where's Jack Ma?" And he'll hang up and that's the whole call.
Pieter Levels (00:46:36):
That's so good.
Shaan Puri (00:46:37):
He'd just be yelling where is Jack Ma?
Pieter Levels (00:46:41):
But, dude, that's the thing of Asia and China, all this stuff is accurate. There's some crazy, but the other thing is also accurate, that there's lots happening in Asia. And I think in the West, in Europe and America, we have a blind spot because we get so much information that's negative about Asia, especially about China. And I'm not a China spy or something. My friends call me a China spy because of that, but I think it's a blind spot a little bit in the west, that we're going to miss out on ... I mean, China's going to be the biggest economy in 2030. I think by GDP it's already the biggest economy by purchasing power or something. Ignoring that, just because there's a lot of arguments why we should ignore China, but it sounds like a blind spot in the west a little bit to me.
Sam Parr (00:47:29):
We'll do an easy one. You tweeted out your calendar and it was free for a week or something like that. And I know Shaan does that, too. And I like that. Sometimes I don't like that because I'll do that for three days and I'm like, "Oh, my god, I'm so bored." Is it real that you just don't plan anything?
Pieter Levels (00:47:47):
Yeah, so this is the only planned thing and it gives me stress because I'm like, "Shit, something's coming up." I live with my friends, so my friends are my neighbors now. So I brought all these nomads friends to Portugal and Europe and we live together. A lot of our lot them are in the city near here, whatever. Everybody's near, so we just have dinners outside and we cook food and the sunsets on the beach and just this nice, chill life that I never had because I was always alone in hotel rooms. I had friends, but they were always around the world. And now they're all here, so I mostly do that. So I don't want to do calls because what am I going to call about? I like having calls with you guys. What am I going to call with other people about? New business [inaudible 00:48:28]
Sam Parr (00:48:27):
Don't you get bored?
Pieter Levels (00:48:29):
No, because I work on my websites. I make coffee, I make open my laptop, me and my friend, we code a little bit together, make a new feature. Then you go to the gym, we go to sauna, we go swim, but that's very recent, this kind of chill life. And I don't get bored as long as I ship a little bit on my websites. I don't really get bored.
Sam Parr (00:48:55):
So basically it's almost always the truth that no matter how hard you try, the more income that you make, your lifestyle gets inflated. Maybe sometimes not as much, but then other times a ton. And I was like I'm going to fight it. I can't imagine spending more than $10,000 out a car or whatever. And then you make more income, you're like whatever. Who cares? You said you spend $4,000 or $5,000 a month. You're one of the few people that has acknowledged that your lifestyle actually doesn't seem like it's been ... It's not lavish at all.
Pieter Levels (00:49:27):
No, but it's on purpose. It's 100% on purpose. Incidentally, sometimes you spend more. Last month hotels were really booked, so we had to pay a lot of money, but now it's chill. I think it's on purpose.
Sam Parr (00:49:40):
How much?
Pieter Levels (00:49:41):
Last month was like $10K or something for hotels because we're in Lisbon.
Sam Parr (00:49:45):
That's still nothing, though. You're making $3 million a year.
Pieter Levels (00:49:47):
But paying $10K for hotel is ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. It should be the max $2K or $3K for me personally, but I've seen a lot of people do that lifestyle inflation because I know from corporate, again, from studying business, I know the management people and stuff they get paid more and they get golden handcuffs and they can't leave. A lot of my friends are like that and I don't want that to happen to me. I mean, it can't happen it to me, but you get what I mean. And I know that material goods don't really make me happy. So I buy a new shirt or something or I buy a new iPhone, within two weeks I'm used to it. And there's studies on this. There's research about this stuff. If you buy a new car, even you get married, after six months you're at the same happiness. If you buy a house, after six months same happiness. So if you know that stuff, you don't really need to spend money so much. You don't need to buy stuff, essentially. And generally it will probably make you happier.
Shaan Puri (00:50:35):
What do you think you would want to spend more on? Let's say that ...
Pieter Levels (00:50:39):
Food. Good food, organic, free roaming. I mean, it's clichΓ©, like Joe Roman, but free roaming, grass fed cow, beef that are happy animals, organic vegetables, that kind of stuff. Not goods, experiences. It's on purpose I do this.
Shaan Puri (00:50:58):
What are some experiences that you think are worth the money?
Pieter Levels (00:51:01):
What is what? Sorry?
Shaan Puri (00:51:02):
What are some experiences that are worth the money? When most people [inaudible 00:51:07]
Pieter Levels (00:51:06):
Most experiences that are good don't even cost money, right?
Sam Parr (00:51:10):
[inaudible 00:51:10] coach?
Pieter Levels (00:51:11):
Life coach? What?
Sam Parr (00:51:12):
No, do you fly ...
Pieter Levels (00:51:13):
Fly coach. Sorry. Yeah, you're right. Man, you got me. You're trying to find stuff, right? Yes, I fly business class. No, exactly. I only do it long haul and I flew only once in the last 16 months and I flew business. Qatar, really nice and you can lie down and sleep and stuff, but that's about it I think. And one thing I notice, I was in Bangkok in this luxury apartment hotel stuff, but it was a little bit too luxury for me. And I was there for a month and you start noticing that you don't meet as much interesting people. I met one interesting person who had this giant wheat farm, the biggest wheat farm in Thailand, because they just legalized it. It was cool, but generally it's more like a socialite, Paris Hilton audience. But in the hostels you would meet crazy people. You would meet backpackers, but also researchers, and entrepreneurs, and fledgling entrepreneurs. You met generally more interesting people because you were more in those areas. Yeah.
Sam Parr (00:52:15):
Sorry. Listen to this. Did I tell you about Sam Corcos from Levels? Other Levels. What's the URL?
Shaan Puri (00:52:27):
Levels Health.
Sam Parr (00:52:28):
Levels Health, the thing that goes in your arm. So this guy, so he raised ... Yeah, that's right. So he has a startup that makes eight figures in revenue. It's worth, I think, it was $400 million. So let's just say that he's worth $150 million on paper. Not real, but on paper. He came over to my house and he was with his girlfriend and she made a comment, joking he always gives me a hard time because it takes me forever to pack, but that's ridiculous. I only had this one carryon. And I was like, "Well, how long does it take you to pack, Sam?" He goes, "I don't pack." I was like, "What do you mean?" He had a draw string bag. You know what a draw string bag? It's like a bag where you put [inaudible 00:53:02]
Shaan Puri (00:53:02):
You get these at conferences.
Sam Parr (00:53:04):
Yes. That's all he had, was that bag. And he goes, "Well, you see, I only own the clothes that I'm wearing right now, which is a white T-shirt, a pair of pants, socks, underwear and shoes." I only own that plus another pair of underwear, a jacket and this bag and my laptop, which I have right here on me. That's literally the only thing that I own. I was like, "Wait, what?" He goes, "Yeah, I've been doing this for eight years now or something like that and I only live and I do what you do." He's like he does what you do, Pieter. He lives in these Airbnbs and hotel style setups and he's been doing it for years. And that's all he owned. And I thought that was the craziest shit I've hear in a long time.
Shaan Puri (00:53:42):
He does laundry every day? I don't understand. How's he living off two underwear?
Sam Parr (00:53:44):
Well, I was like, "Well, what if you got to go to a funeral?" What if you have to do this? He goes, "Well, I just go to a thrift store when I need to go and I buy stuff and then I just bring it back." This is my guess, he does it partly out of convenience of not wanting to worry about stuff. I also think that there's a very philosophical thing going on here because it's extreme, but have you ever heard of anyone, Pieter, being that crazy?
Pieter Levels (00:54:12):
Dude, yes. Actually, in 2015 I was in Chiang Mai and there was an Australian guy who would fly from Australia to Thailand to Chiang Mai with only his MacBook Air and the clothes he wore and not even a bag. And he would buy everything he needed on the spot and he would be there for two or three months and he would donate the clothes he wore to charity. And then he would fly back to Australia with his MacBook Air in his hand and I was so impressed.
Speaker 4 (00:54:39):
This data is wrong every freaking time.
Speaker 6 (00:54:42):
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.
Speaker 4 (00:54:47):
Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support, tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago I totally missed.
Speaker 6 (00:54:57):
HubSpot, grow better.
Shaan Puri (00:54:59):
See, that's cool. I would do that because I think that actually adds to the experience of traveling. Traveling fully light and then when you get there buying what you need and then giving it away when you leave. I'd actually get down with that, but I rotate two underwear and I put my underwear in my bag with my Macbook. I don't know about that. Yeah.
Pieter Levels (00:55:19):
Yeah. No, but I think it comes down to philosophy. And I do think it sounds pretentious, but I don't care. It comes down to constraining your life in a certain way. I think constraints are good in creativity and life and stuff. And it makes you focus on the really important things in life for you personally. It must be different for everybody. For me, that's girlfriend, friends, health, food, happiness, all that stuff. And creative work, meaningful work, very important. I need to have something to do in my day. I need to feel like I'm contributing something, like Sam said.
Sam Parr (00:55:56):
So what do you own?
Pieter Levels (00:55:58):
So I have a backpack. I have a rolling suitcase, though, a small one. I have clothes, I have a iPhone, MacBook Pro. I have a toothbrush, I have [inaudible 00:56:14]
Sam Parr (00:56:14):
So minimal.
Pieter Levels (00:56:14):
Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:56:14):
If you can name all the things you own, that's amazing.
Pieter Levels (00:56:16):
I'm looking around, I have two Stadia controllers, like game pads. You can use Stadia here. It's cool. Yeah, that's about it, I think. I mean, I have backup phones and stuff because two-factor authentication stuff, but it's not a lot of stuff.
Sam Parr (00:56:33):
You could talk about your family or not, if you want, but do you think you're going to do this when you have kids?
Pieter Levels (00:56:38):
So what does doing it mean? Because I'm mostly settled down. I'm mostly in one place. I'm just trying to not buy stuff from Amazon.
Sam Parr (00:56:45):
Doing it as in not owning stuff. I mean, I think your life is cool, but you have to acknowledge that it's alternative in the sense of 1% of the population does what you do.
Pieter Levels (00:56:57):
Yeah, for sure. I think it's interesting that the stuff I do may or may not become a thing because a lot of things I did eight years ago now are normal. So it might be that the things that [inaudible 00:57:08]
Sam Parr (00:57:08):
Who cares? I mean, if you're happy, who cares if it becomes big?
Pieter Levels (00:57:11):
It's not about me, It's more like it might become major. I think even if you have kids, you can do it in an alternative way. You can go to the thrift store or get secondhand toys or something, secondhand clothes, that kind of stuff, but it all doesn't have to be so consumerist and buying. We can do it in a different way and I'm just trying to figure out how I want to do that and trying to keep the focus on ... Yeah.
Shaan Puri (00:57:40):
Well, we've talked about a Nomad List style red pill before briefly, which was my ... I forgot what it's called. Sam, do you remember the name of the Zero Waste Project or the Zero Project or something like that?
Sam Parr (00:57:51):
Yeah, I think I heard about that.
Shaan Puri (00:57:52):
So basically my wife told me about this. She was like, "Yeah, in the city, in the little town we live in, there's this Facebook group." And what they do is it's not even a barter economy. It's a giving economy. So it's like if you have stuff, you just give it into the giving circle and other people can take it out and then they can give stuff in. I think it's a lot around kid stuff. My kid's grown out of this.
Pieter Levels (00:58:16):
But it doesn't make [inaudible 00:58:19]
Shaan Puri (00:58:19):
It's not like Craigslist randos. It's amongst this trusted group of people who believe the same thing. The Buy Nothing Project. And I think I might have butchered exactly how it works. Sam, do you know a little bit how it works?
Sam Parr (00:58:31):
Well, it's just the idea of instead of reduce, reuse, recycle for plastic and shit, they're like, "No, let's just reuse." We're going to reuse everything. So instead of buying a new toy, we're going to go get one for free and then we're going to give away when we're done. It's just a mindset. And then there's a bunch of companies in the space, but the big one is this buy nothing series of Facebook groups where it's just like I'm giving away these children's clothes, come get them.
Pieter Levels (00:58:59):
Yeah. I mean, that's nice. It doesn't make any sense. You have a baby and it grows out of its clothes every month or something or every two months. So why would you buy everything new if you can ask your family for clothes they already wore or whatever? It makes more sense to me personally. Yeah.
Sam Parr (00:59:18):
Who do you want to be like? Who do you admire and who do you want to be like? Because the reason why people buy for their kids is because they want their kids to have Jordans. So they look cool for other people because they want to impress other people. Who do you want to impress and who do you want to be like, you think? Who do you look up to?
Pieter Levels (00:59:38):
I like Derek Sivers. I don't know if you know Derek Sivers.
Sam Parr (00:59:40):
Yeah. Tell me about him. Who is he?
Pieter Levels (00:59:44):
He started a company called CD Baby in the '90s, I think, or in early 2000s, which was one of the first indie music distributors, where you could send your music as a indie musician. And they would press the CDs for you and they would send it to your customers and stuff. And they're also now on Spotify and stuff and he sold this for $30 million. I interviewed him for my [inaudible 01:00:06] actually. He's really nice guy, the most nice guy in startups, I think. And he writes a lot, writes a lot of books now. And he's very philosophical, also nomadic. He's been in living in Singapore, he lives in New Zealand, lives in US and stuff. If you go through his website, sivers.org, I think he writes very much same concepts that I talk about, about simple life. Yeah, it's hard to describe him, but I think that's a very inspirational guy to me.
Pieter Levels (01:00:40):
I think I want to impress my parents, but they're already happy with me, so it doesn't really matter. I want to try and have a stable happiness because I've been depressed a lot. I've been anxious, especially when traveling. You go crazy in hotel rooms alone. Traveling, it brings you very deep into your own self and stuff. And I think the most important thing for me is to impress myself by just being stable and having a stable happy life with people around me and a wholesome life.
Shaan Puri (01:01:18):
What part of your life are you not impressed by for either yourself or Derek Sivers or any of those people? You just mentioned [inaudible 01:01:27]
Sam Parr (01:01:26):
Like the lifestyle, you mean?
Shaan Puri (01:01:28):
Yeah. What part of your life is not at that point where you feel like it's not impressive in that way?
Pieter Levels (01:01:33):
Well, I want to have a family, too, like you guys. And that's what I'm working on. Yeah, that's more of a focus now.
Shaan Puri (01:01:46):
Pretty easy, by the way. You just got to do one thing. I'll tell you about that later.
Pieter Levels (01:01:49):
You got to find the right girlfriend and then you need to see if they're not crazy. You need to connect and all this stuff. And I think that's it.
Sam Parr (01:01:58):
Shaan, you have a ... Go ahead. I want to hear this answer.
Pieter Levels (01:02:01):
No, the thing about Elon Musk, every time Elon Musk presents something, you're like, "Fuck, that's so cool." Why am I building internet websites? This is my only life I have or I'm going to die. I should do something bigger, but then I have to bring myself back to like, "No, it's cool. You're doing okay." Doesn't really need to be bigger, but everybody wants to make space rockets, but it's just so hard to do that.
Sam Parr (01:02:26):
Shaan, you have a dog. A little dog. I've got a big dog.
Pieter Levels (01:02:32):
I love dogs. Yeah.
Sam Parr (01:02:34):
Yeah, so you like animals. I love owning animals, big, aggressive looking dogs. That's my thing. I'm a weirdo. How do you live this? I want to live a little bit more like you. And I can do it, A, now because I have a little bit of money so I can just pay for fancier Airbnbs that are pet friendly and, B, I can only do it basically in America. Doing this lifestyle abroad with an animal, even in America you either have to fly private or you have to drive most places. I drive most places. How do you live this life with an animal?
Pieter Levels (01:03:07):
I don't have animals, but I want them. I had two cats with my ex-girlfriend and it was actually interesting. We went in Bangkok to this luxury apartment hotel and they were cat friendly. And it was this high society of Bangkok people with cute cats and cute dogs. In Asia, all the dogs are small. They like small dogs. I like big dogs, too, like you, Sam. And they walk around in the hotel and it's super cute. And they have cats and dog ice cream and stuff and food. And they have little beds for them to sleep in and stuff and everything is service. And that's another big market, I think, tech people with pets and stuff. They want to travel as well.
Sam Parr (01:03:44):
Shaan, have you guys looked into flying in America with an animal?
Shaan Puri (01:03:49):
Why do you think I don't go places, dude? What am I supposed to do with my dog?
Sam Parr (01:03:53):
Well, your animal's under 20 pounds, right?
Shaan Puri (01:03:55):
Yeah, she is, but that also means she's not tough enough to do all this stuff. We're like how's she going to handle this experience of going on a seven hour flight or whatever?
Sam Parr (01:04:07):
Yeah, but the dog's able to. I don't know if she's physically able to, but she's allowed to. You could put it in a carrier and put it on your lap or in the above whatever, the suitcase thing. And if you have an animal that's above 20 pounds ...
Shaan Puri (01:04:22):
Who's putting their dog in the above thing? You can put your dog down [inaudible 01:04:25]
Sam Parr (01:04:26):
It's not that fucked up. I don't know, dude. It's like putting a blanket over a bird cage. It's all right. I don't know. Or you put it underneath there, whatever you fucking do. I don't have one of these things, but that's what they say on the directions when you look online. If you have an animal above 20 pounds, you basically cannot. This whole emotional support animal thing, that's nonsense or that's getting phased out.
Pieter Levels (01:04:52):
Yeah, I heard about that.
Sam Parr (01:04:53):
You cannot bring an animal, a dog, on a flight. I'm always amazed that for popular routes they don't have a once a month or twice a month animal friendly route.
Pieter Levels (01:05:03):
Dude, it's absolutely going to happen. It's a huge growing market, I think, because lot of rich tech people are not having kids. Sorry.
Shaan Puri (01:05:10):
Right. I was going to say I read something that one airline is being like we'll fly pets. I think they do a lot of pets in the cargo or whatever because most airlines have been facing that out. And I think it's Southwest. I forgot which airline. Some airline is making bank because they take all the pets and it was a differentiator. It's like bags fly free, but it's like we let you fly your pet and everybody else is saying no nowadays.
Pieter Levels (01:05:32):
Man, I think you can do it. I think it's all about slowmading. So if you move, let's say, every six months, it's not that bad for the dog or the cat. And you give them a stable life in where you arrive and not too much chaos and stuff. I think it's okay. I think it's not okay if you keep moving every week or every month. That might be a little stressful for the dog and the cat, but six months, it's okay. And especially you get the ... What?
Shaan Puri (01:05:58):
You had a great tweet. It was if you don't have a dog in your profile picture on Twitter, are you even trying?
Pieter Levels (01:06:04):
That's a grow fact. It's the biggest grow fact, right?
Shaan Puri (01:06:06):
Sam has one, right? You have a Facebook picture, I think.
Pieter Levels (01:06:09):
Yeah, dude. This guy used this on Tinder, right? This was a Tinder dating trick because they swipe right for the dog, not for you, but they still swipe right.
Sam Parr (01:06:18):
I've noticed there's two hacks. When I was single, if I ever walk around with a niece or nephew or a kid, that's an automatic door opener to meet women. And then the other one was having an aggressive, but nice looking dog. It's like they're disarmed, we're good.
Shaan Puri (01:06:37):
And why does it have to be aggressive looking, but nice? Is that one of those things where it's like dog owners look like their pets? And so if your dog looks a certain way, they also think that about you?
Sam Parr (01:06:47):
They want to heal you. Women want to heal you sometimes. It's seeing a guy with sleeve tattoos who smoke cigarettes and a tattoo under his eye who just wants to spend time and cuddle. You're eclectic. I don't know, it just works. Don't ask me, but that just works.
Pieter Levels (01:07:11):
Dude, I love [inaudible 01:07:12] dogs, by the way. They're the big white polar bear dog. And I think it looks like me, but it's so fluffy.
Sam Parr (01:07:19):
That's a very Asian move of you. They're very popular in Asia, right?
Pieter Levels (01:07:23):
Yeah. I've seen them here, too, but yeah.
Sam Parr (01:07:28):
Is there anything that people assume about your life and your lifestyle and your businesses that you ... For example, with the hustle as well as Shaan's Milk Road, a lot of people are like, "That's it? It's just a fucking newsletter? You just write these words and you just hit send? That's so easy. Anyone can do it." And it's like, no, it's actually a user acquisition play. You know how to do that. And then it's also you're just not good at writing. You have to be good and that's just a talent. You either have it or you don't. And so that's some misconceptions about our businesses. What about yours? Is there anything that people always assume and you're like no? Because anyone can copy you.
Pieter Levels (01:08:04):
Yeah, I think generally people think that every website or app or company they're a customer of, that it's more simple than it actually is because you can't see behind the hood. And it's actually way more complicated than you think because there's so many edge cases in every business that you need to code if statements for or build little scripts for special features. It's much more complicated. And I think people realize that when they start because people always clone you. They make a copycat of your website and it somehow doesn't take off because they've been able to copy the outside of it, the aesthetic, but they don't know what's happening under the hood. So it's much more complicated. Dude, a job board is much more complicated than you think. Fuck, how do you explain this? There's so many little parts that especially companies want. They want invoices for every little thing they add.
Pieter Levels (01:08:54):
The price is dynamic, that kind of stuff. I changed job post pricing based on how many people post jobs on my site, for example. There's so much stuff happening behind the curtains that you don't see. Yeah, it's much more complicated. I also think the misconception about ... Yeah, sorry.
Sam Parr (01:09:09):
And a lot of your stuff is automated to where you don't have to be involved. It runs itself. You said everything's automated.
Pieter Levels (01:09:16):
Almost 99.9%.
Sam Parr (01:09:17):
And to post on your job board, it ranges from a $100 to $1,000, I think, whatever the huge range.
Pieter Levels (01:09:22):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
Sam Parr (01:09:25):
I'm tinkering with something that costs many, many thousands of dollars a year. How would you figure out how to do that? And so in my head I'm like, "Fuck, I got to hire a bunch of sales people. That sucks." Do you think that you could automate most things even that are high ticketed items?
Pieter Levels (01:09:42):
For sure. Dude, I sell job post bundles for $50K via Stripe, which is amazing to me.
Sam Parr (01:09:51):
How do you do that?
Pieter Levels (01:09:52):
So you make a page, it's called buy a bundle, and you can go to remoteok.com/buy-bundle and you'll see a slider where you can make your own bundle and get a discount based on it. And it's all automated and you add your credit card and then you pay $50K or $40K, whatever.
Sam Parr (01:10:12):
And how many people do that?
Pieter Levels (01:10:17):
It's 30% of the revenue, I think, bundles.
Sam Parr (01:10:18):
No shit. So someone's using a debit card or whatever for $50K.
Pieter Levels (01:10:22):
Yeah, dude, these company cards. This is lagging information. People don't know the company cards have been upgraded, I think, because they're using it for much more these days. Really, it's a lot of money. And I have no idea. I never thought it. I'm not hiring people, I don't know how this works. I just tried. I think companies ask me, like, "Can we buy a few job posts for in the future?" I'm like, "Okay, I'll make this thing." And a lot of companies use this. So you figure out the features that people want based on talking to them, of course.
Sam Parr (01:10:51):
Dude, I'm looking at this sales page to buy bundles. So buy 25 jobs is $22,000. You do something interesting on your sales pages, is you just pack it with information. That's totally the right move, but you pack it with text. You use icons to break it up.
Pieter Levels (01:11:07):
The emojis. Yeah, I use emojis a lot. Yeah. No, it looks like a circus, but it works. It's not well designed. It's not like minimalist design. It's just I just add stuff every day and it just keeps growing, but it works.
Sam Parr (01:11:24):
What's the biggest purchase someone has made? I can scroll all the way up to ...
Shaan Puri (01:11:28):
I got another call I got to run to. Pieter, this has been amazing. I got to go.
Pieter Levels (01:11:32):
Yeah, nice to meet you, Shaan.
Shaan Puri (01:11:32):
See you.
Sam Parr (01:11:35):
What's been the biggest purchase that you've had? This scrolls all the way up to $150,000.
Pieter Levels (01:11:40):
I think $50K or something. Around $50K. Maybe $49K.
Sam Parr (01:11:43):
But that happens a lot of times?
Pieter Levels (01:11:44):
Yeah, via Stripe. Yeah.
Sam Parr (01:11:47):
Dude, this is crazy. Yeah, I'm working on this thing and it's like $10K a year and I'm like, "Man, I'm going to have to get on the phone all the time," but seeing you is quite inspiring.
Pieter Levels (01:12:01):
I want to use these location service APIs to figure out where are people traveling to, for example. And it's always like you need to do a sales call, you need to contact us and stuff. And I get so annoyed with it. And I know people on Twitter get annoyed with it. They can't get a price directly and sign up. Yeah, I think it's much easier to do like this, like a sales flow.
Sam Parr (01:12:23):
I think it's easier. I would argue maybe [inaudible 01:12:26]
Pieter Levels (01:12:25):
It's easier for now. Yeah.
Sam Parr (01:12:27):
It's easier for you, but I would actually argue there's a world where it's not as effective, though, because I'm in the same boat as you. I don't want to have to do all this crap and I'm not naturally a salesperson, but when I hired a sales team they were shockingly good at drumming up demand. And I remember a cool podcast with the founder of Squarespace, I think it was, and he was like you. He's an engineer. He's like I don't want to leave my room. I don't like talking to people. I like freedom, this and that. And he goes a huge mistake I made was I looked down on sales people and I looked down on this type of pricing where you get them on the phone,
Pieter Levels (01:13:04):
I think I got that,
Sam Parr (01:13:04):
Get them on the phone. But he was like I looked down on it and I was wrong. It was effective. They created demand for a product and that surprised me most. So I don't know. I think [inaudible 01:13:16]
Pieter Levels (01:13:16):
No, I think you're right. I think my problem is that it's very hard to meet good salespeople or to find them. And it's unclear for me how I can hire them. And how can I rate a person to hire them as a good salesperson? I don't know what's a good salesperson. And I've never done outbounds, almost never done outreach and stuff. And I'm scared that if I hire salespeople, I need to manage them. And then they might fuck up, they might start spamming everybody in LinkedIn. And then it becomes a screenshot thing on Twitter, like Pieter Levels is spamming with his website and stuff. So it might turn bad. And I think you're right. If you get to the right salespeople, it can work. I'd never been able to find those people.
Sam Parr (01:14:00):
It just matters what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for happiness and a good life, do it your way. Your way is working really well. If you want to grow at a certain rate per year and you want to really push it, I do think you do need a sales team, but that's not what you're optimizing for. You're optimizing for freedom and happiness.
Pieter Levels (01:14:23):
Yeah. And I also think there's different types of companies. For example, there's companies that ask for a lot of forms. They want a W8 form, the old US IRS forms and stuff. They want you to sign everything. They want you to sign an NDA and there's some companies that just enter their credit card on Stripe and it's done. And it's different customers. And the customers that ask for a lot of questions on email, they generally convert less for me to pay less money and they are more of a hassle to do customer support for and stuff. So you also get different types of customers. If you do it all automatic, you get more modern customers that are easier to deal with, I think.
Sam Parr (01:14:59):
Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about?
Pieter Levels (01:15:06):
No, I think maybe transparency. The reason I'm so transparent is, like I said, I think it's very important to be honest and to show other people that you can build a nice indie company like this by sharing every ups and downs of it. Everybody else is only sharing the good things and we're growing so fast and we're hiring and we're funded and blah, blah, blah. And I think it would be cool if we did business maybe in a more wholesome way, where we share everything and share the ups and downs. And maybe not grow super, super, super big, but more in a wholesome manner.
Sam Parr (01:15:50):
I like that, but I have a few critiques. So you remember Buffer? So Buffer, they did the whole shtick. They did it even more, equally as extreme as you, I would say, but they revealed [inaudible 01:16:04]
Pieter Levels (01:16:04):
They're one of my inspirations, for sure.
Sam Parr (01:16:06):
But they revealed everyone's salary. And I think they did it as a marketing shtick. They did it because they're like, "Our products okay, it's good enough, but let's come up with a cool schtick so we stick out and it aligns with our philosophy." It's great and it worked really well for them, but I actually think that it probably hurts them after a while. It's really hard to do that after 100 or 150. I don't know what the number is. Some amount of employees because you're like, "Dude, I don't want my all out there." And if I was you, when we sold our company, I didn't exactly reveal how much I made because I'm like, "Man, I don't want to be a target." I don't want people to take advantage of me. I don't want to be judged in a particular way. I don't want that type of attention, so I'd rather just say round whole numbers instead of exactly what I do.
Pieter Levels (01:16:50):
No, there's a real security risk, for sure. Yeah.
Sam Parr (01:16:53):
You don't want to talk about where you are right now and part of it is because you're [inaudible 01:17:00]
Pieter Levels (01:16:59):
Yeah, for sure. 100%. Yeah, 100%.
Sam Parr (01:17:01):
So that's part of the downside, but at the same time maybe it agrees with your life philosophy and also it's a pretty sick marketing schtick.
Pieter Levels (01:17:13):
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's hard to stop it because I've been doing it for so long. It's become part of my identity. It would be hard to hide all this stuff now. And they're like, "Where did this open page go?" Why are you not sharing anymore? I'm like I'm just done with it now. And I do think it's this recurring marketing machine that I think is a big part of why my businesses work, became successful and why I got a lot of audience on Twitter, is because of this. I cannot deny that. So it's very hard to quit that once you've been doing this for so long.
Sam Parr (01:17:45):
Yeah, that's why I'm nervous about even doing it in the first place.
Pieter Levels (01:17:48):
Yeah.
Sam Parr (01:17:51):
I haven't gone hard on YouTube or any other social platform because I'm like I don't want a commitment. You got to keep with it.
Pieter Levels (01:17:58):
Yeah. Dude, I wanted to do YouTube, as well, and I have the same problem. Yeah. I'm like this is going to be a new recurring activity I need to do every week. I need to upload a video, make a video. Yeah.
Sam Parr (01:18:07):
I think there's a world where you could do seasons, like a TV show has a season. I think there's a world where you could do seasons and do quite well, but the majority of people do it regularly. And I'm like, man, I don't want to get on that treadmill. That's scary.
Pieter Levels (01:18:21):
No, I think it burns you out. Look at all the YouTubers burning out.
Sam Parr (01:18:24):
They all bail.
Pieter Levels (01:18:25):
Yeah, it's extreme schedule. Yeah, I think it might be interesting if I just sit in front on the laptop like this and I just tell the stuff I know and I think instead of writing it down and just making little videos. Derek Sivers also did that. He makes little videos about small topics, five minutes, explain something and the next video.
Sam Parr (01:18:42):
Yeah, Alex Hormozi was doing it. He came on our podcast, Alex Hormozi. He's been doing it lately and he loves it. And it seems like a lot work, but not that much work. No more work in this podcast and I don't consider this podcast to be too much work, but it works well. Dude, thanks for coming on. This has been fun. I hope you will come on more often and we'll do a little more brainstorming next time.
Pieter Levels (01:19:08):
Yeah. Dude, it was super fun. Thanks for having me. Super cool.
Sam Parr (01:19:12):
You said you were nervous because we were going to ask [inaudible 01:19:14] I don't think we asked anything. We didn't ask anything crazy.
Pieter Levels (01:19:19):
Yeah, cool.
Sam Parr (01:19:19):
There's not much to ask when you tell everyone on the internet about everything you do.
Pieter Levels (01:19:23):
Yeah. This is always when the good part of the podcast starts, right? Because you end it and then the real shit.
Sam Parr (01:19:30):
Hopefully not. The real stuff I hope was going on the whole time.
Pieter Levels (01:19:35):
Yeah. No, it was great. Yeah.
Sam Parr (01:19:36):
Dude, thanks. This is awesome. Pimp out your stuff. So it's @levels?
Pieter Levels (01:19:40):
Yeah, it's twitter.com/levelsio, so L-E-V-E-L-S-I-O. And there's all the links for my websites there, so you can click from there.
Sam Parr (01:19:50):
Thanks, dude. Thanks for coming.
2022-05-16 21:03:00
I was a guest on the Life Done Differently podcast with Neil Witten. I know him because he acquired Sheet2Site from my friend Andrey. I really enjoyed being on their podcast as it went way beyond the standard startup questions and delved more into life and philosophy of why we do what we do. I hope you enjoy it!
Here's the transcript:
Neil Witten (00:00:08):
Hello, welcome to The Life Done Differently podcast with me, Neil Witten and my co-host Ray Richards. Join us on our journey to find out what separates the doers from the thinkers.
Ray Richards (00:00:20):
Hello, and welcome to our conversation with Pieter Levels. Pieter is the man behind nomadlist.com, remoteok.com, inflationchart.com, rebase.co, and much more. Pieter, is hard to describe if you're after an old world description. He's most certainly a business guy and a software developer guy, but he works remotely. Sometimes he charges for his creations, sometimes he doesn't. He does his best to, in his own words, practice radical honesty with himself and others. He's unafraid to experiment, to play and learn as a student that doing something different can have unexpected and very rewarding consequences. He works with a few trusted friends, but creatively he's the man. Neil has been telling me for six months that a conversation with Pieter will be fun and interesting. He was right. Pieter is in charge of himself. He's not going with the flow unless it serves him. He's not short of money, but he doesn't own a home and his laptop seems to be as extravagant as it gets.
Ray Richards (00:01:29):
He keeps things simple. For someone so successfully immersed in the world of digital, he has a level of self-awareness that ensures he spends time IRLing. For the uninitiated, as I was before this conversation, IRL stands for In Real Life. That means no screens just doing stuff out there in the real world. Amen to that. Pieter seems to be on a quest to find the joy in life, but fully understand that what brings joy today may not be what brings joy tomorrow. It's all an adventure. Enjoy Pieter Levels thinking and doing for yourself.
Pieter Levels (00:02:16):
Okay, Perfect man.
Neil Witten (00:02:18):
Cool.
Pieter Levels (00:02:19):
Nice to see you guys. Nice
Ray Richards (00:02:20):
Nice to see you.
Neil Witten (00:02:21):
How are you?
Pieter Levels (00:02:23):
Really good. I just woke up so I'm having my coffee, so if my brain doesn't work yet, that's why.
Neil Witten (00:02:30):
That's all right.
Ray Richards (00:02:30):
I've been awake for a couple of hours and my brain isn't working.
Pieter Levels (00:02:34):
Yeah, it happens. It happens.
Neil Witten (00:02:37):
Pieter, what time zone are you on?
Pieter Levels (00:02:41):
This is Thailand time, so I think it's called in indoor China time, but usually I wake up noon or something. Today's late because yesterday we were late drinking mock tills in the [inaudible 00:02:52] bar, no alcohol, but still. Usually I wake up around noon or 1:00 PM or 2:00 PM or something.
Neil Witten (00:02:59):
Let's start here because it's really intriguing. Because you travel a lot, do you move into time zones of different countries or do you try and stay in a Pieter time zone?
Pieter Levels (00:03:12):
Yes, so the myth is that I travel a lot. I don't travel a lot. I'm a very slowmad, so I-
Neil Witten (00:03:18):
Slowmad. Love that.
Pieter Levels (00:03:20):
When I started nomading 2014, I did travel a lot. I was, every, sorry, I put the microphone a little bit closer. When I started in 2014, I did travel a lot. I was, I think every few months, maybe in every month in a different place and before that I was backpacking. Backpacking, only have one month to see 12, well that's too much. It's five countries, so you're going really fast from city to city. I think that it burns you out after a while because essentially you do the same thing in every city anyway. You sleep, you wake up, you have coffee, you meet people, you work a little bit, you see the city a little bit, you do things, but it starts getting the same in every city after a few years.
Neil Witten (00:04:10):
I've noticed that for some reason you try and find tall things to climb up when you go to new cities. Why do we do that?
Pieter Levels (00:04:20):
What do you mean tall things? What do you mean?
Neil Witten (00:04:22):
So you find tall skyscrapers, tall churches, tall buildings, tall hills.
Ray Richards (00:04:29):
I think it's just you, Neil. That might be just you.
Neil Witten (00:04:31):
Me, maybe it's me.
Pieter Levels (00:04:32):
I think it's just Neil. It is awesome. This is fake news.
Ray Richards (00:04:36):
Well that's much actually big fair. In Brighton we have the i360, which is the tallest thing in Brighton and that is the tourist destination. So maybe you're right.
Neil Witten (00:04:44):
Yeah, I'm sure.
Pieter Levels (00:04:44):
Yeah, same in Amsterdam. Man, it's always funny if this is not rude against all the UK and Europeans, but if you look how tall everything is in Asia and then I go to Amsterdam and they're like... The main tourist attraction is a building. I think it's the Amsterdam Tower. Let's see the height. It's 80 meters, 80 meters.
Neil Witten (00:05:10):
That's massive or the Netherlands though. There's nothing too apart, apart from the people. The people are the tallest thing in the world.
Pieter Levels (00:05:17):
No, no. The people are taller in that building. That's the problem. You don't fit in. But things are really tall in Asia. Generally, I like ground level because I grew up in a ground level. We all do in UK and Holland. I think we grew up usually grew up in ground level houses and it feels nice, but I don't really care. I like ground level also, but in Asia, the higher, the more status is. It's really very metaphorical.
Ray Richards (00:05:45):
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
Pieter Levels (00:05:48):
I grew up where my parents were... They didn't like flats, we'd call them. Maybe UK same, flats. They said it's good to have your own house on the ground and I was like, "Okay", but in Asia they want the top floors and that's status and stuff and I'm like, "Whoa, but you're stuck in this building so high. How do you get out?" I don't know.
Neil Witten (00:06:11):
Sure. We're going to pick up on a few more of these kinds of things. I think as you experience and live amongst other cultures, you start to recognize those things that make a lot of sense because they're everything we've ever known. Suddenly you go to another culture and it makes no sense anymore because it's the opposite. I wonder how much that might, if you've traveled a lot, how much that starts to change your mind, your perspective on the world.
Pieter Levels (00:06:41):
Yeah, I think it's a really good question. It's so interesting. It's a really a psychological journey too if you're always abroad a lot and you're nomading and stuff and you're not in your home country, not even in the west. I was really depressed and really anxious. You go through these years of feeling lost and what are you doing with your life and where are you because you don't have a geographical tie to your home country anymore where you grew up and stuff. For me it was like I lived in Amsterdam a lot of my life and it was my last city in Holland. It's psychologically really wrecking and transformative and destructive in a way because you rebuild as a person. I read on Hacker News, back in the day a few years ago, there was a lot of nomads who go suicidal. A lot of them would go depressed. Removing the ties from your home to then just go anywhere is very dangerous and it can be very intense emotionally, psychologically. Now I feel good and I think the reason for that is that nowadays I always travel with friends. We're always in a group and I make sure I'm never alone anymore. You need friends, you need a girlfriend or boyfriend or something. You need a partner, you need stuff to. So your identity I think comes from contextualizing your environment and stuff from the context of how do you fit in an environment. If the environment is constantly influx, you don't know. You only talk to strangers. You don't really exist anymore as a person.
Ray Richards (00:08:31):
So that's something about home, isn't it? Redefining home, Home can be a place, but it can be people as well. Is that what you're saying?
Pieter Levels (00:08:42):
Yeah. I think so. I talked to a therapist about it and she said similar where she said it can be people, it can be... She's like, "Bring some object with you that you put in your room or something to make it home." And I'm like, "Yeah." It didn't really work but I know what she was trying to say. I think you're right. The home can be redefined. I think that the jealousy of always people at home with a regular life is not completely fair because having home tie is really important. It's a different life and the safety and the comfort and the psychological comfort of a home is... You don't necessarily, but I think it is important to have something like that. Anyway, it's psychologically really, really challenging in the first few years for sure.
Pieter Levels (00:09:33):
Slowing down has to do with it also, you slow down because you want to create more ties. It's nice to live, for example, in two places. That's my plan now, live in Portugal and live maybe in Bangkok or Bali or something for the winter because Europe gets called a new winter. But that creates more ties. You have proximity in repetition and friendship and relationships need proximity in repetition. You need to be near each other and you need to repeat interactions. That's how you become friends. If you go to the same coffee shop every day, you will in inevitably, even if you're socially maladapted, you'll inevitably make friends after three months because you go there every day. That's how it works.
Ray Richards (00:10:11):
Yeah, well I think routines, when you are so repetition is routines and it's just so important. It's so important. Neil and I know each other through doing something different. And we've always been promoting the idea of stepping into the unknown, stepping out of your comfort zone and all that. But it has to be balanced with those routines because if you constantly have two feet in the unknown, it's chaos.
Pieter Levels (00:10:41):
That's a great statement. Yeah. Two feet, because you fall down.
Ray Richards (00:10:45):
Yeah, that's right. If you've got feet in the known, that's a rut. And what this podcast is actually about, in many senses is how to work that balance between having one foot in the known and one foot and the unknown. I think it's really interesting to hear you say that people get depressed and anxious and just the whole mental health can go in the wrong direction because there's no stability.
Pieter Levels (00:11:19):
The environment is influx and it's so difficult to explain to people who are new because a lot of people now want go nomad because of remote work and stuff. Obviously my websites are about it and I'm promoter of it but I've always tried to promote it in a realistic way, not this, because before Nomad List and stuff website, there was all these shady websites like Live Your Dream Lifestyle on the beach, all this bullshit and it's obviously not a dream lifestyle. It's obviously very challenging. Then when you get everything together, your friends are near, you have a relationship, you go to the gym, you eat well, you make enough money to afford a nice place, then you're like, "Okay now it works," and that takes years. It's so weird that it's painted as this Instagram dream lifestyle.
Ray Richards (00:12:09):
Do you think if you'd have had a conversation with someone who'd have shared what you've just shared with you back then, you would've understood that and taken the advice? Or do you think you just have to learn it for yourself?
Pieter Levels (00:12:26):
The funny thing is, I didn't know anything when I started. The only thing was, my friend told me because I graduated with master's degree in Rotterdam business entrepreneurship and my friend was like, "You know, you can work on your laptop because I had a YouTube channel for music and I was making $2,000 a month." And he's like, "Why don't you just buy a laptop and then go travel a little bit?" And I'm like, "Okay." I didn't know about diginomics, I didn't know about.
Pieter Levels (00:12:53):
I remember moving out of my house and my neighbor, this I think 50 year old guy was like, "Do you know Tim Ferriss?" I'm like, "No, I've no idea." He wrote this book about what you're going to do now. I'm like, "What? Really?" So I was like, "Okay." I didn't even read the book, just ignored it. I just flew somewhere. I flew to Bangkok actually and then I went to Chiang Mai in Thailand because I'd been backpacking here before and I didn't know anything. I didn't know even that there was any scene of people doing this. There was only 20 people in Chiang Mai back then and maybe there was 10,000 nomads in the world or something. It was very, very low. Anyway, I didn't prepare anything and it was the fun part about it. It was exciting because I have no idea what was happening. It was all new.
Neil Witten (00:13:44):
What were you searching for back then, Pieter, if you can remember. So let's go back to some of the stuff that was going on in your world and what led towards the YouTube channel.
Pieter Levels (00:13:55):
Well I think, so the channel was much earlier. It was 2008 because I had a music career. Actually I was in the UK a lot. I was doing drum and bass music. Drum and bass, maybe you guys know it.
Neil Witten (00:14:05):
We know it, yeah.
Pieter Levels (00:14:07):
Okay, yeah. So pendulum and stuff, [inaudible 00:14:11] famous classic. I was obsessed with drum and bass music and I would go to London to parties. I would also a DJ in London. I would DJ in Holland. I had my own club night and stuff. I produced genres. That was the point. I made my own music. So I stuck out from all the other DJs in Holland because they didn't know how to produce. I was good on computer so I could learn to make music on the computer and then I would play it in the club and stuff. And so I made my own album. I released it. People bought it, but it didn't become the world's famous super success I was planning to become so I was like, "Okay." What I did was I uploaded it to YouTube, my music and back then nobody uploaded music to YouTube. This was 2007, 2008.
Ray Richards (00:14:55):
Well why did you upload it to YouTube?
Pieter Levels (00:14:58):
For promotion because I needed to promote this album. I went to the factory and we got thousand copies pressed real CDs with the whole, I designed the whole artwork and everything and I needed to sell these CDs. I had some audience. I think I had a MailChimp newsletter or something, but I was like, "Okay, maybe I'll just upload it to YouTube." I knew Adobe After Effects, so I put it in Premier and I made a video. Back then it was really... Nobody understands this. Back then there was music files, MP3 or WAV files and it was video files and it didn't make any sense to put your music in a video file and put it on YouTube because YouTube was for home videos or viral videos and stuff and vloggers. Anyway, I did that and that was accidental success and it became the second biggest channel in Holland.
Pieter Levels (00:15:56):
It became this whole music empire of different genres, first drum and bass and dubstep, very important dubstep blew up at 2010. YouTube started paying me money first, a hundred dollars and thousand dollars, $2,000 at some point, $8,000 per month. I was a student at university. So I was like, "Yeah, this is great." I was studying business, so I was like, "Well this is a business now. It pivoted. It moved from artistic music to... Oh this is our music business on YouTube, making money to then graduating and then my friend saying, "Can you also make these videos on your laptop?" And I was like, "I tried to find a laptop that could render these videos." Yeah, that works.
Ray Richards (00:16:40):
Interesting, isn't it because what you did there was, you said it was accidental, but you were innovating, You were just thinking, "Well let's try this." Sometimes those innovations work and sometimes they don't.
Pieter Levels (00:16:59):
Yeah, but it's always for a different reason. You're doing it then what it turns out to be successful-
Ray Richards (00:17:04):
Yeah, that's right.
Pieter Levels (00:17:05):
The purpose was marketing myself, selling these CDs, these thousand CDs for $10 or something or $6 and it became something completely different. If I didn't make that CD myself, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you because all that stuff led to this.
Ray Richards (00:17:21):
You didn't know. You don't know. There might have been another route we'd have got you at some point.
Pieter Levels (00:17:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Neil Witten (00:17:31):
That's what I'm intrigued by. Ray's thinking in the same way that I'm thinking about this, that you described it as a happy coincidence because you put your stuff onto YouTube, but there was some reason why you decided to do that. It might have been because you had some skills that other people didn't have. But beyond that, you also imagine something about what that might lead to. And that could be a whole range of different things. There's some amount of creative mind that you're applying to something and then the other thing is that you noticed. You noticed a hundred dollars, then a thousand dollars, then $2,000 and you stayed the course long enough to see that to $8,000 where suddenly you then were able to recognize that there is a way of being able to earn money, create money that was less traditional.
Pieter Levels (00:18:23):
Well who would quit when you make more and more money every month? Who would delete this YouTube, right? Yeah.
Neil Witten (00:18:28):
Especially when you're student.
Pieter Levels (00:18:31):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was loads of money. It's still loads of money. One thing you said, Neil, about skills. Interesting thing was I was doing graphic design also. I was always doing stuff on a computer. As a teenager, when I was even 9 years old or something and I learned Photoshop first to do graphic design stuff and arts and then I learned After Effects, which was pretty much Photoshop for video where you could also have layers and you could move all these layers and you could do motion graphics. I was obsessed with motion graphics. It would look so cool like a camera. I wanted to become a motion graphics designer when I was maybe 14 or something I think.
Pieter Levels (00:19:08):
Those skills of After Effects I used later on YouTube. Most people didn't know how After Effects worked or Premier back then. Now a lot more. Nobody knew how video works. I could use that to render my MP3 files as videos with my photo on it and upload on YouTube where the only other content that was on YouTube, like I said, came from camera, so you upload from your camera to YouTube maybe. Right? So that's a skill that I had before and then it became useful again.
Ray Richards (00:19:38):
And that was making you stand out from the crowd?
Pieter Levels (00:19:42):
Yeah because other people didn't know how After Effects worked or even design with Photoshop, especially 2008. People were much less skilled at computer stuff than now. Now everybody can... Software is also much easier now but back then After Effect would Crash, the Photoshop would crash. It was all quite difficult. It's interesting how it all happened.
Neil Witten (00:20:08):
So let's go back to that moment where you decided that you were going to book your flight and go off and start nomading, not knowing what nomading was then. Can you tell us more about it? The YouTube channel was away, you were making some money, but at that point you were probably knowing it or not knowing. You're searching for something. Take us back there and tell us more about what was going on in your head? What was going on in your life? What do you think you were looking for as a next step?
Pieter Levels (00:20:38):
Okay, so I think my brain is like... I don't believe in ADHD or ADD, but people always say, You're quite hyper." Could also be the coffee. I do think my brain goes quite fast because the comments on my YouTube... I do this startup presentation sometimes on YouTube and the comments are always like, "Okay, you need to play it on 0.75 speeds for it to be normal." So I realized I go fast. I think fast at 1.5 times probably. I realized my whole life that I didn't want to have a big corporate life, like a nine to five thing. I was already making graphic arts about intense, but corporate enslavement. You see a guy in his suit.
Ray Richards (00:21:27):
Oh really? Wow."
Pieter Levels (00:21:29):
All these posters I was making at 11. I don't know where they came from, but there was something there that I was against big corporate and this managers and this office and this vibe. I was alternative kid kind. I was skater, so skateboarder. And I like, "Fuck the system, fuck the man."
Neil Witten (00:21:51):
Let me just ask the obvious question so I don't miss it, Pieter, but why study business then?
Pieter Levels (00:21:57):
It's amazing. Great question. You're smart guy, Neil. Because-
Ray Richards (00:22:00):
Well that question, you wouldn't base it on that question.
Pieter Levels (00:22:06):
He said it now. He said it.
Pieter Levels (00:22:08):
I wanted to... Okay, I'm not a communist, but I wanted to hack the system from within. That was really the reason because I knew that if I didn't make money I'd have to get an office job. So I was like, if I learned this capitalism and economics and business from within as artist guy, musician and designer and graphics and stuff because I knew artists would never get rich because this hardly happens, especially back then there was not NFTs. I knew that I had to learn the system from within to escape it and I really wanted to escape it. That's really the truth. At 16, I already needed to escape this system of going to office. Nothing against it for other people, but for me, it's not my thing. I cannot do it. It's hard for me to even sit in school with teachers telling me what to do. I couldn't do it.
Pieter Levels (00:23:07):
I did elementary school which was Montessori. My parents put me in Montessori and in high school was regular school and I hated high school because you need to sit in this fucking structure. Montessori is really a creative school where you sit in groups, not in a class structure. I think there's teacher and there's sub teachers and stuff and they just tell you what you can do, whatever you want to do, just go play with blocks or play with letters or play with numbers. It's really free and it's always, you sit in groups with four other kids or something and you have your own plants your water, and it's all really cute and very chill school. I think that has been important in how I became, because they let you make mistakes. If you do something strange with your blocks or whatever, they're like, "Wow, that looks cool" instead of "That's wrong." There was never that's wrong, and I think that affected me.
Neil Witten (00:24:08):
Have you ever spoken to your parents about the decision to put you into Montessori, but also the decision then to put you into a traditional school after that?
Pieter Levels (00:24:18):
Well, the high school was my own choice because my brothers were there, but the high school... There was a Montessori high school but it wasn't a good school and this school was the best high school in my hometown.
Neil Witten (00:24:34):
Your parents' choice to put you into Montessori originally?
Pieter Levels (00:24:38):
Yeah because you're [inaudible 00:24:39] you already starts at five or something.
Neil Witten (00:24:41):
Were they doing that because they valued the likely outcome or do you think they were doing it because they recognized creativity in you and thought that would be a better place for you?
Pieter Levels (00:24:54):
Well, I have two older brothers. They also went to Montessori, so we all went to the same school and same high schools. I think they did it because, maybe it's because...
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:25:04]
Pieter Levels (00:25:00):
... I think they did it, because... I mean, maybe it's because they also come from the hippie time, the '60s and stuff, and they're also a little bit like, "Fuck the system," and they're like, "You should think for yourself." It's a lot about upbringing too. "You should think for yourself. Don't trust if everybody like a sheep group all jump into the river. Don't trust them. Don't do the same. Just think for yourself. You're probably right." And that's really good lesson, I think. And "Do what makes you happy. Don't lie. Don't cheat people. Don't scam people. Always do good," ethics, moral, just those basics. And that's already enough kind of to...
Ray Richards (00:25:42):
And I think it's probably quite useful, I would imagine, to get both sides, the Montessori and the mainstream schools. Because if you just have the Montessori, you don't necessarily understand other people's...
Pieter Levels (00:26:00):
Yeah. That's a bubble right. Montessori's a bubble of course. Montessori, I mean. I think it's a little bit upper middle class people anyway. So it's definitely a bubble. And there was more exposure of real worlds at the high school, for sure, and there was even more at university. And then moving out of my hometown to Amsterdam, you're like, "Oh, this is the real world. This is completely different," and this hometown with these schools and completely different world. And then you go travel and you're like, "Wow. It's even crazier." Every time it gets crazy.
Ray Richards (00:26:34):
Yeah, yeah. Well, a friend of mine, I think I said this to Neil the other day, he said to me, he said, "You can only see what you can see. Imagine what else is out there."
Pieter Levels (00:26:44):
Yeah. 100%. And to offend all the American listeners, I tweeted yesterday about I'm excited about the time that Americans realize there's 7.6 billion people outside the US and that's there's a world there, because they're a little bit insulated, not everybody, but some Americans. And that's the whole thing. If you go abroad, if you travel, even to your neighboring country, you learn so much. It's...
Ray Richards (00:27:12):
Do you know what-
Pieter Levels (00:27:13):
Especially if you live there for a few months. Yeah.
Ray Richards (00:27:15):
Do you know what I think if you just go to a different part of your own town, you suddenly start to see. I mean, it's incredible. I mean, I've lived in Brighton for 25 years. I'm now in a different part of town. It's like, "Oh, wow. Oh, wow."
Pieter Levels (00:27:31):
100%. Every town has east, west, south, north, and it's completely different and there's different people living there and you just got to talk to them. And I'm not great at that, because you're right. I should explore my hometown more, but I'm exploring 6,000 miles away. So...
Ray Richards (00:27:47):
Yeah. No. But I think there's a time and a place for exploring far afield [inaudible 00:27:51]. And I think COVID has helped us all in a way explore locally, whether that being the streets around you, further afield in the town around you or your own just spent... When I've been away, I've been away in the UK. And do you know what? It's been absolutely fantastic exploring those places.
Pieter Levels (00:28:14):
100%. 100%. Yeah. I did the same. During COVID, I was in Holland and I explored my parents' neighborhoods. You talk to your neighbors and stuff. We went traveling through Holland. I saw nature I've never seen within Holland. Something called the [foreign language 00:28:31] which is... It looked like a desert with pink, purple grass and it looked psychedelic as fuck. Crazy trees. Crazy wind. I didn't even know that existed. So, yeah, 100%.
Ray Richards (00:28:45):
And I think the people that are listening have probably got their own experiences of that. Certainly when I'm talking to people around me, they've done exactly that. My friend, Nick, he discovered this whole area of woodland that is literally 100 yards from his house that he never knew was there.
Pieter Levels (00:29:02):
Crazy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Man, I think that's a really fun, cute kind of angle of travel also. You don't need to fly really, really far to have a completely different experience. You can find it really close by too. It's all about your own mind and... Yeah.
Neil Witten (00:29:23):
Yeah. I was going to make the point that when we're talking about travel, we're talking about travel in a physical sense, but we could go a bit maybe spiritual and go, "Well, what about the travel in your own head?" And I noticed that you said it almost looks psychedelic. And it made me think and I'm going to ask the question. Have you ventured into any psychedelic worlds, Pieter? And if so, when? And how has that affected your perspective?
Pieter Levels (00:29:55):
Well, I'm in Thailand now, so it's very legal. But no. So I've done mushrooms in Holland when I was 16 or 17, which is really fun. But I threw up over the entire wall of my friend's parents' house. And then-
Ray Richards (00:30:13):
I love the fact that you threw up over into the neighbor's garden or...
Pieter Levels (00:30:18):
No. Into the living room wall. We were sitting [inaudible 00:30:21] and then I threw up next to the TV on the wall, like bleurgh. And then I remember it was with four best friends and we had to clean it, because it's like these fucking parents, they might come home or something. So we were cleaning it with towels, wet towels, and it was everywhere. It was next to the TV. It was there. And then my friend was cleaning behind the TV and he's like, "Pieter it's even behind the TV." And then I was like, "We are doing mushrooms and mushrooms hallucinate. How can vomit be behind the TV when I vomited there and the TV's there?" And I was like, "What if we're just hallucinating vomit everywhere?" And he's like, "Ah, interesting." because it was everywhere. And then after the whole trip, there was no vomit anywhere.
Neil Witten (00:31:13):
So you don't know whether or not that was part of the experience or whether you actually just did a great job of cleaning it up?
Pieter Levels (00:31:18):
Exactly. Maybe I just hallucinated everything. And I told my friends and then they hallucinated it too. So anyway, it was really fun. I did that. I think I did ecstasy, [inaudible 00:31:36] and [inaudible 00:31:36] speed, I think. So it's very... I got really paranoid. [inaudible 00:31:42] made it feel really fake. All these people were fake happy and hugging you at the festivals, like, "Oh, my God." And I met old classmates who I was never friends with and they were like, "Oh, my God. Wow. So great." It felt so fake. I was like, "This is bullshit. We're all on drugs and this is not my thing." And it almost felt also satanic where I was looked left and I saw 10s of 1000s people dancing on techno. And I love techno, but it looked like The Matrix, inner Earth, kind of satanic ritual. And maybe this was not good drugs. But then I did [inaudible 00:32:20] later. It was really nice, was happy.
Pieter Levels (00:32:21):
But I think this is a problem with me. This sounds arrogant. My mind is already quite open and I'm already radically honest to you guys now. I'm not really keeping secrets here. I'm just throwing everything on the table. And I think a lot of people use psychedelics to open up. And I think I'm already quite open. So even if I drink alcohol, I'm not that different. I just become more happy and I... Yeah. So...
Neil Witten (00:32:48):
Let's go back. So I'm just going to do a bit of a summary of some of the stuff we've touched on. So Montessori and then to a more traditional school. So there's an interesting yin, yang there. And then this kind of, "Fuck corporate world. Want to fight the system," so you go to study business in order to understand how it works so that you can break it from within. There's also this interesting thing going on between kind of art and science, because you are kind of gravitating towards artistic skills or artistic qualities but you're applying them in quite scientific ways. And then we were zooming in on this moment in your life where you decided then to go away. Let's go back to that time. And you were how you know that you think fast and you were talking about the stuff that was probably going on your head at the time or some of the feedback that you were getting from the YouTube channel.
Pieter Levels (00:33:58):
Yeah. Yeah. So exactly. I drifted off. So what I meant was that in university, in college, life is really fun, because everybody has a few hours they need to go and you don't really need to go to these lectures anyway. So you can hang with your friends all day. Always we would hang at each other's houses. We'd do stuff. We'd party. We'd make music and stuff together. I had rapper friends. Anyway. That all stopped when we graduated, because everybody had to get a job. And I knew this was going to happen. So graduation was my biggest fear, for me and for everything, because I knew everyone was going to change.
Pieter Levels (00:34:41):
And honestly what happened was, because everybody graduates kind of different time this year, next year, it kind of just already immediately started happening where the only time we had was in the evening because you have to work all day, and then people move in with girlfriend or boyfriend. So that takes some time. And then you see each other once a week and you get drunk because that's what people do in UK and Holland. We get drunk in the weekends. And I was, I think, 26 or something. And you get very drunk because you don't have a lot of time. You have two days to party. So you get really drunk. And I would only drink maybe once a month or something or twice a month, because I didn't really like it so much. But the point is life became so much more boring. It was so much more interesting in college. It was so fun and creative in college and then it just became... Everybody kind of hated their job. And it became first alcohol and then drugs. Love drugs, like Amsterdam, London, same, but in a really bad way.
Pieter Levels (00:35:52):
A lot of cocaine. Not me. I never did it, but a lot of people in Amsterdam do it. And that became the party scene because people wanted to go extra hard. So they would do cocaine, other stuff, I don't even need to mention, but it was like we have two days and then, fuck, Monday to Friday went to work again. So we need to go extra hard on the weekends. And I just didn't agree with that whole concept because I was doing YouTube channel and I had fun and I could work anytime. And I did have days where I had to work, but I didn't feel this was a healthy fucking lifestyle. It just wasn't. Just absolutely wasn't.
Ray Richards (00:36:26):
I think this is interesting because I think it's the same thing with... I sort of see a parallel with holidays. If people are looking forward to their holidays so much, what's wrong with their life? And it's the same with alcohol and drugs. If you really, really you smash it, there's something wrong. There needs to be more balance.
Pieter Levels (00:36:52):
Yes. That's the reason why people in... I keep saying UK, Holland, because it's a similar culture. We go to extremely hot holiday resorts or places where it's 40 Celsius. It's way too hot. But it's because it's a counterbalance to cold [inaudible 00:37:07].
Ray Richards (00:37:06):
That's right. It's reaction. It's a reaction. Yeah.
Pieter Levels (00:37:09):
It's a reaction, but it's extreme. They're both extreme. They're not balanced at all. Shitty, cold, rainy weather in the office and then super hot Magaluf. That's where all UK go.
Ray Richards (00:37:22):
You've been there too?
Pieter Levels (00:37:24):
No. I went to Majorca, also UK, but anyway. It's extreme. And I don't like 40 Celsius. I like 25. I like 20. You know what I mean?
Ray Richards (00:37:32):
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Nice temperature.
Pieter Levels (00:37:36):
So that's lukewarm. Anyway, I think that's it, the same weekends. And [inaudible 00:37:41]-
Neil Witten (00:37:41):
Were you questioning your friends? Because you've got this sort, "Fuck the system," attitude to the corporate world. And at that time, it sounds like you're really experiencing it, because what you loved about your life with your friends being around and the creativity of college has now been taken away and it's been taken away by the system that you knew was going to show up at some point.
Pieter Levels (00:38:10):
Yeah.
Neil Witten (00:38:11):
So were you challenging it at that time?
Pieter Levels (00:38:14):
Look, if the whole city at your age does the same thing, how do you... I was the weird one. They were not weird. I was weird. They were not wrong. They just did what everybody did. And...
Neil Witten (00:38:28):
But were you in any way trying to show people that there was another way at that time?
Pieter Levels (00:38:36):
Well, the problem was that I always got invited to parties every weekend or something and I didn't want to go. So I would go once a month or twice a month. And usually I would just be working in the weekend on my computer, making music or videos or whatever. And man, I would mix. It was really fun. I would be working on making a new video for YouTube and I work on it later. So I'm working at 1:00 AM. It's so funny. Working After Effects, Premiere, whatever, or I was making music. And then my door opens because my roommate brought these friends home for the after party because after is a whole thing. You go to the club, but then people want to keep partying. Or maybe it was 4:00 AM. Anyway, they come in. And this guy comes in and he's completely spaced out of his head on lots of drugs. He's like, "Yo. What's up? Can I just sit here? Because it's 4:00 AM and I need to go work at 7:00. It's too intense in the living room. Can I just sit next to you?" And I'm like, "Yeah."
Pieter Levels (00:39:43):
So I'm just working and there's this is guy on drugs sitting next to me. Normal guy, not a junkie, but just normal guy but on the drugs. And he's like, "What are you doing?" And I'm like, "I'm just making music." He's like, "Whoa. Wow. You're making music. So cool, man. Can I just listen?" And he takes the headphones and he's just like, "Whoa." And he just sits there for an hour, kind of cooling down and quite interested in what I'm doing. Yeah. And so these worlds kind of mixed even. So...
Ray Richards (00:40:13):
Yeah. I think what you're saying is that you... Well, maybe you're not. I don't know. You can correct me. You weren't doing it for anyone else. You're just doing it for yourself. You were not going with the flow because it didn't work for you. And you wanted to find what works for you. And that may have inspired a few people and maybe it does today. But you were doing it for you.
Pieter Levels (00:40:37):
Yeah. Well, I knew where it was going to lead. I knew where this lifestyle was going to lead. It was going to lead to fucking nowhere. Because where does this stuff lead? Incidental psychedelic uses is good, but if you do it every week, it's not going to lead to... You're self-medicating some fucked up part of your life and it's not going to lead to nowhere. So I had to escape this shit. And that's what I did. And yeah.
Ray Richards (00:41:00):
And I guess you've continued to do that.
Pieter Levels (00:41:04):
Well, it's funny. I mean, radical honesty, you see a lot of drug users here too. You get invited to parties again with ketamine and stuff. And I'm like, "Sorry. I'm just not fucking into it. I don't want to do it. It's not my style. I'm not going to go to your party." I'm not anti-drugs. This sounds like an anti-drug podcast. I'm not at all anti, but I'm against self-medicating a shitty life, which I think this podcast is about. It's about doing life differently. And I've never talked about drugs so much on podcast, but it's interesting, because all your questions, it has been kind of thing that I've been avoiding. [inaudible 00:41:44].
Ray Richards (00:41:46):
But it's not drugs you're avoiding. It's going with the flow you're avoiding for the sake of it. Going with the flow sometimes is absolutely fantastic, but if it's not working for you and you're just doing it because everybody else does it and you're not thinking about it, you're not understanding how it's affecting you personally, you're just doing it because everybody else does it, because you haven't got your own mind, then it's a problem.
Pieter Levels (00:42:15):
Yeah. And it's a much more friendly way also to say. You're right. There's much less judgemental ways. Just if it doesn't work for you, don't do it. Yeah. [inaudible 00:42:23].
Ray Richards (00:42:22):
And I think in life generally, forget drugs for the minute, but in life in general, we all to some extent or another go with the flow and don't question whether it's working for us. We go with the flow in the sense that we work for a company 9:00 to 5:00 or whatever and just do our job because everybody else, that's what everybody else does. I don't know. We go to watch the football every week because that's what everybody around me does, or I go to parties, or I go bird watching because everybody around me does that. And...
Pieter Levels (00:42:58):
Yeah. That's fine. Yeah.
Ray Richards (00:42:59):
And I think we just got to take... All of us. All of us need to every so often just sort of really question, "Is this actually working for me? Because I'm not the same necessarily as the people around me. Or in some instances I might be, because I like playing sport, but other instances, it just isn't working for me." And it's hard because when you take a step out of your own comfort zone, you're forcing other people to question things, because you're not there and they want you to be there. They want you to be there because that's what keeps it the same. And that's...
Pieter Levels (00:43:39):
100%. That's why lifestyle change is the hardest thing, because your environment dictates your lifestyle. And that's why I think [inaudible 00:43:46] is [inaudible 00:43:46], because when you move locations, when you move to the other side of the world, it's a great opportunity to... You can choose the people you want to be with. You can create your own kind of environment and you can completely change your lifestyle. And that's what I did. And funny thing is you can even test different personalities kind and you can be in different cities. If you're introvert, you can try being extrovert. Because who cares? You don't know anybody here, that kind of stuff.
Ray Richards (00:44:10):
Absolutely. So we talked about this with Steph a couple of weeks ago, Steph Smith, who... I think you... Do you know Steph?
Pieter Levels (00:44:17):
Yeah. She's really cool. Yeah, yeah. My friend. Yeah. She's my friend.
Ray Richards (00:44:18):
Yeah. So we talked to her about this and she was talking about going to Sweden and as a student, her first sort of trip abroad. And the way Neil and I think about it is an opportunity to change, the best way to do it is to either go to a new place, meet new people or experiment with your personality. But when you go to a new place, you're definitely... Well, first of all, you're in a new place. Secondly, you're going to meet new people and a different culture, but also it's just such a brilliant opportunity to, as you say, if you're normally introverted, experiment with being a bit extroverted, if you're normally extrovert, experiment with being a bit introverted and just see how it fits for you, because it may be that the way you were behaving was just the way you were behaving because of the people around you. And it's just-
Pieter Levels (00:45:09):
Yeah. 100#%.
Ray Richards (00:45:11):
Such an opportunity.
Pieter Levels (00:45:14):
I have a friend who's gay and he came out as gay because he became a pilot and he was flying to different cities and he was always scared to explore himself and something in Holland, not because Holland is like Holland's [inaudible 00:45:27], just because it's his own kind of bubble. And he said because he could fly everywhere, he could explore this part of him and find out, "Okay. I'm gay." And we're like, "Okay. Cool. We don't care that you're gay. Nice." But you know what I mean? It gives you a way to test different personalities.
Ray Richards (00:45:50):
I think it's a license.
Pieter Levels (00:45:50):
License.
Ray Richards (00:45:53):
It's a license to behave differently.
Pieter Levels (00:45:56):
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Ray Richards (00:45:58):
Because when you are back home in Amsterdam and you're, I don't know, just assumed to be straight, everybody expects you to be straight and it's more of a challenge because of those people around you and... Yeah.
Pieter Levels (00:46:12):
Yeah. It's also license to misbehave in Magaluf.
Neil Witten (00:46:18):
I feel like you're hiding something. You want to go to Magaluf, Pieter.
Ray Richards (00:46:22):
He doesn't. He doesn't. I'm sure he doesn't.
Pieter Levels (00:46:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My best friend is Daniel [inaudible 00:46:27]. He's from... Where is he from? Somewhere in UK and he's my server guy. And we always joke about Magaluf. Yeah. We always joke about these Britishisms.
Neil Witten (00:46:38):
So let's go back to your YouTube channel, because it didn't start and stop there. So you went off, start exploring. Wasn't a plan, but you were looking for something else. Can you remember what you were looking for and then how it started to play out into the next evolution of you?
Pieter Levels (00:46:58):
Yeah. So I remember dating a Russian girl back then also. And I knew her from Twitter, from the drummer bass scene. She was a big drummer bass manager. And I was booking artists for this YouTube channel. And I would always talk to her. Really cool girl, Anna. And then really cute. So I flew to St. Petersburg. And I remember bringing my laptop also then. This was 2012, so before Nomad. And I was there for only a few weeks, I think. It was really fucking cold. It was minus 40 or something. And I was working back then on a YouTube... I was learning to code a little bit. I was working on a YouTube analytics platform. It was called Bear Stats, like a teddy bear and then stat. It was stupid. And I remember coding on that.
Pieter Levels (00:47:49):
And I was telling her, "If this works, I can make money with it and it's extra income next to YouTube." And it never worked. But that became one of my first products where I was coding something. And I was coding it because I needed it, because I had all these different YouTube channels and they all had a different login, username, password. And they all had a different analytics dashboard. And I had no idea how to sum all this data into one and see how much fuse I was getting and how much money I was making and stuff. And there was a lot of these YouTube networks back then. So I was like, "This could be useful thing." So I tried to solve a problem for myself and that became this analytics app that nobody... Well, nobody paid for it, but Vice Network used it even. Some big brands used it, but nobody paid for it, because I was not good at startups like that-
Neil Witten (00:48:40):
But you'd studied business and still in the back of your mind, you're going, "I want to break the system, but I want to hack the system." So you're looking for something that looks a bit like a business. So how were you thinking about that? Were you thinking about that as work? Were you thinking about that as...
Pieter Levels (00:49:00):
Yeah. So I think business is very different from entrepreneurship. Big business managers, suits, offices, corporate. When it reaches $1 billion, completely different. That's gets into the gray area, gray territory for me. Entrepreneurship feels like art. It feels the same as creativity, feels the same as Photoshop, After Effects, as painting, as skateboarding. It's fun. Entrepreneurship is just... It's so free and fun and not structured and do whatever. The bigger the company becomes, the more legal stuff, the more structured, the more organization, the more hiring, it becomes by definition rigid and boring. And there's exceptions. I think SpaceX is huge. They're going to Mars. Of course, that's not a boring company. And Tesla is also cool. But generally, big companies are... Everything needs four meetings and five-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:50:04]
Pieter Levels (00:50:03):
Everything needs four meetings, and five lawyers, and legal sign off, and blah, blah, blah, and PO sheet, and bullshit. And I just write some code, and it's already there within five seconds.
Ray Richards (00:50:11):
I think it's the difference between building something and maintaining something, if you can break it down. And you are not, and I'm not, and Neil's probably not either, that interested in maintaining stuff. To a certain degree, maintaining things makes things less stressful. But if you're spending all your time, maintaining stuff and not creating anything new, it can become very dull for people like-
Neil Witten (00:50:39):
It's a really good point, Ray. Because I've heard Pieter, you talk about your robots before. And I've noticed that when you talk about them, you talk about them not just in a playful way, but it's more than symbolic, the way you describe your robots. And you talk about the robots that are working for you, because they're so efficient and they're so effective, and you love your robots. But on the whole, I think you don't have people working for you, but many people who are in your position or would have-
Pieter Levels (00:51:08):
For some-
Neil Witten (00:51:09):
But maybe you haven't shaped it up into a traditional company, in the way that a lot people might have done.
Pieter Levels (00:51:16):
Yeah. I still do everything myself. I code everything. I design everything. I have a chat moderator for the community. I have a server guy. Only if the server goes down, he gets on, it never goes down. And customer support person, because I can't do that.
Neil Witten (00:51:30):
So to raise point about maintaining, so anything that has value requires some amount of maintenance. And I guess the more value that it creates, it's possible that, the more maintenance it requires. And that maintenance pushes you into a mode that is, moving you further and further away from creativity. But it seems like what you've managed to do, certainly more recently. It'd be interesting to know whether you've done this consciously or unconsciously, is get to a position where the maintenance side of things is so automated, is so invisible to you, that it allows you to show up creatively.
Pieter Levels (00:52:05):
Man, you're so good at these questions. Yes, that's exactly it. It surprised me too. Generally, reached a point the last year, where there's so few bugs. Because every single bug gets reported to me by the robot in telegram, in a chats app, a PHP bug or a JavaScript bug. If you open my website and there's a JavaScript bug, it sends it to the server and it comes to me immediately. There's so little bugs now, there's one bug a week or something. And it's some JavaScript, whatever.
Pieter Levels (00:52:39):
So usually people say, you need to maintain, and I think because their technology stack is so difficult and complicated. And technology keeps changing, these frameworks keep changing, like React few, Laravel, whatever, they're always changing. My code is all Vanilla, JavaScript Vanilla, PHP Vanilla, CSS, everything is vanilla. So is more simple than you think. And it's now quite keen as well, the code. Which surprised me that, because there's not a lot of dependencies to update, things generally don't really break anymore.
Ray Richards (00:53:15):
Yeah. I'm imagining when you do and there is a bug, maybe one a week. That's the creative process, trying to fix that.
Pieter Levels (00:53:24):
But the bugs take like two minutes to fix now.
Ray Richards (00:53:28):
Oh, right. But in creating those maintenance systems, that's a creative process, right?
Pieter Levels (00:53:40):
There isn't really a maintenance system. It's more, if you write really clean codes, it generally keeps running. If it's not dependent on a lot of other frameworks or services, the more self-contained you create codes, the less moving parts. The less moving parts in a system, the less it will break.
Ray Richards (00:53:59):
So for you, what is creativity? What's the creative part of what of your life?
Pieter Levels (00:54:07):
Making new stuff. So I make new products. I made inflationcharts.com, to track inflation because the government data is inaccurate, I think. I'm creating Rebase now, which is the first immigration as a service startup. So I've helped now over 500 people immigrate to Portugal from anywhere, from UK, from Holland, from Venezuela, from Syria, everybody's moving to Portugal. So that's stuff that's interesting.
Ray Richards (00:54:35):
And let's just take that as an example. Why did you do that?
Pieter Levels (00:54:46):
Similar to slowmads, the trajectory of a nomad is fast travel in the beginning, go everywhere, go crazy, then slow down. And then I realize, "Oh, I do need a residency. I need to have a personal residency somewhere, a tax residency. I need to pay tax somewhere. And it's not going to be my home country, I'm not going to go back to my home country probably. So where should I live? Well, Portugal is 25 Celsius. It's nice, it's affordable. Nice people, very foreign friendly, they're trying to attract foreigners." So that became a thing. And I'm also Portuguese now, that's the introductory for a nomad.
Ray Richards (00:55:30):
Okay. You just did it because you saw a problem in the inefficiency of the existing system, or because you wanted to help nomads, or?
Pieter Levels (00:55:44):
It happened during COVID. I went to Portugal myself, and I saw it on nomad list on my website, that tracks all the cities for nomads. That it was really high ranking, it was a lot of people moving there. Because Asia was closed, so Europe was booming and Portugal was booming, because it's much more affordable than Spain, for example. So a lot of people were in Lisbon, and I started meeting people there and living there, and talking to people. And everybody was talking about... I'm like, "Oh, you're just visiting here for a few months." They're like, "No, I actually registered now. I became resident." A lot of people just before Brexits, they all registered in Portugal to become Portuguese, so they could get [inaudible 00:56:22] and stuff. So I was like, "Okay."
Pieter Levels (00:56:24):
And everybody was talking about that. And then I tried it, it was really easy. And then I kept getting friends asking me about, "Can you tell me who's your lawyer, your immigration advisor? I need one to do the same thing." It's like 20 people messaging me over a month or something. So I was like, "Okay, maybe this is a business." And I asked a referral fee, and I made a little landing page, and that became a business in this span of a year.
Neil Witten (00:56:52):
I'm going to push a bit harder, Pieter, because there's something more here I think. Lots of other people who are in your position and at this time in your life, you had several online businesses that are making more than enough money. You are still slowmading. You've got a great network of people. You can do anything or nothing next, is my perception. So I might be wrong, but tell me if I am. You saw a problem, but I'm guessing you see lots of problems, but you decided to turn it into a business, that's the bit that's interesting. So you could help all of these people, because you could say, "Here's the details of the immigration lawyer." Or you could just give them a bit of information, or you could stick a blog post up. But you turned it into a business, "Or something that starts to represent a business." Why? What was going on in your head? What were you tapping into with that?
Pieter Levels (00:57:57):
Yeah, good question.
Neil Witten (00:58:00):
And I only say it, because most other people in your position wouldn't have done. And it might be that on the surface, because they were too lazy to do it.
Ray Richards (00:58:09):
Or they might have had the idea. They may have thought this is a possible business, but they wouldn't have done it.
Pieter Levels (00:58:20):
Sasha, the German friend, who told me about all this stuff in the beginning, when I met him in Lisbon. And he was like, "I wanted to do this business too." And I was like, "Oh, really?" But he's like, "I never really did it." I'm like, "Okay." So, that's exactly what you said. Well, I tested a lot of stuff. I tried new things. Like this inflation chart for example, is not a business but it's fun. I tried different parts to see if they stick, and I still do that. Same time last year during COVID, I made QRmenucreator.com. Because I was in Portugal and I saw QR codes everywhere as a menu thing, and now it's really common, back then not so much. So I made a side where you can make your own QR code menu and stuff. And now thousands of restaurants use it, and hundreds of thousands of people use every day, but doesn't make money. But the question, why do I... Because otherwise I get bored, so I want to do something that's challenging.
Neil Witten (00:59:25):
So just again, trying to get under the surface a bit more here, and also filling in some of the gaps of the story. So part of your evolution, was you did the 12 startups in 12 months. And I'm guessing that at that time, that it was quite premeditated. But it would partly to find something, and partly to finish your skills, and partly to generate PR. So it's a creative play, but that has lots of positive outcomes. And knowing what I know of you, since that time, you've found a handful of things that have become very successful, and you continue to ship. So you use that language a lot. And again, just for our listeners, by ship you mean deliver new, enhance, develop, create.
Neil Witten (01:00:15):
And don't just make it, but make it and deliver it to people, make sure that people get values from it. But you do that consistently. And again, this is one of the things that lots of people talk to you about and you write about a lot, the importance of showing up and consistency. But do you think that, so ingrained now that, that's what you do when you see something that potentially could be a problem? That you're just there, you're just showing up and that's part of the consistency, and part of the ingrained behaviors now.
Pieter Levels (01:00:49):
Yeah, I think so. I think that's exactly it. If you do something so much... Like in the beginning, it was because you need to make money, otherwise you starve. So I was trying to find stuff that made money and became started. But now of course there's enough money, so it's not really about money anymore. It's still nice if the money increases, if your revenue increases. I look at the numbers, it's important that it increases, but-
Ray Richards (01:01:17):
Is that because it's a game, money is points?
Pieter Levels (01:01:23):
But this is so bad to say, because money it's also the reason why people struggle. Money is the reason I wanted to escape this system. I don't like that you're born in debt as a human. Which is not clear true, because if you're born as an animal, you might get eaten. So we have society where we don't eat each other and fight each other, and it means that you need to go to the job, and make money, and pay rent. That's the agreement we have. Although, you don't agree to on that when you're born, but okay. I lost my train of thought. I don't know.
Neil Witten (01:02:06):
Let's just come back to the question. So there's still a reason why you saw the problem with Rebase, and then took it on. And it's cool, I can see the creative part of you and the trained part of you, is going, "This is fun. I'm just going to enter into this, and it's going to create value for other people. And I get to deploy all the skills that I enjoy using, which are creative skills." But there comes a point with it, where it becomes annoying. Or for lots of other people, it could get to a point where it becomes annoying, because it's more stuff. There're more things going on, there're more questions to answer.
Pieter Levels (01:02:43):
Yeah. So I think that's to do with the automation, because now my main projects are running smoothly and I need some new stuff to do. Because what, I just sit in my room, or go to cafe and just drink coffee and sit. I can talk to my friend, I do that already. My dad always says, when we sit in the kitchen, we drink coffee after one hour of talking, he's like, "Okay. Now enough talking, let's go do something." He doesn't want to just sit, he wants to do something. And he's always working on renovating the house and doing construction and stuff, really fun dad. But yeah, I need something to do. And I think there's also this... Yeah?
Ray Richards (01:03:29):
Well, I was just about to say, I think as somebody that has been always doing stuff and has recently tried to chill more-
Pieter Levels (01:03:48):
Yeah, me too.
Ray Richards (01:03:49):
Because I think it's okay if you're always doing stuff, because you really enjoy what you're doing, then that's different. But if you're doing stuff because you want to get somewhere all the time-
Pieter Levels (01:04:05):
No, that's just drugs. It's the same as drugs.
Ray Richards (01:04:10):
Exactly what I was going to say.
Pieter Levels (01:04:13):
I agree. I don't think that's it for me anymore, because I do chill more, I work way less. But I'm not workaholic anymore, but I've definitely been in the past for sure, for years.
Ray Richards (01:04:25):
Yeah. And I think it's back to that conversation we had earlier about balance. If you're just chilling all the time, it's a problem. If you're on it all the time, and you're striving all the time, that's a problem. And as with anything in life, it's is about finding the balance and noticing, what it is that you are doing. You're just doing all the time, for the sake of it. You're going with the flow. You're going with your habit, just because that's what you do. And you're not ever questioning, what it is you're doing. It's good to look at the... If you're always an extrovert, have a play with being an introvert. If you're always taking risks, have a play with playing it safe. If you're always doing things spontaneously, maybe start looking at planning things.
Pieter Levels (01:05:15):
I figure you're right. And the irony of entrepreneurs is like, "Oh, I don't want to get a normal job, let's build a company." And then they end up in some rat race again, because they're nonstop working, is bullshit. The point of entrepreneurship was, we're going to do our own thing, do something cool. And we'll have a little bit more time for our own life, than going to office.
Ray Richards (01:05:34):
Yeah. And you forget why you did it in the first place.
Pieter Levels (01:05:38):
Yeah, 100%. I think you're never in balance, but relatively balanced now, I can focus on the new projects and it's quite chill now.
Neil Witten (01:05:57):
Is there a different approach to with Rebase? I noticed some time ago, I think that you turned off new applications, because there was so much interest that you turned it off for a period of time. I'm wondering that, have you just reached a level of how you apply yourself to a challenge, like Rebase? Where you're doing it for others, but you're also doing it for you. So maybe a version of you 10 years ago, where you'd stumbled across Rebase. Wouldn't have switched off the application process and instead, stayed up two nights in a row and worked really hard and taken on all that extra stress to get through it?
Pieter Levels (01:06:39):
Well, Neil the funny thing is, I don't do anything with the applications. It's not a law agency, it's a referral directory for lawyers.
Neil Witten (01:06:50):
So you didn't turn it off for yourself, it was because other people were getting.
Pieter Levels (01:06:55):
I have a giant capacity problem with the immigration advisors. So the immigration advisor helped me also move... Well, that's not true. It helped a lot of my friends move to Portugal. And then I did Rebase, and their clientele number went up from, I think 30 a month to 300 or 400 a month. So 10X, it's insane. And the immigration advisor is close to burnout, because he's doing calls all day. It's funny, but it's also sad, but they're making a lot of money now. They're making, I think close to million or something, or more from all these applications. I just make a hundred dollars per application, and then I pass them on to them, and then they do all the other stuff. So the a hundred dollar is like a commission. So I don't do anything. I'm slowly automating the steps of the immigration process, that's what I'm doing.
Pieter Levels (01:07:53):
So I'm trying to make them have less work, and I'm moving further into the immigration processes, like signing all these forms. I'm now learning how to pre-fill a PDF from the Portuguese government, with the data from my database, signing it, and then sending it to the Portuguese government. That's a step you can automate, that was before took weeks. So that kind of stuff is fun to automate. And that's what I do, and it's all asynchronous. So, I never need to do a meeting. I never did a call with these immigration advisors, it's always over telegram. Because I told them I don't want to do calls, it's just calls are always chit chat and nothing fucking happens. Text is, "Okay, there's a specific problem with this form, we need to fix." "Okay, I'll fix the form."
Ray Richards (01:08:46):
Can I ask you a question, going back to a conversation around what I call behavioral flexibility, this [inaudible 01:08:54]? What do you think is your challenge at the moment, in terms of... Where are you testing your comfort zone, or where do you think you should be testing your comfort zone? Where do you think you could benefit from exploring a different part of your personality?
Pieter Levels (01:09:19):
So this is funny, because me and my friends we've worked really hard. I work a lot with Andre, and Neil knows Andre, from Sheet2Site.
Neil Witten (01:09:26):
Sheet2Site, yeah.
Pieter Levels (01:09:28):
Its public info, right? That you-
Neil Witten (01:09:30):
Yeah, he is. I love Andre, great guy.
Pieter Levels (01:09:33):
Yeah. Andre's amazing guy, he's my best friend. And meet him almost every day, we go to cafe and we drink coffee, and he works really hard. And he works in new projects now. And I've been trying to slowly work less, as Ray said, and do more IRL stuff. Like I went climbing this week. Bouldering was really fun. And that sounds really stupid, because why would real life be a challenge? Well, it's a challenge for a workaholic person, to go do stuff out of your comfort zone, where you could fall down four meters break your back. But you need to do those things, and I'm trying to do those things more. Sorry, it's not an interesting answer, but-
Neil Witten (01:10:23):
There might be more in the IRL.
Ray Richards (01:10:27):
You explain to me what IRL stands for, something real life.
Neil Witten (01:10:30):
In real life.
Pieter Levels (01:10:31):
In real life.
Ray Richards (01:10:31):
In real life. Okay.
Neil Witten (01:10:32):
Because-
Pieter Levels (01:10:33):
Especially we use it as a verb, like IRLing.
Ray Richards (01:10:36):
Yeah. Okay.
Neil Witten (01:10:38):
Because so much-
Pieter Levels (01:10:40):
[inaudible 01:10:40] generation is fucked.
Neil Witten (01:10:40):
Yeah. Because what's IRL going to be, what even is it going to mean? But what you mean by that is your-
Pieter Levels (01:10:49):
It means not on the phone.
Neil Witten (01:10:50):
Not on a screen.
Ray Richards (01:10:53):
Yeah.
Pieter Levels (01:10:53):
Because we're always on the phone, on a computer. So it's IRLing is out there.
Ray Richards (01:10:58):
And what does this count as? What does this conversation here, count as?
Pieter Levels (01:11:02):
This is a little in the middle, because it's social, but it's still in the computer. IRLing is like, we go to the cafe anyway, drink coffee. Tt's IRL, but you're still bring your laptop. So it's like, [inaudible 01:11:16]. But going to real activity, going to do some stuff, go hiking or whatever, activities.
Ray Richards (01:11:25):
Yeah. It's so crazy. Sorry, it's just so... We definitely need to do more of that.
Pieter Levels (01:11:34):
No, but I agree it's crazy. But I don't think it's a generation thing even, it's just like-
Ray Richards (01:11:40):
To some extent it is for sure, but-
Pieter Levels (01:11:44):
Yeah. I know my mom and dad, they're IRLing all day. They're gardening and working on the house, and then they check also the chats in the family group chat and stuff. But generally, and they read the news or something. But for sure, everybody's all day on their phone. Well, most are in the computer working, and then regular people, are mostly on their phone these days.
Neil Witten (01:12:11):
I'm just going to throw a few more pointed questions at you, if it's okay Pieter, just before we close out.
Pieter Levels (01:12:19):
[inaudible 01:12:19].
Neil Witten (01:12:20):
I want to just acknowledge your dad for a second, actually, because you mentioned him earlier. And I heard you say somewhere that you got some advice from your dad where, if you ever feel down or depressed, then go to the garden and dig a big hole, and then fill the hole in and then dig a big hole again.
Neil Witten (01:12:35):
I just wanted to acknowledge that, and just give you a moment to talk to about him, and see if there's anything that he or your mom has given you that's... Because you mentioned it earlier, you said there's something about having your own mind. And I don't want us to miss that, in the importance of the way that you think, and how you've been able to apply you to the world.
Pieter Levels (01:12:59):
Yeah. Like I said, they've always taught us to think for ourselves, to not trust the group opinion because it's often wrong, but it's very hard to go against a group because there's so many people. But I do feel groups are usually delayed in their ideology, because in a group something has to spread. So you're usually an early adopter if you're an individual. Like now nomad stuff, remote work is mainstream, so now the group was like, "Yeah, remote work is great." But 10 years ago, they said remote work doesn't work. But individuals said, "Well, it works for me." I think I do have a skill like early lobster, I can see trends a little bit early, and I think it's because I think for myself. And I try practice radical honesty. So I try not lie, it's not perfect, but I do my best.
Pieter Levels (01:14:01):
And if you're honest to other people, you also start being honest to yourself. Because your brain is constantly bullshitting yourself, you're constantly trying to avoid stuff. And a lot of things that you think for yourself that are... And you think, "I'm weird, because I think this thought." But then actually, when you speak it out, often a lot of other people think the same thing. Especially now with internet, if you tweet something that's outrageous, there would be a hundred people all over the world like, "Yeah, I actually have the same thing." So it's a great time for early adopter kind of thinking because of internet, because if you would say in your hometown like, "Oh, I love remote work, it's so good." Hometown would be like, "Nah, this is bullshit." But because of internet, you could connect to a lot of other people in the world who might agree with you. And then in 10 years, the whole world agrees with you. So-
Ray Richards (01:14:57):
Well, because you could go back... Not that long ago, if you were the weirdo in your...
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:15:04]
Ray Richards (01:15:03):
... not that long ago, if you were the weirdo in your town, you could have really got really quite down on yourself because you were just thinking in a very different way to the people around you. You might have thought you are the only one and you might have actually thought you really were a weirdo in the worst sense. I always tell my kids to hang out with weirdos. But these days, as you say, the world is much flatter and you can find other weirdos.
Pieter Levels (01:15:26):
Well, back then you would be persecuted by the church or burnt.
Ray Richards (01:15:29):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Pieter Levels (01:15:30):
Right. Witches and stuff in medieval time. But this is interesting because it's ingrained in our biology that you don't want to feel like outcast. You don't want to feel like a weirdo, when being a weirdo and outcast, I mean, obviously not all the time, but it can be beneficial.
Ray Richards (01:15:47):
Yeah. I was listening to a podcast the other day and they were talking about how knowing what you want is a super skill. And I think that plays into what you're saying, because if most people don't know what they want, then they're going to just copy what everyone else is doing. If you know what you want, then people are more likely to follow. And there's more likely to be creativity applied to that. It's a different mode.
Pieter Levels (01:16:12):
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And you see this on Twitter. If you tweet something that everybody else tweets, and you see this all the time, it doesn't take off. And if you tweet, what's radically honest in yourself and you're an interesting person, you're a unique person. Then it takes off first. First you need to become a unique person.
Ray Richards (01:16:30):
The same as CVs. Me and my son's been sending his CV around. He's looking for work, and he's being advised to do it this way, because this is the way you do a CV. Well, you're just going to look exactly the same as everybody else. Create your own version of a CV. And then you never know somebody who is a little bit innovative might look at an innovative CV and go hang on, this one's a bit more interesting.
Pieter Levels (01:16:56):
I literally did this. I went into Photoshop. I made my own visual graphic CV with charts and colors and everything. And I tried to make into a business too, but-
Ray Richards (01:17:11):
[inaudible 01:17:11], of course, you did.
Neil Witten (01:17:12):
We never touched on that actually. Did you ever actually have a proper job, Peter?
Pieter Levels (01:17:17):
Yeah. I worked in a call center for, ING for the Dutch banking company and oh my God, it was so funny. I had to call existing customers. I had to call the ING bank customers and try upsell them insurance by the sister company kind of. And I had to do the script and I got paid, I think five euros per hour or something. And I would sit in these islands, office islands, kind of with other people and had a headset and I had to do this whole script, like hello, this Peter blah, blah, blah. And the script didn't work, but you need to follow the script. But the script didn't really work. Nobody told anything. They're like, why are you not saying anything? So I started changing the script, and this is interesting because this shows it immediately starts getting low in ethics.
Pieter Levels (01:18:09):
So I started asking, do you like your ING bank accounts? Do you have any problems with it? Trying to make a relationship first. They're like, yeah, actually this is okay. Interesting. Well, we can get a financial advisor to come to your house. Talk about it and also talk about your personal insurance situation. And they're all like, yeah, great. And okay, let's do an appointment. And then bam. And I would go up in the charts of selling and I would be setting like 10 a day, and everybody's like, wow, what the fuck? And then they ask me like, what are you saying? Like I say this to them. And they're like, okay. So everybody started using my scripts, and then the manager found out because they listen in. They found out after a month-
Ray Richards (01:18:52):
I know what you're going to say. I know what you're going to say. Oh God, God.
Pieter Levels (01:18:56):
And then the manager was like, okay, boardroom need to all come into the meeting. And it's like three of these kids, 18 year old something. And he's like, okay, you've all been changing the script. And you've all been saying some random shit, and it's causing us problems. And he was really angry and who started this? But I didn't say. Nobody snitched me. But that was the thing. That was my main job, so.
Ray Richards (01:19:19):
But then I think-
Neil Witten (01:19:20):
But the outcome was you've got to get back to the script?
Pieter Levels (01:19:24):
Yeah, exactly.
Ray Richards (01:19:25):
How-
Pieter Levels (01:19:27):
My script was a little bit dodgy though.
Ray Richards (01:19:29):
Yeah. But that could have been the fun.
Neil Witten (01:19:30):
But with some time, you would've found a good script.
Pieter Levels (01:19:32):
Exactly. Yeah.
Neil Witten (01:19:33):
That was the whole point.
Ray Richards (01:19:35):
I mean, but this is the problem really? And this is not about ING. It's not about call centers. It's just about, this is the way we do things. I was on the committee at the local Baton club and it's the same. It's like, no, no, no, we need to stick to the rules. I know. But the rules don't work. That's not the point. We need to stick to the rules and it's just not going banging head against the brick wall. It's just, oh. Anyway, sorry.
Neil Witten (01:20:04):
Yeah. A couple of other quick ones. So I heard somewhere, when you were talking about automation making more time, I think there was a question around, so if you had no time and you didn't have anything on, what would you do? And I think your answer was I'd go back to art projects.
Pieter Levels (01:20:24):
Yeah.
Neil Witten (01:20:25):
How are you thinking about that now? How are you thinking about your time in art and what art means to you?
Pieter Levels (01:20:33):
Yeah. I mean, art is kind of potential for, I mean, I guess more creativity and stuff. I think the web now is in a way, you know like the word multimedia. There was like a big word in the nineties, and I think it's still accurate word. It's like the web is multimedia. It's visuals, sometimes audio, video, it's everything. It's interactive. And in a way, it's like the coolest art form, like inflationchart.com, maybe a little bit like art project because it challenges the existing status quo of the government and stuff. It's visual, and it doesn't make money, but it's a little bit of, yeah, it's creative product kind and you could make graphic art. Now, I guess you could sell as NFTs again. But graphic arts is so limited. So like static, and YouTubers are in a way artists, they're very creative. They're making all these cool videos and explaining videos and stuff. So-
Neil Witten (01:21:37):
We normally start this podcast with the question, how do you describe yourself to people? So when you meet somebody new and they ask that horrible question, what do you do? How do you answer it? How do you actually answer that question today?
Pieter Levels (01:21:51):
It's so funny because in the beginning, you talk to taxi drivers and they ask what you do, and this whole fucking story about [inaudible 01:22:01]. And it's like this website. So it's [inaudible 01:22:04] and there's community and then there's meetups and blah, blah. And it's too much. So now I just say, I make a travel website, and I make a job board for work from home because that works with regular people. They understand immediately and like work from home. It's like, yeah, but I guess I [inaudible 01:22:32].
Neil Witten (01:22:32):
Would you ever describe yourself or think of yourself as an artist?
Pieter Levels (01:22:37):
No. Because artists is not like, if you're a real artist, it's not about money, right. It's about costly, challenging everything, challenging yourself, challenging the society, [inaudible 01:22:49].
Ray Richards (01:22:49):
But yours is-
Neil Witten (01:22:50):
Isn't that where you're at?
Ray Richards (01:22:51):
Yours isn't about money from, I guess it seems it's not now anyway.
Pieter Levels (01:22:56):
Well I charge money, right. [inaudible 01:22:59]
Ray Richards (01:22:58):
Yeah, but artists charge money.
Pieter Levels (01:23:05):
Yeah. I would prefer creative. I think like banksies artists. Right. That's like always challenging and stuff. I think that's real art.
Ray Richards (01:23:17):
Yeah. Okay. But you're a creative business, though.
Pieter Levels (01:23:20):
It is definitely kind something artistic. It's creative. Yeah. It's artistic, creative. And I think that's what I like. And what's what makes it really fun. And yeah.
Neil Witten (01:23:33):
Are you still carrying your laptop around in a carrier bag, Peter.
Pieter Levels (01:23:38):
Actually, this changed because of Andre. Andre, he couldn't take it anymore that I-
Neil Witten (01:23:44):
Please tell me that he bought you a bag.
Pieter Levels (01:23:46):
He bought me a backpack. But I didn't like this backpack. This is some low and it was too hard. So I was like, Andre, I don't like your gift. He's like, thank you for being radically honest. I said, okay, then he got it. And then I just ordered a [inaudible 01:24:02] backpack. But yeah, grocery bags are great. I was considering also making data business, left up grocery bags because it's kind of cool. It's kind of like a fascist statement.
Ray Richards (01:24:17):
Well, I have to say, I have to admit that I have my grocery bags from Amsterdam that I use all the time. Because you can carry them over your shoulder. Not the plastic bags that you carry in your hand.
Pieter Levels (01:24:27):
What do you call them? Girls always have these bags.
Ray Richards (01:24:31):
Totes bags.
Neil Witten (01:24:32):
Yeah.
Ray Richards (01:24:32):
Yeah. That's right.
Pieter Levels (01:24:33):
Tote bag.
Ray Richards (01:24:34):
Yeah, but that's great. Because when you've emptied all your stuff out of your bag, you can put it in your pocket. You can't do that with a rucksack.
Neil Witten (01:24:39):
Yeah. But when-
Pieter Levels (01:24:41):
I think there's something. Yeah.
Neil Witten (01:24:42):
No, go ahead. Go ahead.
Pieter Levels (01:24:43):
There's something cool about a grocery bag because it force you also to be minimal. Backpack feels again a little bit like corporate, you're going to, like in London, you always have suits with backpacks and such going to the HSBC office and stuff and who the fuck goes with a grocery bag? It's kind of like a statement. Obviously having a MacBook in a grocery bag is just as much as a statement as a Louis Vuitton bag. It's just a different statement. It's like, look, I don't give a fuck. Yeah.
Neil Witten (01:25:14):
Yeah. I like that.
Ray Richards (01:25:16):
It's probably better than having a grocery laptop in Apple bag though, isn't it?
Pieter Levels (01:25:22):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. True. Yeah.
Neil Witten (01:25:24):
Okay. My last question I think, you talk about, so you don't intend to ever buy a house. You're trying to be-
Pieter Levels (01:25:35):
Well, you can never know the future, right?
Neil Witten (01:25:36):
Never say never.
Pieter Levels (01:25:37):
It's like, yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah.
Neil Witten (01:25:39):
But your minimalist, you're trying not to make things about money particularly. And what I think about is what are your vices? What is it that you're going, I really do want that thing, but I'm not going to let myself have it. And I wondered whether the backpack might have fallen into that category instantly.
Pieter Levels (01:26:05):
I really want like two cats and a dog because my ex-girlfriend had two cats and they were really cute. And I want a dog, but then I have to walk the dog. So it's kind of like, I need to be settled down in Portugal or something. So maybe. I don't even like cars, maybe a Tesla. I don't even have a driver's license. So I can't even drive a Tesla. So I only buy MacBook. I buy a iPhone. I don't even like a DSLR camera because it's too much. Every device you buy, you have to charge it. I have a Kindle. I never use it. I always have to charge it.
Pieter Levels (01:26:47):
I really like spending on, for example, now I spend on a kind of hotel apartment kind of place here, which I mean the living room now, there's a bedroom. It's really nice, nice view. Like service kind of apartments. And it costs a little bit more than an Amsterdam apartment you would rent. It's quite expensive. It was like 3k a month. But you don't have a water pipe leaking and you don't have shit breaking. It's kind of like a service thing, kind of furnished, serviced. And it's really nice. That's stuff I like to spend money on. It's more like an experience to live somewhere nice. And [inaudible 01:27:33], yeah.
Ray Richards (01:27:33):
So it creates you time, it frees up time because you're not doing-
Pieter Levels (01:27:37):
Yeah. I think that's why it's worth it. And outside the air in [inaudible 01:27:41] is now quite bad. It's like 120 AQI, I think. And inside is filtered air. I have a sensor and it's like, AQI one. So the air is really good. That kind of stuff is how, oh yeah, actually steak, organic meats, organic vegetables. I like to cook and I like to buy good ingredients because I think it's important for health, like microplastics and stuff. And I don't like farm meat, like it's not nice for the animal, but that's definitely nice to spend money on. It's again, just spending money on experiences and not on stuff. Because stuff, you get used to it so fast, you buy a new thing. And within a week you're used to it. I bought this t-shirt four days ago and now I'm like, I'm still in the happy mode.
Pieter Levels (01:28:25):
This is a nice new t-shirt-
Neil Witten (01:28:27):
I was going to say, I really like your t-shirt.
Pieter Levels (01:28:30):
Thank you. But in a few days I'm like, yeah, who cares? So I've proven that things really don't make me happy and home ownership, a new house makes you happy. But then after six months, you're the same. Marriage, after 12 months, you feel the same. A car, three to six months feel the same. So I think this is absolutely proven now. And unless it's an object that you can use for an experience, if you are a good guitarist, you need a good guitar. If you're starting out, maybe buy a cheap guitar, but it's something you use that makes you happy and buy a nice pen to write with or something. But you see in Asia, especially because there's so many malls, you see how much stuff is produced in China and stuff and how much perfume and bags and all these Bluetooth speakers and this and that and all these stuff.
Pieter Levels (01:29:25):
It's absolutely we're in a consumerist addicted culture. That again, it's same with alcohol. People are bored, not happy with their life. And then you start buying shit to make you happy. You start filling up your house with stuff, you have all these people, these tech people, they always buy these lights, purple blue lights for their home. And I know these people and they always also have the special keyboards and they have the laptop stand and they're like, their work is not about their work. It's about, they're obsessed with making this room so perfect which is nice. But it's also not my thing. It's all about stuff. And then it never stops. You always need to buy more like, oh I need to collect my cables into a cable tube. Okay. But you know what I mean? Having just a MacBook forced you to and just a backpack force you to limit it and you cannot buy more because you have to carry everything. And let's, I think a really good benefit.
Neil Witten (01:30:27):
Create constraints. We talk about this a lot in our podcast. It comes up all the time actually. But the importance of having constraints, either you put the constraints in yourself or you just value the constraints rather than trying to push the constraints away.
Pieter Levels (01:30:41):
A hundred percent and constraints make you unique. And when I was making music, I had a really shitty computer to make music on and it was too slow. So I couldn't use all the channels. I had to use only one drum kit or something in the channel. And then my music became successful. I was on BBC radio one, I was on 1Xtra playlisted. And then I was like, let's use this money. I got royalties. I get registered at the British royalty agency. And then I used that money to buy a new computer. And it was the best spec out computer. And I could have infinite audio channels on it. And I think my music became worse from then. It was more real with the constraint of a shitty computer. And on this new one, I could do anything and it was not. So I think this is a real thing. And I think if you're honest with yourself, life is about experiences, about friends, about relationships, about meaningful work, about exercise, foods, being healthy and stuff. And if you prioritize those things, I think you care less about stuff because it doesn't make you happy and you don't need it because you don't need a drug or an addiction or an extrinsic thing to fill your dopamine. It's all about dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin and stuff, these hormones, and...
Neil Witten (01:32:20):
You need a good swim in some cold sea.
Pieter Levels (01:32:25):
Or a hot bath, it's also nice.
Neil Witten (01:32:27):
Or above. Yeah, exactly.
Pieter Levels (01:32:30):
I'm not into this whole [inaudible 01:32:33] Dutch guy method, but I take hot baths a lot and I love hot baths and sauna is nice. But yeah, I don't know. And home ownership is more interesting because I track the home prices and stuff and I know what's going on. And even with leverage of a mortgage, I think it could even be more beneficial to just put all your money in ETFs, in diverse market, index funds and [inaudible 01:33:04], and stuff.
Neil Witten (01:33:04):
For sure. I think academically or mathematically a hundred percent. But I think there's that other side, which is back to where we-
Pieter Levels (01:33:12):
Emotional.
Neil Witten (01:33:12):
... in the conversation. Yeah, exactly. It's back to, what do you need around you? What are our kind of instinctive needs and that sense of place there is whether that has to be manifested in a thing you own. I don't know, but a sense. [inaudible 01:33:28].
Pieter Levels (01:33:28):
Yeah. Yeah. I think that the market is going to move towards more of that being in a rental Airbnb apartment experience for upper middle class, if you can afford it for tech workers and stuff. But I do understand the romance of buying a piece of land in Portugal on the coast and putting the foundations in and building a house. And I see my dad do it every day. So if you don't see it as an investment thing, for sure. Yeah. But then it's also this nice feeling to have all your money on your iPhone, in your broker app and a backpack and it's all in the market and yeah, it's all virtual.
Pieter Levels (01:34:13):
There's something good and bad about it. Something cool and not cool. And obviously if you do this minimalist, you're dependent actually on society to function properly. If the apocalypse happens, you're fucked because your apps not going to, internet's not going to work. Electricity's not going to work. And if you have a house, you can defend the house, and that's absolutely valid counterargument, I think. And obviously minimalism is, it's like a rich man or woman's hobby. Right. If you don't have the resources, you cannot be minimalist, it's pretentious in a way, but I don't do it for pretentious reasons. I do it yeah, just because it fits me. I think
Neil Witten (01:34:57):
We would normally at this point say, where do you want people to find you? But I'm wondering whether you actually do want people to find you. So I'm going to ask you if you want me to ask the question.
Pieter Levels (01:35:07):
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm on Twitter a lot. Mostly twitter.com/levels. L-E-V-E-L-S, IO, levelsIO. And this is where I tweet a lot and my main websites are nomadlist, nomadlist.com, remoteok.com and my new immigration service. If you want to move to Portugal is rebase.co, so dot C-O. What else? Inflationchart.com where I track inflation, pretty much, but it's all my Twitter bio. So you can find it there.
Ray Richards (01:35:40):
So I'm hoping that we're all going to go off and do some IRLing.
Pieter Levels (01:35:46):
I'll [inaudible 01:35:48] Andre.
Ray Richards (01:35:49):
I'm off to do some IRLing and I never knew I was going to do that so.
Neil Witten (01:35:55):
I'm going to go do some IRLing as well. Yeah. Fantastic.
Pieter Levels (01:35:56):
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. This is life coach. Okay. I'll go IRL too.
Neil Witten (01:36:00):
Would you say hello to Andre for me please? And say-
Pieter Levels (01:36:05):
Yes. Yes. For sure.
Neil Witten (01:36:06):
... say about how he featured in our conversation, which he'll appreciate. I'm sure.
Ray Richards (01:36:09):
Yeah. And we'll see him in [inaudible 01:36:11].
Pieter Levels (01:36:10):
He always joke-
Neil Witten (01:36:11):
Yeah. Yeah. That right.
Pieter Levels (01:36:15):
Neil, we always joke because during the acquisition, I think once you went to Lego Land and we're always joking, like, oh, Neil's always in Lego Land. Like meme kind.
Neil Witten (01:36:27):
Yeah. That sounds about right. I should go to Lego Land.
Pieter Levels (01:36:31):
No, but you're really, I think IRL and family focused and is a really good trade to have. And Andre was like, oh, I need to, because Andre has so much stress. He was like, because he's Ukrainian. I think it's like, he never trusts anything to properly work because in Ukraine doesn't work properly. And he was like, this thing is going to fall through and blah, blah. And he wanted to get it done as fast as possible. And you were like, yeah, I'm in Lego Land now. And it was the two things, he's like stressing. He wants to get the money and he's in Lego Land, like chilling. And it's like, it was so beautiful meme.
Neil Witten (01:37:02):
I think I can even remember texting him from Lego Land, but feeding a little bit of his stress because I was thinking, oh man. But I also felt like I wanted to do the right thing by him as well. It's really, it's amazing.
Pieter Levels (01:37:15):
Yeah. Yeah. No, you did super proper. And it's just really funny. Funny meme.
Neil Witten (01:37:19):
Neil from Lego land. Ah, that's great. I'm going to make [inaudible 01:37:22]. Also you should, if you haven't done it already go and get slowmadlist.com.
Pieter Levels (01:37:29):
Yes. Good point.
Neil Witten (01:37:30):
Because that's clearly going to be your next thing or someone's going to make it.
Pieter Levels (01:37:33):
Yeah. I think Rebase is kind of like slowmadlist. Yeah.
Ray Richards (01:37:35):
Yeah. Well it's becoming it. Maybe that's what it gets rebranded to at.
Pieter Levels (01:37:39):
Yeah, maybe rebrand. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ray Richards (01:37:41):
Cool.
Pieter Levels (01:37:42):
Thanks so much for having me it. It was [inaudible 01:37:44].
Neil Witten (01:37:44):
Oh man. It's been great. We've loved it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Thanks Peter. We got them in then. Well, I'll drop you a note on Telegram when we are ready to put it out. It'd probably be a couple of weeks or something.
Pieter Levels (01:37:54):
Sure man. Yeah. It was really, really, really new. It was really, really good questions. Really. You're really smart and yeah, it's really cool.
Neil Witten (01:38:02):
Thanks man.
Ray Richards (01:38:03):
Yeah.
Neil Witten (01:38:03):
We loved it.
Speaker 1 (01:38:03):
That's it, folks. Show notes. Head over to the website at www.lifedonedifferent.ly where you'll find links, a quick summary and you can also explore other conversations. If you enjoying this podcast, then please tell your friends, give us a good rating and remember to subscribe. We're also really keen to hear your feedback. So please do let us know what you think and give us your ideas over on Twitter. You can tweet us at Lifedonediff, that's double F.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:39:00]
2022-05-10 23:07:00
I went on the Building Remotely podcast with Sondre Rasch to discuss Rebase, my immigration service that helps people move to new places that are trying to attract remote workers.
Topics we discussed:
- The process and difficulty of building Rebase
- Major trends in the nomad community
- Working on a big vs small company (indie projects vs VC funded startups)
- The rejection of creativity in modern society.
Pieter (00:01):
In society in education, like the industrial society kicks creativity and kicks individual crazy, weird ideas out of you because you're being laughed at, in a group like, ah, what a dumb idea. When, if you don't laugh at it, if you let it kind of like evolve, it might become, you know, art, or it might become a company society's very scared of different thoughts, ideas, and you need to take the risk to be embarrassed and laughed at by people. To be honest with yourself.
Sondre (00:28):
Welcome to building remotely. Our goal is to create the world's first guide to building a remote company inspired by founders and leaders at remote startups. I'm Sondre the founder and CEO of SafetyWing the company, offering global health insurance for remote teams. Let's begin. In this episode, we are joined for the second time by Peter Levels. Peter is the founder of several projects for nomads and the remote work community such as nomad list RemoteOk And most recently, and the topic of this episode Rebase. Welcome back to the podcast. Pieter.
Pieter (01:01):
Thank you for having me again. It's really good to be back
Sondre (01:04):
Together with Pieter. We are going to talk about the migration of the new remote workforce Rebase why it's so hard to build and scale, and what's so great about it. And also we will cover inflation and what's happening with the great designation. With that, Pieter, last time we touched on, you know, remote towns, nomad visas, I feel like every time I talk to you, it's like a little peak into the future. You really have a good sense. I feel like of where things are going. Like the things you're interested in has this like caring way to it. I wasn't planning on starting with this, but I'm very curious. Like, do you have a self-reflection on like, why that is like why the things you're interested in tend to be real and not kind of fads?
Pieter (01:49):
Obviously, I don't know if I'm right every time. Right. But I do feel like, I think I'm honest with myself and I think I'm some kind of like proto user or adopter, you know, like they have these these personas, when you build a startup, they have personas in marketing, right? Like what's kind of user, I'm like my own persona for my own businesses. So what I feel, what I'm annoyed with or what I struggle with in my own life, because I do all this stuff with remote work and nomad stuff in my life too. I see as problems that might become a problem for more people after a while, cuz I'm kind of like an early adopter. And then like if you listen to yourself, like honestly like, okay, everything that's in your brain in your mind that comes up, you don't need to be embarrassed about it.
Pieter (02:30):
You need to think about it. Like, do you have problems with dating? For example, all this traveling around, for example long term, okay. Maybe slow down, go to less places. Maybe you can make a dating feature for remote works or whatever. Or there's like a recent problem with matching regular people who still have office jobs. And now a lot of people have remote work and they cannot hang out together because they're remote working people. They kind of work ay. And they can meet up on Tuesday and they can go for a walk. But the office people have to be in the office at Tuesday afternoon. Mm. So these people, there's a mismatch. That's another thing, for example. So there's always something in my life when a person life going on, where I'm like, ah, this seems to become a problem for more people in the next six months or the next few years. And it often happens because this is like a new movement still, and now it's going mainstream, but you can really quickly see these problems if you're honest with yourself, I think.
Sondre (03:20):
Hmm. I think that's perfect. You're you're an early adapter and you're honest with yourself, by the way. Why do you think, think a lot of builders, founders, you know, when they make these kind of products that are kind of solving problems for nobody. And I often find a sense that they're not honest with themselves, like why do you think it's so hard for people? Some people like to be honest with themselves,
Pieter (03:42):
I think it comes down to education where like, when you're kids, like this is quite common phrase. But like when you're a kid you're really creative and you draw and you play and everything's fun. And once you get older, well, no people start saying like, no, you made the wrong drawing. That's not how you should draw. Like people start telling you what to do. Right. And you're embarrassed by your true feelings or your ideas, your creative ideas, even your drawings, you're embarrassed. Like, oh this is not like my friend was colorblind demo. And he would always draw the sky purple. And the art, the teacher was like, you're doing wrong. The sky's not purple. And he didn't even know it, but that kind of makes him interesting person cuz he's color blind. And he thinks the sky's actually purple mm-hmm
Pieter (04:31):
Like, ah, what a dumb idea. When, if you don't laugh at it, if you let it kind of like evolve, it might become, you know, art or it might become a, a company it might become like I wanna go to Mars. Like Elon Musk probably said as a kid, people laugh at him, but I think society's very scared of different thoughts, ideas, and you need to take the risk to be embarrassed and laughed at, by people. To be honest with yourself on Twitter, social media, Instagram, or in real life even. And I try to do radical honesty where I try to be as open and honest as possible in my business and in my personal life too. And it has helped me a lot. I think you waste no time with lying or I'm not perfect. I also have lied. Of course, I've also done that, but you pursue a life of honesty and you hear a lot of philosophers or like internet philosopher. People also talk about like, don't lie, be honest and it's not easy, but yeah.
Sondre (05:31):
Mm. I think you're totally right. So people lie to themselves so that they won't get left at or rejected by society.
Pieter (05:39):
Yeah. Fear of rejection is huge.
Sondre (05:40):
Right? Yeah. It's terrifying.
Pieter (05:43):
The most interesting part of humanity is that every brain is different and you have these different experience and different ideas and that makes you beautiful. That makes you cool and interesting. That makes conversations so fun. When you go to the bar or something with your friends, some person will say something outrageous and you're like, wow, that's interesting why you think that? You know, and we're too scared to do that in general. I think it trifles stifles, is that the word? Innovation.
Sondre (06:09):
So I wanted to get into rebates, but first I wanted to just touch briefly on a topic that everyone is very interested in today. As headline inflation was announced 8.5% and you made a fun project by called inflation chart. So I was very curious to just hear your take, like what's happening and what will happen with inflation. You think like what's the facts.
Pieter (06:30):
Yeah. So I was noticing inflation about two years ago, I think, or maybe a year ago. And I was like, okay, what if we track prices ourselves? Cuz the government has these price indexes called consumer price index. And they're the ones telling you what inflation is. And it's always something like 4% or something. And you're like, Hmm, interesting. Cuz the rent is getting outrageous. The housing price is getting outrageous. Why is it only 4%? This was like a year ago. So I'm like, okay, I'll just start collecting all these prices like price oil, price of the S and P 500 prices of stock markets. I started tracking the money supply, like how many dollars are being printed. I started tracking food price index, worldwide. All these data sets are public. You just need to find them. And then you need to put 'em in a spreadsheet.
Pieter (07:10):
And then in a database I make a website and I made this site called inflation charts.com and you can kind of use two metrics. So for example, you can see the it's quite difficult, but you can see the price, the real price of a us home, for example, in the money supply, essentially it means you can track inflation. You can check the real value of the stock market and the real value of the prices. And what it shows is that the real inflation based on my data is much higher than even the today reported inflation, which is 8.5%. My inflation is around 17 to 18% per year. And that is based on that. I include housing rent and I also include real estate prices based on the average spending on those and the governments in general, European governments, the British government, us government. They generally don't include housing in the consumer price index, which is insane because that's usually the thing that goes up most like only recently it's food.
Pieter (08:04):
So I think inflation is a very hot topic. And I think that people forget that inflation literally just means if it's, you know, 10% or something or 8.5%, it means you get 10% poorer every year. And even if your bank balance stays the same, you have less money because you can buy 10% less than the year before. And your bank balance stays the same, but prices change. So it's hard to see that you're getting poorer, but you're getting poorer. And I think what's scary about it politically, where I just read the white house, made a statement that they call it the Putin price hike, which makes it a political thing. And of course it has to do with it. And let's not go too far in politics, but let's not forget that the us printed, I think 40% of the entire us dollar supply in the last two years.
Pieter (08:47):
And how can you not include that in your statement about inflation because of COVID we've printed our way into this problem. I think, and, and the scariest thing about inflation is that it hits poor people most. So if you're rich or if you're middle class, upper middle class, you can invest in the stock markets. The stock market goes up with inflation. Usually a lot of middle class lower don't have the means or even information to know how to invest. And they are not exposed to the stock market. They didn't even have the amount of money to invest. And all they see is that the prices go up and their salary usually stays the same. Yeah. Inflation is theft from poor people to, you know, upper middle class and rich people and to the government. And I think that's really, really not a good thing. Like it's not nice.
Sondre (09:33):
No, it's not like many things becomes really hard to do as well. We have a person in the company, April wonderful designer. We have, so she's from Argentina and there's like 40 50%. And she said the exact same thing. It's like, okay, here's why it's so hard. Your rent goes up, all food goes up, salary stays the same
Pieter (10:07):
Yeah. It's really bad for business, really bad for people. And it's very interesting. A year ago I was tweeting about this website and there was a lot of replies, like, nah, inflation is not a problem. Like a lot of people believe this, it was unpopular to talk about inflation. It was like not done. It was like, you know, it's not bad. Inflation is, inflation is healthy and now you don't hear those people anymore. And it's a little bit like vengeance again, like, look, we could have seen this coming and now it's here. And now inflation is for sure a problem. But yeah, I hope this website helps with giving people information about it. And hopefully it helps them also to learn to invest like in the stock market, in ECFS or something, because at least it keeps your money the same. Usually the stock markets go up with inflation and it protects you a little bit, but there's this quote about, yeah, I'll find there's a really scary quote about inflation.
Pieter (10:58):
I put it up, but it was too scary. So I removed it. The end game of rampant inflation is always war or revolution. Mm-Hmm
Sondre (11:30):
I do still think that the us will reign itself in, I mean they had like 10 to 20% inflation, like in the seventies. Right. And they were able to turn that around.
Pieter (11:38):
Well, it's about like, you need to raise the interest rates. Right. And they're scared to raise interest rates because if you raise them then the market crashes. Yeah. They're starting to raise it now. So that's good.
Sondre (11:46):
I think we're just gonna have to take a market crash now.
Pieter (11:49):
Yeah, I think so too. And it's well at least that makes the rich poorer doesn't make the poor poorer so much. Well maybe, also cuz you get fired, but yeah. Economics is so complicated. It's hard to see what does, what, and what's the consequence of what and yeah,
Sondre (12:03):
One last curiosity question before I get into to DVA, sorry, which is that if you were to kind of examine your own interest, whatever you're interested in, that seems like niche and weird now and you don't have to like expect that it becomes big, but it's like, what's something that you're like kind of interested in lately. That's niche.
Pieter (12:22):
I think a new thing and I've experienced it here in Asia where I'm renting instead of renting like a, an empty apartment, like in Amsterdam where you furnish it yourself and stuff. I rent now from hotels, which have switched to remote workers kind of. So you're talking about like big hotels, like Intercontinental, whatever they have these sub brands and they're starting to sell long term deals and they're also starting to install kitchens. So they're starting to compete with Airbnbs now for long term, staying people that want furnished and service apartments also for families like it's like two bedroom, three bedroom places they're changing the hotel format from tourists to more long term stay people actively because of remote work even for the local market in Thailand, in Asia actively for that. And I think that's very interesting and the prices you're talking about are like 1.5 to two times more than regular rent.
Pieter (13:12):
Like it's a little bit of skill, but I think you can get a washing machine, but you can also get the laundry done. For example, it's, it's more service where you can focus on your work and it's kind of like a living solution. They call it, I think. And that's getting really big here in Southeast Asia. And I think it might also be able to get big in, in America or in the rest of the world where what you see is hospitality moving into the Airbnb space and into the rental space, even. So you have regular housing buying a house or renting house. Then you have Airbnb, which is in those houses, you get your guest, a hotels and hosts and they're all merging into each other and competing with each other soon. Yeah, because it saves me so much effort because always in AMAM apartments, the water pipe breaks and you need to get the water mechanic guy to come and needs to fix this shit. And it's and always the heating breaks and this breaks and that breaks. And if something breaks here, like you get a new room, you get a new apartment or, you know, they switch you up. So I think that's also for families. I think that that could be definitely future.
Sondre (14:16):
Yeah, no, that, that sort of for term model is great. Like, you know, run the maintenance of your building in this like very customer service oriented way, as opposed to a lot of landlords who are just awful at customer service
Pieter (14:30):
Like European landlords are well probably American too. They're horrible. They're like they don't care and they never wanna fix stuff. I think the flip side is you cannot customize a furnace service apartments. It all looks the same. It's very uniform. Uniform is very accepted in Asia. Uniform is not accepted in the west. Everybody wants their own individual apartments here. Everybody has the same looking apartments, but it's a really good looking apartment. So it's kind of like less individualistic, but less struggle and less errands. And also like around here, for example, there's a really good supermarket, five minutes away. I can just walk. It's all kind of part of the same project and there's a really good cafe near here. Really good restaurants. And it's all in walking distance kind of a little bit like Chango valley also like Chango did it organically. Mm-Hmm
Sondre (15:24):
For sure. And you saw the, the Bryan ske put out that Airbnb data that now the majority of their revenue was 30 plus days stays. I mean, that's remarkable.
Pieter (15:34):
Yeah. It's gonna, I think flip the whole hospitality industry on its head. Like a year ago I started like investing in stocks or ETFs. And I also did like a mini ETF build myself about hotels. Cause I thought this was gonna happen a little bit. So I Googled all the big hotel change and I Googled remote work and see if remote work is on their website and how much, and I found it on the Marriot website, the hyats and the IHG into continental. So I bought those stocks. Yeah, just cuz I was like, they might get big with remote work.
Sondre (16:04):
So let's get into Rebase. Let's start with the beginning. Like why did you build it? What was the building process like
Pieter (16:12):
Rebase is the first immigration as a service company where it sounds really cool, but it means that before you had to go to lots of dodgy, weird agencies to, to immigrate to a country and I want to try and get it all online, where you just sign up, you pay money, you enter your details and you can move to a country. And a lot of people have predicted this was gonna happen. Like con companies are kind of starting to compete, just like the prediction of this book, sovereign individual from the nineties, like government countries are gonna compete for talent and stuff. So I thought, okay, I'll just build this. And during COVID I ended up in Portugal kind of randomly when COVID started, I flew back to Europe cuz I asked Twitter on a poll like, should I stay in Asia? Or should I go to Europe back then?
Pieter (16:56):
COVID wasn't in Europe yet. So it wasn't China. And they were like, well of course go to Europe because it's no COVID and you know, it's not gonna come to Europe. And of course was really bad in Europe, much worse than in Asia. So I ended up in Europe and I was with mark and we did kind of like a road trip with a lot of masks to see where we could kind of live long term a little bit for during COVID cuz we didn't wanna stay in Holland, both for our countries. And mark is my best friend and we we know met together. So I ended up in Portugal cuz it was really high on noit list suddenly. And a lot of people were, were there suddenly. So I organized a meet up and 40 people were gonna come and I had to cancel it cuz it was COVID.
Pieter (17:34):
It was like, I think December, 2020 and I had to cancel it cuz it was really dangerous with COVID. So we couldn't even do the meet, but it showed me like, okay you organize the meet up 40 people show up. This is quite exceptional. There's a lot of people for my website. So I was like, okay, Portugal's really popular. And then I spoke to people there and a lot of them said that they moved to Portugal. They became a resident and Portugal is very foreign friendly. They also had very beneficial like tax discounts for foreigners. If you come there and I was like, okay maybe I should try. So I got a lawyer, I got an immigration advisor and I did it myself. Cause I also was looking for a place to live legally and actually live, you know, at least half the year because I was still kind of roaming around the world and I had the problem that I couldn't even take out money from my company because I wasn't living anywhere.
Pieter (18:19):
And I left Holland officially. And if you leave a country like Holland or you know, Sweden too, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the tax authorities are really strict. So if you leave, you need to kind of find a new place to live and start paying tax there. And if you don't, it kind of falls back to Holland again. So I didn't take out any money for two years. And I lived all my savings and my savings ran out and I had to borrow money for my friends. Meanwhile, my companies were making lots of money. I would be tweeting about, look this new revenue milestone like $400,000. I couldn't even spend it. I was borrowing money for my friends. It was hilarious because I wasn't a resident anywhere. And then finally I came to Portugal and I became a resident and I pay tax and I can get money now for my company.
Pieter (19:02):
And, and I lived there and Portugal is, it's amazing. It's good air quality. It's on the coast. There are so many beautiful places. The beautiful nature. It's very calm. It's very affordable. It's getting higher. But the cost of living is about, I'd say Bangkok and Thailand in terms of like food and stuff. And it's really quite cheap. It's, it's one of the cheapest places in Europe and the people are the nicest people you've met. I think Thai people are really nice. Portuguese people are really, really nice. They're so friendly and hospitable and yeah. So anyway, so I ended up in Portugal and I found out about all these people moving there, all these nomads moving there, cuz nobody could go to Asia cuz of COVID cuz the borders were closed. So everybody ended up in Portugal and people started becoming residents there and I kept getting people asking me like, who's your lawyer?
Pieter (19:49):
Who's your lawyer. And I was like, okay, this and it like 20 times. And I was like, okay, let's make a little type form. So I made a type form, a moment list. Like if you wanna move to Portugal, I become a resident. You can do this. And it was like a few people signing up. Like I would say 50 people. Then I made a real website about it, like a real beautiful landing page with video and stuff. And I accidentally launched it cause I made a photo of my badge over my laptop, like with the landing page on it, which I was still working on. And I, I tweeted like just, I didn't meant it to go viral. I just tweeted like a POV working on my immigration as a service startup. And I went like really viral, like I think a thousand retweets.
Pieter (20:26):
And then people started going to the websites cuz I saw it in the screenshots and I started going there and website was of course already live cuz that's how I kind of worked. And they started screenshoting the website with all the benefits, nice country tax benefits that went viral by other people also. And hundreds of people started signing up and I think we had like 500 signups in one month of people wanting to move to Portugal and it was outrageous. And then I looked up the statistics of how many people moved to Portugal and it was like 60,000 a year by month. That's like, like what like 5,000 per month. So I was doing 10% of the entire Portuguese immigration markets within a month. So I was like, this is insane. Yeah. And my lawyer said, you need to close the applications or my immigration advisor because he said, you can't do this. This is too many, too many. He was getting calls, doing calls all day. These onboarding calls, he was going burn out. So we closed applications a little bit for now, but it's soon gonna open up again and I'm trying to automate all the steps to make it more smooth, kinda like Stripe Atlas, which is like a way to start a company. Yeah. Yeah.
Sondre (21:35):
Now I saw you commented. Actually I recall to that thread that you wanted to digitize the physical process of doing immigration, similar to how Atlas did it for starting a company hundred percent yet. I think that's such a great thing because so many processes when interact with government are so bad, but you can, you know, with a lot of patients automate some of that, certainly, you know, it's possible to fill out PDFs.
Pieter (21:58):
That's literally what I'm working on this week. I have a PHP module to pre-fill PDFs. Mm-Hmm
Pieter (22:39):
The only limitations are like, for example lawyers say stuff like Peter, I don't think we can get the signature from a HTML canvas into a PDF. It's not really legal or something. And then you need to like figure out the legality, how can we make this legally defensible? There must be a law article that allows for this. So you need to find that it's a really different industry than just making a little SaaS app. It's really interesting. It's really different. And people are really grateful. It's so different than my other websites because you have people like go through this whole process and then they end up in Portugal and they live there and they live there with their family and you help do that for like a few hundred dollars or something. And you're like, wow, this is so cool. Like the other websites are also cool, but this is so physical. Like we have Venezuelan families now getting out of Venezuela to Portugal, like that's like Venezuela is, is a very country not doing so well, like Argentina. So it's a really cool business. It's really so different and yeah, you must have the same of insurance. It's a, it's a very different business than just a normal, you know, iOS app or something or website it's, it's much more it's about people's lives in your case is, you know, medical.
Sondre (23:48):
Yeah, no. And insurance is similar in both of the ways you mentioned there. So one is that you're dealing with people who have real personal catastrophe and it's also similar in the first way you said, which is that you interact with infrastructure that is pre-digital regularly. And you know, thankfully our co-founder and CTO, Sarah, one of her first jobs was that she built this automation for government agency in Norway. And so she built this like PDF generator
Pieter (24:38):
Sondre (25:44):
It's a hundred percent correct for people listening. I'm sure there are people listening who want to apply. If you could just give a quick walk through like how easy is it? What are the steps people go through?
Pieter (25:54):
The website is rebase.co. You fill out a form of your personal details. Stuff. Like I think like your income cuz there's income requirements, but it's not supervised like $15,000 a year by a Portuguese government. There's a few requirements. Depending if you're European union citizen or a non-European union citizen, or even American cuz American government is quite crazy with stuff. They still want you to pay tax. Anyway. Even if you're out there outside us, you apply, you do an onboarding call with the immigration advisors, which is one hour where they guide you through the steps of like actually doing it. And I'm starting to automate that call. Also, I'm starting to make it, you know, straight to this forums and pre-filling depending on the situation, you need to get a visa for Portugal. If you're outside European union use, you need to get a visa, which is a, I think a D seven visa, which lets you live in Portugal to get all this stuff sorted.
Pieter (26:44):
Then you fly to Portugal. I think you go to city hall, signed documents. After a while you end up as a resident, then you apply for the special foreigner benefits because they want to attract the foreigners, which is called NR. And then you get approved and then you live in Portugal and, and the cool thing is after five or six years, you can apply for a Portuguese passport. So it's really beneficial for people like from Venezuela or outside you that want access to you know, I mean European union passport is always great. And yeah, so if you have a stable life there, if you don't have a criminal record, if you make nice money, not even a lot, but just okay. You can probably get a Portuguese passport. It's really cool. We've, we've been helping a lot of Ukrainians. Also since the war, we already had a lot of Ukrainian customers and we refunded all of them because now the European union allows Ukrainians to just come and, and we're still helping them get all the benefits too, but Portugal's been very open for Ukrainian refugees and it's a great place. Yeah. You can just apply. I think it's like a hundred dollars to apply. And then the legal costs after are like, I think somewhere like $800, but it kind of depends. I don't know exactly pricing, but yeah.
Sondre (27:54):
Could I explore that choice with you about whether to build this into, you know, a billion dollar company or not? Yeah. You know, it, it has real trade offs and you know, it's like the upside is you get a billion dollars. The downside is it's like you sacrifice big portion of your life on the way there you take on a lot of stress. Yeah. And often, you know, when, when we go through these periods of, you know, raising money yeah. Like by the time this is live, you know, we've announced there's serious B so we're going the venture route and it's great. In some ways, you know, you can advance the scaling head of the revenue and you have a real shot at building like billion dollar company pretty fast, you know, a few years. But I'm wondering, how do you think about that choice? You know, it's always bittersweet when we raise those rounds, you know, it's like I do have this part of me, which is like, gosh, it would be so romantic to just only company a hundred percent. And
Pieter (28:57):
Okay. This is so radical, honest, right? I talk to so many founders like VC funded founders who talk to me in the and say the same thing after 10 employees, it gets really stressful after 10 people. And they say like, if I would do it again, I would probably do it with max 10 people and I would go maybe India and stuff, but you need to understand VC founders are also in a lot of stress. So of course they complain a lot about, and they look at grasses greener, like, oh, look at Peter levels with his little PHP scripts, making money, it's always grass green. I also have grass greener about VC. I'm like, you know, it would be cool to build this giant company. And it seems so much easier if I see these other companies. Like if I look at remote.com for example, and they're really VC funded and they're doing really well.
Pieter (29:38):
And I look at like, wow, this side, this landing page looks so cool. Cuz they have these designers, the logo looks so cool. And they entering all these different markets and it's like worldwide and blah, blah. I'm like, wow, it's cool. And then I look at myself, I'm like myself is kind of simple, kind of basic, but it also is really nice, but the, the skill is different and you can reach people's hearts and minds in both ways. Like I do think my websites do reach millions of people and then they also make millions of dollars now. So it's kind of nice per year. I do think it's less stressful than VC or than getting funded because you're always with this runway and you're always looking at what's, you know, are we gonna be on time for the next raise? And are they gonna, you know, what if the market crash, is there gonna be a next round or this stuff goes in your brain and it's difficult to maybe sleep with that, for example.
Pieter (30:23):
So the question is, would I do, for example, funding for rebates, I would do it if I was 10 years younger, cause I'm 35 now. And I already spent, you know, last eight years working quite hard on all these websites, cuz it was a really momentous effort as an individual. And it was really fun and really great. But I think it might be dangerous cuz a lot of my life is my work. Just like with you, right? We are those kind of type A people where we probably don't have a lot of hobbies next to this. This is our work and we, we, we sleep and we think, and we, this whole company, it dominates our life. When we shower, we think about it and less now for me. But a few years ago, this was everything always in my head when I walk, when I talk.
Pieter (31:04):
And I think the problem is after a while, if you do that for over a decade,
Sondre (31:55):
You wanna preserve the source of the uniqueness. Like you don't wanna become your work entirely and become this like flat person. Who's like yeah, perfectly optimized to the problem at hand,
Pieter (32:11):
Like startups is about money, right? Like you make a lot of money and you get these millions of dollars in revenue and that's a momentous achievement. That's like, that's a lot of money and you get millions of customers or users and that's so high in dopamine. That's why we like it. It's so difficult to achieve that. And it's so difficult to run that. And when it runs, you're like, holy shit, why we did this? This is amazing. Like this is miraculous. It's so difficult. It's like pro athlete stuff. And that's why it's so hard for that to compete with a normal life, like a normal personal life, like walking your dog or something or family life. A lot of entrepreneurs have difficulty, even family life, right? They're not there for their kids or something. I don't wanna do that because we live in such a capitalist society, which is fine with me.
Pieter (32:56):
But you start thinking, wow, this is so important cuz it's about millions of people and millions of dollars. But you know, what about your life? Like life is about more than money, more about success, more than about status. It's also about friends, barbecuing and not talking about work, but talking about like, you know, the sky is purple, but it's not cuz your color blind, but that kind of stuff, you know, it's it's, it's about more than that. And you need both of course, but it's really easy to get lost into entrepreneurship, into like this obsessive thing because it's so monumental. I think,
Sondre (33:25):
I think that's a great place to, end I'm gonna go for a walk now and reflect on that. Yeah, exactly. Don't worry, I'm definitely still committed to SafetyWing
Pieter (33:36):
Angry investors.
Sondre (33:37):
Thank you so much, Peter. I, I see we're coming up in time. I'll be respectful of your time and thank you so much for joining us. People of course can go to rebase.co. I believe it is. Is There any other of your projects you would recommend people check out?
Pieter (33:53):
Did I make something new? I don't think so. I think this is it. Yeah. This is all like Twitter, twitter.com/levelsio as always. That's where you can find all my stuff.
Sondre (34:02):
One of the best Twitter accounts in the world definitely check out @levelsio.Thank you so much. Peter, I always enjoyed talking with you and me too. This was definitely one of the best. Thank you very much.
Pieter (34:14):
See you next time.
Sondre (34:16):
You can also get more insights from other remote leaders on buildingremotely.com here. You'll find the first chapters of the building remotely book as well as articles and events relating to remote work. See you next time.
2022-01-26 22:46:00
After 4 years I finally got back on the Indie Hackers podcast. The last time, back in in 2018, time was very different. It was 2 years before COVID started, remote work was still quite fringe (especially outside of the tech/startup scene). Nomad List made "just" $15k/mo and Remote OK $5k/mo. My idea was remote work would go mainstream in 2035. Then COVID happened and everything changed.
I talked with Courtland about all of this and more. I hope you enjoy reading it/listening to it! There's two parts:
Courtland (00:06):
What's up everybody. This is Courtland from indiehackers.com and you're listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process, and on this show, I sit down with these Indie Hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.
Courtland (00:28):
I'm here with Pieter Levels. He's a man who needs very little introduction, but I'll do one anyway. You're the Founder of Nomad List, sort of the hub for digital nomads. You're the founder of Remote OK, the biggest remote job board in the world, and you're probably the primary inspiration for Indie Hackers itself. And I think it's been like four years now, yeah, it's been four years since you've been on the show. So this is your second time. How's it going?
Pieter (00:52):
I'm great, man. So nice to see you again. It feels like a century. It feels like we spoke last like a hundred years ago. It's great to see you, man. I heard you've been living offline life recently, so that's really nice to hear.
Courtland (01:08):
I've been super chill. I've been much less of a workaholic than I've ever been in my entire life and honestly, it's like disorienting, because I'm like, what do I do with myself? Like what do I do? And it's hard to find hobbies and stuff because they sometimes don't feel like as meaningful as doing like a crazy all in startup or being super passionate. I'm like, I guess I'm going to collect a lot of plants and water them. But I'm like, this feels pointless. So maybe I'll get back into it soon.
Pieter (01:31):
Oh so nice. Yeah. I know exactly the feeling you're talking about. Yeah. I've been trying to slow down as well, repeatedly over the last few years, but I don't know, man. It goes in cycles, right? Like you ...
Courtland (01:43):
Yeah.
Pieter (01:44):
You go in these work times and then you feel like burned out. You're like, oh my God, I work too much. And then you want to relax, but then you get bored because you've done real life and real life also gets boring after a while. So it's like this endless dance, right?
Courtland (01:57):
Yeah. Yeah. You just switching one to the other, although you're like, I don't view you as like a cyclic person, because it's like, what were you talking about last week? You're like, oh I've, I've realized that I've shipped for a thousand days straight on the work in progress community. So it's like literally not a single day in the last thousand days have you missed.
Pieter (02:13):
Yeah.
Courtland (02:14):
And that's real consistency.
Pieter (02:17):
Yeah.
Courtland (02:17):
I feel like I've had that for like maybe 34 years. I'd rather from probably like age eight to 34 and then just like ...
Pieter (02:26):
Wait from H eight to age 34, you've been working nonstop?
Courtland (02:29):
Basically.
Pieter (02:30):
Wow.
Courtland (02:30):
Age eight was like, I want to get into MIT, and then it was like work super hard, a brief stint where I was like, I want to become a professional StarCraft player, and then I realized I wasn't as good as all the Koreans and then back just working and then graduating college, startup grind, and then eventually Indie Hackers and grinding on that. And then six months ago was the first time like what if I just chilled out?
Pieter (02:51):
Yeah. I think I'm exactly the same actually. Yeah. Something like from like seven or eight. Yeah. That's already when the ambition started for us, I guess. Yeah.
Courtland (03:01):
It's kind of like, what's the meaning of all of it, right? Are you driven by some outcome that you're trying to achieve by being so ambitious? Or is this a thing that you just have to do for its own sake? Even if you weren't making any money or you weren't becoming famous, because you have so many projects that are so successful, that make millions of dollars, you have tons of fans, you're tweeting constantly. Is that the point?
Pieter (03:23):
Yeah. I think it's a really good question. And I think we're in a very similar situation where you probably don't do it as much for the money anymore, because you probably are quite financially stable and you generally want to do it because you like the process, like to do something with your day, you like to wake up for something and you like to have this daily challenge where something doesn't work or a competitor who's trying to take over who is getting better than you. You want to have a goal in each day, and that goal can spend for weeks and months, right? But you want to have something you're working towards to, and I feel like I've spoken to a lot of people that are older that are not in startups and don't have their own business and stuff, and a lot of them are really happy. Some of them tell me that they miss that thing we have, like this meaningful pursuits, that's probably unhealthy, it's not really healthy. I think it's meant to be unhealthy pursuit because a lot of people want to do it, they get into business or startups, but it's really mentally taxing I think. And you need to be a little-
Courtland (04:25):
It can be an obsession.
Pieter (04:26):
It's an obsession. If you want to win, you need to be obsessed. Like look at Elon Musk, right? He's completely obsessed. He can barely keep relationships going. So it's not that really [inaudible 00:04:37], but like it gives you some kind of meaningful thing that's different than watching Netflix, you know?
Courtland (04:45):
Yeah. I don't know. I think meaning often comes from doing things that are hard. Like if you're doing something that's entirely hedonistic and it just feels good the whole time, it's hard to ascribe it meaning, even if it's helpful, but when there's like a part of it that's a little bit self-sacrificial and you know it would be easier to do something else and you're still doing, I think it forces you to dig and try to find some deeper reason why you're doing this thing that's hard, and that's often like where you discover meaning.
Pieter (05:09):
Yeah. And the hedonistic aspects like foods or sex or whatever, they all, you adapt to them really fast. Right?
Courtland (05:18):
Yeah.
Pieter (05:18):
Like if you don't have them, you want them, you're hungry. If you have them, you're like, okay, this was nice. And then you open your laptop again. You're like, let's go make something, right? Or I don't know, if you're a painter, you start painting. So I think because of the frame of the problem keeps changing and is like perpetual, it never bores generally because the problem never ends, which is also the tiring part of it. You're like when is this business going to end? When do I reach the goal? Because you know musicians, they always finish an album and then they're done. They can do the tour and they're done, and it feels really nice. Like I used to do that. And with a startup, with business, you keep going. Like when does it end? When you sell, when you exit.
Courtland (06:02):
Well you've done what, I think you had another tweet where you're talking about like how many projects that you shipped and you said that-
Pieter (06:08):
Yeah, I calculated. It was like 70 or something.
Courtland (06:11):
Yeah. More than 70 projects. You said only four out of 70 plus projects that you ever did made any money and grew, which means that you have something like a 95% failure rate and a hit rate of the only like 5%.
Pieter (06:23):
That's right. Which is crazy. It's insane.
Courtland (06:27):
Like in a way, yeah, how much of your success with all the projects do you think comes from just being this relentless shipper, which almost no one is. Almost no one has like 70 projects they've really tried to ship. And how much of it comes from being like a strategic mastermind, having the right business strategy, because you have a pretty solid business background and education too.
Pieter (06:45):
Well, this is obviously biased, but I do get tired from the, it's like the current side guys in America where it's everything is luck. If you're successful, it's luck. It's completely your upbringing and your background. I do think that's a part of it is definitely some percentage is like maybe 40 or 50 or something. But what you see from this example, when you need to keep trying for loads of times, like 70 times or more, 100 times, and you might get a few successes and if you try once, it's probably not going to work because the odds are not there. And I mean, I'm not a mathematician or statistician, but I do believe that if you keep try trying something, you can somehow, you don't change the odds, but you keep playing the odds and there must be a statistical fallacy in this, but I do think your rate of maybe getting success gets higher, I think, when you keep trying.
Courtland (07:32):
Yeah. I think so too, because I mean you're building skills and stuff. It's not like you're just rolling the same set of dice. It's like you're rolling the same-
Pieter (07:38):
That's it yeah.
Courtland (07:42):
You're a little bit better, where you figure out the physics of the dice, because you failed a bunch of startups so you're like, okay, don't do that mistake again or I really don't like these types of projects.
Pieter (07:47):
That's exactly. That solves the [inaudible 00:07:49] problem I had. If you increase the skills, the odds next to them will be better, and that builds up and it adds up and also I guess, network, right? I don't have a network, you probably have more network than me, I'm just on Twitter, mostly, because I'm fully remote around the world and stuff. So you also increase the people you know, and you get more known so you can tweet about stuff and then people DM you like, oh we'd love to, as a company, we'd love to use your product or something. That also helps, right?
Courtland (08:15):
Yeah. You just keep incurring advantages. And so I guess maybe the thing to do is to try to figure out how to put yourself in a position where you can do 70 plus projects.
Pieter (08:24):
Yeah.
Courtland (08:25):
Because I don't think everyone can do that. Like maybe they don't have the motivation or they don't have like the financial sort of freedom and independence to do that. But if you can keep doing that, eventually you will have one or two wins.
Pieter (08:36):
Yeah. I think if you're in university, that was for me the main time where I did so many projects and that was a great time because in Holland you get like $250 a month for free from the government, back then I think, they call study financing and you don't have to pay it back and you can borrow some money from the government too for really low rates, and you're pretty much just doing lectures, you're going to university. And all the time you have, apart from that, I think it's same in American college, you can work on side projects.
Courtland (09:04):
I think I probably spent my college years partying mostly the first couple years-
Pieter (09:08):
Yeah. Me too.
Courtland (09:09):
Then it's like I'm going to do startups, and just like trying to do random startups. Because you have so much time.
Pieter (09:18):
Me too, it was a good mix. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You have so much time. That's the perfect time to start a lot of stuff.
Courtland (09:22):
You mentioned this sort of like pervasive attitude and I think maybe it's just the United States, I don't know, because I haven't traveled in years where it's kind of like everything you do is luck, and no matter what you do, you can't be proud of what you've done because it was a result of your privilege or upbringing, your parents' money or whatever. And that is kind of like a demotivating, I don't really like that perspective because even if, let's just say hypothetically speaking, it's true, what's the result of saying that, right? It doesn't necessarily motivate anyone to work any harder. It just motivates everyone to just to give up, I think. It like kind of like a-
Pieter (09:53):
Hundred percent. Yeah. It increases bitterness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Courtland (09:56):
Yeah. It increases bitterness. Maybe it increases compassion, I think is like kind of the idea, like the good thing about it, but it decreases I think motivation because it's like, well, if you weren't born to a good circumstance, you're fucked. You might as well give up. And if you were, you have no reason to push hard and work on anything because you can't be proud of it.
Pieter (10:13):
Yeah. A hundred percent.
Courtland (10:13):
I don't know. Sometimes I feel like it's hard for people to hold two ideas in mind, and it's like the two ideas I think you want to hold in mind is like having compassion for people who came from backgrounds where it's just harder to succeed, but simultaneously having optimism that like you still can make it. That optimism is pretty important because without it, you're saying like, what is literally, why would you even try if you didn't think it was possible? Like you need some degree of optimism, and sometimes I feel like that's missing, you know?
Pieter (10:39):
Yeah. I think it's missing in a lot of parts in America. I think where you see it is in Asia, though. In Asia, where I spend a lot of my time, the ambition is insane and Asia has all of its own problems, for sure, but there's this massive ambition to get ahead, get wealthy, get successful, that you don't see in America, especially I think lesser and less or so. And we should kind of not go into politics too much, but look at all the hate Elon Musk gets. I think it's quite crazy because he wants to bring us to Mars and works his ass off to do this and yeah, he's the richest guy on earth, but he doesn't even spend his money. He doesn't spend it on a lavish life, he just sleeps in the factory and he does so much stuff obviously, does some bad things, probably, in the factory, I don't know, but this seems like a net benefit guy to society and gets a lot of slack for just getting us to Mars. So I think that's kind of another strange data point.
Courtland (11:38):
Do you feel like you get that kind of reaction from people? I mean you're way more active on Twitter than I am. Like you're tweeting about everything that you're doing. And so you've got a lot of fans, and people who follow what you're up to, you publish your revenue numbers and stuff so people know exactly how much money you make. Like it's easy to put you like in this rich guy category, do you get, obviously like on a smaller scale, but the same kind of criticisms that someone like Elon Musk gets?
Pieter (12:00):
Yeah. I think I had it a few years ago. I started aggressively muting people and I had this robot, which if I mute a person, they would also remove them as a follower. So they would be like shouting into the void and they would obviously be monitoring what I tweet because they followed me. But then they wouldn't notice that it automatically removed them as a follower. So I slowly removed hundreds of these people and I honestly, I don't really get that anymore. I hardly get, and it's really cleaned up everything. It really helped. And I don't want to block, I don't like blocking so much, obviously I've blocked in the past, but generally the replies I get are quite positive these days. So it really got a lot better. I don't know if it just got better for me or for everybody.
Courtland (12:39):
Yeah, it's funny because when you block people or you're like removing people, it's like, you're kind of creating your own echo chamber, which is-
Pieter (12:47):
A hundred percent. Yeah.
Courtland (12:47):
A quote unquote bad thing with the internet. You don't want to create an echo chamber, you want a variety of opinions, but it's like, well how big of a variety do you want? Do you want to sign on every day and see a bunch of haters? Not really.
Pieter (12:58):
If people are a hostile, it can really get to you. You know that. You always remember the hateful comments and you can have 99 good comments and you always remember the haters. So it can be psychologically taxing if you're working really hard on something and you just get all these negative comments. So I agree with this echo bubble though, but I don't mute, I try to not mute just negative replies. I try to mute like really the hater kind of comments.
Courtland (13:27):
There's another topic that I think is interesting, essentially, because you are Pieter Levels, you travel all over, you have kind of your finger on the pulse of like what's going on internationally. I have no idea how ambitious are people in Asia compared to how people are in Europe.
Pieter (13:40):
Yeah.
Courtland (13:41):
I have no idea. I'm just like kind of stuck in my bubble. So like you're living in what, you're in Thailand right now. What do you see in Thailand? What motivated you to move to Thailand? And you're also doing this new project Rebase that I sort of intentionally tried to learn very little about so I can learn about it from you.
Pieter (13:56):
Yeah. So I actually live in Portugal now. So during COVID happened, I mean COVID is absolutely terrible. Two years ago, I was in Asia too, and with Andre, we also had on the podcast, Mark from Bay List and stuff. And COVID started happening Asia, so I flew back to Holland, stayed with my parents for like a few, I think, five months or something. And then I started traveling again with Mark because we were not tax residents in Holland anymore. We were not residents anymore. So if we stayed over six months, we'd become a tax resident. We didn't want to do that. So we had to leave. So we went on a road trip to Europe and we ended up in Portugal and it was very, like, I'd never been in Portugal. I'd heard kind of Portugal, if you're European, you know about Spain and Italy and stuff, but you don't really hear about Portugal.
Pieter (14:44):
It's like a small country next to Spain. It was COVID so you couldn't really do a lot of stuff. So we ended up in a seaside village near Lisbon, which is the capital, and we lived there and every day we'd go for walks on the beach and we'd have some coffee and we'd just kind of work from there. And I started also meeting other like nomad people kind of from Bali, who also move to Portugal and stuff. And I started seeing, oh, this is kind of like a thing that's happened because of COVID Asia is closed now, so a lot of people are moving, would go to Bali in the winter and stuff are now going to Portugal and stuff, and Spain and Mexico, and a lot of Americans would also go to Mexico, for example.
Pieter (15:22):
So anyway, I'm in Portugal and I'm meeting all these people and they're all saying like, we're also becoming residents here. I'm like, why would you become a resident here? They're like, well, because we're nomads. So we have this problem, where do we pay tax? Because we're always moving from place to place and we're never a resident anywhere. And it's very difficult. So these people were becoming residents in Portugal, they were becoming real like Portuguese residents and setting up their base kind of, and paying tax and becoming part of Portugal culture, because there was not much you could do with COVID. Still, you cannot really travel much, especially not to Asia. Asia is still kind of closed. So I tried the same thing. I became a Portuguese resident and now I live there and I rent my own place in Lisbon. I have a lot of friends there and since I've been there, it's been exploding like crazy it's very often like number one on Nomad List. I didn't change anything. It's just what it is. A lot of people are going there.
Courtland (16:19):
So as a Portuguese resident, you don't pay any taxes to like, you're Dutch, you're not paying any taxes to the Netherlands?
Pieter (16:26):
I mean, European governments, western European comes are very strict. So if you want to leave your country, you really need to leave and stay away. America's just as strict, America's more strict even with the international tax stuff. But if you say like, okay, I'm going to nomad, your home country's always going to tax you unless you say like, okay, I don't live in my home country anymore. I'm going to live somewhere else. So yeah, Portugal's a great base for that, and a lot of nomads have been doing that. So yeah. I built a website about that, which is called a rebate.co, rebase.C-O, which is the first it's kind of inspired by Stripe Atlas, you kind of work for Stripe, so you know Atlas very well. Stripe Atlas is like a service to create a company online really easily. So they kind of make the whole process of creating company much more easy with lawyers and stuff. And I did the same thing, but for immigration. So I smoothed out the whole immigration process to move to Portugal, showing all the benefits of Portugal and that's been taken off now as well.
Courtland (17:26):
Yeah. It's interesting to me the way that you work on projects. You're talking about musicians that put out an album and it's like this very final thing, and now they're done with it and they can just sort of go on tour. And with me and Indie Hackers, for example, I've never had anything like that. I've just continued to work on Indie Hackers as this monolithic thing. But you have like all these different projects, like you have Nomad List.
Pieter (17:47):
I think it's like ADHD maybe.
Courtland (17:50):
Yeah. Yeah. Like you're like, okay done with that, on the next thing. Should you get some of that hit of like I finished maybe, but are you ever really finished? Could you work Rebase into Nomad List? They're so related. They're both about digital nomads. Why make a separate project? Why not just be like, okay, here's another branch of Nomad List.
Pieter (18:07):
Honestly, I think these separate projects they launch better, right? Because if you make a sub page on Indie Hackers or Nomad List, people are like, ah, you made a sub page, but it's not really a new business. But if you call it a new business with a new domain name and a new landing page, people are like, wow, this is like a new-
Courtland (18:22):
Look at this new thing.
Pieter (18:23):
That's also marketing, right? And you can always integrate it later. So I think it's kind of like a trick, but I think this is, it's the same with Remote OK. Remote OK started as a page on Nomad List, like Nomad Jobs, but then I realized like 90% of remote work jobs are not nomads, they're like people that just like stay at home moms or stay at home dads they're they just want to have a work from home job. So I split it off into its own website. And I think here it's the same case because this seems to be targeted at people that are kind of at the end of their nomad journey. They've been around the world for a few years and they're like, okay, this is unsustainable. Or at least this is unsustainable in a legal way, in a tax way, and I want to build up a little bit of a base so I can still travel, but I have this Portugal thing and I live here and I get healthcare, for example, from Portuguese government and I pay tax. I think that's kind of what it is.
Courtland (19:16):
Yeah. I'm reading through the list because you have a list of benefits for why people should live in Portugal. The first one is the McDonald's in Portugal has the Royal Deluxe and the Big Tasty Double.
Pieter (19:28):
I put that in as a joke, but then I accidentally deployed it to GitHub. So now it's on there.
Courtland (19:36):
0% tax on foreign income, 0% tax on crypto, 0% tax on wealth. So this is all very attractive for entrepreneurs who are like, okay, I'm trying to like make money and build something. This seems pretty like a pretty good place to go.
Pieter (19:49):
Yeah. And I think it's to Americans, the climate is very similar to California, but it's also very similar to like Miami and Austin how they're attracting people from California right now. It's very the same concept. Portugal is attracting people, also Americas, but also Dutch people, Germans, UK, Denmark, Sweden, those kind of people where it's colder temperature, and Portugal is warmer and they have these benefits and they need foreigners, they need this income.
Courtland (20:18):
Another part of your website, you talk about how Portugal is still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and experiencing a massive brain drain. And in 2021, they had the largest population decrease in the last 50 years. There's sort of been dire need of foreigners, and I've seen like the same thing in like certain cities in America. I did this road trip last year, I guess a year and a half ago where I was just driving around. And whenever I wasn't in a really big city center and I would talk to people, it was like pretty obvious like, oh, there's a lot of brain drain. The most talented, ambitious people just left, they didn't stay here. And a lot of times the places were really nice. They were beautiful. The food was good. The weather was good. But in terms of like, if you wanted to be a nomad or you wanted to be surrounded by this kind of energy of other ambitious people, that wasn't there for you so there's no reason to go. And it seems like Portugal's got the best of both. It's like beautiful, and despite the brain drain, for some reason you got all these people sort of collapsing and coalescing in this one place.
Pieter (21:15):
Yeah. But you hit the nail on the head, it's loads of places that can do this. The US is super ahead with remote work, they were before, and they're ahead with this migration also, because you see, for example, in America, in US ski resorts, snow resorts are sold out everywhere off season now, like [inaudible 00:21:35] told me this because I think his friends work at a ski resort and people are moving into ski resorts just to snowboard all day and work remotely. They work a little bit, they have breakfast, and then they go ski. It's amazing. You see people move to like, I think Tulsa, Oklahoma, they pay $10,000 now for you to move there. So cities are trying to attract people, countries are trying to attract people, remote workers, [inaudible 00:21:59] on Twitter, I don't know if you know him probably you know him, very famous on Twitter.
Courtland (22:01):
Yeah.
Pieter (22:01):
He talks a lot about like the network state and the nation state. He talks about it in a very rational way. I'm a big fan and I like that, I see it more in an informal way, people just want to live in cool places where they have a nice balance between work and private. Just like going outside, going for a walk in nice clean air on the beach, for example, if that's your thing, or going skiing or whatever, if that's your thing and all the places you saw on this road trip, a lot of them can do this because if they have fast internet, they're usually very affordable because there has been a brain drain. There's been an exodus of people. So yeah. All these places have opportunities to attract remote workers, I think.
Courtland (22:48):
Do you think this will be like, you're doing the same with Rebase, I guess your sort of business model is like you are charging people to basically help onboard them, to set up their residency, and to help them file their tax return. Kind of just like doing like you have no idea how to be a digital nomad, we're just going to do it for you, all the paper stuff.
Pieter (23:08):
Yeah. Yeah.
Courtland (23:08):
Do you want to like copy pace that to other places too?
Pieter (23:11):
Yeah. So I've been polling Twitter because Twitter is really good for research now, and I've been asking where do you people want to move next? What's interesting for you? And people say like Dubai or Spain, Mexico. Yeah. It's mostly Mexico, Dubai, Spain, I think. I mean Thailand, Bali, but I think the problem with the place in Asia for Europeans and America is just too far, especially for Americas. Asia is just too far to settle down for a long time. Maybe when you're retired or something, but Americans are okay with settling down somewhat in Mexico, I think, and maybe some other parts of Latin America, like Colombia, Medellin, for example. And maybe you also see a lot of Americans in Portugal. You see a lot of Europeans in Portugal and Spain and stuff. So those are kind of places that seem more realistic. And I love Thailand, I love Asia, the problem is it's still hard to kind of integrate or what do call assimilate here as a foreigner on the long term. It just, it's very difficult.
Courtland (24:10):
How's it on the ground in Portugal right now with like lots of different sort of entrepreneurs and nomads moving there, are you hanging out with them? Are you guys working in coworking spaces? Is it social?
Pieter (24:20):
Yeah. I mean, Lisbon is super social. So social that you walk on the street, you go for coffee and somebody shouts like, "Hey Pieter." And you're walking, that's how I met some people. And then at the same night we went to a house party outside on the roof, so it was COVID safe kind of.
Courtland (24:36):
Yeah.
Pieter (24:37):
But yeah, it's super easy to meet people. It's kind of like the people we know, kind of tech people, but also artists, you now have the crypto people moving in from web trading stuff. Like there was a big crypto conference, I think recently. So it's a really eclectic mix of like artists, entrepreneurs, crypto, tech, very interesting mix, like really kind of like 1920 Paris, I think. People sometimes compare these places to like the [inaudible 00:25:06] and the cafes where people would group of artists and stuff.
Courtland (25:09):
Right. Yeah, I'm looking at you've got this sort of moving picture Portugal too, like kind of a mini looping video in the top left of Rebase, and it's beautiful. It looks kind of like the Bay Area, almost, like this like beautiful bay and this red bridge.
Pieter (25:21):
Dude, it looks like San Francisco. It has the same bridge.
Courtland (25:23):
Right? Yeah. I'm like, is that the Golden Gate Bridge? No. It's [crosstalk 00:25:28].
Pieter (25:27):
It's the same bridge. It has the same trams. It's insane. It has the same hills. It's literally San Francisco and Europe. It's insane.
Courtland (25:36):
It's smart for you to put that image there. It reminds me of one of the reasons why Airbnb, they sort of figured out early on that the pictures are so motivating, you see this like really beautiful place, you're like, ah shit, I got to go. I'm looking at this-
Pieter (25:47):
Yeah, you want to get the vibe.
Courtland (25:49):
Yeah. Just because of this like picture. It looks gorgeous.
Pieter (25:53):
I'm adding music next to the video, so that's going to increase, actually I've date on this because I launched Rebase as a Typeform, just a test, like a year ago and I love Typeform, it's nothing against Typeform, but it was kind of like a black color Typeform with white letters like, do you want to move to Portugal or something? And then you could fill out the text and it didn't really work. There wasn't many sign ups. So I think you need this whole designing vibe. Somebody told me it's quite an intense step to move to a country, you want that to be kind of comfortable and you're not going to do it type form.
Courtland (26:28):
Yeah. It's like if you have a fancy restaurant, you got to have clean floors, a good storefront, otherwise people don't trust your kitchen. If you are doing some sort of a crypto project and it's an exclusive Discord or DOW or something. [crosstalk 00:26:43].
Pieter (26:43):
Letters with gradient. Yeah.
Courtland (26:46):
You need to be sleek and cool, maybe like a dark background, maybe a little cryptic.
Pieter (26:50):
Yes.
Courtland (26:50):
You're trying to get somebody to like move somewhere or stay in a place, that needs to be bright and look really happy and clean.
Pieter (26:56):
And I'm not very good at design. So I start very functional. So it took me a while to get to this point. Yeah.
Courtland (27:06):
So you said like Rebase went viral on Twitter. Give me the sort of, I guess Indie Hacker breakdown of okay, how did you come up with the idea? How did you launch it? How did you grow it to where it is now?
Pieter (27:19):
Yeah. So I made this, I was working on this landing page and of course true fashion, it wasn't done of course, but it was already online and it already kind of worked. So I made a photo of me sitting on my bed, like just like I'm sitting here on bed with my laptop and Rebase being open, and then I wrote the tweet, like POV, building an immigration as a service startup. And then everybody started retweeting it and they asked the URL and I gave the URL and then everybody starts signing up. And then suddenly I had like thousand retweets on some other retweet and it was everywhere. And then, you know at that point you probably had the same with Indie Hackers where your friends start sending that their friends sent something that you made and then it's viral. And I had that, and the last time I had that was with Nomad List and it was eight years ago or something. So I was like, wow, it's took eight years to go viral with a startup again.
Courtland (28:16):
That's crazy. I didn't realize it was like that big. You talk about like having like these 70 plus startups that you started and like four of them have succeeded. Rebase is really like a standout among those 70. It's the biggest since Nomad List.
Pieter (28:28):
Yeah. Yeah. This is one of those four. Yeah. So it took ages to make something again, that's successful and making money. So I've been building so much stuff between that that didn't work. So it feels like, you know you want to have a you still got it, that feeling like, come on, I'm going to [inaudible 00:28:46]. Because everybody's saying, oh, you made a project once, it was successful, it's been eight years ago. Like go away. Feels nice.
Courtland (28:55):
Okay. So you tweet it just goes viral. Like that's it. You just had to tweet it and it was the right product to the right audience and ...
Pieter (29:02):
Yeah. But I tweet loads of stuff that doesn't go viral. I tweet all the time and it doesn't go viral. So I cannot predict what works and what doesn't. So again, it's the odds thing, right? It's like, I didn't know this was such a thing. It hit like a vein.
Courtland (29:16):
It's like a consistent thing you've always done. Because even when you were first starting, you did that blog post 12 startups in 12 months and your whole philosophy was like, I'm just going to do a lot of stuff, and I'm a hundred percent count on any one thing working, but if I try a lot of stuff, maybe one thing will work. And here you are 10 years later, same thing. No matter what it is, you're still on Twitter. You're promoting it to your audience. You're super hyped about it. If it fails, you just seem to not care. You just move on to the next thing.
Pieter (29:45):
I know. It sounds so weird. Yes. Pray and pray, right?
Courtland (29:48):
Like I don't see people on your Twitter, like, hey, what happened to that one thing you started? What happened to make chat [crosstalk 00:29:53]-
Pieter (29:53):
People just forget. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Courtland (29:54):
People just forget about your failures or whatever, it doesn't matter.
Pieter (29:58):
Yeah. Unless you post about it then, yeah. But I don't think it's the only, this is the problem. People start thinking what you do or what you say is the only way I don't think it's the only way, like you see so many other people do, the Slack founder, Stewart Butterfield or something?
Courtland (30:12):
Stewart Butterfield.
Pieter (30:13):
Yeah. He made Slack, and then before he made Flickr. I don't think he made that many projects, he made two games or something and both games became a startup. Like Flickr was a video game and became Flickr, and then Slack was a video game as well, became Slack. So I don't think everybody does the same thing. I think it works for me.
Courtland (30:35):
I think one of the reasons that you're so popular is because you're like crazy vulnerable and transparent, like you just share everything, but also like what you're doing right now. You're just excessively humble. You're like, oh, I'm not that great, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like really inspiring, you know? Like it's like when I first started reading your stuff, I'm like, okay, if Pieter can do it, like I can do it, because you're so humble about all this stuff. And I know behind the scenes, you are really thoughtful, whatever. But I think for someone who's just getting started, the approach that you've taken of try a lot of stuff, be okay with the fact that like some of it's not going to work out, a lot of it's not going to work out, but keep trying, don't let that discourage you and you don't have to be like some sort of mad scientist genius. I think that's probably the most approachable thing for most people. And I think that's why it's really inspirational.
Pieter (31:23):
I have to be like that because when I started, I was looking up to all these people and they looked like gods to me, like they knew everything and they could make these websites and these startups and these building teams and hiring people and raising money and all this stuff seemed like magic to me and I was like, I can never, ever get to that skill level ever. I barely can code. I didn't know how databases work and stuff. So I think you need to, I think the nicest thing to do is to show that I still don't really know what I'm doing because it makes it accessible, like you say, and it brings more people into it because the worst thing I see with developers and especially engineers is the gate keeping, right?
Pieter (32:06):
Where it's like, oh, you need to code things in a certain way, and you need to do this in a certain way, but there is no certain way, of course. You can just do whatever you want, as long as it's legal and you can ship a startup. The most cool thing in creativity, like new projects are built with these weird creative constraints where, because you don't know how to do things properly, you do it completely wrong, but it still kind of works and it ends up very different because the process is so different and you see it in art, you see it in music, everything, you see it in startups too, where your design might be really bad, but that might become aesthetic, like brutalist or something, right?
Courtland (32:49):
Right, right. Yeah. Like you got your own, very unique design where you're like, okay, I'm not going to do a bunch of images and stuff, but I really like emojis. And so your design will have lots of emojis in it, and it's like very distinctly Pieter Levels.
Pieter (33:00):
Yeah. But it's because I'm too lazy to figure out icon sets, how they work. So I just use emojis, you know?
Courtland (33:07):
Exactly. And now a lot of people copy you, but when I see that, I'm like, oh, they're biting off Pieter Level's style, because you're the first person I saw did this. So you have this other stat on your Rebase site, you say Rebase now helps, this is nuts, Rebase now helps 9% of all people who move to Portugal. So every year, 60,000 people-
Pieter (33:24):
Yeah, this is insane.
Courtland (33:26):
-move to Portugal, that's like the most ridiculous that I've ever seen. You're a major part of this entire country's import of new citizens or residents.
Pieter (33:34):
Yeah. This is super weird. So I didn't realize this until I was like, there must be like half a million people migrating to Portugal every year or something. I never really thought about it. And then at Googled, it was only like 50,000 or something. And then I realized, okay, if I do like something like 400 a month or 500 a month, that's almost like 6,000 a year. That's like over 10% or something. Yeah. And I was like, wow, this insane. I didn't know that. And I was like, so nobody's moving to Portugal, and now everybody's moving to Portugal because of this website, and I do it from a laptop. I don't have an office. It's just, the whole thing is weird to me too.
Courtland (34:13):
Yeah. It's like, that's nuts. I feel like the government should be like reaching out and talking to you.
Pieter (34:17):
Yeah. But governments are so hard to talk to. I mean, imagine B2B enterprise sales, but times 10, it's impossible to. I tried. I tried talking to governments. They didn't even reply. So I give up. I'll just make my websites and they can email me if they want. But yeah. I'll just use the laws that they create for my business. But yeah, there's some cool stories I heard. Somebody tweeted, or I saw it, I think there's people from Venezuela now that are trying to get out of Venezuela because Venezuela is like a disaster now and they're trying to move to Portugal and they're using Rebase for it, and there's like four Venezuelans now in the database that are using it to move to Portugal. So that's like next level cool, because you're helping people change their life to move to Europe.
Courtland (35:01):
Yeah. It's cool. How does the product actually work? So I click the start now button.
Pieter (35:06):
So you enter this form with all your legal data and stuff, income sources, I think. So essentially what it is because I'm not a legal firm, it's like legally sensitive territory, you cannot like, I'm not a lawyer, so I shouldn't do law stuff, but I can resell, I can refer legal services. So I have lawyers that I refer you to that are good and they know how to deal with the types of people that I attract, like remote workers, and they help you through the process, and I get a commission on the amount of money that you spend. But I'm not a legal firm. I just resell. And I think Stripe Atlas, I talked to the Stripe Atlas head of product, I think, and he said they do something similar because I was always saying, ah, you must hire all these lawyers and stuff, and actually I don't think they do. They do kind of similar, but I think they do it nonprofit because they're just doing it to, like Stripe wants to increase the amount of businesses on the internet, it's like the mission. But I think they operate in a similar way. You just resell to high quality lawyers that are trusted. So it's a very strange-
Courtland (36:14):
So at any point do you like collect payment? Like is there like a Stripe payment form in your website?
Pieter (36:19):
Yeah. After you fill out the form, there's a Stripe checkout and you pay and then there's a dashboard where, I've used Stripe a lot, like I use Stripe for KYC, so know your customer. So the moment you've paid, you get into the dashboard where you need to do KYC, you have Stripe identity. So Stripe identity is a service in Stripe where you can upload your passport, Stripe checks it for me, and then I don't need to see the passport, so it stays safe at Stripe, but it tells me, okay, this passport is verified. This person is real and is KYC, know your customer. And that also makes it legal for the lawyers and stuff as KYC.
Courtland (36:57):
And so then you get the money and then the people who sign up, basically, I guess you contact the lawyers on their behalf and then you pay the lawyers, but you keep your commission.
Pieter (37:05):
Yeah. So it's like, I keep the commission and the lawyers take the money that comes after. So it's quite a simple model. I can change the business model maybe later where I take more of the commission from the lawyers, but I wanted to keep you super simple and easy just to see if it would've worked, you know? And it works now. Yeah.
Courtland (37:24):
Right. Yeah. And I bet you're making like a decent amount of money from this because it's like, okay, if you're getting 500 people a month signing up, and this is not like a $5 a month to-do list app that you're selling to people. It's a giant move people are making with their life. They're used to paying a lot of money for this kind of stuff. And so it's like hundreds of dollars that you're making per person who joins.
Pieter (37:46):
I think right now it's something like 30, 40, 50K. The problem actually is that there was too many, like this lawyer was used to getting like, I don't know, like 50 customers a month. And suddenly I brought him like 400. So they were just this huge bottleneck, so I needed to email these people like, okay, it's going to take a little bit longer because it's been going viral and too many people signed up. I closed to sign up for a few times as well. And now they've been hiring more people. They've been hiring five more people. They need to train them now for the back office and stuff. So they're also growing now.
Courtland (38:18):
Yeah.
Pieter (38:19):
So it's kind of cool. Yeah.
Courtland (38:20):
Yeah. Also since, I guess the last time we talked, you hadn't even started Remote OK. So it's now like the biggest remote job board in the world. So not only is like Rebase taking off, but in the last four years, you have this other project that's now making, I think millions of dollars and is huge. So like you just like keep having hit after hit, and in between those hits like a bunch of failures that nobody remembers, but it doesn't matter.
Pieter (38:43):
Yeah.
Courtland (38:44):
Let's talk about Remote OK, because it's all in the same vein, right? Nomad List, you're digital nomads. Remote OK, get a remote job. Rebase, relocate to Portugal. You're sticking into your wheel house, but they're just different aspects of it, and they become these huge projects. So what's the story behind Remote OK?
Pieter (39:00):
Yeah. So I started it as, like I said before, like Nomad Jobs. I built Nomad List first and after a few months people were like, okay, is there remote jobs we can do as Nomads? And back then, remote jobs weren't even big yet. It wasn't like a big for thing. And there was still a lot of stigma against remote work. This was like 2014, 2015. I remember Buffer was pushing remote work really hard. A few other companies, I think Automatic from WordPress were pushing it, so they, those were the ones hiring. Zapier too, but it wasn't a big thing at all. And so I built this job board, Nomad Jobs, and then I spun it off as Remote OK, because I realized quickly, like I said before, that most remote jobs are not for nomads. Most people are not Nomads. 95% of the remote job market is not nomads, it's just normal people that want to work from home, for example.
Pieter (39:51):
So I spun it off as Remote OK, and the first year it didn't even make money, I think. I was aggregating a lot of jobs from non remote job boards, because there was not really a lot of remote job boards except mine, but there was classic job boards which had remote jobs and they would be located in Remote, Oregon. So Remote is a city in Oregon or a village, so I would just take those jobs and then put them in on my sites. That was a real big problem back then. And this kind of started growing, I started charging like $1 for a job post. So companies started directly posting on my side as well. After a few years, it made okay money. But then when COVID happened, like everything changed. It was like, if you look at the revenue charts, it's like on remoteok.com/open, it just goes up radically.
Courtland (40:41):
Basically 2020. It just took off, the trajectory changed. And then also like 2021, around March or April just took off again, like a whole different trajectory.
Pieter (40:53):
And I didn't do much stuff, that's the weird thing. So I think Sahil from Gumroad said, tweeted this once, that it's all about the market, like you think you are doing it, but the market is doing it. And as long as you're in the market, you will benefit from the market. And I think this is super true. Like suddenly remote work is mainstream now. I mean, we were pushing for it for years. We were tweeting about it relentlessly. The remote work is the future, and nobody believed us, and then suddenly just a worldwide pandemic and everything changes. It's insane. It's like, how do you predict this? You cannot predict this. And it's also grim because it's a really bad thing, a pandemic. It's like a lot of people died, millions of people died.
Courtland (41:30):
Right.
Pieter (41:31):
And it's good for your business. It's a very strange feeling.
Courtland (41:34):
Yeah. It's strange. I've seen this so much on Indie Hackers where most people I interview have tech businesses and if any category business did well during the pandemic, it was online tech businesses and it is like this weird juxtaposition between like, well, it's hard not to be happy when your business is doing well, but it's also like, damn, you're happy that essentially this like worldwide tragedy occurred.
Pieter (41:56):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Courtland (41:57):
No one would like, if we could all go back, no one would want the pandemic to happen.
Pieter (42:00):
Yeah. It's not good. Just like wars have changed society, right? Society changes, I think very slowly and then very radically, revolutions happen like spikes. It's cool that things change, but ...
Courtland (42:16):
Right. Well, it's cool that you're so consistent with your projects because when things change, there's some chance that some of your projects will be moving with the zeitgeist, and some might not, but really all you need is one or two, and Remote OK, obviously remote work is humongous now. It's like huge. I'm looking at the job board right now and like you have seemingly hundreds or thousands of posts on your job board. It's got to be, I mean, it's the number one remote job board. So you just beat out all the other remote job boards.
Pieter (42:42):
Yeah, it just became the number one remote job board this month. I mean, but again, I also don't know how I did that. It's just kind of happens.
Courtland (42:51):
[crosstalk 00:42:51] how did you do that?
Pieter (42:53):
I have no clue. I think what I did recently helped, there was this whole trend of like, I woke up, I drank coffee and I was browsing Reddit, and it was this meme that went viral about, like a South Park meme. Like if you want me to apply for this job, then tell me what salary it is or something. I forgot the joke. I'm so bad at jokes, but it was like 50,000 upvotes. People want job posts with salaries. So I was like, okay, this is obviously, again, like a society thing. Everybody thinks the same about something. So this is a cultural moment. So I started tweeting about this meme and I was like, okay, maybe I should just require companies to show salaries on the site, not just optional, because I had it on the site, it was optional.
Pieter (43:37):
So I'm like, okay, let's just go to my code editor and make this input type textbooks required, and I check it with JavaScript if it's required, if it's filled in or not. And immediately I started getting the emails from the companies being angry.
Courtland (43:50):
Of course.
Pieter (43:51):
We don't want to share our salary and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, yeah, but come on. And I was just fighting with them over email. And meanwhile, I was tweeting about it as well, that it was really hard to do this because like big companies that pay like, $20,000 for a job post bundle like 10 jobs at the same time or more, and they were trying to get out of not showing salaries. And then in, I think it was February this year, Colorado I think, the state of Colorado made it a law to require job posting to show salaries. So I was like, okay, now it's not just my thing. It's actually a law. So I can say like, okay, if you hire remotely, worldwide, Colorado is included. So you need to do this legally. And that helps a lot, like having it as a law. And then also I think in other countries and stuff, all the job seekers were more happy. And I think then also you started seeing more traffic because people want to see salaries when they apply for a job.
Courtland (44:46):
It's like in a way they like these things that the internet is like that you think would come with the internet, like transparency. Okay. You have so many people on the internet. There's so much more competition. Ultimately things should get more transparent or the distribution of people geographically, okay anybody can work from anywhere because of the internet, so you should see people spread out. And yet it's taken like 30 years to get to this point where we're starting to see some of these things happen.
Pieter (45:11):
I think the strangest part with remote work was that in, I think 2014, there was entire San Francisco tech, like VCs and startup funds were fighting against remote work, and it was weird for me because I was like, this is the center of tech. These people make the big internet companies, which is the internet, it's like a virtual concept and they cannot work remotely, they cannot accept that you can work from around the world that we have internet to just connect with each other, like we do now. And it's so weird. I was, yeah.
Courtland (45:40):
And so bizarre. It's it's weird. Like how like uneven, like the distribution of technology is too. Cause I remember like 2004 playing world of aircraft as like a 17 year old. And like we were basically living in the future. We were always on, you know, basically the discord of the time and we would be on team speak, which would be like a giant, like, you know, audio chat, like clubhouse or something. And it'd be like 40 people. And they were distributed remote all over the world and they had different little jobs as part of like our Guild and we'd be on every night like talking and that was like 2004 and yeah, like that was like a video game, you know? And that wasn't just me, that was like millings of people doing that, you know? And now it's like 15, 16 years later, people were sort of just catching onto this stuff.
Pieter (46:23):
I was in Quake II clans. We were already doing this. We were already in metaverse as well. So yeah.
Courtland (46:28):
Yeah.
Pieter (46:29):
It took a long, long ass time.
Courtland (46:31):
And I'm looking at your graph for Remote OK, like even Remote OK took a long time. The very beginning of your revenue graph is like 2015. And so I look looking at it today and it's like, okay, you're at like 1.4 million a year run rate. Like that's huge.
Pieter (46:46):
Yeah.
Courtland (46:47):
It's job boards like printing cash, but for many years your revenue run rate was like $10,000, $20,000, 30.
Pieter (46:58):
Yeah. I mean, it was good, but I was convinced it was going to kind of stay there. And for a while it stayed there, it was kind of like this. I remember feeling kind of mad about it in like 2016, 2017, because it was just, nothing was growing. It was kind like going like this and Nomad List was the same, it didn't didn't grow. And I was like, okay, this is it. I mean, just be happy, it's still a lot of money. It was like 500K a year or something. So half a million year, it was still a lot of money, but I was like, okay, maybe it's not going to grow much more. And then COVID.
Courtland (47:30):
Yeah. At the end of 2016, so I'll just read some of the numbers. At the end of 2016, Remote OK was making $30,000 a year. At the end of 2017, so this is like three years in, you're making $82,000 a year, so that was like a pretty okay salary. And then in 2018, it grew a lot, it's making like $200,000 a year. And then at the end of 2019, right before the pandemic, it's making almost $300,000 a year. So it grew to a pretty sizable amount, but compared to the last couple years, that almost looks like just like flat on the graph. Like you can't even see it.
Pieter (48:04):
Exactly.
Courtland (48:05):
It looks like no growth. And the first two years definitely look flat on the graph.
Pieter (48:10):
You're putting so much effort into the site and it's kind of like ...
Courtland (48:15):
Yeah. You're not seeing a lot of reaction in terms of the revenue based and the effort you're putting in. And that's when people quit, the first couple years where it's flat.
Pieter (48:21):
Yes. They always quit the first five years. And the reason I didn't quit was because I was in music before, I was in drum base, electronic music, and I quit after like five years. And then I remember the people that started at the same time as me, they continued and they went for like a whole decade, like for 10 years, and they became world famous. They became, in that scene, in the music scene, they became world famous DJs. And I gave up, so I gave up too fast. I think, with music, and I didn't want to do that again. So I'm like, I'm just going to do this for 10 years at least and see where it ends up and I think it's a 10 year rule or something, like 10,000 hour rule. Like you need to do something for a very long time to get good at it, and I think 10 years, it's a really long time, but it's a good time to see if you can get something somewhere because you've done it over and over and over and over and over. And you really understand the industry after that time, I think.
Courtland (49:20):
What do you think you understand about launching these products and building startups that you sort of accrued from probably spending at least 10,000 hours on this stuff over the past decade?
Pieter (49:30):
I think the biggest mistake that people will make is that the only focus should be your user and the customer and how you make them happy. It doesn't have to be like very special, it has to do a basic function really, really well. Like Nomad List tells you if you have specific preferences where to live, like I want to live in a warm place in January in Europe. Okay. It'll tell you that exactly. It's a very simple problem. And it solves that problem very easily, very fast. And Remote OK, you say I need a remote PHP job, okay, you can find that really easily. And this amount of salary and this company information, blah blah blah. And it's very simple, but it does everything that the user wants in what I think is the best way a user wants it. And you see all these other websites, they look too good, they have too many gradients, and they're too aesthetically pleasing, there's too much focus on all this stuff, and I think that's like a red flag for me almost. It should be function over form and like Jony Ive is a good example with Apple, right? The Apple designer, where he made these MacBooks the last five years, like 2015, I think 2017 to 2020, he made the worst MacBooks that existed because he-
Courtland (50:44):
Hate them. I hate them.
Pieter (50:46):
Yeah, he's a good guy, but he chose form over function, and now you see the new MacBooks are function of a form again. Like they have SD reader.
Courtland (50:55):
I know. They're awesome.
Pieter (51:00):
It's amazing.
Courtland (51:00):
Did you get a new one?
Pieter (51:00):
I just got it here. Yes. I just have it here.
Courtland (51:02):
Me too. It's awesome. I hate it my old MacBook.
Pieter (51:03):
Yeah, me too. And we paid so much money for this shit book, but now it's good. I think that's the point, like function over form should be the key in business. You need to solve this problem real easily, and that almost, again, makes it more accessible for more people too, because you don't need to be again a designer or a big developer, you need to solve something in a very basic way, but you need to solve it. And a lot of apps don't even solve something. They just good. And a lot of them don't even have a problem they're solving in the first place. So you know what I mean?
Courtland (51:32):
Yeah. I mean, with startups, even with like the bootsstrappers now, there's kind of a scene, on Twitter, or if you're in Silicon valley, and it's like, I think it's really easy to get caught up in a scene and you're trying to impress the gatekeepers. You trying to impress your peers instead of like talking to your customers.
Pieter (51:49):
Exactly.
Courtland (51:51):
All right. We've talked about Nomad List, Remote OK, and Pieter's other projects. There's still a ton that I want to talk to Peter about. And so listeners, this is a two part episode. You can find the second part of this conversation and next week's episode.
Courtland (00:06):
What's up everybody. This is Cortland from indiehackers.com and you're listening to the Indie Hackers Podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process. On this show, I sit down with these Indie Hackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunity and the strategies they're taking advantage of so the rest of us can do the same.
Courtland (00:29):
This is part two of my conversation with Pieter Levels. If you missed the first part, that's cool. Just go back to last week's episode where we talked about Pieter's companies, Remote OK and Rebase.
Courtland (00:45):
Let's talk about money. Tyler Tringas gets asked this. He's a good example of someone who's moved to Mexico.
Pieter (00:49):
Yeah. I know him.
Courtland (00:50):
He's in Mexico city. He's all about Mexico city. He's like, "Mexico City's pretty cool." I've been down to his conference down there, but he wanted to know how you are handling investment in money now that your projects are making 3-4 million dollars or something. I'm just curious more from a broader psychological aspect or perspective too. You ask people on Twitter, "What should we talk about?"
Courtland (01:10):
And a lot of the questions were like, "Are you happy? Does money make you happy?" Or, "What do you know about happiness now that you've had these successful projects?" I look at you and you're like okay, I'm carrying my laptop around in a grocery store bag. I don't know. What is your relationship to-
Pieter (01:24):
It's not how I imagined my life.
Courtland (01:27):
What is your relationship to money now?
Pieter (01:30):
Yes. I think it's very interesting because I remember in the student, days I was making $300-400 a month and now much more. But so we talked a little bit about this on DM too. I think almost this is also a touch topic. It's like money and capitalism and stuff, but you need a base amount of money to be comfortable. Do you know FIRE, F-I-R-E?
Courtland (01:53):
Yeah. Financially independent, retire early.
Pieter (01:55):
Yeah. So they have this concept where if you save, let's say you save $100,000, you can take out $4,000 a year. Sorry, invest this $100,000 in stock markets, like in ETFs and stuff. And then you can perpetually take out 4% per year. So $4,000 a year. So if you have a million dollars saved after 20 years, you can take out 40,000.
Pieter (02:17):
So 40,000 is about some money you can maybe live off. That means that having a million dollars can give you $40,000 the rest of your life, kind of, perpetual. So then you're kind of retired. I think that's a much more interesting way to see millions or seeing money that it's not... A million dollar doesn't mean you could spend a million dollar. A million dollar means you can spend $40,000 per year. I think money in a way is a scam because, and this is controversial, but the narrative in culture, we talk about this on DM, the narrative in culture is that especially as a guy, if you make money, you get successful, suddenly you get women, all the stuff. You get power. It's from, I think Scarface and stuff. You get the money, you get the power.
Courtland (03:04):
Scarface, rap songs.
Pieter (03:06):
Yeah. It's bullshit. It doesn't worthy that. Nobody cares about that. Really, everybody's just looking for another nice person to be a boyfriend or girlfriend with, to be a partner with. And if you meet the people that do want you for your money, you don't want them because they're gold diggers. I don't even meet those people. People don't really care. Really, people don't care about this stuff.
Pieter (03:27):
That's the biggest shock. Not that I did it for that, but it's all a scam. It's a society narrative that you need sports cars and a big house. I rented this big architect villa because I wanted to do it. So I rented it this year in Thailand and I lived there with my ex-girlfriend and it was really beautiful, Instagram amazing and it was really boring also. I was so bored and I felt lonely. It was too much space.
Pieter (03:57):
I'm not saying it in a humble brag cool away. I'm just saying that to test that, you need to test that lifestyle and really quickly realize that I'm much more happy with a grocery store bag in a hotel room than this kind of luxury life that you see in TV and movies. I don't think it's real. I think it's artificial. It's data signaling. It's signaling that you're rich to other people, but that's not an intrinsic way to get happy I think. I don't need to signal I'm happy. I'm okay. It doesn't add anything.
Courtland (04:31):
Why do you think that is? Because it seems from the outside looking in, there are a lot of rich people who really also love the trappings of being rich. They love their huge mansion, they love their designer clothes. They love their boujee ass stuff. It seems that doesn't provide any happiness to you. Are they just status signaling? Do they really not it or is it just something unique about you that makes that stuff just unnecessary?
Pieter (04:56):
It's a good question. We don't know. But I've never had much motivation or incentive to signal. My status signaling would be like, "Look, this cool thing I made. Look this cool website I made. It works now. It was really difficult and challenging and now I made it."
Pieter (05:13):
That's signaling because it's that's this creativity kind of stuff. You could argue, this is like [inaudible 00:05:18] where you could argue showing revenue it's signaling already. But I don't really do it for that. I do it more for transparency, but I do think we're a tribal people. Humans are animals and people are tribal, which means they need to signal on the tribe, their status. And maybe then my state of signaling is in a different way than the classic way of like look at all this ownership I have.
Courtland (05:44):
Right. The way you signal depends on the tribe that you're part of. If you're part of a tribe, that's like, "Okay, we're a bunch of makers and we like to build things to be financially independent." And then you signal by building cool stuff and generating revenue from your projects. If you live with a bunch of people who are in some fancy suburb of LA and the way you signals by having a really big house and a really nice car, then you don't care about building projects online. You care about that kind of stuff. I like the tribe that you're part of personally, because it's more productive.
Pieter (06:19):
Yeah. I think that hits in the nail on the head, yeah. I do think it's a trend though. I never know if someone is a trend or it's just me and our tribe kind of doing it. But I do see trend of being more about intrinsic, pure motivations and happiness and less about capital and ownership and material goods and cars, sports cars, flashy clothes and stuff. Look how we dress usually. We all wear basic T-shirts that are $10. You're probably the same. I don't know. Maybe.
Courtland (06:49):
I'm wearing my robe that I got on Amazon for 20 bucks. Super comfy. It's wearing a blanket. It's got a hood. It's nice.
Pieter (06:54):
Exactly. It's amazing. Yeah. I got the hoodie too. We dress like kids pretty much. Having a really big house also takes a lot of maintenance and management and you see these rich people that have crazy lives. It's so much fucking work and they're stressed out of their mind, they burnout from just existing. I think the real key for me, the benefit is not having to do anything like that, not having to manage a lot of people and just sit on my bed and do Indie Hacker Podcast and just chill and not after all those obligations.
Courtland (07:29):
I read a book recently. It's by Anderson Cooper. He was a journalist, also a reporter, but he also comes from this Vanderbilt family. His dad's last name is Cooper, but his mom's last name is Vanderbilt. And she was the sixth generation of the Vanderbilts. And they were at some point the richest family in America in the 1800s and the late 1800s. It got to the point, it was the third generation of kids and they just had a ton of money that they had inherited from the previous generations of people who were sort of building this empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Courtland (07:57):
But the kids, at that point, what did care about? They didn't have any business savvy, they didn't have any ambition, they didn't have any acumen in that area. They just cared about being part of high society and state of signaling.
Courtland (08:08):
And so they just squandered the greatest fortune in America by doing nothing, building giant elaborate houses and throwing these crazy balls and just showing off as much as they could to try to cling onto the status they had of the richest of the rich people. It's like you said, these houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to maintain. By the time it was '30s or '40s, they were all broke. The kids were all broke. It all disappeared and there's nothing left of it. That's what I think of when I think of old money. And I think of new money, it's like, "Don't do that."
Pieter (08:41):
Man, there's so many lessons there. It shows again what we said in the start, you adapt to this stuff so fast, you adapt to big houses and cars and crazy rich extravagant parties and stuff. The hedonism part of it as well. You all probably adapt to this, but it takes some effort to imagine that because it seems so nice. It's like wow, these cool parties. But you probably get used to that too and then it's the same thing.
Pieter (09:10):
So I think if you take the effort to imagine that and okay, let's not do that and instead live in a more conscious, also to yourself manner of what do I want to do? My life's so simple now. All I do is I wake up, I drink coffee and I open my laptop a little bit. I talk to my friends, I code a little bit. I go for a walk. I go to the gym every two days.
Pieter (09:33):
Andre lives here also, so I see Andre a lot. There's another guy, Javi lives here and we hang out. It's a very simple life right now. Also because of COVID of course, but I don't know. I'm happy. There's this quote I read on Twitter this week, "If you can't be happy with your coffee, you cannot be happy with a billion dollars." Same thing. Be happy with simple things and my dad says the same thing. All he says is you wake up and he drinks tea and he eats a cookie and he's like, "This is life. This is the best thing."
Pieter (10:02):
Basic shit. This data on this studies that show buying a house after six months, you're at the same level of happiness. Marrying, buying a car, after two months or something. Hedonic adaptation, the hedonic treadmill is a very interesting concept.
Courtland (10:19):
It is. And it's especially relevant when you're, I think, organizing your life in a way where you're always chasing these big goals. Because if you're chasing a goal, you're essentially saying, "Okay, there's a thing I don't have right now and I would be happy if I had it." That's dangerous because the flip side of that is like, "I'm not happy right now. I'm not happy unless get this thing. I got my coffee. I'm not happy with the coffee, I need a billion dollars."
Pieter (10:40):
Yes, yes. But this is such a difficult concept to grasp. That's why people work their ass off until they're 80 or 70 or whatever, to get there. This is a really sensitive thing to say because you always have these rich people to say, "The answer's not on wealth. Blah, blah."
Pieter (10:55):
It's bullshit. Of course, it is. If you have enough money that you don't need to work, that's a great benefit. Financial independence should be... Everybody should get that. Universal basic income should be for everybody. It's so comfortable and nice to not have a boss. It's amazing. But after that, when I passed 1 million a year in revenue, that was exceptional and now it's 2 million year in revenue and it's just a number. It doesn't mean anything. You pay more tax and that's it.
Courtland (11:22):
So then how do you navigate that transition? Because before you get there, there's definitely, I think a difference between having that financial freedom and not having it. I think there is kind of a happiness change. There is kind of a burden lifted off your shoulders when you're like, "Okay. I like being independent."
Pieter (11:37):
[inaudible 00:11:37].
Courtland (11:37):
"I got that million dollars. I can live off 40K a year. Wow, that's a whole bunch of stuff I no longer have to do ever if I don't want to." How do you adjust to that? Because well now you need, ideally... Maybe you don't. Maybe new things that make you happy, like some of the old goals you had, you've sort of accomplished.
Courtland (11:55):
I think that can be pretty jarring for a lot of people. A lot of people get really rich and then they commit suicide or they become depressed because the thing they were chasing, no longer even matters and they don't feel that difference. They just hedonically adapted.
Pieter (12:12):
Dude, athletes. Athletes when they retire always, you have a lot... In Europe, footballers when they retire, they get really depressed. I think in US of NFL players as well, but I think it is jarring because society promised you that this would've solved everything. This would solve your money situation, your friend situation, your relationship situation.
Pieter (12:34):
Money solves everything they say. It's just not true. It's just simply not true. It solves some things. Then you need to, like you say, it's jarring. So you need to go back to what really makes me intrinsically happy? It was probably the thing that made you start working on stuff when you were eight years old. Like making something, like creating games or apps or whatever or paintings or drawings, that you didn't do that for a reason. You just did that because it was fun and that's how you got here.
Courtland (13:03):
Yeah. It's pretty awesome to be in a position where the thing that you did to basically earn your financial freedom is also one of the things that you like doing the most. And I think if you have that, then once you get to that point of financial freedom, you don't have to change anything. Because you're like, "What got me here, actually, I really love. I love the process itself."
Courtland (13:22):
So even if the goal is gone, the process is it's own goal. It's like if I look at my life, I love coding. I love designing. I love sitting down and making a new project and I've done it a bunch times for free with no hope of any money just because it was fun to do because I have some idea that I have in my head and I want to get out.
Courtland (13:39):
I think I've also probably much more so than you, allowed myself to be sort of co-oped into like, "Well, I'm doing this for some goal. I'm doing this because I'm trying to get to financial freedom and et cetera, et cetera." At some point, the goal can kind of co-op the process and you become more obsessed with the reason you're doing it than the fact that it's fun to do.
Courtland (13:59):
I think with me, what I've experienced has been kind of like... This was like I kind of got the goal, achieved what I wanted to achieve and now it's like, "Well, do I even doing the activity anymore?" I forgot what that was because I haven't done it just for its own sake in so many years.
Courtland (14:16):
And so it's like I have to relearn my love for that, if that makes sense. I also have to get over this weird mental state that I think Silicon valley is really toxic for depending on the tribe you're part of. It's where you're like no, no, no. It's not good enough to just do something for its own sake. You have to be going for some bigger, better goal. Why aren't you starting the next bigger company to get to the next level of wealth or fame or success.
Courtland (14:42):
If you have that in the back of your mind, it can be so hard to just appreciate doing simple, fun things because you're like, "Well, is this enough? Am I using my full potential?" You get this nagging, unnecessary feeling that I don't think needs to be there, but can take some work to kind of shrug off.
Pieter (14:58):
I think at the stage you're in now, if this is the stage you're in which you just said, I would just start a new project. That's what I would do. I would just be like, "Yeah. I don't really feel all this stuff."
Courtland (15:08):
Next thing.
Pieter (15:08):
Let the old thing run and be so automated. I'll just go work on new stuff and try new stuff and then I'll dive in something new because I'm bored with the old. First of all, I love Indie Hackers, but I almost think you have so much creative energy to create things that it'd be lovely to see that energy be funneled into a new project, something different.
Courtland (15:34):
I like the way that you've done it with Nomad List. It's so smart. Because you're doing these things that are new projects, but like you said, it's also kind of a marketing trick. Because these are so part of what Nomad List is, they could just be Nomad List/Rebase, Nomad List/Jobs.
Courtland (15:52):
With me with Indie Hackers, I don't have that separate strategy where I do these different things. And so it can kind of feel the slog where I'm working the same thing, same thing, same thing. But if I could maybe take a page out of your playbook and just do different things because most of the things I'm interested in doing are very related, but they could have a different name living in a different website and just feel fresher.
Pieter (16:12):
Yeah. You can always put them back later, right?
Courtland (16:15):
Yeah. What about the practical parts of money and investing? I know a lot of people who make more money end up switching from this mode of, "Okay, earlier I was trying to earn my freedom, but now that I'm here, I'm trying to protect what I have or I'm trying to invest it wisely."
Courtland (16:30):
That's a whole different skill set. Building a startup, it's very different than investing in crypto or the stock market or ETFs, whatever. How has that changed for you? What are you doing with your money basically?
Pieter (16:42):
Yeah. I've been tweeting a lot about ETFs. I know the thing today is to tweet about crypto, invest in crypto. Of course, but I think crypto might be the future and I invest in crypto too. But investing in the stock market is also the future still, I think. A good way to invest in the stock market and I learned this from Matt Kotz, from Google, he had a blog about how he invests his money.
Pieter (17:10):
He wrote about, he puts almost all of his money in Vanguard ETFs. ETFs are funds that you can buy. They're just stocks, but instead of a stock, one stock, you buy a Microsoft, you buy a thousand stocks at the same time through an ETF. It's a basket of stocks. And that means that if Microsoft goes up, you profit.
Pieter (17:30):
But if Microsoft goes down and Apple goes up, you still profit because they balance each other out. So you get a more balanced return.
Courtland (17:39):
Diversifying a bit.
Pieter (17:39):
Diversifying, it's just diversifying and it's very cheap. The fees are 0.01% with Vanguard or something. It took me a year to in understand stuff. Because it's kind of complicated. It's not very accessible, but I think more people should learn about it because with most brokers, you can just open an account interactive brokers or I don't know, the trade apps and you can buy an ETF. I know it makes more sense from your gambling casino hearts, as we all have. You want to gamble your money like, "I think Apple's going to go up."
Pieter (18:11):
But statistically over long term, it makes more sense to diversify your money and just put it in a basket of stocks and that's what ETFs are.
Courtland (18:20):
Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense and it's something that I hear associated with... It's like the beginning of your career. You don't have any money. You're trying to do something. You're the opposite of diversified. You're like, "I'm going all in on my startup. All my money is going to me doing this thing."
Courtland (18:35):
And then when you start to make your money, it's like, "Okay. Well, I don't want to lose this. I don't want to be a super risky..." I guess there's some people who are, "I'm putting it all on crypto," but it's probably not the wisest thing. And if you want to sort of maintain what you're doing and maintain your lifestyle and keep the freedom that you have and you're not sort of obsessed with just getting more and more and more and more, I think it's not uncommon at all to do what you're doing and sort of diversify, try to keep it stable and then focus on what you love rather than just obsessively trying to make as much money as possible.
Pieter (19:05):
100%. I think it's common with tech people that are very well-read and stuff. But I think it's very uncommon with people who aren't and they usually invest in individual stocks and that's statistically just a very bad idea. It just underperforms over the long run. I think that's a good thing to talk about, to tell people kind of avoid individual stocks. But yeah, this is not financial advice podcasts, but you asked me.
Pieter (19:31):
But I do also invest in crypto. I've been buying Bitcoin since 2013 when it was $32 Bitcoin and I used to have 162 Bitcoin. I think it would be $11 million now. I lost it though. I day traded it away. That was also a lesson. Don't day trade, just hold, huddle.
Courtland (19:55):
I've had similar things happen.
Pieter (19:57):
Really?
Courtland (19:57):
I owned really Bitcoin and Ethereum back when they were sub a couple of hundred bucks and I also spent a lot of time trading in the 2008 market, after the crash or whatever, with very little money because I was in college and I had a consulting job.
Courtland (20:09):
But in hindsight, if I had just not day traded it and I just kept the stocks that I bought and just not touched it for the last 12 years, all of that's 10Xed. It's like okay, well lesson learned.
Pieter (20:20):
Yeah. Lesson learned, but that's a lesson you need to become 30 to learn that. But if you're 20, you can skip this whole lesson. You can just buy now, buy these diversified stock forms and hold crypto. But hold it for long term.
Courtland (20:34):
Well, when you're 20, 10 years seems an eternity. If you told 20-year-old Courtland, "Just hold for 10 years," I'd be like, "I'm not going to be alive in 10 years. The world might be over in 10 years. 10 years, are you kidding me? What are you talking about?" Now at 34, I'm like, "Okay. 10 years seems reasonable. It's not that long. I'll be patient."
Pieter (20:53):
I think when I was 20, I was reading Mr. Money Mustache randomly, this blog. And he was also about the FIRE movement and about compounding interest and I learned all this concept and he, he said something, "Even if you don't make a lot of money, just start saving now. Pay off all your debt and saving every month a $100."
Pieter (21:08):
So I started logging the groceries I bought and I started buying $100 less groceries a month to save this $100. After a year, I had $1,200 saved and I was really happy. And then I put it in a, I think a CD, a deposit for five years and got nice interest. Because he was like compounding interest, when you start early it really adds up, even if you don't make a lot of money.
Pieter (21:33):
I was like, "Okay, cool." These are good lessons also what you said about people losing their money. It's really common with rich people that they lose their money, really, really common. There's this friend, Gabo, who made a ETF websites a blog explaining ETFs. He shows that if some rich people lost all their money, if they would've just put it in the ETF of the S&P500 for 20 years, this is the amount of money they would've made. And this is a lot of money, like hundreds of millions. But instead, they're bankrupt by investing in shady deals.
Courtland (22:05):
Can you imagine if you lost all the money that you made from working on your projects for the last [inaudible 00:22:11].
Pieter (22:12):
It's horrible. I cannot imagine having that kind of personality where you start investing in just random stuff and you lose everything. Elon Musk did it. Again, Elon Musk, but he invested all his funds from selling Zip2, I think or PayPal into SpaceX.
Courtland (22:31):
Just huge gamble. This might ruin me.
Pieter (22:33):
Yeah, yeah. If it would've ruined him, we wouldn't hear about him now. But I don't think you should take these outlier results as examples to do things in life. I think you should look at statistics and studies to see what you should do. To me, that sounds ETFs and Bitcoin and Ethereum, mostly ETFs. Yeah.
Courtland (22:54):
What about you were talking about your investing habits. There's people on Twitter who also wanted to know, just like your productivity habits, because you ship a crazy amount of stuff. Like we were saying earlier, you haven't missed a day in over a thousand days. I think that's not common. It's very difficult. I think for people to get onto the treadmill of working consistently at all. And then it's very easy to fall off that treadmill and have trouble getting back on. It's like what are you doing to help you sort of be so prolific and productive?
Pieter (23:24):
Yeah. I use the site called Wip. It's kind of a competitor to [inaudible 00:23:28] a little bit, wip.co, and it's kind of a tracking system for your to-dos for any makers kind of. Made by my friend, Mark. I think you should buy the websites. I think you should acquire Indie Hack, you should acquire Wip. I've always tell you, but I think they would work really well together.
Pieter (23:44):
But you can just log your to-dos on Telegram, this chat app and also on the website. It's a very easy way for me to do... I also log my life stuff, sometimes even food logs and stuff. I just do /done, fix bug, joint button. Nomad List doesn't work. #Nomadlist. And then add a screen shot, sometimes a video and that's it. And that gives me a really accountable public log of what I'm doing.
Pieter (24:12):
It's really nice. I think Jerry Seinfeld talked about this chart where, on the calendar, you do a cross and you don't want to break the chain when you want to learn something or something. I think that's the same thing. You want to do the streak, you don't want to break the chain and... But even without that, it kind of just happens where I wake up and I check the errors I receive, my robots send me errors on telegram like what happens when I sleep for example.
Pieter (24:41):
And I kind of check like okay, this is a problem we need to fix. My robots control me and manage me and give me instructions what to work on the next day. I kind of need to, because people are like... I don't have much staff. I have some contractors, but they don't really develop. So it's kind of on me to keep the customers happy and it's really fun to do that, I think.
Courtland (25:05):
Yeah. You are number two on the leaderboard. You've got a 1040 days shipped in a row. Someone named Niels is right above you. They have 1,114 days.
Pieter (25:13):
Niels is on the island next to me. It's kind of funny. Yeah. He's also in Thailand.
Courtland (25:20):
This whole product is super interesting to me because it's like... Whip's kind of social in some ways because you can see everyone else who's shipping and I guess in a way, that makes you accountable, especially if you get to really hang on the leaderboard. You know that people know that you're high on the leaderboard. You probably don't want to lose that status.
Courtland (25:35):
But then also, there's this idea of building in public and it's like there's almost no better place to do that than Twitter. Because you get the most feedback, you get... Because I post on Web2 and it's really good for me solitarily is motivation. I want to break the chain. But then if I want people to respond to me, I post it on Twitter.
Courtland (25:50):
On Indie Hackers, we've kind of tried to do this too with these product directory pages where you can sort of have a timeline of your progress, but I feel no one's really cracked the code of what's the best way to sort of help people with their goal of building in public and ideally help them build an audience as a result for that? And then simultaneously solve this problem where you're motivating them and making them accountable and helping them be productive.
Pieter (26:12):
Yeah. Yeah. I think Twitter's the easiest, because it has this whole audience already. It has millions of users, so everybody can see your tweets.
Courtland (26:20):
But you probably don't post little updates like, "Fix the color of this button," on Twitter.
Pieter (26:24):
No, it's too small. It's too basic. But you want to show a big feature or a really big problem you solved. You want to tell the story kind of, so that's more for Twitter. So this is more for small things, but the building in public thing, for a while, I thought live coding was going to be a big thing.
Pieter (26:40):
The build in public live coding, it was the 24 hour startup. I think we had with Pat Walls and Armin Made That.
Courtland (26:46):
[inaudible 00:26:46] on Twitch.
Pieter (26:46):
Yeah, exactly. It was kind of looked it was going to be a thing. I've tried. It's so stressful. I can't do it and I think that's the problem kind with it. You need to sit there for hours, people watching you and it's really fun, but it's too intense for me. So I don't know.
Courtland (27:06):
Even the gamers who do that are constantly stressed out about having to always be performing because it's not enough for them to just play the game and be good at it, they have to entertain this audience on Twitch who's going to criticize and scrutinize their every move. It's like, "Do you really want to be on camera for hours while you're working and having a bunch of like..."
Pieter (27:23):
I don't know. I kept leaking API keys. Every stream, I leaked API keys. It was insane. And then I would get stuck on a problem, which every day I get stuck on a problem where I just need to walk around and think about it or lie down, but you can't lie down because there's 90 people watching, so you're trying to fix this problem you're sweating and it's stressful. You see the viewer is dropping because it's not interesting anymore. Because they only like when you're making new stuff.
Pieter (27:51):
I respect if you can do it, but I can't do it anymore. it's just too intense.
Courtland (27:56):
I've never tried it and I never plan to. I also have like... My sort of productivity tricks are, I've kind of copied your note, you're sort of post-its.
Pieter (28:07):
Post-its. Yes, yes. Yes.
Courtland (28:08):
I love post-its. Most of my post-its have always been little reminders to myself. So if I show you my monitor, I've got these reminders and my romantic relationships, here's how I can be better, I can be more vulnerable, blah, blah, blah. Other parts of my life, like exercise... I have a post-it note where I look at it and I have to do 20 pushups.
Pieter (28:28):
Dude that's amazing.
Courtland (28:29):
I consciously avoid looking at it most of the day, but then I sometimes do and it's just like whatever. I just end up doing pushups every day because of this note. But I never thought-
Pieter (28:36):
You see, you lose, this thing.
Courtland (28:38):
Yeah. Exactly. You see it, you lose. But you do post-its, I think, for tasks and productivity, all you have to do that. I just started doing that a couple of weeks ago and I love it. It's so easy.
Pieter (28:48):
Yeah. It's so simple. I use windows for it. Not Windows, operating, I use the window of hotel rooms or apartments, whatever. I put it on the window and I make a grid of things. And then on the other side, I do the stuff that I finish. I take it, I put it on my laptop and I focus on that task in particular. And then when it's done, I take it and I put it on the finished part of the window.
Pieter (29:11):
It's kind of a combo of using post-it notes and also using the web chat. But post-it notes, it's really nice. You can really... I'll take an hour or something to figure out every thing that I need to do, every bug that's remaining and I collect everything from online and I write it down and I saw this study, I think, that said writing things down on paper, you use a different part of your brain than if you write it down digitally.
Pieter (29:39):
There's something about writing on paper that's different. I think that's true for me. The physical act of taking the post-its and like, "Okay, this is what we're going to do now. Fix the joint button on Nomad List." And I put it on my screen and I work on that, it's really nice feeling because I don't want to fix the joint button on Nomad List. I want to finish this to-do, it's like a hack. I want to take this post-it note, put it on the window and-
Courtland (30:03):
Move it.
Pieter (30:05):
Yes. That's what it's really about. It's not about the bug. I hate the bug. I don't care about the bug.
Courtland (30:10):
Do you ever almost forget to do what to do any day? Has there ever been a day where you almost lost your thousand days streak because you forgot to do something and had to do something late at night or is it just automatic and so obviously easy to you?
Pieter (30:24):
Almost. Yeah. Almost. I just do it when I wake up. I do a small thing immediately.
Courtland (30:28):
It's a habit.
Pieter (30:31):
You don't want to lose the streak.
Courtland (30:33):
Did you see that book? It's like the most popular book on Amazon in every category and every sort of vertical?
Pieter (30:39):
In human history.
Courtland (30:41):
It's like the most [inaudible 00:30:43]. I had him on this show and I had him on a different podcast I have called Brains and I talked about his book and he just tweeted, "Yeah, it's the best-selling book on Amazon period." He's crushing it.
Pieter (30:55):
Every tech guy, well, every tech bro or something or you want to call it, "Yeah man, you shouldn't make goals. You should create systems." I know which book you read, man.
Courtland (31:08):
Yep. My mom was telling me the same thing. I'm like, "Mom, people are stressed out. She's like, "Create systems instead of goals." I'm like, "Damn! This book is too popular." It's crazy.
Courtland (31:18):
I want to ask you about one more time before we get out of here. I'm curious about your thoughts on just the future. Because you're always on the web, you are tweeting about Web3 and crypto and trying live coding and stuff like that. I tend to get my head buried into work and then I come up for air every year and I'm like, "What's going on?" What do you think about these new trends? What do you think about Web3? What do you think about crypto? I've been trying to get into a little bit more and research it and I think it's quite cool. There's some upsides and downsides, but I don't know what you think. What are your thoughts on all this?
Pieter (31:48):
Yeah. Man, it's taking the world by storm. Last week, I was retweeted by Jack, from Twitter and my notifications went crazy because I repost this meme about Web3, which was just a picture I found somewhere and I posted it. I was like, "This is kind of funny." And it showed Web3, this funnel of water coming out and then going into the mouth of VCs, venture capital investors, a lot of water and then some drips were left for the retail investors.
Pieter (32:17):
The kind of sounded it's matched with what I saw on the... Because I follow a lot of Web3 projects and I follow which projects are new. There's a telegram channel, you can't follow everything. What I was observing was that almost every project I saw, there was a big, I'm not going to name, but a big VC firm in there.
Pieter (32:38):
I was like, "Interesting!" They're in every Web3 project. And then I saw Jack tweeting about this. I was like oh, this meme kind of makes sense. So I tweeted and it was insane. It went crazy. And then Jack retweeted and I got so much hate and also I think 600 retweets or something, a thousand retweets.
Pieter (32:56):
So it's a sensitive topic to talk about because they're so... I'm a crypto investor. I'm invested in it, but I also can criticize it kind of or market as a joke. Like, "Come on. Everything should be Markable, but apparently you cannot do it with Web3." And I got blocked by Mark Andreessen and Chris Dixon, but I didn't even mention them. I just posted a meme about Web3. I don't know. It's just all kind of funny.
Courtland (33:20):
They blocked you because you posted the name and Jack retweeted it and they saw it because he retweeted it probably and they're like-
Pieter (33:21):
And then they blocked Jack and they blocked me. It was just a cartoon. It's so ridiculous. Mark Andreesen followed me before that. He was a follower. Damn! Sad. But anyway, it's all kind of interesting.
Pieter (33:42):
I do think it's a future in many ways, like the smart contact stuff. It's a really slow computer that's decentralized and stuff. Everybody knows how it works by now. I think what I really don't about it is that a really big percentage of the projects are bump and dump, how they feel. They're pretty mind then giving them off to VC investors to buy into and then they end up...
Pieter (34:04):
I know people in this crypto world and they go to the big crypto exchanges, they pay money. I think it's 150K to get listed. And then this coin once it gets listed, everybody who knows it's going to get listed already bought in, which is insider trading which is legal because it's crypto.
Pieter (34:21):
And then it pumps 10Xs and if you invest a hundred million, you just made a billion dollars. This is legal, but is it... Maybe we would be doing the same thing if we had all that money. But all I'm saying is that I don't... Man, it's so difficult to criticize because I'm not very well debated with all this stuff. I don't have all the data. I think the technology is very promising. I don't like all the bumping and the, "We're all going to get rich."
Pieter (34:47):
Because I don't think... That's not possible. That's not how it works. You need to get in now, this FOMO stuff. It has all of the red flags of every internet bubble and tulip bubble and all this stuff. I don't think that's interesting stuff. I bought an NFT too. I bought the Poolsuite NFT by Poolsites, Poolsuite they're called now. It's like a members card and it went up a lot and then people are, "Look, you get it. This is how it works."
Pieter (35:14):
I'm like, "No, I don't get it. Why? What are we doing here?" There's no intrinsic... I look sides and pull. I like the concept. But a lot of the NFTs, there's no intrinsic value there or it's very... You know what I mean? My gut tells me something's really off.
Courtland (35:31):
I think there's a lot of this excitement, "Okay. This is a revolution for artists. I know a handful of artists who made a lot of money and so therefore every artist is going to be able make money." Or, "It's a revolution for music. Now, every musician's going to be able to make a lot of money."
Courtland (35:45):
What feels off to me is well, there's still going to be the power-law dynamics where the most popular people are going to get the most listens and watches and whatever. There's still going to be people who are probably pretty good who aren't that good at marketing who no one sees their stuff.
Courtland (35:58):
I don't see how crypto is really going to suddenly make everybody rich. It seems really scammy and doesn't make any sense. But it gives really smart, reputable people saying this.
Pieter (36:08):
Sorry to interrupt, but the argument for that, I think that they have is that you become owner of the project. Even if you're not the person that's successful, you're in early and your part owner. Just like a stock. I think that's actually promising because it would be interesting if I could just list Nomad List as a public company with tokens. But the SEC doesn't allow that because that is a financial security. I do think if the SEC changes their law, that I can just list or mint Nomad List and people become an owner and I can go public with a small company. That'd be great because an IPO now, you need a hundred million revenue. I don't have a hundred million revenue.
Courtland (36:46):
So that's the thing that I'm the most excited about, which is, I guess in a way, these tokens are allowing the average person to "invest" in different projects and stuff. You get a lot of bad things with that and you get a lot of good things with that. The sort of meme that you posted, that's showing the VCs are taking most of the returns for these crypto projects and the retail investors are getting drips.
Courtland (37:08):
I think that is probably true. The VC there is a16z is probably the most notable one. But also, if you look at the status quo of startups, they're isn't even a little drip for the retail investors. If you're the average Joe, there's no way for you to invest in Uber or Airbnb. Only the VCs got in.
Courtland (37:27):
It's like, is it still kind of a VC-run game? Yeah. But is it better or worse than what we had before? I think it's better. You can get into all these things as a normal person. Then often the VCs are just buying tokens that any other person could buy. Maybe they get a few advantages or something sometimes and maybe they get a tip in some insider trading, but you could buy it too. And then an average Joe can't become an angel investor in Silicon Valley unless they know the right people and have enough network to be an accredited invest.
Courtland (37:53):
It's just like you're never really successful. I kind of think it's a move in the right direction. But with that you get scams and you get pump and dump and people who are like, "There's average people investing now? I can fool them much easier than I can fool the VCs."
Pieter (38:06):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Courtland (38:09):
[inaudible 00:38:09].
Pieter (38:10):
Exactly. I went here, football golfing. There's this football golf place here. And I talked to the owner and he said he invests a lot in crypto projects and stuff. I was like that's really cool, because it's a older guy and he puts a lot of his money from his business into crypto. I'm like, "That's cool but I really hope that it works out for you because you've got to pick the right ones to... It's kind of scary and it's all positive. We're all going to go to the moon and it's all going up and stuff." But that's just not always how it goes. A lot of people can lose money and I know there's a libertarian streak in the world, especially in the US of well, it's your own responsibility.
Pieter (38:47):
And it's like yeah, but it's really sad to see people lose a lot of their money and... Maybe it's because I'm Dutch, but in Holland, we grew up where you don't want to see your neighbor go bankrupt. You want everybody to be happy and financially happy. Man, if you go look in history of the stock market in I think 1900 or 1890 or 1910, where there wasn't a lot of regulation, a lot of regulation was created to... Also to protect investors and also in a bad way, because now you need to be accredited and you need to be rich to invest in startups and stuff. So that's not good, but a lot of stuff is to protect people. This is political territory again. I don't know if you need to protect people, but I do know that a lot of people can lose their life savings. How do you... What do you do with that? Sorry, you made the wrong mistake.
Courtland (39:41):
We're all trying to figure this out. The world's changing so fast. A year or two ago, a fraction of people were talking about this stuff that we're talking about it now. No one knows where the future's going to be. But there are these ideas like you were saying, universal basic income or the broader idea that appeals to me is creating a floor below which people can't fall.
Courtland (40:00):
You don't want to see your neighbors go bankrupt. You don't want people to be struggling to eat. Ideally, it's a society we can keep raising that floor higher and higher and higher. I don't know if universal basic income will be the thing, but there are things that once we create, people don't fall... Once we invent technology, that technology exists and it spreads and we don't tend to revert.
Courtland (40:21):
New technologies make the world a better place. And so if we can create a really safe floor where it's safe for people to experiment, then I'm 100% percent cool with people placing crazy bets, trying to go as high as they can and if they lose it or whatever, at least they can't fall that far. I hope that's the direction society moving in, but we're kind of getting...
Courtland (40:39):
It's not like a perfectly straight line to get there. It's kind of jagged. We're like, "Okay, well now anyone can invest in crypto, but the floor's not quite there yet. So you might lose your shirt." Do you think you'll do any crypto stuff with Nomad List or your projects? Because if you had a token for Nomad List, a token for Remote OK, a token for Rebase, I would 100% buy some of your tokens. Partly because I just... You're not going to IPO with any of this stuff most likely.
Pieter (41:00):
Yeah. I would buy Indie Hackers too. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%.
Courtland (41:02):
Right, yeah. I've thought about it. It would be so cool to be able to buy tokens and the projects you believe in that you know aren't vaporware, bait and switch type pump and dump schemes.
Pieter (41:13):
I think the regulation has to change with the SEC allowing for tokens to have actual ownership of companies and projects, because right now they don't allow it. And the only thing you get is voting rights usually. Voting rights is not real ownership. I know they do that because otherwise, it becomes a financial security and they go to jail.
Pieter (41:29):
But the SEC needs to change that. And then following that the European Union, whatever financial authority they have, they do need to do the same thing and the same thing in Asia and whatever. Because then you can have really nice, actual ownership tokens with voting power also. I can give dividends. I'd love to give dividends as a company to the owners of the company. Why not? And that would be super cool. I think we're going to get there within five years. I think it's going to happen. That would validate the whole Web3 scene almost overnight, I think. Because it would not be bullshit. It would be real ownership and until then, if that doesn't happen, we don't know what all these tokens mean. They don't mean anything right now.
Courtland (42:10):
Not ownership, for sure.
Pieter (42:12):
Yeah.
Courtland (42:12):
Yeah. I've done some token investing where it's an interesting question because if I look at the things that I bought, I don't know if I cared about ownership. It would be nice to have ownership. If I bought stock, technically that gives me some rights and stuff. But a lot of the other things exist. You can give dividends to people who own your token.
Courtland (42:31):
I got an airdrop because I owned the ENS token and they paid everyone who owned any of their domain names literally $15-20,000, which is nuts. There's a lot of projects that are going to do that. You get voting rights, you can sort of delegate your voting rights to others. And so I guess my question for you is how important is the ownership? If people can essentially profit when your company increases in value, if they can sell the tokens, if they can get voting rights, if they can get distribution and dividends, why do they need the ownership rights?
Pieter (43:06):
Man, yeah. That's a good question. I was a week too late with ENS registering. I did not get the airdrop by the way, so I didn't get the token. But who cares? But the thing with... If you say you get dividends from an airdrop, I assume that means you get tokens from the same project, which people are trading on. So they have value from trading on them, which is different than giving dividends from the money I make from customers that I then give to you as a owner.
Courtland (43:35):
That's true. They could do that, but you're right. That's not what they did.
Pieter (43:39):
You want to have some kind of intrinsic value in the core where it comes down to. So you have a lot of tech companies Amazon, they don't even give dividends, I think, they don't even make profit. They just reinvest. Because there's a hope in the future they might issue dividends when they are big enough or something.
Pieter (43:55):
That's priced into the price. That's part of the deal kind of. You still own the company, but they're not... It's the same as not owning it, but having a token, but at least there's some kind of... As a stockholder, you can also vote. You can say, "Okay, we want now Amazon to start giving dividends?" How do you do that with a project that doesn't really give dividends. You can issue more tokens, but issuing tokens about what? What's the value? The only value is some kind of concept.
Courtland (44:23):
It's just trading it.
Pieter (44:23):
Right? Some kind of, "Yeah, this is going to be big." You cannot live forever on, "This is going to be big." You need to have some... You know what I mean? There needs to be-
Courtland (44:33):
True. Eventually, the growth stops and...
Pieter (44:35):
Yeah. Otherwise, if it's not, it's MLM. We know a lot of MLM schemes in America like Amway, all that stuff, allegedly, I should say legally, because I don't want to be sued, but you don't want it to be that.
Pieter (44:49):
I think it would really legitimize this whole thing if it became real ownership for me and maybe it's because I studied business also we had finance. So I know a little bit about all this options and stocks work and stuff and... There was this new law in America that let you crowd fund stocks. There was the safe [crosstalk 00:45:09] or something.
Courtland (45:09):
Yeah. They raised they raised the limit on how much you can crowdfund basically to [inaudible 00:45:14] investors. I think [inaudible 00:45:16] did it with Gumroad and got a ton of people.
Pieter (45:19):
Yeah. So it's already getting closer. I think we're almost there and it's unfair that if you don't make a hundred million a year, 50 million a year, you cannot IPO. It's like why can't I IPO? I don't want to sell my company to some person.
Pieter (45:34):
It would be much more fun to sell to the people who use it and then they can vote and they can tell me to hire people and it can be a board of directors and stuff. That would be super cool.
Courtland (45:45):
There's another thing you can do with these tokens that you can't really do with stock, which is you can use them as kind of currency. Let's say you have a Nomad coin or something, you could do job listings that people buy them with the coin. Or if you own the coin, you can get access to the community forum or something.
Courtland (46:03):
There's little sort of things you can do that give the coin intrinsic value beyond just speculating on it. It's interesting. It's a very wild west type thing. I'm not very optimistic that we're going to see the SEC. No one knows. I'm not very optimistic that it's going to be like, "Okay, you guys. Here's our official stamp of approval. Go for it." It'll legitimize things [inaudible 00:46:26]. I feel they have no idea what to do.
Pieter (46:28):
They've been pretty mild on crypto. They've been pretty embracing though, the last few years. And they're leading. If they do something, the rest of the world follows. It's the US. I think they really have the power to change things. You know this better. I'm not American, but it'd be very interesting if to do that.
Pieter (46:46):
The social tokens thing, I think it's interesting because I run a community. I run the biggest remote worker community kind of on Slack and on the internet. If the token of a membership, the price is dictated by the market, these friends with benefits, I think of FWB social token I saw. So the token becomes a $1,000. So now it's become an exclusive community which is kind of good in a way, but also kind of not my thing, because with Nomad List, it's usually 80 or 90 or a $100 lifetime fee and people...
Pieter (47:20):
It means that every month, there's 500 new Nomads that come in and they... It's kind of a nice churn vibe where it's a cafe, new people come in, there's some old people still, new people. It gives a community this fuel of refreshment and communities that don't do that, they kind of die out. I feel they get stale or they become too exclusive and I can see it. If I raise the price too high, I would get a 100 sign ups a month and the community would start dying. People would be like, "Why is the chat so empty?" Price should be dictated by the market for a community.
Courtland (47:59):
I agree. I thought about doing this for Indie Hackers. I don't think I will. Just because it's because Indie Hackers is part of Stripe, you immediately have to go to Stripe's legal team. It'll be just a whole much bigger than just me as an individual. But I was thinking about the same problem too because it's like I don't the idea of creating a really small, exclusive community that's really hard to get into and whatever.
Courtland (48:20):
So it's like okay, well if it costs a certain amount of tokens to get access to the community, you could potentially lower that over time as the token price increases. They're like okay, joining is always the same price. But if you've invested in the token earlier, you still make money.
Courtland (48:35):
That token can still appreciate, but it's valuable for other reasons rather than just access. I don't know. I think there's a lot of experimentation. I hope you do something because I want to... The thing I the most about Web3 and these tokens is I want to see all these different creators who are building their stuff. I want to be able to invest in them. And right now it's impossible for me to invest in them because they're not a $100 million companies. I hope Web3 goes in that direction.
Pieter (48:58):
Dude, I think that's the, what do you call it? Killer app, one of the killer apps. I really believe in Bitcoin. I have a lot of Bitcoin and I think it's... I think I'm starting to pay my contracts with Bitcoin soon because the trouble.
Pieter (49:15):
So I work with a contractor who does customer support and she's Filipino. When I hired her as a contractor, she was living in Vietnam and then she moved to Morocco now. And then when I tried to pay her, I was in Hollands, I think... Or no, I was in Portugal. I was a Dutch person in Portugal paying a Filipino worker in Vietnam with a Singapore company. These were five entities and I tried to do all these...
Pieter (49:45):
I tried TransferWise and Payoneer stuff and they were like... I had to talk the customer support because they're like, "Why is your house in Portugal, but you are Dutch? And your company is in Singapore and your contractor is Philippina in Vietnam. This all doesn't add up." All red reflects. And then we could do this with Bitcoin, with the Lightning Network within half a second with almost no fees now.
Pieter (50:09):
Bitcoin has become cheap and fast. This completely solves it. We need to remember, we are like Europe and America, but most of the world is not Europe and America and their finance, their money system doesn't work like ours and it's not easy at all. It's very difficult to pay people in the rest of the world. Asia, Africa, Latin America.
Pieter (50:29):
I think Bitcoin might help with that a lot.
Courtland (50:33):
For sure. Yeah. Well, listen, dude, thanks so much for coming on. Do you want to let listeners know where to go to, I guess, follow you if they don't already follow you and see what you're up to?
Pieter (50:42):
Yeah. So I'm on Twitter mostly. It's @levelsio, which is L-E-V-E-L-S-I-O. From there you can see on my websites in my bio and see my crazy stupid tweets every day where I-
Courtland (50:55):
See the progress bar of how close you are to $5 million a year.
Pieter (50:59):
Yes.
Courtland (51:00):
Cool.
Pieter (51:01):
Thank you, man. Thanks so much for having me.
