My First Million: Pieter Levels: Making $2.7M A Year With No Employees

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now.

HubSpot just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

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company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find Another Bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

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

but less.

Are you intimidated?

Why are you?

He said he took a run before this because he was nervous.

No, because I've been on a lot of podcasts, but like they're usually kind of small.

You know, it's like, I see you guys as like Joe Rogan for business.

So it's like this one step above is like Joe Rogan and then it's you guys.

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

They're amazing.

But you know, like this is like a level.

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

It's a feeder levels.

So and you also don't know what Sam might ask you because Sam might just come out of left

field and be like, yeah.

No, but that's the thing.

I was thinking like Sam is like, it's not a regular interview, you know, he asked some

crazy shit.

So wait, first of all, I don't know if that's true.

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

It's you too, Sean, to ask weird stuff.

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

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

No, that's true.

But I mean, you're not yes, man.

Like, you know, there's yes, man podcast where like they just it's kind of like a fan

thing.

Obviously that's not you guys.

You have real shit.

Real questions.

And I think it's more interesting as well.

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

Can I share that on here?

On the pod?

Yeah.

Which one?

The Sampar strategy for networking.

This is, you know, you can go to Harvard, you can go to Stanford.

You're not going to learn this one.

Sam has this habit where if like, you know, it's a very small little tweak, but it's

just so Sam that it just is awesome.

So if you're, if Sam wants to hang out with you, he'll text you just like a normal person

would, but and he doesn't need to even know you.

He's just like interested in you.

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

somebody else.

Like, Hey, it's Sam.

Uh, you know, I'm in San Francisco, but instead of saying want to hang, Sam will just go,

I'm in San Francisco.

Let's.

He said me some shit that I won't say a lot, but yeah, but I think it works.

Yeah.

So Sam, what, what is this?

And why does it work so well?

It's like a phrase.

You know, like people will be like, uh, you know, I fuck with that guy, like I fuck with

Drake.

I like Drake.

It, it, it extends from that.

And I just say it and people, uh, they reply.

I don't know.

I just, this particular one, it was a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company who I'm

friendly with.

I just said, what's up?

I'm in your hood.

Let's.

And he goes down when like it worked out.

It's amazing.

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

You've been, 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 I am a, that doesn't mean I like you.

It's just, I'm more in the closet about it, whereas Sam is very open.

Sam's like, this guy's amazing.

This guy's like an artist.

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

So it's all true.

And now we finally got you here.

And it was hard, I think, right?

Cause you like don't do, you don't schedule or something like that.

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

I don't need to know if you do that, but I like, you guys, I would get so many DMs

and they're all like, I mean, generally they're very low quality DMs, right?

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

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

I think it's like being a hot girl in the club, like people want something for you,

but they don't want to invest the time to actually get to know you or, you know,

you feel like an object and I don't like to feel like that.

And I want to, um, spend more time with, you know, like with my friends in real life,

with, uh, my girlfriend or something.

I want to spend time on, in the gym, you know, on my health and cooking food

and that kind of stuff, go for walks.

And, uh, I think because I, cause I've been doing this for 10 years,

like startups, like eight years, and now I get the money's going well.

So I don't really need to do any calls anymore, any DMs.

So I'm just trying to create a more chill life and I'm not an asshole.

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

So I close my DMs and then people go really angry on tweets.

They're like, why don't you, why do you close your DMs?

Are you arrogant and stuff?

So I wrote a blog post, like kind of explaining my day and my routine

and what I do in a day and that I don't really have time.

If I do all the things I do now to also DM everybody and reply everybody

and do calls and stuff.

Um, and that's pretty much the arguing argument for it.

Let's give the context.

So let's explain who you, who the heck you are.

So, uh, your name is Peter Lovells.

You're known on, um, Twitter as levels IO, right?

Yeah, that's the, uh, that's the right way to say it.

I saw you a while back.

I'm just going to say some interesting things about you.

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

I believe you publish how much you make every year.

And in fact, it's in your Twitter bio in your location.

There's like a meter that's like your road to three million a year.

And it says 2.7 million.

So your, your meter is almost all the way filled up.

Um, you build a bunch of random, small projects, usually around

some things you like or believe or your lifestyle, which is kind of a nomadic

lifestyle. So I believe, uh, I think you, you, you hop around or you, you

don't have like a home base.

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

Netherlands.

You could be a different place all the time and you make these small

websites or apps and it says in your bio that you have 13 million monthly

active users.

Um, and I've, I remember seeing you because you did a community, uh, like a,

like a nomad community, a Slack community really early on, like Slack had

just come out and I was like, no, this guy's like charging 10 bucks.

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

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

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

Um, like just by making a Slack group, you just do a bunch of small

experiments like that.

Um, that's what I know.

Sam, what did I, I'll give, uh, Peter, Peter, let me give like 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 least, the

lesser of the two interesting things.

So you have roughly five or yeah, you have seven different businesses, uh,

ranging from nomad lists, which makes, uh, 2.1 million dollars in the last 12

months. That's a, that's a, uh, a job board.

You have another job board called remote. Okay.

That's making a hundred and $15,000 a month.

You have readmate read make, which looks like it's like an e-book.

Something like that.

Yeah, it's like e-book. Yeah.

Yeah. 60k a month.

Then you have got like a bunch of really,

Sam, you're seeing these numbers because he publishes them.

Where do you publish these?

He publishes all of them on like the, the URL, uh, go to his Twitter profile

and we'll let you talk.

Sorry, Peter.

In a second, but go to his profile, go to his Twitter profile and then like

click off and it's like, uh, open revenue at the very bottom, but I'm

reading off of our notes.

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

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

but tracks inflation. And then you have rebase, which is a platform to help

people become a citizen of Portugal, help them real relocate to Portugal.

So what's the first part is those businesses.

Like I said, you have those that are interesting.

I would narrow it down to say you have a series of job boards for nomadic or

remote work that are pretty profitable.

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

these things.

So you do a few things that are interesting.

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

And 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 kind of like my big intro of what you do.

I could see a website and I could know you built it without you having an

about page, which is kind of clunky, right?

It looks a little, but it's kind of nice way, I guess.

Yeah.

It's not a designer.

Yeah.

Um, no, I think it's accurate description.

Um, it's like, like, I'm not very nomadic anymore.

Like I'm slowly settling down, right?

But I started very nomadically.

I was like moving around every month.

Um, I started like in 2014.

I started nomadding and I went to all these places and I started building

these apps, these little websites, little products to validate.

And I remember it.

I mean, I told the story so many times, but I was following Patrick Mackenzie,

Patio 11 on Hacker News, famous Hacker News guy.

And now he works for Stripe and he would do, he would share his revenue on his

blog about all his little products he made.

And it was like appointment reminder for barber shops.

So you got an SMS just before your appointment.

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

And I was really inspired.

Like, okay, this is not like some big VC funded guy.

This is just like an indie guy was just on his laptop, kind of building

stuff.

Um, and I kind of mixed that with the nomad thing where like building

from your laptop, from your backpack, moving around.

Um, 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.

Uh, you, your life becomes very unique because you meet different

kinds of people.

You, you're in different kinds of places.

You see different kinds of products like in shops.

Like if you're in Asia, you see some futuristic shit.

You don't see in Europe and America.

Um, and all that stuff kind of, it helps for inspiration for creating

products in some indirect ways as well.

Um, so that's pretty much what I've been doing.

And I think it's, I've been trying to be like radically honest.

Like I know this, this American guy who pushes the radical honesty

movement.

Um, so I'm trying to do that in my personal life.

I'm trying to do it on the internet.

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

Uh, because I don't like this fake corporate stuff.

And it's because I studied business administration and I have a

master's degree in it.

So I know all the management because he'll see bullshit.

You know, I've been there.

I don't know.

I know this is where my friends work.

I know investment bankers and I hate that, that a lot of that

world where it's like fake and not real.

And I, uh, want to be very open and honest.

And I think it's also a little bit of a European thing, not to slag

of America's a lot of America, but like, um, in Europe, people are

very, uh, a little bit more direct and a little bit more, uh,

straightforward.

And, uh, I think that comes across in my, in the stuff I do a little

bit.

So what's the total size of all your, of all your projects in

terms of top line and bottom line revenue?

And isn't it true that you're the only full-time person and how

many contractors are you using?

Yeah.

So I have one customer support contractor part-time, uh, Isabel,

and she works for all my projects.

Um, and I have, uh, a moderator for the slack group cause to

slack groups, they, there's some drama in there.

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

So you need to have a moderator, you need to have rules and you

need to have a, you cannot just automate this moderation away.

Like I tried that, but you need a real person there to, you know,

check on messages and stuff.

Um, and then I have a dev ops, uh, guy is my best friend, Daniel.

And he, uh, works kind of like a SLS SLA, like a service level

agreement where if the server goes down, he gets a message, you

know, if I'm sleeping with something, he brings it back up,

but the problem is it never goes down anymore.

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

So, um, he does security updates and stuff, you know, like, cause

I have a VPS.

I don't use Amazon.

I use a VPS on digital ocean and line out.

Um, and he kind of keeps that stuff safe.

You know, so that's good.

And how big is the business top line?

So how big is the business?

Um, so remote a case, the job board, it's the biggest, uh, business

makes the most money.

No, when this is starting to grow, though, it's like it's past,

I think a hundred K this month, a hundred K a month.

Um, so almost like a million dollar business.

Um, remote a case, 1.6 million a year.

I think, um, and rebase is new business is an immigration agency.

So I want to help remote workers immigrate to countries that

want to attract remote workers with like, you know, beneficial

texts, stuff, uh, Portugal is one of the first ones to do that.

Um, so those are the three business really make money.

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

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

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

So I've looked at your kind of like system and I've looked at a

bunch of people because I got into a little pickle where I was

like, God, I'm doing so many things and I want to do all these

things.

I'm interested in all these things.

But shit, you know, am I going to be able to juggle five

different things?

I got a podcast.

I have a VC fund.

I have my e-commerce business.

I have a newsletter business.

I have, um, you know, I don't even know what else.

Course business.

I got another shit, right?

And so it's like, uh, am I going to be able to do this?

And what I saw that you did, I like, I have this kind of like

mental model of a solopreneur and a solopreneur.

Nobody's actually solo.

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

That's like helpful.

Some, some in a big way, some in a small way.

But basically it's like somebody who builds a personal brand and

then builds a bit, builds a successful business and lifestyle

around that.

And what I noticed was that you had this formula, which is, I

don't know if it's intentional or unintentional, but I'll say it

out loud because here's my, my read of your business.

It's basically you have, you starts with the red pill.

So the red pill is like, you know, that scene in the matrix

where Morpheus is holding out a blue pill.

He's like, you know, do you want, 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 he was like, no, I need to know the truth.

What's the truth?

He takes the red pill.

And basically it's like every great solopreneur, I think starts

with one truth.

So like Tim Ferriss's truth was basically that like the nine to

five work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like effing broken

and you don't need to do it that way.

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

And so that was like Tim Ferriss's red pill and yours was

basically like this idea of being a nomad, a digital nomad.

Which was like, hey, yeah, you don't have to, you know, prescribe

to the, subscribe to the normal way of living.

You pick a place that's where you are from.

That's where you live and you pay, you know, you just kind of

stay where you grew up and like, and you go to an office every

day and like you have to wear shoes and whatever you're like,

no, I wear flip flops.

I walk around on beaches.

I just kind of go wherever I feel like, whenever I feel like,

and I carry a little like backpack and that's my life.

So you start with the red pill.

Then you, then you create content around that red pill.

So as you talking about that lifestyle and sharing everything

from like, hey, people always ask what I keep in my backpack

for the day. Here's what it is.

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

That's like poppy.

That's like fits that red pill.

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

So you become an authority.

And so, you know, Pomp became an authority around Bitcoin

and Tim Ferriss became an authority around life hacking.

And you've become an authority around nomadism.

And then you take that and then you basically spin off one of

many businesses that can come up with it.

But every one of those business either it's a big money maker

or it's just another funnel and more content,

more new audience that's going to like get sucked into that same

red pill lifestyle that you are like talking about.

And so it, even though you're doing six things,

they're all actually part of one flywheel.

And everyone that you do is you 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 a good, is that true?

Or is that not?

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My thing started when I was blogging.

Just like you said,

I was blogging about, like, nomadding.

But I was blogging for my mom,

because back then you had, like, travel bloggers,

like, 2013.

And I was going to travel, kind of, and nomad,

and I wanted to, you know, every place I went,

I wrote a little,

I 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, okay, she can read English,

so it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff,

more audience.

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

It just kind of happened.

And then those blogs started showing up on Hacker News.

And I started writing more about, like,

bootstrapping startups as a nomad in Thailand or something

or in Asia.

And those started going on.

Hacker News is really high.

And I think that was the time.

It was, like, 2013, 2014.

There was a time when I noticed that

the developers in San Francisco

were working for all the startups.

They also were realizing, okay,

I can start doing this remotely.

Because remote work was not cool back then.

And nomading was not cool back then.

Because you had the Tim Ferriss wave in 2008.

It was, like, the first nomad wave.

But there was, I love Tim Ferriss,

but there was something about the followers there

and the business that were created.

They were kind of, like, shady.

There was a lot of shady shit I met.

I came across in Asia, in Thailand,

like Americans and Europeans.

There was, like...

A lot of brain supplements and shit, like...

Yes, yes, dude.

Drug dealers, online drug dealers,

spam, dexing, and, like...

There's still shady shit, but less.

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

I don't feel, like, part of the scene.

I think it would be cool to make it more, like,

you know, mainstream, like,

reputable businesses, reputable jobs that do it.

So I kept blogging about it,

and it kept taking off on hacker news.

And you're right, I think.

And then I went on Twitter,

and I think I kind of, 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.

And, yeah, and then I started all those businesses.

But I think it's not like some...

It sounds very, like, a constructed...

It's not a master plan.

No, it's not a master plan.

It's very organic.

Like, I kind of try...

I'm, like, user zero.

I try to build stuff for myself.

And I always have, like...

I have, like, new ideas, like...

Just like you said, Red Pill.

There's, like, something that's a...

This congruence in society and what I'm thinking.

And most people then think, like,

okay, there must be wrong...

There must be something wrong with me.

But I think, like, arrogant...

I think there must be something wrong with society.

Maybe this is, like, a new thing.

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

Like, inflation.

Like, three years ago or two years ago,

I was tweeting about inflation.

Like, this shit's gonna go crazy

with all the fat printing money.

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

Stop whining about it.

I'm like, no, I'll just prove you

that the real inflation numbers are higher.

So I made this inflation chart.com website

that shows inflation numbers are really high.

Turned out to be true kind of now.

So...

Yeah, that's great.

What technology are you using to build those sites?

Because they all do look alike

and you seem like you can spin them up,

like, really quickly.

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, right?

Like WordPress.

So I knew PHP a little bit.

So I was like, okay, 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 used jQuery.

So everybody starts laughing now

because jQuery is, like, way passé.

But I still use it

because it's so easy to, you know,

make a button,

bind an event to it,

age xj 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,

like, I can make a new button in, like,

you know, 20 seconds and deploy it to the server.

It's really fast.

And I know other developer friends of mine

use a very big stack,

all those, you know, Kubernetes and all this stuff,

all these keywords I don't really know.

And for them,

it takes sometimes, like, you know,

an hour or maybe even days to deploy a new feature.

And I think what we learned from startup

and lean startup is that the customer feedback loop

has to be very,

the 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 and that's,

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.

And yeah, so that works for me.

So very, very simple stack.

And what do you think?

We won't laugh at you because,

not because we're nice,

we just, we don't know anything about,

I don't know what jQuery is.

Neither to say I'm sorry.

I mean, nobody, these days,

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 pieces.

Nice, it's a good podcast.

What do you, what do you think,

what do you think this whole,

your whole thing's worth?

Cause if you go,

Okay, so it depends if you do 5x, sorry.

Sean, go to his like sites and you could see like,

it's like something slash open.

It's usually like the website slash open.

And then like it says like so many stats,

most of which honestly are kind of useless,

but it's just like, it's cool.

It's like, you know, like how many,

70% of them are like, you know,

the equivalent of like a step counter.

It's like, oh, how many DMs did I get today?

How many?

No, I don't have that.

No, you do, you have.

But it's collective.

It's like DM sends, you know, it's collective events.

Yeah.

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, you know, CO2 removed from the atmosphere.

You see the full PNL.

You see a bunch of other things.

And one of them that you see is my, okay.

So 73% profit margin.

Your team says 0.78.

So I guess that's like part time.

Yeah, like full time equivalent.

Like FTE, yeah.

And then plus 492 bots.

What is that service?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

So on the server,

he has the valuation too.

If you scroll, it says,

if we sold for like act, whatever the multiple.

30X profit.

If it was 30X profit, this would be 17 million.

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 like sync it to that sometimes.

But dude, it completely depends on the multiples.

Someone's going to pay for it, right?

Have you sold any of these?

No, I've sold nothing.

But I've been in selling process with previous guests

on your podcasts, you know?

So, but it kind of bounced off.

I'm just going to guess it was Andrew Wilkinson

because he loves...

Andrew Wilkinson.

Yeah, because he loves job boards.

That's just a guess.

I can't say anything.

But 80%, I signed NEA.

80% of the acquisitions, they bounce off, right?

So right now, I'm like, I don't really care.

I like that I have cash flow and my life is nice.

But I...

Until recently, I was really like...

Until like a few years ago,

I was like obsessed by the selling

because you build a startup like in a movie,

like social...

Well, not the movie, social network,

but in big movies about startups,

they're like, oh my God, grow big and sell

and you're millionaire.

But then if you become millionaire yourself

with your cash flow, you're like,

okay, why does it matter actually?

Well, let's actually talk about that

because what's interesting about you

is you have a few that you could sell.

So like, remote, okay, and nomad lists

are both pretty cool.

Have you calculated like how much money you want

and how long it's going to take you

to get there via cash flow?

And if it's better to like, well, why don't I just sell one

and I can get like an eight or $10 million lump sum?

But then I still own this other one

that's making like $3 million.

I mean, have you thought, have you done that math?

And what have you...

The thing is most of my revenues profit,

like the margins are really high,

especially remote okay,

it's like, it's like 94% margin pre-tax.

So it's very high.

So I'd say 10X after 10X gets interesting.

I think the problems with bootstrap companies,

you usually get three, four, five X,

profit or revenue, not sure, which is too low for me.

It's like, 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 kind of just keep going.

It's like heavily automated, like 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, you know, design trends change,

but generally it will keep running.

So it doesn't make sense for me to sell for, you know,

five X, four X, if I might as well wait.

And also like normal, this is like my baby.

So if I sell it, they're going to fuck it up.

I already know because they always do.

Like let's say a big, a big remote startup buys it.

Okay.

I know VC fund remote startups are cool,

but they're also going to be bought

by big, boring companies later,

like corporate companies, right?

And they're going to shut this shit down.

They're like, and this is my contribution.

This is my life's work.

It's like a legacy.

So remote, okay.

I care less because it's a job board.

Job board is not very interesting,

but normally this is like this whole movement and culture

and there's like tens of thousands of people on there

and my friends are on there

and it's like this work of love, you know?

And so yeah, it's hard.

It would be hard to sell that because people are going

to fuck it up.

Are you the largest?

Go ahead, Sean.

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 kind of toiling and tweaking

and iterating that it took before the big kind of breakthroughs

happen.

My life was the same way.

You know, I started my first startup when I was 2021

and I made my first million by the time I was 30 or 31.

Right?

Like it was.

It took 10 years.

And then every year since then, a bunch of great stuff has

happened, but like 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.

It's like the sum of all my revenue together in one chart.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's all your revenue from all your projects all together

in one chart and it's looking like it's like, I don't know,

2012 or 2013 start.

And basically if I go all the way up until let's call it 2019,

you're at maybe 600, 700 K in per year in revenue.

And only in the last like kind of the pandemic boom,

like, you know, let's say 2020, from 2020,

you went from under a million dollars to 2.5 million a year.

Right?

So you tune out of X and you like, it's 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 and which I'm guessing is like pandemic

fueled a lot of people wanting to be nomads and like,

you were there to catch that wave.

You were the guy ready to catch the wave.

Yeah, but I know it was coming.

Right.

This was like, I did this presentation in 2015 where I predicted

there would be 1 billion remote workers in 2030.

And everybody laughed at me and I was like, even in the comments,

like YouTube comments were like, this is ridiculous.

Whereas your sources is bullshit.

And then COVID happened and it suddenly seems very reasonable.

And nobody could have seen this coming.

And I had no idea.

I was actually kind of like thinking like...

You lost COVID or what?

Exactly, with Fauci.

But it kind of like, if you look at the chart,

it's kind of like, you know, it doesn't really go anywhere.

And I was like thinking, okay, this is bullshit.

Like I tried everything to make it grow.

And sometimes it grew and sometimes it didn't.

But generally it wasn't very, it wasn't like a VC startup.

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.

And I remember that like 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, nah, being a nomad is the way to go.

Yeah, but those people were like freaks.

They were seen as very weird.

100%, yes.

But there were some people who took the red pill at that time.

I think Steph Smith, who worked at the household,

she met you in, I don't know, Indonesia, Bali,

or something like that because she had,

I think probably during that, more like that time period,

2014, 15, 16, something like that,

she was one of those people that defected then,

whereas now there's like another wave.

And like if you look at kind of like any lifestyle movement,

it happens this way.

It starts with like very, like crypto,

it starts with the cypher punks.

Exactly, you're right, yes.

They don't 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...

It's the same with the next wave.

Like music genres, like hip-hop, like early hip-hop,

and I come from electronic music,

so drum and bass music was my previous career,

like music producer, it's the same thing,

like EDM taking off in the US in 2009,

like pop-step, that's what broke EDM in US,

that kind of stuff.

You, like these movements,

these scenes are almost dead,

and then suddenly something happens, it's like...

Right, 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 in life, just surf waves,

stop trying to control it, just surf it,

and kind of like pivoting, like pivoting startups

into, that's pretty much just surfing,

or over the waves, because you cannot control the market at all,

you cannot control society at all, you know?

One of the things that bothers me

about this indie hacker movement is...

I love that.

I really like it, I like it,

but in general, what I don't like about it

is people think pretty small,

so they're like, you know,

it's kind of related to the fire movement,

which is like, oh, 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, oh, 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,

you can contribute to society,

and with a lot of these indie hackers,

they kind of 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,

because are there any others

like you that are actually...

How do you think I'm going to go harder on it?

Well, your numbers are bigger.

It's substantial.

Your numbers are nice already,

and it's very clear that...

Could be survivorship bias, right?

Yeah, definitely,

but I still think that there's a mindset of...

For example,

your Twitter bio thing says

your meter is going to $3 million.

I would say most people who are indie hackers

and kind of like the sort of tinkerer community,

they don't even have their meter to there.

Their meter, you know, initially

is going to start much lower,

$60,000 or $70,000 a year,

and maybe yours did too,

but then you like, oh, cool, I filled up that meter,

I leveled it up.

So what was your initial goal?

Was it like make enough to not need a job,

or where did you start?

When did you get more ambitious?

Back when I started, I had a YouTube channel

for this electronic music.

And they was making like a few thousand dollars

from YouTube AdSense.

So I had some runway, some cash flow

to live off, travel off, and work on mini startups.

But it was very fast.

It was shrinking because of the competitive...

Like the copyright claims on YouTube in 2012 and stuff.

So it was pretty much becoming like below

$1,000 a month.

But...

So I had that cash flow.

But to go to your question,

I think it's a power law,

like 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.

All these...

This indie scene didn't really...

It wasn't cool until maybe, I think,

2018 or something, 2017.

So these people that are going into it now,

they're just starting kinda.

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 like 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 business,

to a real product toolkit, right?

And then I think another thing is

you don't see a lot of people

with multimillion revenue

because they will quickly raise VC.

Like once you pass a million dollars a year,

they will switch to, okay, let's go big,

let's go become a billion dollar company.

And I think, well, I'm the exception.

I'm like, I don't wanna be a billion dollar company.

And that's why you don't see those people a lot

because I do know them and they quickly disappear.

Like this app we're using now,

Riverside, I think is raised VC now,

started Bootstrapped,

and then I think Oprah Winfrey used it

and because he's my friend Nandov, 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 gonna raise VC.

I'm like, okay, yeah, you should do that.

Because they think this is like,

this could be bigger than just a few million, right?

So you tweeted something out there

related to this, you go,

not sure if people realize it,

but if your app does 20,000 a month in revenue,

you're probably already a millionaire.

20,000 dollars per month times 12 months,

assume you could sell for, let's call it,

four or five X multiple.

That's a million dollar selling price, right?

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 gotta build a million dollar business.

Like, I don't know.

But getting something to 20,000

to 30,000 a month in revenue

that's digital, it's approachable.

And that's kind of awesome.

I think that's an amazing,

like, 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 kind of bringing it up here.

I think if more people heard that,

that is a pathway to

a millionaire status that does not require

like, winning the startup lottery

of like, inventing the next big thing.

Or working and saving

and, you know, paying your crazy W2

taxes for like, you know,

15, 20 years to get the same outcome.

Yeah.

Exactly. I agree.

Yeah. 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.

So you can sell for 5X, right?

Then your revenue is almost your profit.

So it's the same.

Yeah.

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, oh, you could make a website

that does X or you could make

Nomadlist for this other niche

or you could make, you know,

the immigration one for this other thing.

What's a business that you think could get somebody

to this millionaire status?

Dude, I think what's, man, it's like, again,

this is so personal. So I've been living,

like I used to live in hostels, right?

Like dorms in 2014.

I didn't have money.

Shared with six people, like crazy.

Then I started like private rooms in hotels.

Then the rooms got a little bit more luxurious

because I had more money.

And then I started discovering like apartment hotels

and it sounds like bullshit,

but it works so well with remote work.

There's a hotel right now in Europe on the beach

and there's a kitchen.

What's an apartment hotel? What does that mean?

So apartment hotel is essentially a hotel.

So full service, furnished,

nice interior hotel room,

but you also have a kitchen.

You have a bedroom. You have a living room.

You have a, you know, it's very big.

It's pretty much like an Airbnb.

And you pay per month or per night or what?

You pay per month. Well, you can pay per night.

You can pay per month. It's just like a hotel.

It's like Saunders or whatever.

It's like the one the guy was supposed to come in the pod

and cancel that.

You did one of these in Nashville, right?

Or something where you're like, this is awesome.

It's like a lobby where everyone's working.

Yeah. It's like a, it's basically just an apartment

that you can rent for five days.

And they're pretty cool. I do, I do them all the time.

The problem that I've experienced is what in the New York,

it's like 10 grand a month and it's like 600 square feet.

So that's why I tend to go Airbnb.

But when I'm in smaller, less expensive cities,

you can get like a thousand square foot plays

for like 6,000 a month.

And it's just, it's basically

an apartment building

that has one floor or all floors

dedicated to Airbnbs.

Yeah. The problem of 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.

The water stuff might break.

If things break here, you just get a new apartment, right?

And I've done this in Europe

and I've done this in Asia too, in Thailand.

And I spent about, you see,

two to three K, 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 of surface and stuff.

And it's a huge thing in Asia.

It's a used 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.

And you don't want to live in a hotel room.

A hotel room is very depressing.

I go insane in hotel rooms.

It's just like 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 that make a lot of money,

if you target them, you can make a lot of money

because it's serviced, furnished.

So what would you build?

Do you actually build an apartment hotel

or you'd build a digital product?

That's a big question because I'm a software guy.

I don't want to own stuff.

I don't even want to buy land.

I don't even want to buy a house.

I want to be able to be a 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.

My wife and I are 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 a year, one place,

half a 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, all right, I just want to book

this one place.

Three grand a month.

But they have to show up before I arrive.

They've got to completely set it up.

And they've got 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.

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,

I think it's a thousand times better.

And I think that's another...

Yeah.

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,

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.

If a company can specialize

in managing this stuff and renting it to you,

it's much better.

I think that's a real...

You're on point. That's a real business.

And imagine you can go to a website and you can say,

okay, you can choose different sets of furniture,

different interior 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.

What are some other things that you're interested in,

like lifestyle that you're like,

huh, I do this lifestyle thing differently than people.

This could be...

You could build a business around this.

I think that the biggest problem

with the digital nomad thing is that there's a...

Maybe it's a good big podcast to say that

there's a perception that people travel really fast.

And I have the data that they don't travel fast.

They travel like 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, we have 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,

this family is 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 slow-man market,

which most of us are.

We're mostly slow-mads.

Slow-mads.

Think about education.

Think about homeschooling is taken 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 kind of cool.

But you can do things in a different way.

And now we're still 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,

that's a high-end market

of like, tech workers

that are remote.

You said that you don't own stuff.

You kind of said you don't like owning stuff.

You said that

you don't want to own real estate.

So if you're making

$2.5 million a year in profit,

this is a question that Sean always asks

that I'm stealing it, which is,

what do you do with your money then?

So I'm heavy in ETFs.

I read a blog post

by, what's his name?

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.

I know the West, there's a lot of things about Asia

that are good, but still things very futuristic.

And I also invest

in crypto, like I hold Bitcoin and Ethereum.

I was always scared

to say those things on the podcast, right?

But it's all like very secure and stuff.

It's not exactly the most shocking thing

to assume that you own some crypto.

Every tech guy, every tech bro has crypto.

Yeah, exactly.

You're actually not allowed to have that haircut

if you don't own like three...

Yeah.

If you can't have a high fave with like long top hair

if you don't own three.

I spend about like four or five K

a month or something, that's it.

So most of it is just, 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'm like,

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 for 100 ETF

outperformed all my stock decisions

over the last two years.

So I'm stupid, just like most people...

John, you want to tell them what you did recently?

What? Oh, selling?

With your stocks?

Yeah, so I sold not everything,

but pretty much everything.

I get that.

Yeah, but

I'm scared, they always say like,

don't try and time the market.

So I'm like, okay, I'll just sit and just crash

with the...

Why don't you just like chill?

Two reasons.

One, I didn't want to risk a margin call

because I'd borrowed a little bit

against my stock portfolio,

but to what I felt was extremely safe

and it's still safe, but I was like,

look, 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 it away from

my day-to-day quality of life.

And 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.

So what did you do with the money?

What did you do with it?

It's just in cash right now.

I might do some short-term

fixed-income type stuff,

but for now I was like, again,

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

so six months in,

and that it's all going to get better soon?

Basically, like, there's three paths.

Either it gets better now,

it stays,

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

getting things going up

soon seemed like

the least likely thing.

I would actually be betting against that

heavily, and so I thought, okay,

there's 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 like,

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.

So I thought, either it's going to be

flats boring

in sideways for a period of time,

or it's going to go down more.

And I thought, well, in either case,

then 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

by doing this. And so that was my

thought process, and I figured, okay,

there's going to be these little bear market rallies,

so just sell at the top of the next bear,

so that's what I did. Everything rallied

5%, and I just sold, and I kept

like, I don't know, 20% still in the market,

and I just left the other 80%

and, you know, not

thinking about it cash. But I held my crypto,

I didn't sell my crypto.

That's good, yeah.

Are you guys mostly invested in the American

stock market or worldwide?

Yeah, like you said, I believe in Asia.

I'm like, yeah, 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 like an ETF for like Japan

or something? What are you doing?

Dude, I had a Vanguard ETF, China, and then

suddenly 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,

I don't know this. The government did some shit

with private ties.

They made private companies public or something.

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.

Sam, have I told you about the Jack Ma

thing?

How it's crazy that the third richest man

in the world, they were

trying, I was like, hey, Jack,

shut up. And he's like, yes, sir.

They just took Jack offline.

Yeah, my brother-in-law calls

me like, so we had one moment where

like 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, like,

how crazy is that? That Jack Ma is just

not like, what if you just couldn't find Elon

Musk because he said something that Biden

didn't like? That idea is crazy.

They did it with the tennis player, too.

Yeah, I saw that.

My brother-in-law still calls me. He'll be like,

he'll just call me out of the blue. It's been like a year now.

He'll be like, where's Jack Ma?

And then he'll hang up. And like, that's the whole call.

It's so good. He'll just be like, yelling,

where is Jack Ma?

But dude, that's the thing with Asia and

China. Like, all this stuff is accurate.

There's some crazy shit.

But the other thing is also accurate that

there's the love

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 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, you know, China is going

to be the biggest economy in 2030, I think

by GDP. It's already the biggest economy

by purchasing power parity or something.

Ignoring that

just, you know, 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.

Do you

what

well, I'll do it. We'll do an easy one.

Do you act you like tweeted out

your calendar and it was like free for a

week or something like that. And I know

and I

I kind of 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.

Are you is it real that you just don't play

in anything? Yeah, so

this is the only plan thing and it gives me

stress because I'm like, oh shit, there's someone

coming up.

But I mostly like I spend my days like 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 kind of live

together. A lot of them are in the city near

here or whatever. Everybody's kind of near. So

we just have like dinners outside and we cook

food and the sunset on the beach

and just this nice chill life

that I never had because I was 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

about like because what am I going to call about?

Like I like having calls with you guys. What am I

going to call with other people about like new

business? I don't know. Don't you get bored?

Like, no, because I can I because I work

on my websites, right? I open I make coffee.

I make open my laptop meet my friend and we

code a little bit together, make a new feature.

You know, then you go

to the gym. We go to sauna.

We go swim.

They're kind of like but that's very reason,

you know, I don't get bored.

As long as I ship a little bit

on my websites, I don't really

get bored. You're like the only

rich person. So basically it's almost

always the truth

that no matter how hard you try

the more income that you make

your life, your lifestyle gets

inflated. Maybe sometimes

not as much but then other times

a ton and like I was

like, oh, I'm going to fight it. Like I can't imagine

spending more than $10,000 at a car

or whatever. And then you make more income.

You're like, oh, 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. No, it's on purpose. It's 100%

on purpose. Like it's very

and it's not always

incidentally sometimes you spend more, right?

Like last month was the hotels were

really booked so we had to pay a lot of money, but now it's

still again. I think it's on purpose

because I try to follow like last

month was like 10k or something

for a hotel because we're in Lisbon.

You're making $3 million a year. Yeah, but paying

10k for hotels is ridiculous. It doesn't make

any sense. Like it should be the max like 2 or 3k

for me personally. But I've seen a lot

of people do that

lifestyle inflation because I know from corporate

from again, from starting business, I know

the management management people and stuff

they get paid more and they get golden handcuffs, right?

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, can't have 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 like research about this stuff. Like if you buy

a new car, even if 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 know that

okay, 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. What do you

think you would want to spend more on? Let's

say that like, you know, food, like good

food, like organic

you know, free roaming

I mean, it's cliche like Joe Rowan, right? But

free roaming grass fat cow

beef, you know, that are happy animals

organic vegetables

you know, that kind of stuff

like not goods, you know, experiences.

It's on purpose. I do this.

What are some experiences that you think are worth the

money? What?

What are some experiences that are like worth

the money that, you know,

most people don't even cost money, right?

Like, what do you like coach?

Life coach? What?

No, do you do? Oh, sorry.

No, so that's yeah, you're right. So man,

you got me like you're trying to find like stuff, right?

Yes, I've got this because no, exactly.

I'm done with

I can't sit. I only

do it long haul and I only fly like 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 you know, there's a one

thing I noticed like I was in Bangkok in this

luxury kind of apartment hotel stuff,

but it was a little bit too luxury for me, you know, and

I was there for a month and you start noticing

that you don't meet as much

interesting people like I met one interesting

person who had this giant wheat farm, the biggest

wheat farm in Thailand because I just legalized

it was kind of cool. But generally

it's a very different it's more like a socialite

kind of Paris Hilton audience, you know,

but in the hostels you would meet crazy

people, you would meet backpackers, but also like

researchers and entrepreneurs

and fledgling entrepreneurs, you know, you

met generally more interesting people

because you were more in those

areas and I think the problem

Yeah, sorry

Did I tell you about

Did I tell you guys, listen to this

Sean, did I tell you about Sam Corkos

from levels, other levels

What's the, yeah, yeah,

Levels health, yeah. The levels health, the thing

that goes in your arm. So this guy

So he raised, yeah, that's right.

He raised, 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 on paper. He came

over to my house and he was with his girlfriend

and she made a comment like

joking like, oh, you know, he always gives me a hard time

because it takes me forever to pack, but that's ridiculous. I only have this one carry on.

And I was like, well,

how long does it take you to pack Sam? He goes, oh, I don't

pack. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well,

he had a drawstring bag.

You know what a drawstring bag? It's like a bag that like

you get these at conferences.

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 in 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 like eight years

now or something like that and I only live

and like I do what you do. He's like, he does

what you do, Peter. He lives in

like 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 done in a long time.

So he does laundry every day? I don't understand. How does he

live off too much work? Well, I was like, so 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 and he does it partly

out of, I think this is my guess.

He does it partly out of

like convenience of not wanting to

worry about stuff. I also think that there's

like a philosophy, like a very

philosophical thing going on here because

it's like extreme.

But have you ever heard of anyone, Peter, being that

crazy?

Dude, yes. Actually, like

in 2014, 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 like 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. See, that's cool.

I would do that because I think that actually

adds to the experience of traveling

like traveling fully

light. And then when you get there.

So yeah, I always carry what you need

and then giving it away when you leave.

Like, I'd actually get down with that.

But like, I rotate to

underwear and I put my underwear in my bag

in my bag.

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 like

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. So what do you own?

So I have a backpack.

I have a rolling suitcase though, like a small one.

I have clothes.

I have an iPhone,

MacBook, a pro.

I

have a toothbrush.

I have two stadia.

You can name all the things you

own.

I have two stadia controllers

like gamepads. You can use stadia here. It's kind of cool.

Yeah,

that's about it, I think.

I mean, I have like backup phones

and stuff because, you know, two-factor authentication

stuff, but it's not a lot of stuff.

You mentioned

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?

So what does

doing it mean? Because I'm mostly settled down.

I'm mostly in one place. I'm just like trying to not

buy stuff from Amazon.

Doing it as in not owning stuff.

I mean, like, I think

your life is cool, but you have to acknowledge

that it's alternative in the sense of

like, you know, 1% of

how normal it is. Yeah, for sure.

For sure. I think it's interesting that like

the stuff I do may or may not

become a thing because a lot of things I did

eight years ago now are normal, right?

So it might be

that the things I do now become...

I mean, if you're happy, who cares if it becomes a thing?

Oh, no, it's not about me. It's more like, yeah, it's more like

it might become mainstream.

I think even if you have kids,

you can do it in an alternative way.

You can, you know,

you can go to a thrift store and get like second-hand toys

or something, second-hand clothes, that kind of stuff,

but it all doesn't have to be

so consumerist and

buying. You know what I mean?

You can do it in a different way and

I'm just trying to figure out like how

I, yeah, want to do that and

we try to keep the focus on

a nomad-less style

red pill before briefly, which was

my, I forgot

what it's called. Sam, do you remember the name of like

the Zero Waste Project or the Zero

The Zero Project or something like that?

So basically my wife told me about this. She was like,

yeah, you know, there's like, like in

the city, in the little town we live in,

there's like this Facebook

group and what they do is it's just like

it's like a barter, it's like, oh,

it's not even a barter economy, it's like 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 and it's basically like, oh, your kid,

I think it's a lot around kids stuff, like

my kid's grown out of this.

It doesn't make sense to buy new, right?

It's not like Craigslist Randos. It's like

amongst this trusted group of people

who believe the same thing, but the buy

nothing project, yeah.

And I think I might have butchered exactly how it

works. Sam, do you know a little bit how it works?

Well, it's just the idea of like, instead

of like, reduce, reuse, recycle

like for like consumer

or for like plastic and shit, they're like, no, no, no,

let's just like 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

there's a bunch of companies in the space

but the big one is like this

buy nothing series of Facebook groups

where it's just like, I'm going to give away. I'm giving away these

children's clothes. Come get them.

Yeah, I think I mean, it's

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 every new if you can ask your

family for clothes they already wore or whatever,

right? It makes more sense

to me personally.

Yeah. Who do you want to be like?

Who do you admire

and who do you want to be like? Because

like the reason why people buy

shit for their kids is because they want

to have they want their kids to have Jordan. 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? Like who do you look up

to?

Um,

I like Derek Sivers.

I don't know if you know Derek Sivers. Yeah.

He's a tell me about who is he?

He's, um, he started a company called CD

Baby in the 90s, I think

or in early 2000s and

which was like one of the first indie

kind of music distributors where

you could send your music as any

musician and they would press the CDs

for you and they would send it to your customers and

stuff. And they also now

Spotify and stuff and he sold us for $30 million.

I interviewed him for my best

first thesis actually. He's really nice guy. Like the most

nice guy in startups, I think.

And he's very, he writes

a lot. He writes a lot of books now and he's very

philosophical also kind of nomadic. He's been in like living

in Singapore, he lived in New Zealand, lived in US

and stuff and he's very

if you go to

his website like DerekSivers.

Or Sivers.org I think, he writes

very much

kind of same concepts that I talk

about like about

simple life and

yeah, it's hard

to describe him but I think that's a very inspirational

guy to me and

I don't really need to impress. I think I want to impress

my parents just but they're already happy

with me so it doesn't really matter.

I want to

I want to

try and stay, have like a stable

happiness because I've been depressed a lot. I've

been anxious. I had like

especially when traveling you go crazy in these

hotel rooms alone.

Traveling can, it brings

you very deep into your own self and stuff

and I think the most important for me is to

impress myself

by just being stable and

having a stable happy life with people

around me and

kind of wholesome life.

What part of your life

are you not impressed by?

Either yourself or DerekSivers

or if any of those people

like the lifestyle you mean.

What part of your life

is not at that point where

you feel like it's not impressive in that way

that

I want to have a family too

like you guys and

that's what I'm working on

and

that's more of a focus now.

Pretty easy by the way. You just got to do one thing.

I'll tell you about it.

You need to find the right girlfriend and see

if they're not crazy and you need to connect

and all this stuff and I think

that's it done.

Dude, Sean, you have a

go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. I want to hear

what you're saying.

I think about Elon Musk.

Every time Elon Musk presents something you're like

oh fuck, that's so cool.

Why am I building shitty internet websites?

This is my only life I have.

I'm going to die. I should do something bigger

but then I have to bring myself back to

no, it's cool what you're doing okay.

It doesn't really need to be bigger

but everybody wants to make space rockets

but it's just so hard to do that.

Sean, you have

a dog, right? A little dog?

Yep. I've got a big dog.

Oh, do you like a love dog?

Yeah, so you like animals.

I love owning animals like big aggressive

looking dogs. That's my thing.

It's like 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 like 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

I drive, 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?

I don't have animals

but I want them. I had two cats with

my ex-girlfriend and it was actually interesting

we went to in Bangkok to this luxury

apartment hotel and they were cat friendly

and it was like this

high society of Bangkok people

with cute cats and cute dogs in Asia.

All the dogs are small. They're like small dogs.

I like big dogs too like you some

and they walk around in the hotel

and it's super cute and they have like cats

and dog ice cream and stuff

and food and they have little

little beds for them to sleep in

and stuff and everything is service and

that's another big market I think

tech people with bats and stuff

they want to travel as well.

Sean have you guys looked into flying in America

with an animal?

Why do you think I don't go places dude?

What am I supposed to do with my dog?

Your animal is under 20 pounds right?

Yeah she is but like that also means

like she's not like tough enough to do

all this stuff like we're like oh god

how is she going to handle this experience

you know

of going on a seven hour flight or whatever.

Yeah but she's the dog's able to

so like in turn 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 like in the above

whatever the suitcase thing

and if you have an animal that's above 20 pounds

Who's putting their dog in the above thing?

You could put your dog in something.

It's not that far done. I don't know dude

it's like but it's like putting a blanket over a

it's like putting a blanket over a bird cage

right? I don't know

you put it underneath

whatever you fucking do I don't know

I don't have anything

but that's what they say on the directions

when you look online

like if you have an animal above

20 pounds

you basically cannot

this whole emotional support animal thing

that's kind of nonsense that's kind of getting phased out

you cannot bring an animal

a dog on a flight

I'm always amazed that for popular routes

like a once a month or twice a month

animal friendly route

dude it's gonna happen it's absolutely gonna happen

it's a huge growing market I think

because a lot of rich tech people are not having kids

sorry right

I was gonna say I read something that one airline is

like being like yeah we'll fly pets

like I think they do a lot of pets in the cargo or whatever

because most airlines have been phasing 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 like a differentiator

it's like we let you fly your pet

and everybody else is saying no nowadays

man I think you can do it

I think it's all about slow madding

so if you do if you move like every

let's say every six months

it's not that bad for the dog or the cat

and you give them a stable life

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 like every week

or every month that might be a little stressful

for the dog and the cat right

but six months like yeah it's okay

you had a great tweet

you had a great tweet

it was if you don't have a dog

in your profile picture on Twitter

are you even trying?

that's the biggest growth hack right?

Sam has one right?

you have a Facebook picture I think

this was a thinner dating trick

because they swipe right for the dog

not for you but they still swipe right

so yeah

I've noticed there's like two hacks

when I was single if I ever walk around

like a kid

it's like an automatic door opener to meet women

and then the other one was having

an aggressive but nice looking dog

it's like oh doors

they're disarmed

we're good you know

and why does that be aggressive

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'll think that about you

they want to heal you

women want to heal you sometimes

look at a guy with like a sleeve tattoos

who smokes 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

that just works

dude I love Samoyed Dogs

by the way

the big white polar bear dog

it's so fluffy

that's a very Asian move

of you

they're very popular in Asia

I've seen them here too

but yeah

is there anything

that people assume

about your life and your lifestyle

and your businesses

for example with the hustle

as well as Sean's Milk Road

a lot of people are like oh 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

you can play

you gotta know how to do that

you're just not good at writing

you have to be good and not just talent

you either have it or you don't

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

I think generally people

think that every

website or app or company

that they're a customer of

is much 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 somehow it doesn't take off

because they've been able to copy

the aesthetic kind of

but they don't know what's happening under the hood

so it's much more complicated

than you think

like how to explain this

there's so many little parts

that especially companies want

they want invoices for every little thing they add

the prices 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

it's much more complicated

I was thinking the misconception about

and a lot of your stuff is automated

where you don't have to be involved

it kind of runs itself

it's automated

and to post on your job board

it ranges from $100 to $1000

whatever the huge range

how would you

I'm tinkering with something that costs

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 gotta hire a bunch of salespeople

that sucks

do you think that you could automate most things

that are high ticketed items

oh for sure dude

I sell job post bundles for like 50k

via Stripe

which is like amazing for me

to me like I'm like how do you do that

that works so you make a page

called buy bundle

and you have this

you can go to remoteok.com

slash buy dash bundle

and you'll see like 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 cards

and then you pay 50k

or 40k whatever

how many people do that

it's like 30% of the revenue

I think bundles

so someone's using a debit card

or whatever for 50k

these company cards

this is lagging information

people don't know the company cards have been upgraded

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 like I don't

I'm not hiring people I don't know how this works

I just try it like okay maybe

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

dude I'm looking at this sales page

it was buy bundle so buy 25

25 jobs it's $22,000

you do something interesting on your sales pages

you just pack it with information

totally the right move

you just pack it with tax

like you use icons to kind of break it up

the emojis yeah I use emojis a lot

yeah

no it looks like a circus right

but it kind of works

it's not like well designed right

it's not like minimalist design

it's just like I just add stuff every day

and it just keeps growing but it works kind of

what's the biggest purchase someone has made

I can scroll it all the way

I got another call I got to run to

Peter this has been amazing

nice to meet you Sean

what's

what's been the biggest purchase

that you've had this scrolls all the way up to

$150,000 I think

$50,000 or something around $50,000

but that happens a lot of times

yeah yeah yeah

this is crazy yeah I'm working on this thing

and like it's like $10,000 a year

and I'm like oh man I'm gonna have to like get on the phone

all the time

but seeing you is quite inspiring

but I get annoyed if I

if I need to use like 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 like contact us and stuff

and I get so annoyed with it and I know people on Twitter

get annoyed with it that they can't get a price

directly sign up you know

yeah I think it's much easier to do

like this like a sales flow

I think it's easier I would argue

maybe from now yeah 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 sales person

but when I hired a sales team

and 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

and he goes the biggest

one of the huge mistake I made

was I looked down on sales people

and I looked down on this type of pricing

where I could 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 like I don't know

I think you're right

I think my problem is that it's been

it's very hard to meet good sales people

or to find them

it's so unclear for me how I can hire them

and

you know how can I rate

a person to hire them

as a good sales person

I don't know what's a good sales person

and I've never done outbound

almost never done outreach and stuff

and I'm scared that if I hire

sales people I need to manage them

and then you know they might fuck up

they might start spamming everybody on LinkedIn

and then it becomes like a screenshot thing

on Twitter like Luke Peter Levels is spamming

bad and

if you get the right sales people it can work

I just I'd never

been able to you know find those people

it just matters what you're optimizing for

if you're optimizing for happiness

in a well

if you're optimizing for happiness in like a good life

do it your way your way is working really well

if you want to like

grow at a certain rate per year

and you want to really push it

I do think a sales person is

you do need a sales team

you're optimizing for it you're optimizing for freedom

so in happiness

and I also think there's

different types of companies for example there's companies

that ask for a lot of forms like they want like a W8 form

like all these 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 they pay less money and they are more

customer support for and stuff

so you also

you get different types of customers

if you do it all automatically you get more kind of modern customers

that are

easier to deal with I think

is there anything that

we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about

no I think we

maybe transparency

like the reason I'm so transparent is

I think it's very

like I said before 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

and instead of because 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

I like that but I have a few critiques

the first is I think that if you're

so you remember Buffer

Buffer did the whole

they did it even more

equally as extreme as you would say

but they revealed

but they revealed everyone's salary

and they did that

I think they did it as a marketing shtick

and they did it because they're like

our products okay it's good enough

but let's come up with a cool shtick

so we stick out and it aligns with our philosophies

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 shit all out there

and if I was you

I don't like when we sold their 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 like round

whole numbers instead of like exactly

no there's a real security risk for sure

yeah like

you don't want to talk about where you are right now

and part of it is because

yeah for sure 100%

yeah 100%

so like that's part of the downside but

at the same time

it's a marketing it's maybe it's

it agrees with your with your life

philosophy and also it's a pretty

sick marketing shtick

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 like hide all this stuff

now and they're like where did this open page go

like why are you not sharing anymore I'm like ah I'm just done with it now

um

you know yeah 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 right once you've been doing

it for so long

yeah that's why I'm nervous about even doing it in the first place

yeah yeah yeah

you know it's kind of like a I haven't

gone hard on YouTube or any other

social platform because I'm like oh I don't

want a commitment

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 like activity I need

to do every week I need to upload

a video make a video yeah I think

there's a world where you could do seasons

you know 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

like regularly and I'm like oh man I don't

want to get on that treadmill that's scary no

I think it burns you out like look at all the YouTube is burning out

it's a they all bail extreme yeah

yeah it's extreme schedule yeah I think

this is my I think it might be interesting if I just sit in front

of the laptop like this and I just tell the stuff

I know and I think and instead of writing

it down and just making like little videos

Derek Sivers also did that he makes little

videos about small topics you know five

minutes explain something in the next

video and so Alex Hermosi

is doing it the guy on our

he came on our podcast Alex Hermosi he's been

doing it lately and he loves it and he

and it seems it seems like a lot

of kind of a lot of 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

but dude thanks for coming on this has been fun

I I hope you

you will come on more often and

we'll do a little more brainstorming this time

yeah dude it was super fun thanks for having

me super yeah hopefully we

didn't you said you were nervous because we were

going to ask no I don't think we asked

anything we didn't ask anything crazy yeah

cool there's not much to ask when you tell

everyone on the internet about everything you do

yeah this is always when the good part of

the podcast starts right because you end

it and then like the the real shit

hopefully not

the real stuff I

I hope was was going on the whole time

yeah dude thanks this is awesome

up you pimp out your stuff so it's

at levels yeah it's

twitter.com

levels I also L-E-V-E-L-S-I-O

and there's all the links

on for my website there so you can click from there

thanks dude thanks for coming

yeah

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.