
Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK - Pete-Codes
https://www.nocsdegree.com/pieter-levels-learn-coding/
======
heipei
Well-deserved in my opinion. His no-nonsense and unpretentious way of building
products, often out in the open, should be a source of motivation for others
who can come up with a dozen reasons why they shouldn't attempt to do X. His
blog-posts and Tweets are not hustle-porn but just straight-up "works for me,
I honestly don't care what you say". A quote that I recently read applies to
him very much: "Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money". Pieter doesn't
try to sound smart, after all what could possibly sound smarter than making
this amount of revenue as a solo founder.

~~~
Philip-J-Fry
Yeah a lot of people get stuck in the loop of worrying whether they're using
the right framework or programming patterns or whether their blog will scale
to 1 million daily hits. They rarely ship anything.

If you never put your work out there, you'll never be successful, so the key
is to stop messing around and just build. If it's shit, it's shit, no one can
see the code, if you want to rewrite it then ship it and do it after.

The quicker it's out there, the better it is for you, and it's also incredibly
motivating to get feedback ASAP without guessing what people might want from
your product.

~~~
chrisjarvis
I'm bookmarking this!

------
nstart
I am super inspired by Pieter. At the same time, I'm also not a believer of a
one size fits all approach. A lot of Pieter's work these days is built around
remote working communities. His first ideas when he was doing 12 months, 12
startups were very singular in focus. Nothing wrong with that at all. At the
same time, Pieter's approach has not been used across a broad range of
products in terms of product complexity.

I'm basically curious which larger products have been made with this kind of
relatively ultra-light technological approach and have still succeeded.

I'm particularly curious if there are products that started out as a super
simple application and then grew in complexity while maintaining this kind of
approach. At what point did it break? Are there examples where it did not
break?

Edit - by growing in complexity I mean feature/product complexity while
maintaining technical "simplicity".

Or am I thinking about this backwards? If you are a single developer, you use
your basic tools, and launch products that are light on complexity where the
focus is to ensure it earns money and that's it.

~~~
swyx
i mean, facebook started as a very light php app and then they just built
layer upon layer upon layer on top of it until they basically now have their
own fork of php.

~~~
still_grokking
To my knowledge Facebook doesn't use any PHP since years. (Hack is not a "PHP
fork").

Also I would be very surprised if there is any code left form the early days.
FB was (to my knowledge) rebuild "form scratch" several times during it's
life-time.

Also I don't think one could build a website with PHP and SQLite and scale
this out unmodified to millions of concurrent users for example.

But most websites don't have millions of concurrent users, and it's true that
some very "basic" tech is more than enough to server one's users well in the
majority of cases.

The horrible amounts of over-engineering one can see "everywhere" are imho a
result of two issues: People building stuff and using tech they don't actually
need! Most people don't have the problems Google or FB have for example. Still
people are running static websites on Kubernetes nowadays, and things like
that. (You know, in case you need to quickly scale things out this makes
perfect sense, doesn't it? ;-)).

IMHO one of the main points of good engineering is to choose the right tool
for the job. This means that in 99% of the cases you're actually perfectly
fine with even a "bare metal PHP / MySQL" stack (or similar). _Especially_ if
you're just trying get something up the ground.

On the other hand's side a good engineer should know upfront when this won't
lead to the desired result. As an engineer you should know _all_ of your
tools. The simple day to day ones but also the complex and advanced ones — you
need to choose wisely which to use when. If you don't think about all of the
possible design space, and all the pros & cons of going some direction, you're
otherwise just a guy with a hammer; and not an engineer…

So it makes imho a big difference whether it is an informed choice to use "low
tech" or just the result of "I don't know better". No matter the (first)
outcome may look quite similar.

In the first case there is a chance that the people that did that will be able
to "scale shit out" or add all kinds of features in a clean way. In the second
case one can expect that the people that "just had an hammer" will create in
the future the usual "layers and layers of mess" all over the place when
tasked to extend or scale their system, as they just don't know better.

As a bottom line: Software engineering is hard, very hard. To arrive at a
_simple_ but _correct_ solution is almost an art and requires the most skilled
and knowledgeable engineers money can buy. It was a genius btw who insisted on
things being as simple as possible, but not simpler. Coming up with "a simple
solution" (ignoring half of the problem) or "killing flies with Bazookas" is
trivial, everybody can do that. But that's not proper engineering, imho.

~~~
cutler
Hack is to PHP as Typescript is to Javascript so, yes, Hack is a PHP fork.

------
brainless
I am a solo founder and I recently saw the post of solo founder persistence,
which I am yet to read in full. Pieter is one of those that can consistently
deliver. He has been doing that for years now. I admire him and what he does,
yet I know I can not. I am plagued by mental, emotional issues that break my
routine every few months. I started focusing on perseverance and I am happy
with where I am now. There is still a long way to go for me and Pieter will
stay an inspiration.

~~~
pieterhg
Hey :) you should see my brain and discover what I'm plagued by! I struggle
with moderate anxiety and depression on and off too and esp this year has been
quite hard.

Work is quite therapeutical for me because it keeps me creative, active and
have goals. It keeps me on the rails really. Daily creative stuff to work on.
My dad does the same as he's always renovating the house, doing woodworking,
or studying film history. Just tasks to do.

Even if those tasks feeling meaningless and motivation drops (eg symptoms of
sneaking up depression, especially during this crazy year), getting one task
done usually helps to alleviate that and get back into it. That and a
supportive girlfriend, working out a lot and trying to eat healthy.

I think it's much more common especially in entrepreneurship and ambitious
pursuits than we think, so the moment I drop the word depression or anxiety
people are like "omg are you okay?", but it's just a part of my and many
people's existence I think.

So just so you know, while it might look like my brain has it together from
afar, it's somewhat of a struggle on and off and will be the rest of my life,
and I think for many people. And my work might just be a result of trying to
deal with that, instead of an obstacle.

~~~
brainless
Pieter, I do not know how to thank you enough for this. Last few weeks have
been a disaster, cluelessness creeping in and I hit the bottom again.
Thankfully I have YC Build Sprint so I forced myself somehow to ignore
everything that is not working in my life and focus on what is working.

Yes depression and anxiety are common in these circles. My work motivates me,
I am 37 years old and this is my life, has always given me comfort. I have wet
eyes while I write this, thanks, a million times.

\- Sumit

~~~
pieterhg
Hang in there! Take life one step at a time. Everyone is dealing with their
own challenges all the time. You can do the ting! And if you ever need someone
to listen, send me a message on Twitter

------
umaar
Sometimes I think it's fascinating the rabbit holes we'll go down, when
ultimately, the user just doesn't care.

TypeScript vs. plain JS

Logic-less templates like Mustache vs. Handlebars

Vue vs. React

Using async/await, and adding the relevant infrastructure to support that
(transpiler)

Clean code practices in general

Unit tests, end to end tests

CSS BEM vs. tailwind

You can make indirect connections to imply the user _does_ care, e.g. E2E
tests catch a bug which meant the user didn't see it, but generally, these
things are meaningless to them.

For my first course, I put time into those things - time taken away from
making content. The more I think about it for my new course, the more I wonder
should I just sell on a platform which already handles all of that, like
gumroad.

Where's the line though? When is gumroad or squarespace not the answer?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Yeah that is what it boils down to often; the user doesn't care. It's more
about what's best for the developer.

The problem is that a lot of developers want to work with what is 'sexy' at
the moment. That's one factor that also drives e.g. job adverts; most
vacancies I've seen will have "cryptocurrency" and "IoT" sprinkled in, just
for the sake of looking attractive.

And old applications get rewritten in newer tech because of a combination of
technical debt and developers going "I did not write this so I cannot read it
and do not want to work with it".

Granted, newer programming languages (or versions thereof) often have better
developer ergonomics (I spent my morning trying to get a C codebase to work
while with my new Go codebase it should be a matter of installing the Go tools
and doing 'go build').

Another factor is the perception of productivity; rebuilding software
greenfield will feel super productive for at least the first six months to a
year, after which things become more of a slog as the backlog fills with bug
reports and change requests, instead of new features.

Source: I've seen this happen a number of times.

Disclaimer: I'm in a rebuild project myself now, the old codebase is nearly
200K of very poorly written PHP / JS, and the Decision was made to rewrite it
from scratch. I'm going with Go and React at the moment; Go because it's
unsurprising and boring code that should be fine for the next decade, and
React because it's a de facto standard now and should be fine for the next 3-5
years as well. Both tools were decided on in part for future developers that
will work alongside or to replace me.

But I'm sure in a few years my opinion on what is the best tech stack may
change, idk.

~~~
throwaway815190
Another factor here is employability. Employers go with the latest fad
framework because they think it'll improve their ability to hire engineers in
the short term. Unfortunately, this means that web developers need to always
know the latest fad framework, whether they like it or not, or they won't get
interviews let alone job offers.

------
sushshshsh
I would say that for every Pieter on this planet, there are thousands of
failed Pieters.

The success of his business niche doesn't have much to do with tech stack or
even programming, but rather Instagram style lifestyle businesses.

~~~
kiza
Agreed, almost any developer could build the same products. The real reason
for success is by selling the nomad lifestyle via social media.

People buy into the dream.

~~~
sushshshsh
And it's a very tenuous dream at that, I'd say. It requires constant
handholding, upkeep, juggling, whatever you want to call it, to manage all of
the visas, plane tickets, bookings, finding remote work, finding a network of
people for which reason you allegedly moved to the country :)

Call me square but it's much easier to just overpay for rent in the USA and
just focus on building "bulletproof" skills for a long career here.

After all, nobody stands up postgres on EC2 anymore right, we all just use
redshift and lambdas? right? ok well maybe not all of us :)

------
thrownomadaway
I am going to take the opposing side of HN's groupthink and tell why I don't
like that this guy is celebrated as a hero.

I haven't checked since a while but a long time ago when I tried to sign up to
his site it was a showcase of dark patterns. What I specifically remember is
that it sucked in all my data on a sign up form before telling me that I
actually have to pay for access. I specifically checked every square inch of
the opening site beforehand to see if it's a paid system. But it was filled to
the rim with all the other usual dishonest marketing psychology bullshit too.

Usually it's best to avoid anybody who does any business with "digital nomad"
in its description. So many hustlers preying on clueless people who are sucked
into the promise of easily setting up an online passive income while
travelling the world. Coaches, masterminds and paid-for online communities are
the worst: newcomers pay access to people who are either essentially in the
same shoes as themselves or are only part of the community to make a profit
out of it. Obviously the ones who are willing to pay for this (and fall for
the above described dark patterns) are the ones who want to get value out of
it, not the ones who can provide. Why would any serious "digital nomad" pay to
be part of such a community?

Also the original nomad list site was like a distillation of everything that's
wrong with the lean startup ideology. The content was not only thin, it
actually looked like it was totally made up. Whenever I saw someone link it as
some authority on a location I always wondered whether anybody who has ever
been to that place had any input on it. But it didn't matter, it was sleek and
easy to digest so it took off. And then could be used as a traffic source for
the other ventures under the same umbrella.

So the guy is now making half a million a year based on a site spreading
completely useless and misleading information and riding the hope of a better
life of newb digital nomads. Yes I am bitter that I am not his position. But I
am also bitter that this is the kind of business practice that makes money
nowadays.

------
gargron
I don't think it's at all surprising that there is no relation between tech
stack and business success. End-users don't care if you use a single PHP file
or a Go binary, they never get to see that anyway. So I don't really see "it
was all a single PHP file" as a gotcha. The whole thing could've been coded in
Assembly, the difference is in the effort required for development, ease of
maintenance/scaling up and how well-guarded you are against vulnerabilities.

~~~
amelius
Also, this is not really a "tech" story. Everybody is building websites these
days. What counts is what business you build with them.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Yes and no. The tech doesn't matter but that is The Point. That is, your tech
won't save bad product. Using the latest cool kids framework or buzzwordy tool
won't save bad product.

Yes, the business you're in matters. No, it doesn't matter how you build them
- as long as it's quickly. If you outgrow you're overly simplistic stack, that
is a _great_ problem to have.

~~~
xchaotic
Arguably Pieter might be at this point already and he doesn’t care. With the
right tech and more people he could scale some of his businesses further but
he deliberately doesn’t want that as its diminished returns for him,
personally.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Right on. With complexity also comes responsibility and commitment. Sometimes
less is more. It might not be sexy. It might not win awards. But that can mean
less stress and less risk.

------
sdoering
> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's
> makers.

I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from
their documentation:

"SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic
websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that
SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database.
Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work
fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a
hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that
amount of traffic.

> The SQLite website ([https://www.sqlite.org/](https://www.sqlite.org/)) uses
> SQLite > itself, of course, and as of this writing (2015) it handles > about
> 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of > which are dynamic
> pages touching the database. Dynamic > content uses about 200 SQL statements
> per webpage. This > setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server
> > with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below > 0.1 most of
> the time." (Source:
> [https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html](https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html))

So SQlite is quite a valid choice if you need a database and stay below ~500k
HTTP requests per day. So it probably is "production ready" for many a site.

~~~
Cthulhu_
As long as SQLite doesn't catastrophically break under load it's fine for
production, but only as long as it has a single client; traditional database
engines can deal with multiple applications connecting to them.

I'm using sqlite for a production application as well, but its load will be in
the range of - at best - thousands per day. The only complexity will be that
there has to be a secondary 'fallback' server; the current application just
copies the whole .db file over to the secondary server after certain events.

~~~
bravura
If I have a simple Flask or Django app, backed by sqlite, how do I make sure I
only have one client? If I use a prerolled Apache or Nginx frontend (which may
or may not be set up with multiple threads or whatever), and have very very
low traffic, how do I make sure I'm not corrupting it with multiple writes?

~~~
lukeschlather
It's probably fine to leave Apache or Nginx with multiple threads (probably
even a good idea) but you need to make sure that uwsgi or whatever Python
server you're using on the backend only has one process.

If you can somehow architect things so a single process is doing writes (but
leave multiple processes doing reads) that's likely even better.

However I would suggest doing a lot of testing. It's possible multiple write
processes isn't the end of the world below some threshold.

------
Abishek_Muthian
Having done exactly opposite to what Pieter has done as a solopreneur for many
years -

i.e.

• Best Engineering practices set by industry leaders.

• Using state of the art tools, libraries, architectures etc.

• Being paranoid about Technical Debt.

I would say Pieter's strategy is a better if you're a serial-solopreneur. I
had a CS degree, so its even hard to think of such a route and I considered my
startup to be a long haul but there are valuable lessons to take from no-
code/non-CS community; after all they solve problems for their consumers and
make money from it.

But, I wish every solopreneur knew and suggests one advise in every interview
they give ' _Buy a fat health insurance, largest you can afford, take care of
your health as when you go down your startup goes down and no amount of
automation can save it_ ' and that's what happened with my startup.

------
devit
I don't think this has anything to do with tech stack.

React is generally easier to use correctly than plain JavaScript, PostgreSQL
is as easy to use as SQLite (and more powerful), Node is as easy to use as PHP
(but has more libraries, and you can use TypeScript which makes it easier to
write correct code), etc.

The only actually simplifying choice seems to be using a single VPS instead of
a Kubernetes-based cluster.

It's far more likely that both the financial success and the tech stack are
caused by a pragmatic attitude focusing on the business itself rather than
tech details, rather than the tech stack being the cause of the success.

~~~
ShorsHammer
> PostgreSQL is as easy to use as SQLite

Absolutely disagree. One is incredibly secure out of the box, the other is
certainly not, they probably shouldn't even be compared. We can check Shodan
if you want some empirical evidence for this.

------
break_the_bank
Link to tweet by Pieter where he mentions monthly revenue that totals to
$1m/year [0]

His entire empire runs on one VPS that costs him just $320 a month.

[0][https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/11340898562654945...](https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/1134089856265494528?lang=en)

~~~
spiderfarmer
My (smaller) 'empire' runs comfortably on 3 VPS servers because I have more
media and data IO, but that also totals around 400k. It's amazing what you can
do with VPS servers when compared to 15 years ago.

~~~
Pete-Codes
Good to know!

------
sixQuarks
I don’t usually like to toot my own horn, but I make $600k/year off a plain
HTML static site that isn’t even coded well, in-line CSS, many pages not
responsive, broken links, etc.

~~~
kreetx
What site is that? :)

~~~
sixQuarks
I knew someone would ask. Sorry but I’m not gonna reveal it, don’t want
competition.

I will say it’s been online for over a decade, information rich, with
affiliate lead generation as the main source of income.

~~~
kreetx
Hah! But great work otherwise then. But did it start out as a hobby, or was it
entirely planned as a business?

~~~
sixQuarks
It was planned as a business from the start. I was running a different site
that started as a hobby, and one of the affiliate links was performing well
even though it wasn’t highly targeted to the audience. I knew there was a biz
opportunity there.

------
refresher
Something jarring about the 'Dracula PRO' colour scheme unlabelled
advertisement in the middle of the article.

~~~
giarc
Yes it was really out of place. Same with the No CS Degree job advertisement.
It was even more out of place since the main article was about a guy creating
job boards, I thought perhaps Pieter had made a new one?

------
cblconfederate
Levels is quite transparent about how to build and monetize communities. I 'd
expect he 'll receive a lot of hate if blogs like this make him a posterchild
about "making money without a degree". He is talented, which the blog fails to
mention, not everyone with or without a CS degree is talented. I also like his
opinionated approach of not engagint with haters.

~~~
Pete-Codes
Actually, he sent a DM to say he liked the article.

I would re-think talent. Pieter works hard.

Talent can lead you to think people are born to be successful.

Pieter just works hard. Work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

------
nikolastojkov
This has nothing to do with Tech and everything to do with his MBA and
business knowledge. The way he markets, writes copy and actually builds
communities is what is making him a shit ton of money, not the single
index.php

------
langitbiru
I'm collecting these kind of success stories (without the helping from VC).

The other story which is very inspiring as well is the Tailwind CSS
([https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-
byproduc...](https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduct-to-
multi-mullion-dollar-business/?ref=heydesigner))

~~~
herrgigglung
I met a guy travelling in South Africa / Namibia in 2013 who had two web
businesses
([https://www.replacementkeys.co.uk/](https://www.replacementkeys.co.uk/) and
InternetRadio.com). Had No Degree, just self taught / on the job training. He
had written most of his stuff in Perl :o! Similar philosophy to this to Pieter
Levels!

------
pc86
If you don't know who Pieter Levels is, the title makes it sound like this
person makes $600k doing remote coding work on jobs found on Nomad List and
Remote OK.

In actuality, he is an MBA who runs these two businesses.

~~~
bilbopotter
Also he's up to about 900k now the video referred to is old.

~~~
swyx
that's run rate - he had a recent spike up to 1m run rate. his biz is quite
volatile.

~~~
pieterhg
Yep, it's about $710k/y with Nomad List and Remote OK only now. Add to that
more side income from MAKE book, other smaller projects and investments

------
person_of_color
I don't get it. One guy makes a job board and makes 300k/year. Not exactly a
hard problem to solve.

What's stopping a proliferation of job boards to arbitrage away his revenue?

~~~
ativzzz
Network effects. The value of a job board is the amount of companies and
potential workers that use it. Being tied to his digital nomad community
brings in a supply of workers and companies that work remotely.

------
vmception
I have a broken bootstrap template that I've recycled for over half a decade
to make landing pages for new products.

It's always funny when junior developers come to support the product and balk
at the code.

Yessir, its a one page static website that just got me $1,000,000 in three
weeks and your attention and ability to pay you.

Funnier because I used to be that junior developer.

The memes that recognize this are so good and spot on: the pedantic guy with
glasses and out of place bowtie complaining about some irrelevant best
practice, while money printer go brrrrrrr

~~~
cblconfederate
what bootstrap version?

~~~
vmception
3.3.4 from 2011, but this was in use for a very long time before the real
flurry of upgrades started coming out. I've been using a template since
2014-2015

------
Pete-Codes
Not bad for a PHP in one file guy, huh?

~~~
cblconfederate
All programming is programming, it could be in C and I d be fine with it

------
techslave
i think this deserves a nitpick. when we say “makes” wrt a person, it means
their gross salary/income. here, it refers to revenue. that’s misleading.

~~~
tome
They must be pretty close for those kinds of sites, no?

------
kelvin0
I did not know if this person until today, very glad for their monetary
success.

However, the technological choices that he makes seem fine for the type of web
applications he's building: seemingly simple, one-off projects to which he
adds more features as needed.

I don't know if that approach would work on maintaining a large code base in
the case of a meatier project that needs to be maintained for the long term.
My own experience doing web dev (which is not my specialty) is that
HTML,CSS,JS quickly become unmaintainable when you try to scale them without a
well though out architecture and some prior experience.

Once again, glad for him!

------
dsbleia
This is exactly how I learned to code. Started with simple coding projects
online then built a personal website now building web apps.

Although, I do think it is important to learn React now a days. I started
teaching myself React a few weeks ago via this same process. Incredibly
powerful for web dev

------
dvh1990
Pieter's businesses are impressive, but IMO not using React nowadays is
actually harder than using it. Building stuff vanilla takes more time, effort
and knowledge.

~~~
ativzzz
> not using React nowadays is actually harder than using it

For a solo dev, the only thing React makes simpler is dealing with JS that has
to manipulate a lot of HTML. If your app doesn't do that (IDK if nomadlist
does or not), then React is overkill and unnecessary. Even if you want
reusable components, for many simple usecases the React lifecycle is complex
and unnecessary.

------
deltron3030
He didn't just develop an app, but an entire movement.

~~~
BrianOnHN
Which movement was that?

~~~
skrebbel
I think GP is referring to digital nomads. Pieter didn't start that for sure,
but I can imagine more people took the dive because of Nomad List + Pieter's
open and honest sharing about his own digital nomad life.

------
davidbrennerjr
sqlite can't be compared to postgresql since sqlite was specifically designed
as file-based DB for embedded applications not as a full-featured RDMS

------
maxdo
Why this ad posted on HN?

------
RhodesianHunter
I haven't visited either site, but I sure hope he doesn't have logins or
gather any sensitive user information if he has no CS background, no prior dev
experience, and is running entirely on vanilla JS/PHP using no frameworks.

That combo sounds like an ideal recipe for a security nightmare.

------
xwdv
It's worth remembering that while his tech stack is low tech stuff, the
methods Pieter used to build a community is basically the marketing equivalent
of using React, powered by a microservices architecture using multiple
languages and feeding data from a sharded database with multiple points of
redundancy and cache layers.

