I think that's right. But there's a limit to what kind of business you can create with a single php file in 2018, and typically those spaces are pretty competitive.
Pieter's approach of what lead him to land on Nomadlist is I think where the value is - scratch your own itch, and do a lot of business experiments - don't spend more than a month or two on a business idea if it hasn't gained traction, move to the next one. Again, only works for some type of businesses.
Just ship it works great if you have a unique mailing list with 100.000+ interested users. He had a hit with NL and kept building it from there; most of these businesses share the same target audience. Good for him!
No offense but Pieter Levels seems like a bit of a bastard, and you can see it in that thread. I don't pay much attention to him, but when I do come across his social media posts they're pretty off-putting. He's pretty successful yes, but €50k/mo is not exactly f-you money.
50k a month isn't f-you money? What???? What in the world is wrong with this place? My wife and I are combined pulling 10k a month. I can only imagine that I would need to come up with creative ways to actually burn through the other 40k.
It's certainly impressive for a one person company. Is that 50k a month profit though? I co-own a company that turns over a similar amount but you wouldn't be jealous of my bank balance.
Not sure where I’m being a “bastard”? I answer most replies, many of them odd questions about tech stack when the whole point of the original tweet is that tech stack is irrelevant here.
You weren't being a bastard at all. That tweet shows several people telling you that you're doing it "wrong", and your responses were concise and kind. If anything, I think some of those people were being a little rude.
Can't argue with results. I don't personally care if you have one file with 4500 lines or 100 files with 45 lines. You have a successful and helpful business. Good job!
Frankly all the messages he has to put up with are plain stupid, so if he's being a bit of a bastard, rightly so. I just found about his websites, bookmarked nomadlist.com already. It's funny, to say the least, how people exaggerate taking some data from a database and spitting it out as HTML. The important bit here is the data and the presentation, nothing else.
WRT $50k/mo, for any sane person that's two times more-than-enough. If I could stably do $5k/mo from an app or website I'd be happy.
So I'm going to reply here because I think this is a good one (of the replies I've gotten) to express my thoughts a little bit more clearly:
1) I was wrong about what was going on in that thread. I sort of scanned it at first and saw that snarky "this is why I build companies and you do contracts" post and it rubbed me the wrong way.
2) The $50k (or €50k, im not sure which it is now) number is a lot, but given the way I originally interpreted the thread my initial reaction was more of one like "who does this guy think he is?"
3) I later went back over the thread and saw that people were being needlessly critical of a tiny webapp.
All that being said, I do agree with the replies that are being critical of my thinking here -- I just can't go back and edit it on HN!
Yeah, that sometimes happens, totally understandable. You can't edit after 2 hours, and I think that's too short of a window. After posting the comment you replied to, I saw you made similar clarifications elsewhere, where if you could edit you could've added a little "whoops" message under your original one.
I think it's the word you chose that brought it all on you though. Yet empathising with the way you interpreted the thing, I could've made a similar rant too, frankly.
When it's $50k/mo revenue from business you built and do not need to needle with day in and day out, it absolutely is. Can you sit back and live off dividends from that? No of course not. You don't have Hollywood money or VC money but you sure as shit don't need to spend an afternoon polishing your resume for a day job.
If unemployed and broke is at one end of the spectrum and living off investment dividends is the other, this is 95% of the way there.
Not to mention he could probably have f-you money if he accepted an acquisition. So I would say that he is double smart for not doing that and continuing to build.
Where do you live? I always find it fascinating how the same amount of money can be valued so differently by people. €50k/mo would absolutely be f-you money in my world.
Hell, €5k that's just about passive income(like Levels business are close to being) would set me free and change my life in ways I cannot describe.
$50k/month may seem not much to you but a lot of us earn much less. I would sign now to get 10 times less that figure for life. Besides, that amount is well above the necessary "critical mass" of money needed to make it grow by itself if carefully used: just resist the temptation to waste them immediately in new cars, luxury homes etc. That's the mistake most "rich quick" people (mainly sport players, top chart artists etc.) make when they believe that money will flow forever (it won't).
On more levels than just one. Take a look at the bottom right hand corner of one of his projects[0]. No publicity is bad publicity, but I'm certain that violates proper attribution for Open Maps. If it were Google Maps instead, I'm sure he'd have gotten a very suggestive letter by now.
I think it's really good. Probably the best startup talk I've seen in a while.
In my opinion, there are benefits to doing things alone, but you have to be able to learn a lot of things quick, have a lot of available time with few distractions, and be very focused and persistent.
Cons: it's not as fun, and will probably take longer than working with people with specific talents.
I don't know anything about the person in question, but any "profit" number is going to have to be fictitious anyway. Ideally, you make as little profit as possible so that you avoid paying taxes. You want your money working for you rather than going to the government (or sitting in a bank account). This is one of the nice aspects of taxes and tax avoidance -- it provides incentives for companies to continue investing. Anyway, the point is the person could give an impressive sounding number (indicating that they are bad at managing money) or they could give a tiny (or even negative) number. It's kind of lose-lose.
But I agree with you -- anybody posting "I'm making $X/month doing something that seems easy" is usually trying to sell you a book/workshop/seminar (which is where they make their real money).
I agree and observe the same. I honesty do it because I want to show you can build a business without venture capital funding, and do it as an indie (and in my case solo) maker with a strong disregard for hip tech stacks and frameworks.
I sell a book but that’s less than 5% of my income. 95% is business.
In terms of money, if you just save enough and have low costs, it means potential financial independence.
I think the most joy I get is from making, so I will continue that. Money was the goal in terms of me having to pay my bills, but the second goal was always that I just like to make things.
Before websites, I made music and visual graphic art. Making makes me happy.
Let's use a car as an example. Say Peter's biz buys a car and he uses it. Is that an expense? Does the biz make less profit because of that car payment? Or is he just spending profit on it since it's mainly/entirely personal use? Not trying to get into a tax discussion but my point is profit can be massaged and is entirely subjective. Revenue is not. The money came in, or it didn't. Even in the US for single-job W2 employees, tax rates vary even by locality for folks at the same pay rate in the same company. So with identical pay, benefits, retirement savings, state and federal taxes, my personal take home pay is different than the guy next to me because we live in different townships. Same with business. Revenue is the easy number, profit is pretty subjective.
And by definition profit is a fraction of revenue. It can't exactly be more than 100% can it?
Bwaha, revenue can be massaged even worse. There are companies making BILLIONS in revenue, and it all sounds very impressive until you see they are actually burning more money than they are even making. Profit can’t be more than revenue, but it can certainly be negative.
Making billions but spending more is not "massaging revenue." It's being shitty at turning a profit.
Please explain the scenario in which you can take the same balance sheet and use it to show two different revenue figures. You can't. You can easily do the same thing with profit.
Yep. I spend about $1,500/month to live. Then there's Mapbox ~$500/month, SendGrid ~$500/month, and Linode $300/month. One part-time moderator as contractor $1,000/month, and part-time server guy as contractor $1,500/month.
