This Guy Makes $3M+ per Year With 0 Employees

Have you heard of a guy who launched 12 startups in 12 months? The guy who, to this day, has built over 70+ products while backpacking across the world.

Yes, I am talking about Peter Levels.

He makes all his money while living a nomadic lifestyle. He has traveled to dozens of countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. But did you know his journey started with a simple spreadsheet?

Out of his 70+ projects, only a few turned out to be successful. According to him, almost 95% of everything he ever did failed, except a few hit projects.

RemoteOK → ~ $1.6M/year

NomadList → ~ $1.2M/year

ReadMake → ~ $60k/year

PhotoAI: → ~ $624K/year

InteriorAI: → ~ $480K/year

TherapistAI → ~ $48K/year

Let’s get into this amazing founder's story.

Just a quick reminder: here is a link to my Medium list, which includes all the founder stories I have written to this date. Thanks

How this all started

In 2012, Peter graduated from university with a Master’s degree in Business Administration and Entrepreneurship. Pieter launched his first business entirely by accident.

While in college, he started uploading his electronic music mixes to YouTube. He grew the channel Panda Drum & Bass Mix Show to 100k+ subscribers. Now, other DJs asked for their mixes to be featured on the channel.

The channel made enough money from ads to support him. But he didn’t like being tied to Google’s YouTube machine. So he decided to change the way he was doing things.

In 2013, he sold most of his belongings and flew to Thailand. It took him a while to complete any real work. The fear of his project failing drove him to spend a long time perfecting it.

In 2014, Peter came back to Europe to get rid of fear and depression.

Pieter began the 12 Startups in 12 Months challenge to ensure that he followed through on his ideas. His breakthrough came on the fourth startup.

The first 3 projects were called:

Play My Inbox

Go Fucking Do It

Tubelytics

For NomadList, his fourth project, Pieter wanted a list of cities that were suitable for his nomadic lifestyle. Instead of creating a website first, he made a public Google spreadsheet to collect the initial data. His tweet went viral among remote workers and nomads.

‘’I was slightly stunned by the response. Apart from filling in all the data, people started adding columns for different indicators’’,

Peter, during an interview

He built the first version of NomadList from all the data he crowdsourced. Peter later launched an MVP in less than a month. After getting some initial traction, he started to monetize Nomad List.

Ideas creation and marketing

Peter does not believe in conventional marketing. But, in truth, he is one of those marketing geniuses. Look at the ways he promotes his startups.

He bought a billboard in front of Apple’s headquarters in San Jose to promote his startup.

I did a giveaway of $10,000 to a random person who retweeted his tweets to promote his startup, RemoteOK. And guess what?

He got 8k+ retweets on this tweet. Possibly more than 2 million impressions (crazy marketing tactics).

After launching Nomad List, it brought in about $1.2 million in ARR.

RemoteOK, the 7th project in the series, is a job board for remote jobs. These are mainly programming, web design, and development jobs.

RemoteOK is Pieter’s largest business, bringing in over $1.6 million in ARR.

How is Peter doing?

Pieter is someone who kept at it even after so many of his projects failed. Can you replicate his success in 2024 with simple ideas like his? Probably not.

But the lesson here is building; new opportunities will come. Better ones.

In recent times, Pieter has worked on a lot of cool stuff in AI, like:

PhotoAI

AvatarAI

InteriorAI

TherapistAI

AplicantAI

Peter is a genius indie entrepreneur who loves to make products, promote them creatively, and live a nomad life. He is seen online posting photos from Hong Kong one day and tweeting from Thailand the next.

He is now an inspiration for people who want to make it big in life.

Story lesson

Peter’s story is one of those stories that gives us an important message: that success is all about iteration.

And the other aspect of this story is how many of us in life succumb to survivorship bias. Peter most projects failed but we see only the ones that succeeded.

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