Pieter Levels shares his philosophy and practical stages for bootstrapping successful software startups as a solo developer without venture capital.
📚 My book is out now: readmake.com
🐥 My Twitter: x.com/levelsio
Presented at Dojo Bali dojobali.org, thanks to Michael Craig and Haren Tambi for hosting, Marc-Antoine Fonne for filming, Andrey Azimov, Clare Harrison, and Petr Suska for supporting.
The popular narrative of startups is outdated. You don't need venture capital to build a startup. You do need a DIY attitude, a lot of persistence and become a generalist who can learn new skills like coding, design and marketing quickly. This way of building a startup is called bootstrapping and it's the coolest way to do it I think. The best thing is you don't need to rub up to venture capitalists to get funding, you keep ownership of your company and you have higher odds to make more money.
The 7 stages of bootstrapping a startup:
Intro
💡 Idea
🛠 Build
🚀 Launch
🌱 Grow
💰 Monetize
🤖 Automate
🚪 Exit
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This event took place in at dojobali.org in Canngu, Bali on January 15, 2018.
This is straight from my book that's coming out this month called MAKE (makebook.io/) for $30. Don't worry, this book is only 1% of my income, so I'm not a bullshit artist telling you to buy my book. I am doing fine without it! Thanks!
ABOUT ME
I am Pieter Levels, the founder of Nomad List (nomadlist.com/), the biggest crowdsourced city database and digital nomads social network. I also founded Remote OK (remoteok.io/), the biggest remote jobs board in the world.
After I was quickly going broke in 2014, I started building "12 startups in 12 months" which got a lot of attention and forced me to ship a new app every month.
Most of those apps didn't become successful, but some did: Nomad List became a real startup with millions of monthly users, multiple acquisition offers, $25,000 to $40,000/month in revenue, while having a real cultural impact of getting tens of thousands of people to travel and work remotely.
Remote OK started as a basic jobs board for remote workers, and grew out to now be the highest traffic generating remote careers platform with about $30,000 to $70,000/month revenue in job posts.
My total revenue over all my projects together has now surpassed $100,000/month and is growing at 1.76x per year. I share this to make the point again: it's possible to bootstrap a company without venture capital and all the bullshit that comes with it.
I also won Product Hunt's Maker of the Year in 2016 and 2018, won Product Hunt's Side Project of the Year in 2018, am the #1 most upvoted Product Hunt maker, got my apps multiple times to #1 on Hacker News and I was on the frontpage of Reddit twice (with Nomad List and Hoodmaps).
I don't have the keys to success, so I can only
Why it's here
2 people recommend this
What people say. Recommended as an inspiring and realistic talk on solo software development, bootstrapping, and launching fast.
d
dharma1on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?”
Here's a recent talk by Pieter - link to this video 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.
Check this video out where he goes over his past projects: link to this video The truth is, out of the dozen or so products he made, only two had real commercial success, NomadList and RemoteOK. So there is survivorship bias present, he just kept trying until he succeeded.
On “Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?”
Here's a couple of links you might like, although not all of them are exactly what you're looking for: - link (of course) - link - link - link - Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? (Jan 5, 2017): link (thanks @jbonniwell) - Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? (Mar 9, 2014): link - Ask HN: Sideprojects/passive income businesses with little or no own coding?: link - Pieter Levels - Turning Side Projects into Profitable Startups (1h presentation): link to this video
Hello HN. I was partly inspired by Pieter Levels' talk about 0 turning side projects into startups and his 1 startup per month. So I finally got my act together, and launch my own sideproject to a greater audience here in HN. Honest and brutal comments are welcome. 0link to this video
On “You Don’t Need All That Complex/Expensive/Distracting Infrastructure”
8 days ago also, 81 comments link After the last time I watched a video of the Nomadlist guy, Pieter Levels, talking about it and he said >I've woken up so many times at 4:00 a.m. to just check if my website down and I have to do all this stuff and then I'm awake for three hours because the server crashed. link to this video So maybe just PHP on Linode has some drawbacks
On “Ask HN: How do you stay disciplined in the long run?”
It's painful. It's supposed to be painful. Anyone that successfully launched kept working through the pain. Think of non-coders that taught themselves to code and launched webapps just by googling and facing the pain. link to this video
