// transcript — 832 segments
0:00 Intro
0:00 I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe,
0:02 because it's almost like the patient is so sick— Never waste a crisis.
0:06 The problem is, if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right?
0:11 It's hard to stay in between. I also work really hard, because I tweeted,
0:15 I think 125,000 times over 10 years, so it's like, 40 tweets a day.
0:18 You've contributed so many brain cells to spending time on X.
0:24 Pieter Levels, one of the most prolific indie hackers and digital nomads,
0:27 whose businesses now do more than $3 million in revenue— and it's just Pieter working on them.
0:33 Cheers. I think you are maybe the most prominent indie hacker?
0:37 Pieter’s resume
0:42 Nomad List, got to $700k in ARR, Remote OK has gotten to $3.4 million in revenue,
0:48 Photo AI got to $600k in ARR. And these are all just you. Like, these are not startups that you have started,
0:55 these are just Pieter Levels productions. You're also at the vanguard of the digital nomad thing.
1:01 You've lived in more than 40 countries and 150 cities? Yeah, I think so.
1:05 I've mostly just been working on my laptop for the last decade, traveling around,
1:11 just making stuff, making little creative projects that I needed
1:14 to solve my problems. And then most of the time, nobody else needed
1:18 that problem solved. But a few times, it worked, And then, I mean, I used Stripe a lot, right?
1:24 When Stripe came to Holland— back then I lived in Holland, it was 2014, I think—
1:28 I was like, "Oh, shit, now I can start making money." and that was the year I started making money.
1:32 When I was a kid, I think I was 12 years old, I was making websites too,
1:36 and I wanted to charge money on the internet. And I remember signing up to Worldpay—
1:41 I think it was Worldpay—and there was a giant contract. It was in America, and I lived in Holland,
1:45 I asked my dad to sign for it. And my dad read the whole contract, and it was like,
1:49 "You're liable for damages up to $100 million." He was like, "What am I signing for?"
1:53 I'm like, "No, Dad, you don't understand." "I need to make money on the internet. Just sign it."
1:56 And he signed it. We faxed it to America, and I had a merchant account. I never sold anything.
2:04 Luckily, maybe, because otherwise, we would be liable for damages.
2:07 I feel like this is a common thread amongst entrepreneurs getting their parents to help them with things
2:11 they shouldn't do. Patrick, at one point, got a demo of a Sun Microsystems workstation.
2:17 Oh my god. Remember, these were very high-end workstations. And he just filled out the form and
2:22 got them, they came with a truck and they unloaded it... Oh my god.
2:25 ...and he was playing with it. And I just remember the Sun Microsystems rep
2:29 was calling the house and they were like, "Is Mr. Collison interested in continuing with a purchase?"
2:35 And our mom was like, "Mr. Collison is doing his homework, and you need to stop
2:38 calling me." They hadn't realized that he was 12 years old at the time,
2:42 or whatever. Man, amazing. Did you try to monetize projects before you started building them
2:46 on YouTube or— No, because... So what happened was, I was making music and I was DJing,
2:49 I was organizing nightclub nights in Holland, UK and stuff, drum and bass music.
2:55 You're Irish, you know drum and bass. Drum and bass, most people don't really know it,
2:58 but British people know, Irish people know it. So, when YouTube started monetizing videos,
3:05 I was uploading my music already. So I was one of the first YouTube monetizing people.
3:09 I was number one or number two in Holland for a while, in the top channels.
3:13 But the thing is, I started making money, like $1,000, and then $2,000, and then $8,000 per month,
3:17 a lot of money. And I was in university. So it seems like you've done well
3:20 on this, kind of being a person on the internet. How much of a partisan are you
3:25 on the topic of the indie hacker approach? Because obviously, most of tech
3:31 doesn't run in the indie hacker way, where, again, you're building multimillion-dollar
3:34 revenue businesses all by yourself. Do you think way more people should be doing
3:39 the indie hacking thing? I mean, I think the internet makes you partisan, right?
3:43 So I don't think I've been partisan much, but I think— Until you got on X.
3:47 Yeah, well, X does help with it. But you have to understand—2013, '14,
3:51 when I entered kind of the startup world, there was barely any... There was no indie hacking,
3:56 there was no bootstrapping, almost, except Patrick McKenzie,
3:59 who you know well. You would find investors, you would raise money,
4:02 you would grow fast, you would hire a lot of people, you get a big office.
4:04 Remote didn't exist, remote work. So compared to that, what's possible now?
4:10 There's alternatives possible now. Yes. And you can make a lot
4:13 of money with this. I don't think you can become a billionaire.
4:15 Maybe we will see that in the future. So you think for talented engineers
4:19 who have a commercial brain, and who are good at product... ...they should at least seriously evaluate the path
4:28 of just building their own successful products in the internet, like you? Yeah, I think...
4:31 Look, what I hate most about VC stuff is when you see people burn money.
4:35 You probably hate this as well. A company with no users raises $50 million, $100 million,
4:40 and you're like, "What is this product?" Like, it doesn't have any traction and it's just hype.
4:44 We've all seen these startups. And they just disappear. I think it's much more interesting—
4:50 and maybe you guys did the same with Stripe— but validate first and build a business first,
4:55 and see if you get traction. Like, get to $50k or a $100k a month.
4:58 No, look, I'm with you. Despite the fact Stripe has obviously raised VC,
5:02 we just started writing code, we got our first paying customer
5:05 way before we raised any money for the business... Wow. ...and then it just
5:08 kind of grew and grew and grew. And it's a little bit different
5:10 company in the financial services space. You need to be well-capitalized
5:14 Yeah, but this is the thing. It's natural. It's kind of organic, right?
5:16 Even if you raise money, you did it in an organic way, and you only raise more when you see the growth coming.
5:21 Have you ever been tempted to raise for one of your projects?
5:23 No. But a lot of VCs have been in my DMs, and they want to invest.
5:26 And I think because now I'm financially independent, I've made a lot of money,
5:32 now I could do it, because now I'm at a point where it sounds fun to play with other people's money.
5:38 But also, in a serious way, it sounds fun to go to a bigger thing.
5:44 I mean, that's something you typically say after you've been a week in San Francisco, right?
5:47 You start talking like this. But I'm not convinced yet. But I think now it would be fun. for example.
5:52 But the problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right?
5:58 It's hard to stay in between. You can't make $10 million a year.
6:01 You kind of need to make $100 million a year. You kind of need to become a unicorn.
6:05 That's difficult, because the odds of that happening are not super high. Like, it's a few percentage [points] maybe.
6:12 So most people don't get there, and they do spend five years
6:15 or, I don't know, seven years of their 20s on that. And that's something where, if you would be an indie,
6:20 and you would have a $10-million-a-year company... It'd be great. ...and you have 100% ownership.
6:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. You have so much money. You're saying as a VC-funded startup,
6:27 you're kind of locking in the expectations for your company in advance as to what's successful and what's not.
6:33 Yeah, And it's quite liberating to just start building things.
6:35 Pieter Levels enterprises, broadly, is making $3.1 million a year. Yeah.
6:40 And you've launched 70 projects? Yeah. Probably more, because I don't have the list, Yeah.
6:44 But it's like— You've launched so many that you lose track, but it's at least 70.
6:48 Do you shut them down if they're becoming too small to be relevant? No, I try
6:52 to keep a lot of them running. I like to keep the internet history existing.
6:56 It's sad to see all these websites disappear Yes, yes. I keep them on my
7:00 server running. URLs shouldn't break. Yeah. One product that still runs on Stripe is Go Effing Do It.
7:05 I don't know if I can curse, but gofuckingdoit.com, where, for example, you wanna quit smoking.
7:10 So you write, "I wanna quit smoking," or "I don't wanna smoke." And the deadline is
7:15 December 1, 2025. And then, you have to enter the email of your friend
7:19 and he checks it. And then you enter your credit card with Stripe
7:23 and it creates a customer, and it doesn't charge the customer yet.
7:26 And you set a price. So for example, $100. And then on December 1, 2025,
7:30 your friend gets an email, "Did he smoke?" And he says yes or no.
7:34 And if it's yes, you get charged and I get the money, And the product still works,
7:38 and it still makes, I think, $50 a month, and I didn't change the code
7:43 in 10 years. It's PHP, you know? Yes, yes. It still runs. So part of what you're doing
7:47 is you're creating all these businesses that have actually pretty long lifetimes as well.
7:50 Yeah. Who should try the digital nomad thing? Who does it appeal to?
7:54 I think anyone. It doesn't matter if you're 20 or 70 or whatever.
7:57 It's so interesting, because you change as a person also. But I think, digital nomad, it's so cool,
8:01 because leaving your own country, which I did... The first time, I did a study exchange program.
8:07 I went to Korea in 2010, I think, from university, and I was like, "This is a completely different world."
8:14 I'd never left Europe before. I went to France, you know Italy,
8:17 but there's neon signs, and it's like... Far away places. ...it's crazy. Yeah.
8:22 This changes you on such a fundamental level, going to the other side of the world.
8:26 It's amazing. And it's way safer than you think. Usually nothing happens.
8:29 I've never been robbed except in my hometown. It was a burglary. So in 10 years of digital nomading,
8:34 nothing ever happened. So, yeah, I think it completely expands your horizon.
8:38 There's nothing I can recommend as much as for people to just go travel. And don't be scared, man.
8:42 There are always people who will help you. If you don't speak the language, you can use your arms—
8:47 How did you make it not be lonely, not knowing anyone in all these places? It was extremely lonely.
8:50 Oh, okay. It just was lonely? I was like, "This is amazing."
8:54 And then you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture,
8:58 your home country. And everything's fine, people are nice, but you're like...
9:04 It fundamentally removes your foundational culture at some point.
9:09 You become untethered. Yeah, untethered. That's it. And you have to rebuild it up.
9:12 And that's a psychologically taxing process. It takes some years.
9:15 Yes. What have you learned from Patio11? Dude, amazing guy. What an inspiration.
9:21 So, you have to go in the time machine. Back in 2013, or even earlier,
9:25 I'm reading Hacker News in university, and I read two types of articles.
9:29 I read, "We're raising $40 million for a startup." Back then Hacker News was full of raising,
9:34 it was special. Now you don't see that anymore. Now it was more tech.
9:36 And you'd read Patrick McKenzie, "I made $60,000 this year with Appointment Reminder."
9:41 This site, which was like... He would go to hair salons, I think,
9:44 and then sell his appointment reminder website. It just reminded people to show up for their appointments.
9:49 Yes, like an SMS. It was the most amazingly simple business. And I would read this post,
9:52 it was like, "This is amazing, this guy." Like, $60K a year, that's big. We need to do this.
9:57 So seeing somebody making a cool, honest business... And another guy, Jon Yongfook,
10:02 he was a few years after Patrick Mckenzie, but he was also traveling as a nomad in Singapore and Asia,
10:08 and he was very well-dressed, and he was making beautiful SaaS.
10:13 I was impressed that they were making honest, cool, clean businesses.
10:16 Yes. And I wanna do the same thing. One thing I was reflecting on
10:17 125k tweets and the brand of @levelsio
10:19 is the fact that you are now a big brand, in a way, the brand of Pieter Levels,
10:25 where... Well, no, think about it. You sold $50,000 of pre-orders for your book
10:29 before you had written any of the book. You just said, "I might write a book, and buy it here,"
10:33 and you got $50,000 of sales. And so, to what extent does the recipe now work
10:40 because you are launching these products, and if someone else was to build
10:43 the flight simulator or if someone else was to write the book... Yeah, I've seen these
10:45 replies, too. ...then it wouldn't sell as well? Yeah. Man. I think of course it's part of it,
10:50 but I also work really hard, because I tweeted, I think 125,000 times over 10 years,
10:54 so it's like 40 tweets a day. You've contributed so many brain cells
10:57 to spending time on X. Exactly. Are you getting a lot of ChatGPT referrals?
10:59 Getting referrals from ChatGPT
11:02 Talk about this. It's amazing, yeah. I've seen the growth. ChatGPT, a month ago, was...
11:08 So, if you have the Google traffic, that's like 100%. ChatGPT was, like, 4%.
11:13 Now it's 20%. Wait. In the last month, ChatGPT has gone from 4%
11:16 to 20% of your traffic? In the last month. Yeah. So it went 5x, and I checked other websites
11:19 it's the same story. And I think it's beneficial for me, because it's very hard for me, as a solo person,
11:25 to do SEO stuff. And I hate SEO stuff. I just want to make a cool product and a cool website
11:30 with a nice title and whatever. You talk in your book about automation
11:34 being really important for making the indie hacker recipe work.
11:38 Because I guess if you get drowned in operational work, you're not gonna be able to do multiple projects,
11:41 you won't do as many shots on goal, everything like that. So how much has the automation
11:43 What Pieter automates with AI
11:46 of your business tasks improved over the past 10 years, if at all?
11:51 Man, it's been amazing for me. What have you automated? So, for example, Nomad List,
11:57 it's a big website, you can visit, you can find a place to live and work remotely.
12:00 But you can also join a community. You can pay $100, you join a community of meetups,
12:05 a chat group, all this stuff. This chat group was hell to maintain.
12:10 I mean, you know from communities, it's so much drama. I've had crazy stories.
12:13 Wait. Is the AI content moderating the community now? Exactly. It was very hard for me
12:18 to moderate this stuff, and it was very hard for me to be impartial.
12:22 You have, like, politically different sides. And I feel I'm kind of in the middle, kind of neutral.
12:28 But the moment you ban one side, they're like, "Oh, you're on that side."
12:31 And so with GPT, it's actually neutral. It's really good. I write down the rules of my chat group—
12:38 and it's 40,000 people— and it doesn't ban anymore, it just mutes people for a day or 10 minutes, or—
12:44 Like the debate moderators in the presidential debates. Yes, essentially. It just muted them.
12:49 That's it. So, like, I can either hire people, or I can just use the GPT API.
12:57 I don't like hiring because I need to manage people, and I don't really like managing people
13:00 because it's not my thing. I like to create things. Well, in your book, you recommend that people build
13:02 Investing and home country bias
13:04 for their own understanding of the problems they have. Shouldn't you make an investment product?
13:09 You and Warren Buffet basically have the same views, which is, a lot of money managers
13:13 and wealth management products... Oh, come on. ...are very bad because they're charging you
13:18 very high fees to invest in bad things. And actually, what the vast majority of people should do
13:22 is buy a simple index, maybe the S&P 500 or the MSCI World or something,
13:25 and then just leave their money there and don't touch it, and especially don't sell it during drawdowns.
13:29 Yeah, so Vanguard. Exactly. But Vanguard already does that. But there aren't good products for Europeans,
13:33 I feel like. That's less common. We buy them via Ireland. UCITS.
13:37 Sure, you do. But again, I feel like, you know, if you want an idea for the next business,
13:41 I think good investment... There's a lot of money in there. It's a lot of money. ...good investment products
13:43 for Europeans. But then, you increase the price. That's the problem.
13:45 Like, if you resell a Vanguard ETF that has a 0.07% fee per year—
13:49 No, you need large scale to make it work, Yeah, yeah. And maybe that doesn't fit with the indie hacker
13:53 philosophy. Yeah. No, I think it's a cool idea because it helps people get richer and wealthier.
13:56 Yeah, and there's this home country bias in stock purchasing,
13:59 where people in Germany... Oh my god. My parents have this. ...buy German stocks.
14:01 This is crazy. I told my parents, they're like— Yeah, they're buying the Dutch stock market, probably.
14:06 Yeah, and I'm like, "You need to buy S&P 500 fund." They're like, "No,
14:08 we're not gonna buy in America. We're gonna buy Royal Dutch Shell."
14:11 I'm like, "Come on." And they have all that money in Shell, in oil.
14:15 And then, "Have you seen Tesla, electric cars now?" And they're like, "No, it's not gonna happen."
14:20 I think investment is very important. Look, if you make money as any indie hacker has,
14:25 even as a VC founder, it's very important to not spend all this money,
14:30 because you have a limited time in startups to make money, I think...
14:33 ...and put this money in the market. And it doesn't have to be only America.
14:37 I always talk about Asia, and it's very hard to benefit in Asia
14:39 from the economy's rising because the product market is not as efficient as in the US.
14:44 So you should definitely have the S&P 500. But definitely, you can look at other ETFs
14:48 in the rest of the world. I've got some in China, it's always never
14:51 doing well, but at some point, I'll be right, you know. So yeah,
14:55 it's very important to invest your money well. And most people
14:57 don't know personal finance. Like, you don't get it in school.
15:02 You save money, but your money, your cash, disappears the moment you have it.
15:05 Hacking thermostats
15:05 Yes. Are you one of those people who hacks the thermostat when you get to a hotel room?
15:10 I've tried, but I've never succeeded. I also have failed. I've watched the YouTube videos.
15:13 But it's always some different model. Siemens. I think they're wise to such people,
15:19 Like, they make it hard to override them now. This air conditioning problem,
15:22 it's such a big problem here. We need people in the comments to teach us
15:24 how to override the hotel thermostats, because the ones that are set to, like,
15:28 72 degrees Fahrenheit, or 22 degrees Celsius in Europe... I mean, that should be—
15:32 I mean, how many times do you get back to Europe? Often, right?
15:34 Often, yeah. It's a massive problem. The European hotels and air conditioning,
15:39 it's not a good situation. No, but it's Airbnbs, too. My friend went to an Airbnb in Italy,
15:44 and it said, "Don't put it below 25 degrees because of regulation."
15:47 It's like, this is unacceptable. And all the studies show, like,
15:51 look at Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore... For sleep, you actually need it pretty cold, yeah.
15:53 You need it really cold. The sleep quality gets so good. We're talking about European air conditioning.
15:57 EU acceleration movement
15:58 You've talked about the EU accelerationism movement. What is required for EU accelerationism?
16:05 So I think it was two years ago or one year ago, I saw Beff Jezos, who's Guillaume Verdon.
16:12 He made e/acc, which is effective accelerationism, which is like, "Let's accelerate America again."
16:17 Like, it's been a very depressing time, especially with Covid.
16:19 Let's look at the benefits of technology and AI for the future,
16:22 and I thought, "That's amazing. We need to do the same for Europe," so I did EU/acc.
16:27 Like, let's do this for Europe. Because Europe has the same kind of depressing,
16:31 kind of down vibe about the future. And I understand, because there are a lot of problems,
16:34 it's not an easy life for a lot of people. So that got a lot of traction.
16:38 And I crowdsourced this bug board where everybody could submit their ideas
16:43 for how to save Europe, how to fix Europe. And tens of thousands of people submitted ideas,
16:48 and then they up upvoted each other's ideas and stuff. I think number one is just, like,
16:51 remove the regulatory burden for new businesses. Yeah. And there's other stuff, like remove
16:55 the cookie banner and stuff. and I hope it'll be easier in Europe
16:58 to start a business, run a business... Yes. ...As easy as it is in America.
17:03 I think there's so much... Nobody doubts European talent or intelligence,
17:10 It's cool, smart, ambitious people. But there's a ceiling for them.
17:15 They can't go higher because they're getting pushed down by governments,
17:17 by regulation. And it's like, what are you doing European countries?
17:21 You have amazing people. You could compete easily. Yeah. I think there's kind of two things.
17:26 One is where the regs are just bad. And the second is where the regulations
17:30 are not standardized, where employment law is really annoyingly different across European countries.
17:37 So if you're a 10-person startup and you employ people across Europe,
17:40 it's actually really cumbersome. Whereas in the United States, that's quite easy.
17:44 Yeah. so the problem of Europe is...it's very funny. You have all these different countries,
17:48 and you have the left side of the political spectrum are not very pro-business,
17:54 they're more for regulation and for protecting people, and the climate change and stuff.
17:58 And then you have the right side, which is pro-business, but they're also nationalists.
18:03 But the problem is, what we need is pro-business and federal Europe.
18:07 Like you need to be pro-Europe. Yeah. Not nationalist, and you need to be pro-business. So it doesn't exist.
18:13 So it's like, where do you start? I think it's actually good that it's going so bad
18:17 in Europe now, because it's almost like the patient is so sick—
18:21 Never waste a crisis. Yeah. Finally, Europeans are like, "Maybe we should do something?"
18:28 Two years ago, when I would tweet about this, they said, "Stop talking bad about Europe.
18:31 It's going great here." And now they're like, "Okay, maybe we need to do something."
18:34 Entrepreneurship in the EU
18:36 What would you highlight as the ideas that need fixing? I think the problem is if there are not a lot
18:44 of opportunities in Europe for people to get jobs or start businesses,
18:48 then they're gonna look down on Americans getting rich with these big businesses,
18:52 because they're jealous. Europeans are jealous. And you need to change this idea that business is bad,
18:59 that getting rich is bad. Getting rich is simply a representation
19:03 of your added value to the world economy, in most cases. Of course, there are edge cases.
19:08 Generally, the money in your bank account is how much value you added to society.
19:13 And in Europe, that completely does not... They really think different.
19:17 In America, you get much more respect for being an entrepreneur.
19:21 But I would say, don't be afraid of money. Money is a tool in this world
19:26 Pieter's reflections on Stripe’s API
1:33 Trying to make money online as a 12 year old
1:36 and I wanted to charge money on the internet. And I remember signing up to Worldpay—
1:41 I think it was Worldpay—and there was a giant contract. It was in America, and I lived in Holland,
1:45 I asked my dad to sign for it. And my dad read the whole contract, and it was like,
1:49 "You're liable for damages up to $100 million." He was like, "What am I signing for?"
1:53 I'm like, "No, Dad, you don't understand." "I need to make money on the internet. Just sign it."
1:56 And he signed it. We faxed it to America, and I had a merchant account. I never sold anything.
2:04 Luckily, maybe, because otherwise, we would be liable for damages.
2:07 I feel like this is a common thread amongst entrepreneurs getting their parents to help them with things
2:11 they shouldn't do. Patrick, at one point, got a demo of a Sun Microsystems workstation.
2:17 Oh my god. Remember, these were very high-end workstations. And he just filled out the form and
2:22 got them, they came with a truck and they unloaded it... Oh my god.
2:25 ...and he was playing with it. And I just remember the Sun Microsystems rep
2:29 was calling the house and they were like, "Is Mr. Collison interested in continuing with a purchase?"
2:35 And our mom was like, "Mr. Collison is doing his homework, and you need to stop
2:38 calling me." They hadn't realized that he was 12 years old at the time,
2:42 or whatever. Man, amazing. Did you try to monetize projects before you started building them
2:46 on YouTube or— No, because... So what happened was, I was making music and I was DJing,
2:49 I was organizing nightclub nights in Holland, UK and stuff, drum and bass music.
2:55 You're Irish, you know drum and bass. Drum and bass, most people don't really know it,
2:58 but British people know, Irish people know it. So, when YouTube started monetizing videos,
3:05 I was uploading my music already. So I was one of the first YouTube monetizing people.
3:09 I was number one or number two in Holland for a while, in the top channels.
3:13 But the thing is, I started making money, like $1,000, and then $2,000, and then $8,000 per month,
3:17 a lot of money. And I was in university. So it seems like you've done well
3:20 on this, kind of being a person on the internet. How much of a partisan are you
3:25 on the topic of the indie hacker approach? Because obviously, most of tech
3:31 doesn't run in the indie hacker way, where, again, you're building multimillion-dollar
3:34 revenue businesses all by yourself. Do you think way more people should be doing
3:39 the indie hacking thing? I mean, I think the internet makes you partisan, right?
3:43 So I don't think I've been partisan much, but I think— Until you got on X.
3:47 Yeah, well, X does help with it. But you have to understand—2013, '14,
3:51 when I entered kind of the startup world, there was barely any... There was no indie hacking,
3:56 there was no bootstrapping, almost, except Patrick McKenzie,
3:59 who you know well. You would find investors, you would raise money,
4:02 you would grow fast, you would hire a lot of people, you get a big office.
4:04 Remote didn't exist, remote work. So compared to that, what's possible now?
4:10 There's alternatives possible now. Yes. And you can make a lot
4:13 of money with this. I don't think you can become a billionaire.
4:15 Maybe we will see that in the future. So you think for talented engineers
4:19 who have a commercial brain, and who are good at product... ...they should at least seriously evaluate the path
4:28 of just building their own successful products in the internet, like you? Yeah, I think...
4:31 Look, what I hate most about VC stuff is when you see people burn money.
4:35 You probably hate this as well. A company with no users raises $50 million, $100 million,
4:40 and you're like, "What is this product?" Like, it doesn't have any traction and it's just hype.
4:44 We've all seen these startups. And they just disappear. I think it's much more interesting—
4:50 and maybe you guys did the same with Stripe— but validate first and build a business first,
4:55 and see if you get traction. Like, get to $50k or a $100k a month.
4:58 No, look, I'm with you. Despite the fact Stripe has obviously raised VC,
5:02 we just started writing code, we got our first paying customer
5:05 way before we raised any money for the business... Wow. ...and then it just
5:08 kind of grew and grew and grew. And it's a little bit different
5:10 company in the financial services space. You need to be well-capitalized
5:14 Yeah, but this is the thing. It's natural. It's kind of organic, right?
5:16 Even if you raise money, you did it in an organic way, and you only raise more when you see the growth coming.
5:21 Have you ever been tempted to raise for one of your projects?
5:23 No. But a lot of VCs have been in my DMs, and they want to invest.
5:26 And I think because now I'm financially independent, I've made a lot of money,
5:32 now I could do it, because now I'm at a point where it sounds fun to play with other people's money.
5:38 But also, in a serious way, it sounds fun to go to a bigger thing.
5:44 I mean, that's something you typically say after you've been a week in San Francisco, right?
5:47 You start talking like this. But I'm not convinced yet. But I think now it would be fun. for example.
5:52 But the problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right?
5:58 It's hard to stay in between. You can't make $10 million a year.
6:01 You kind of need to make $100 million a year. You kind of need to become a unicorn.
6:05 That's difficult, because the odds of that happening are not super high. Like, it's a few percentage [points] maybe.
6:12 So most people don't get there, and they do spend five years
6:15 or, I don't know, seven years of their 20s on that. And that's something where, if you would be an indie,
6:20 and you would have a $10-million-a-year company... It'd be great. ...and you have 100% ownership.
6:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. You have so much money. You're saying as a VC-funded startup,
6:27 you're kind of locking in the expectations for your company in advance as to what's successful and what's not.
6:33 Yeah, And it's quite liberating to just start building things.
6:35 Pieter Levels enterprises, broadly, is making $3.1 million a year. Yeah.
6:40 And you've launched 70 projects? Yeah. Probably more, because I don't have the list, Yeah.
6:44 But it's like— You've launched so many that you lose track, but it's at least 70.
6:48 Do you shut them down if they're becoming too small to be relevant? No, I try
6:52 to keep a lot of them running. I like to keep the internet history existing.
6:56 It's sad to see all these websites disappear Yes, yes. I keep them on my
7:00 server running. URLs shouldn't break. Yeah. One product that still runs on Stripe is Go Effing Do It.
7:05 I don't know if I can curse, but gofuckingdoit.com, where, for example, you wanna quit smoking.
7:10 So you write, "I wanna quit smoking," or "I don't wanna smoke." And the deadline is
7:15 December 1, 2025. And then, you have to enter the email of your friend
7:19 and he checks it. And then you enter your credit card with Stripe
7:23 and it creates a customer, and it doesn't charge the customer yet.
7:26 And you set a price. So for example, $100. And then on December 1, 2025,
7:30 your friend gets an email, "Did he smoke?" And he says yes or no.
7:34 And if it's yes, you get charged and I get the money, And the product still works,
7:38 and it still makes, I think, $50 a month, and I didn't change the code
7:43 in 10 years. It's PHP, you know? Yes, yes. It still runs. So part of what you're doing
7:47 is you're creating all these businesses that have actually pretty long lifetimes as well.
7:50 Yeah. Who should try the digital nomad thing? Who does it appeal to?
7:54 I think anyone. It doesn't matter if you're 20 or 70 or whatever.
7:57 It's so interesting, because you change as a person also. But I think, digital nomad, it's so cool,
8:01 because leaving your own country, which I did... The first time, I did a study exchange program.
8:07 I went to Korea in 2010, I think, from university, and I was like, "This is a completely different world."
8:14 I'd never left Europe before. I went to France, you know Italy,
8:17 but there's neon signs, and it's like... Far away places. ...it's crazy. Yeah.
8:22 This changes you on such a fundamental level, going to the other side of the world.
8:26 It's amazing. And it's way safer than you think. Usually nothing happens.
8:29 I've never been robbed except in my hometown. It was a burglary. So in 10 years of digital nomading,
8:34 nothing ever happened. So, yeah, I think it completely expands your horizon.
8:38 There's nothing I can recommend as much as for people to just go travel. And don't be scared, man.
8:42 There are always people who will help you. If you don't speak the language, you can use your arms—
8:47 How did you make it not be lonely, not knowing anyone in all these places? It was extremely lonely.
8:50 Oh, okay. It just was lonely? I was like, "This is amazing."
8:54 And then you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture,
8:58 your home country. And everything's fine, people are nice, but you're like...
9:04 It fundamentally removes your foundational culture at some point.
9:09 You become untethered. Yeah, untethered. That's it. And you have to rebuild it up.
9:12 And that's a psychologically taxing process. It takes some years.
9:15 Yes. What have you learned from Patio11? Dude, amazing guy. What an inspiration.
9:21 So, you have to go in the time machine. Back in 2013, or even earlier,
9:25 I'm reading Hacker News in university, and I read two types of articles.
9:29 I read, "We're raising $40 million for a startup." Back then Hacker News was full of raising,
9:34 it was special. Now you don't see that anymore. Now it was more tech.
9:36 And you'd read Patrick McKenzie, "I made $60,000 this year with Appointment Reminder."
9:41 This site, which was like... He would go to hair salons, I think,
9:44 and then sell his appointment reminder website. It just reminded people to show up for their appointments.
9:49 Yes, like an SMS. It was the most amazingly simple business. And I would read this post,
9:52 it was like, "This is amazing, this guy." Like, $60K a year, that's big. We need to do this.
9:57 So seeing somebody making a cool, honest business... And another guy, Jon Yongfook,
10:02 he was a few years after Patrick Mckenzie, but he was also traveling as a nomad in Singapore and Asia,
10:08 and he was very well-dressed, and he was making beautiful SaaS.
10:13 I was impressed that they were making honest, cool, clean businesses.
10:16 Yes. And I wanna do the same thing. One thing I was reflecting on
10:19 is the fact that you are now a big brand, in a way, the brand of Pieter Levels,
10:25 where... Well, no, think about it. You sold $50,000 of pre-orders for your book
10:29 before you had written any of the book. You just said, "I might write a book, and buy it here,"
10:33 and you got $50,000 of sales. And so, to what extent does the recipe now work
10:40 because you are launching these products, and if someone else was to build
10:43 the flight simulator or if someone else was to write the book... Yeah, I've seen these
10:45 replies, too. ...then it wouldn't sell as well? Yeah. Man. I think of course it's part of it,
10:50 but I also work really hard, because I tweeted, I think 125,000 times over 10 years,
10:54 so it's like 40 tweets a day. You've contributed so many brain cells
10:57 to spending time on X. Exactly. Are you getting a lot of ChatGPT referrals?
11:02 Talk about this. It's amazing, yeah. I've seen the growth. ChatGPT, a month ago, was...
11:08 So, if you have the Google traffic, that's like 100%. ChatGPT was, like, 4%.
11:13 Now it's 20%. Wait. In the last month, ChatGPT has gone from 4%
11:16 to 20% of your traffic? In the last month. Yeah. So it went 5x, and I checked other websites
11:19 it's the same story. And I think it's beneficial for me, because it's very hard for me, as a solo person,
11:25 to do SEO stuff. And I hate SEO stuff. I just want to make a cool product and a cool website
11:30 with a nice title and whatever. You talk in your book about automation
11:34 being really important for making the indie hacker recipe work.
11:38 Because I guess if you get drowned in operational work, you're not gonna be able to do multiple projects,
11:41 you won't do as many shots on goal, everything like that. So how much has the automation
11:46 of your business tasks improved over the past 10 years, if at all?
11:51 Man, it's been amazing for me. What have you automated? So, for example, Nomad List,
11:57 it's a big website, you can visit, you can find a place to live and work remotely.
12:00 But you can also join a community. You can pay $100, you join a community of meetups,
12:05 a chat group, all this stuff. This chat group was hell to maintain.
12:10 I mean, you know from communities, it's so much drama. I've had crazy stories.
12:13 Wait. Is the AI content moderating the community now? Exactly. It was very hard for me
12:18 to moderate this stuff, and it was very hard for me to be impartial.
12:22 You have, like, politically different sides. And I feel I'm kind of in the middle, kind of neutral.
12:28 But the moment you ban one side, they're like, "Oh, you're on that side."
12:31 And so with GPT, it's actually neutral. It's really good. I write down the rules of my chat group—
12:38 and it's 40,000 people— and it doesn't ban anymore, it just mutes people for a day or 10 minutes, or—
12:44 Like the debate moderators in the presidential debates. Yes, essentially. It just muted them.
12:49 That's it. So, like, I can either hire people, or I can just use the GPT API.
12:57 I don't like hiring because I need to manage people, and I don't really like managing people
13:00 because it's not my thing. I like to create things. Well, in your book, you recommend that people build
13:04 for their own understanding of the problems they have. Shouldn't you make an investment product?
13:09 You and Warren Buffet basically have the same views, which is, a lot of money managers
13:13 and wealth management products... Oh, come on. ...are very bad because they're charging you
13:18 very high fees to invest in bad things. And actually, what the vast majority of people should do
13:22 is buy a simple index, maybe the S&P 500 or the MSCI World or something,
13:25 and then just leave their money there and don't touch it, and especially don't sell it during drawdowns.
13:29 Yeah, so Vanguard. Exactly. But Vanguard already does that. But there aren't good products for Europeans,
13:33 I feel like. That's less common. We buy them via Ireland. UCITS.
13:37 Sure, you do. But again, I feel like, you know, if you want an idea for the next business,
13:41 I think good investment... There's a lot of money in there. It's a lot of money. ...good investment products
13:43 for Europeans. But then, you increase the price. That's the problem.
13:45 Like, if you resell a Vanguard ETF that has a 0.07% fee per year—
13:49 No, you need large scale to make it work, Yeah, yeah. And maybe that doesn't fit with the indie hacker
13:53 philosophy. Yeah. No, I think it's a cool idea because it helps people get richer and wealthier.
13:56 Yeah, and there's this home country bias in stock purchasing,
13:59 where people in Germany... Oh my god. My parents have this. ...buy German stocks.
14:01 This is crazy. I told my parents, they're like— Yeah, they're buying the Dutch stock market, probably.
14:06 Yeah, and I'm like, "You need to buy S&P 500 fund." They're like, "No,
14:08 we're not gonna buy in America. We're gonna buy Royal Dutch Shell."
14:11 I'm like, "Come on." And they have all that money in Shell, in oil.
14:15 And then, "Have you seen Tesla, electric cars now?" And they're like, "No, it's not gonna happen."
14:20 I think investment is very important. Look, if you make money as any indie hacker has,
14:25 even as a VC founder, it's very important to not spend all this money,
14:30 because you have a limited time in startups to make money, I think...
14:33 ...and put this money in the market. And it doesn't have to be only America.
14:37 I always talk about Asia, and it's very hard to benefit in Asia
14:39 from the economy's rising because the product market is not as efficient as in the US.
14:44 So you should definitely have the S&P 500. But definitely, you can look at other ETFs
14:48 in the rest of the world. I've got some in China, it's always never
14:51 doing well, but at some point, I'll be right, you know. So yeah,
14:55 it's very important to invest your money well. And most people
14:57 don't know personal finance. Like, you don't get it in school.
15:02 You save money, but your money, your cash, disappears the moment you have it.
15:05 Yes. Are you one of those people who hacks the thermostat when you get to a hotel room?
15:10 I've tried, but I've never succeeded. I also have failed. I've watched the YouTube videos.
15:13 But it's always some different model. Siemens. I think they're wise to such people,
15:19 Like, they make it hard to override them now. This air conditioning problem,
15:22 it's such a big problem here. We need people in the comments to teach us
15:24 how to override the hotel thermostats, because the ones that are set to, like,
15:28 72 degrees Fahrenheit, or 22 degrees Celsius in Europe... I mean, that should be—
15:32 I mean, how many times do you get back to Europe? Often, right?
15:34 Often, yeah. It's a massive problem. The European hotels and air conditioning,
15:39 it's not a good situation. No, but it's Airbnbs, too. My friend went to an Airbnb in Italy,
15:44 and it said, "Don't put it below 25 degrees because of regulation."
15:47 It's like, this is unacceptable. And all the studies show, like,
15:51 look at Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore... For sleep, you actually need it pretty cold, yeah.
15:53 You need it really cold. The sleep quality gets so good. We're talking about European air conditioning.
15:58 You've talked about the EU accelerationism movement. What is required for EU accelerationism?
16:05 So I think it was two years ago or one year ago, I saw Beff Jezos, who's Guillaume Verdon.
16:12 He made e/acc, which is effective accelerationism, which is like, "Let's accelerate America again."
16:17 Like, it's been a very depressing time, especially with Covid.
16:19 Let's look at the benefits of technology and AI for the future,
16:22 and I thought, "That's amazing. We need to do the same for Europe," so I did EU/acc.
16:27 Like, let's do this for Europe. Because Europe has the same kind of depressing,
16:31 kind of down vibe about the future. And I understand, because there are a lot of problems,
16:34 it's not an easy life for a lot of people. So that got a lot of traction.
16:38 And I crowdsourced this bug board where everybody could submit their ideas
16:43 for how to save Europe, how to fix Europe. And tens of thousands of people submitted ideas,
16:48 and then they up upvoted each other's ideas and stuff. I think number one is just, like,
16:51 remove the regulatory burden for new businesses. Yeah. And there's other stuff, like remove
16:55 the cookie banner and stuff. and I hope it'll be easier in Europe
16:58 to start a business, run a business... Yes. ...As easy as it is in America.
17:03 I think there's so much... Nobody doubts European talent or intelligence,
17:10 It's cool, smart, ambitious people. But there's a ceiling for them.
17:15 They can't go higher because they're getting pushed down by governments,
17:17 by regulation. And it's like, what are you doing European countries?
17:21 You have amazing people. You could compete easily. Yeah. I think there's kind of two things.
17:26 One is where the regs are just bad. And the second is where the regulations
17:30 are not standardized, where employment law is really annoyingly different across European countries.
17:37 So if you're a 10-person startup and you employ people across Europe,
17:40 it's actually really cumbersome. Whereas in the United States, that's quite easy.
17:44 Yeah. so the problem of Europe is...it's very funny. You have all these different countries,
17:48 and you have the left side of the political spectrum are not very pro-business,
17:54 they're more for regulation and for protecting people, and the climate change and stuff.
17:58 And then you have the right side, which is pro-business, but they're also nationalists.
18:03 But the problem is, what we need is pro-business and federal Europe.
18:07 Like you need to be pro-Europe. Yeah. Not nationalist, and you need to be pro-business. So it doesn't exist.
18:13 So it's like, where do you start? I think it's actually good that it's going so bad
18:17 in Europe now, because it's almost like the patient is so sick—
18:21 Never waste a crisis. Yeah. Finally, Europeans are like, "Maybe we should do something?"
18:28 Two years ago, when I would tweet about this, they said, "Stop talking bad about Europe.
18:31 It's going great here." And now they're like, "Okay, maybe we need to do something."
18:36 What would you highlight as the ideas that need fixing? I think the problem is if there are not a lot
18:44 of opportunities in Europe for people to get jobs or start businesses,
18:48 then they're gonna look down on Americans getting rich with these big businesses,
18:52 because they're jealous. Europeans are jealous. And you need to change this idea that business is bad,
18:59 that getting rich is bad. Getting rich is simply a representation
19:03 of your added value to the world economy, in most cases. Of course, there are edge cases.
19:08 Generally, the money in your bank account is how much value you added to society.
19:13 And in Europe, that completely does not... They really think different.
19:17 In America, you get much more respect for being an entrepreneur.
19:21 But I would say, don't be afraid of money. Money is a tool in this world
19:26 to change the world. If you were running Stripe, what would you fix?
19:32 I think it's going really well recently. I think it wasn't going well after Covid.
19:37 It was a few years where the API was getting more and more complicated.
19:41 We all complained about it. It felt like it was being run by engineers,
19:45 not by people who actually used Stripe. Like, illogical defaults on the API.
19:51 One time, I had this bug, and it was from the Stripe API because it changed,
19:55 and it didn't create a customer anymore. Everybody was a guest.
19:58 I was like, "Why would I want people to be a guest? I can't even curate them as a customer anymore."
20:03 Those kind of things. But now it seems much better, and it seems like sanity has returned.
20:08 But it's scary, and it must be scary for you, because you're running a big company.
20:11 It's very hard to manage a company from small to big and not become corporate.
20:18 Of course, you're always corporate because you need to do B2B sales.
20:21 But you need to keep the original Stripe mentality of, like, simple, right? Stripe JS,
20:26 it was one line of code you would add to your page, and you had a payment button, you know?
20:30 Keeping that is so important, keeping the original soul of the company.
20:34 And I think you're doing a great job. Because essentially, I don't wanna go into Stripe
20:37 to do anything. I want to go there to see how much money I make,
20:39 and I wanna go back to my coffee and code a little bit. I see all these new features on Stripe,
20:44 making workflows and stuff, and I think it's very cool, but I don't have time to do this stuff
20:48 because it's not that important for me. I think our perspective is, you should be able
20:51 to get started with anything instantly. You shouldn't even need to integrate an API.
20:57 You should just be able to send a Payment Link, something like that. Exactly. That's amazing,
21:00 I'm always saying to people that generally, people will not even want to start
21:03 by integrating the API, they'll want to start by sending people
21:06 to a hosted page— Yeah, that's what I do now like a Payment Link.
21:09 But you will, over time... We think the workflow engine is really cool,
21:11 because if you want to build something complex, you don't have to build it yourself.
21:14 But if someone is starting with the workflow engine... Exactly. ...then something's gone horribly wrong.
21:18 You know what I mean? I think the challenge is exposing them slowly
21:21 Looking 5 years into the future
2:43 Being one of the first YouTube creators
2:46 on YouTube or— No, because... So what happened was, I was making music and I was DJing,
2:49 I was organizing nightclub nights in Holland, UK and stuff, drum and bass music.
2:55 You're Irish, you know drum and bass. Drum and bass, most people don't really know it,
2:58 but British people know, Irish people know it. So, when YouTube started monetizing videos,
3:05 I was uploading my music already. So I was one of the first YouTube monetizing people.
3:09 I was number one or number two in Holland for a while, in the top channels.
3:13 But the thing is, I started making money, like $1,000, and then $2,000, and then $8,000 per month,
3:17 a lot of money. And I was in university. So it seems like you've done well
3:18 Who should indie hack
3:20 on this, kind of being a person on the internet. How much of a partisan are you
3:25 on the topic of the indie hacker approach? Because obviously, most of tech
3:31 doesn't run in the indie hacker way, where, again, you're building multimillion-dollar
3:34 revenue businesses all by yourself. Do you think way more people should be doing
3:39 the indie hacking thing? I mean, I think the internet makes you partisan, right?
3:43 So I don't think I've been partisan much, but I think— Until you got on X.
3:47 Yeah, well, X does help with it. But you have to understand—2013, '14,
3:51 when I entered kind of the startup world, there was barely any... There was no indie hacking,
3:56 there was no bootstrapping, almost, except Patrick McKenzie,
3:59 who you know well. You would find investors, you would raise money,
4:02 you would grow fast, you would hire a lot of people, you get a big office.
4:04 Remote didn't exist, remote work. So compared to that, what's possible now?
4:10 There's alternatives possible now. Yes. And you can make a lot
4:13 of money with this. I don't think you can become a billionaire.
4:15 Maybe we will see that in the future. So you think for talented engineers
4:19 who have a commercial brain, and who are good at product... ...they should at least seriously evaluate the path
4:28 of just building their own successful products in the internet, like you? Yeah, I think...
4:31 What Pieter hates about VC-backed businesses
4:31 Look, what I hate most about VC stuff is when you see people burn money.
4:35 You probably hate this as well. A company with no users raises $50 million, $100 million,
4:40 and you're like, "What is this product?" Like, it doesn't have any traction and it's just hype.
4:44 We've all seen these startups. And they just disappear. I think it's much more interesting—
4:50 and maybe you guys did the same with Stripe— but validate first and build a business first,
4:55 and see if you get traction. Like, get to $50k or a $100k a month.
4:58 No, look, I'm with you. Despite the fact Stripe has obviously raised VC,
5:02 we just started writing code, we got our first paying customer
5:05 way before we raised any money for the business... Wow. ...and then it just
5:08 kind of grew and grew and grew. And it's a little bit different
5:10 company in the financial services space. You need to be well-capitalized
5:14 Yeah, but this is the thing. It's natural. It's kind of organic, right?
5:16 Even if you raise money, you did it in an organic way, and you only raise more when you see the growth coming.
5:21 Have you ever been tempted to raise for one of your projects?
5:23 No. But a lot of VCs have been in my DMs, and they want to invest.
5:26 And I think because now I'm financially independent, I've made a lot of money,
5:32 now I could do it, because now I'm at a point where it sounds fun to play with other people's money.
5:38 But also, in a serious way, it sounds fun to go to a bigger thing.
5:44 I mean, that's something you typically say after you've been a week in San Francisco, right?
5:47 You start talking like this. But I'm not convinced yet. But I think now it would be fun. for example.
5:52 But the problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right?
5:58 It's hard to stay in between. You can't make $10 million a year.
6:01 You kind of need to make $100 million a year. You kind of need to become a unicorn.
6:05 That's difficult, because the odds of that happening are not super high. Like, it's a few percentage [points] maybe.
6:12 So most people don't get there, and they do spend five years
6:15 or, I don't know, seven years of their 20s on that. And that's something where, if you would be an indie,
6:20 and you would have a $10-million-a-year company... It'd be great. ...and you have 100% ownership.
6:24 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. You have so much money. You're saying as a VC-funded startup,
6:27 you're kind of locking in the expectations for your company in advance as to what's successful and what's not.
6:33 Yeah, And it's quite liberating to just start building things.
6:35 Pieter Levels enterprises, broadly, is making $3.1 million a year. Yeah.
6:40 And you've launched 70 projects? Yeah. Probably more, because I don't have the list, Yeah.
6:44 But it's like— You've launched so many that you lose track, but it's at least 70.
6:48 Do you shut them down if they're becoming too small to be relevant? No, I try
6:52 to keep a lot of them running. I like to keep the internet history existing.
6:56 It's sad to see all these websites disappear Yes, yes. I keep them on my
7:00 server running. URLs shouldn't break. Yeah. One product that still runs on Stripe is Go Effing Do It.
7:05 I don't know if I can curse, but gofuckingdoit.com, where, for example, you wanna quit smoking.
7:10 So you write, "I wanna quit smoking," or "I don't wanna smoke." And the deadline is
7:15 December 1, 2025. And then, you have to enter the email of your friend
7:19 and he checks it. And then you enter your credit card with Stripe
7:23 and it creates a customer, and it doesn't charge the customer yet.
7:26 And you set a price. So for example, $100. And then on December 1, 2025,
7:30 your friend gets an email, "Did he smoke?" And he says yes or no.
7:34 And if it's yes, you get charged and I get the money, And the product still works,
7:38 and it still makes, I think, $50 a month, and I didn't change the code
7:43 in 10 years. It's PHP, you know? Yes, yes. It still runs. So part of what you're doing
7:47 is you're creating all these businesses that have actually pretty long lifetimes as well.
7:50 Yeah. Who should try the digital nomad thing? Who does it appeal to?
7:51 Who is digital nomading for?
7:54 I think anyone. It doesn't matter if you're 20 or 70 or whatever.
7:57 It's so interesting, because you change as a person also. But I think, digital nomad, it's so cool,
8:01 because leaving your own country, which I did... The first time, I did a study exchange program.
8:07 I went to Korea in 2010, I think, from university, and I was like, "This is a completely different world."
8:14 I'd never left Europe before. I went to France, you know Italy,
8:17 but there's neon signs, and it's like... Far away places. ...it's crazy. Yeah.
8:22 This changes you on such a fundamental level, going to the other side of the world.
8:26 It's amazing. And it's way safer than you think. Usually nothing happens.
8:29 I've never been robbed except in my hometown. It was a burglary. So in 10 years of digital nomading,
8:34 nothing ever happened. So, yeah, I think it completely expands your horizon.
8:38 There's nothing I can recommend as much as for people to just go travel. And don't be scared, man.
8:42 There are always people who will help you. If you don't speak the language, you can use your arms—
8:47 How did you make it not be lonely, not knowing anyone in all these places? It was extremely lonely.
8:50 Oh, okay. It just was lonely? I was like, "This is amazing."
8:54 And then you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture,
8:58 your home country. And everything's fine, people are nice, but you're like...
9:04 It fundamentally removes your foundational culture at some point.
9:09 You become untethered. Yeah, untethered. That's it. And you have to rebuild it up.
9:12 And that's a psychologically taxing process. It takes some years.
9:15 Learning from @patio11
9:15 Yes. What have you learned from Patio11? Dude, amazing guy. What an inspiration.
9:21 So, you have to go in the time machine. Back in 2013, or even earlier,
9:25 I'm reading Hacker News in university, and I read two types of articles.
9:29 I read, "We're raising $40 million for a startup." Back then Hacker News was full of raising,
9:34 it was special. Now you don't see that anymore. Now it was more tech.
9:36 And you'd read Patrick McKenzie, "I made $60,000 this year with Appointment Reminder."
9:41 This site, which was like... He would go to hair salons, I think,
9:44 and then sell his appointment reminder website. It just reminded people to show up for their appointments.
9:49 Yes, like an SMS. It was the most amazingly simple business. And I would read this post,
9:52 it was like, "This is amazing, this guy." Like, $60K a year, that's big. We need to do this.
9:57 So seeing somebody making a cool, honest business... And another guy, Jon Yongfook,
10:02 he was a few years after Patrick Mckenzie, but he was also traveling as a nomad in Singapore and Asia,
10:08 and he was very well-dressed, and he was making beautiful SaaS.
10:13 I was impressed that they were making honest, cool, clean businesses.
10:16 Yes. And I wanna do the same thing. One thing I was reflecting on
10:19 is the fact that you are now a big brand, in a way, the brand of Pieter Levels,
10:25 where... Well, no, think about it. You sold $50,000 of pre-orders for your book
10:29 before you had written any of the book. You just said, "I might write a book, and buy it here,"
10:33 and you got $50,000 of sales. And so, to what extent does the recipe now work
10:40 because you are launching these products, and if someone else was to build
10:43 the flight simulator or if someone else was to write the book... Yeah, I've seen these
10:45 replies, too. ...then it wouldn't sell as well? Yeah. Man. I think of course it's part of it,
10:50 but I also work really hard, because I tweeted, I think 125,000 times over 10 years,
10:54 so it's like 40 tweets a day. You've contributed so many brain cells
10:57 to spending time on X. Exactly. Are you getting a lot of ChatGPT referrals?
11:02 Talk about this. It's amazing, yeah. I've seen the growth. ChatGPT, a month ago, was...
11:08 So, if you have the Google traffic, that's like 100%. ChatGPT was, like, 4%.
11:13 Now it's 20%. Wait. In the last month, ChatGPT has gone from 4%
11:16 to 20% of your traffic? In the last month. Yeah. So it went 5x, and I checked other websites
11:19 it's the same story. And I think it's beneficial for me, because it's very hard for me, as a solo person,
11:25 to do SEO stuff. And I hate SEO stuff. I just want to make a cool product and a cool website
11:30 with a nice title and whatever. You talk in your book about automation
11:34 being really important for making the indie hacker recipe work.
11:38 Because I guess if you get drowned in operational work, you're not gonna be able to do multiple projects,
11:41 you won't do as many shots on goal, everything like that. So how much has the automation
11:46 of your business tasks improved over the past 10 years, if at all?
11:51 Man, it's been amazing for me. What have you automated? So, for example, Nomad List,
11:57 it's a big website, you can visit, you can find a place to live and work remotely.
12:00 But you can also join a community. You can pay $100, you join a community of meetups,
12:05 a chat group, all this stuff. This chat group was hell to maintain.
12:10 I mean, you know from communities, it's so much drama. I've had crazy stories.
12:13 Wait. Is the AI content moderating the community now? Exactly. It was very hard for me
12:18 to moderate this stuff, and it was very hard for me to be impartial.
12:22 You have, like, politically different sides. And I feel I'm kind of in the middle, kind of neutral.
12:28 But the moment you ban one side, they're like, "Oh, you're on that side."
12:31 And so with GPT, it's actually neutral. It's really good. I write down the rules of my chat group—
12:38 and it's 40,000 people— and it doesn't ban anymore, it just mutes people for a day or 10 minutes, or—
12:44 Like the debate moderators in the presidential debates. Yes, essentially. It just muted them.
12:49 That's it. So, like, I can either hire people, or I can just use the GPT API.
12:57 I don't like hiring because I need to manage people, and I don't really like managing people
13:00 because it's not my thing. I like to create things. Well, in your book, you recommend that people build
13:04 for their own understanding of the problems they have. Shouldn't you make an investment product?
13:09 You and Warren Buffet basically have the same views, which is, a lot of money managers
13:13 and wealth management products... Oh, come on. ...are very bad because they're charging you
13:18 very high fees to invest in bad things. And actually, what the vast majority of people should do
13:22 is buy a simple index, maybe the S&P 500 or the MSCI World or something,
13:25 and then just leave their money there and don't touch it, and especially don't sell it during drawdowns.
13:29 Yeah, so Vanguard. Exactly. But Vanguard already does that. But there aren't good products for Europeans,
13:33 I feel like. That's less common. We buy them via Ireland. UCITS.
13:37 Sure, you do. But again, I feel like, you know, if you want an idea for the next business,
13:41 I think good investment... There's a lot of money in there. It's a lot of money. ...good investment products
13:43 for Europeans. But then, you increase the price. That's the problem.
13:45 Like, if you resell a Vanguard ETF that has a 0.07% fee per year—
13:49 No, you need large scale to make it work, Yeah, yeah. And maybe that doesn't fit with the indie hacker
13:53 philosophy. Yeah. No, I think it's a cool idea because it helps people get richer and wealthier.
13:56 Yeah, and there's this home country bias in stock purchasing,
13:59 where people in Germany... Oh my god. My parents have this. ...buy German stocks.
14:01 This is crazy. I told my parents, they're like— Yeah, they're buying the Dutch stock market, probably.
14:06 Yeah, and I'm like, "You need to buy S&P 500 fund." They're like, "No,
14:08 we're not gonna buy in America. We're gonna buy Royal Dutch Shell."
14:11 I'm like, "Come on." And they have all that money in Shell, in oil.
14:15 And then, "Have you seen Tesla, electric cars now?" And they're like, "No, it's not gonna happen."
14:20 I think investment is very important. Look, if you make money as any indie hacker has,
14:25 even as a VC founder, it's very important to not spend all this money,
14:30 because you have a limited time in startups to make money, I think...
14:33 ...and put this money in the market. And it doesn't have to be only America.
14:37 I always talk about Asia, and it's very hard to benefit in Asia
14:39 from the economy's rising because the product market is not as efficient as in the US.
14:44 So you should definitely have the S&P 500. But definitely, you can look at other ETFs
14:48 in the rest of the world. I've got some in China, it's always never
14:51 doing well, but at some point, I'll be right, you know. So yeah,
14:55 it's very important to invest your money well. And most people
14:57 don't know personal finance. Like, you don't get it in school.
15:02 You save money, but your money, your cash, disappears the moment you have it.
15:05 Yes. Are you one of those people who hacks the thermostat when you get to a hotel room?
15:10 I've tried, but I've never succeeded. I also have failed. I've watched the YouTube videos.
15:13 But it's always some different model. Siemens. I think they're wise to such people,
15:19 Like, they make it hard to override them now. This air conditioning problem,
15:22 it's such a big problem here. We need people in the comments to teach us
15:24 how to override the hotel thermostats, because the ones that are set to, like,
15:28 72 degrees Fahrenheit, or 22 degrees Celsius in Europe... I mean, that should be—
15:32 I mean, how many times do you get back to Europe? Often, right?
15:34 Often, yeah. It's a massive problem. The European hotels and air conditioning,
15:39 it's not a good situation. No, but it's Airbnbs, too. My friend went to an Airbnb in Italy,
15:44 and it said, "Don't put it below 25 degrees because of regulation."
15:47 It's like, this is unacceptable. And all the studies show, like,
15:51 look at Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore... For sleep, you actually need it pretty cold, yeah.
15:53 You need it really cold. The sleep quality gets so good. We're talking about European air conditioning.
15:58 You've talked about the EU accelerationism movement. What is required for EU accelerationism?
16:05 So I think it was two years ago or one year ago, I saw Beff Jezos, who's Guillaume Verdon.
16:12 He made e/acc, which is effective accelerationism, which is like, "Let's accelerate America again."
16:17 Like, it's been a very depressing time, especially with Covid.
16:19 Let's look at the benefits of technology and AI for the future,
16:22 and I thought, "That's amazing. We need to do the same for Europe," so I did EU/acc.
16:27 Like, let's do this for Europe. Because Europe has the same kind of depressing,
16:31 kind of down vibe about the future. And I understand, because there are a lot of problems,
16:34 it's not an easy life for a lot of people. So that got a lot of traction.
16:38 And I crowdsourced this bug board where everybody could submit their ideas
16:43 for how to save Europe, how to fix Europe. And tens of thousands of people submitted ideas,
16:48 and then they up upvoted each other's ideas and stuff. I think number one is just, like,
16:51 remove the regulatory burden for new businesses. Yeah. And there's other stuff, like remove
16:55 the cookie banner and stuff. and I hope it'll be easier in Europe
16:58 to start a business, run a business... Yes. ...As easy as it is in America.
17:03 I think there's so much... Nobody doubts European talent or intelligence,
17:10 It's cool, smart, ambitious people. But there's a ceiling for them.
17:15 They can't go higher because they're getting pushed down by governments,
17:17 by regulation. And it's like, what are you doing European countries?
17:21 You have amazing people. You could compete easily. Yeah. I think there's kind of two things.
17:26 One is where the regs are just bad. And the second is where the regulations
17:30 are not standardized, where employment law is really annoyingly different across European countries.
17:37 So if you're a 10-person startup and you employ people across Europe,
17:40 it's actually really cumbersome. Whereas in the United States, that's quite easy.
17:44 Yeah. so the problem of Europe is...it's very funny. You have all these different countries,
17:48 and you have the left side of the political spectrum are not very pro-business,
17:54 they're more for regulation and for protecting people, and the climate change and stuff.
17:58 And then you have the right side, which is pro-business, but they're also nationalists.
18:03 But the problem is, what we need is pro-business and federal Europe.
18:07 Like you need to be pro-Europe. Yeah. Not nationalist, and you need to be pro-business. So it doesn't exist.
18:13 So it's like, where do you start? I think it's actually good that it's going so bad
18:17 in Europe now, because it's almost like the patient is so sick—
18:21 Never waste a crisis. Yeah. Finally, Europeans are like, "Maybe we should do something?"
18:28 Two years ago, when I would tweet about this, they said, "Stop talking bad about Europe.
18:31 It's going great here." And now they're like, "Okay, maybe we need to do something."
18:36 What would you highlight as the ideas that need fixing? I think the problem is if there are not a lot
18:44 of opportunities in Europe for people to get jobs or start businesses,
18:48 then they're gonna look down on Americans getting rich with these big businesses,
18:52 because they're jealous. Europeans are jealous. And you need to change this idea that business is bad,
18:59 that getting rich is bad. Getting rich is simply a representation
19:03 of your added value to the world economy, in most cases. Of course, there are edge cases.
19:08 Generally, the money in your bank account is how much value you added to society.
19:13 And in Europe, that completely does not... They really think different.
19:17 In America, you get much more respect for being an entrepreneur.
19:21 But I would say, don't be afraid of money. Money is a tool in this world
19:26 to change the world. If you were running Stripe, what would you fix?
19:32 I think it's going really well recently. I think it wasn't going well after Covid.
19:37 It was a few years where the API was getting more and more complicated.
19:41 We all complained about it. It felt like it was being run by engineers,
19:45 not by people who actually used Stripe. Like, illogical defaults on the API.
19:51 One time, I had this bug, and it was from the Stripe API because it changed,
19:55 and it didn't create a customer anymore. Everybody was a guest.
19:58 I was like, "Why would I want people to be a guest? I can't even curate them as a customer anymore."
20:03 Those kind of things. But now it seems much better, and it seems like sanity has returned.
20:08 But it's scary, and it must be scary for you, because you're running a big company.
20:11 It's very hard to manage a company from small to big and not become corporate.
20:18 Of course, you're always corporate because you need to do B2B sales.
20:21 But you need to keep the original Stripe mentality of, like, simple, right? Stripe JS,
20:26 it was one line of code you would add to your page, and you had a payment button, you know?
20:30 Keeping that is so important, keeping the original soul of the company.
20:34 And I think you're doing a great job. Because essentially, I don't wanna go into Stripe
20:37 to do anything. I want to go there to see how much money I make,
20:39 and I wanna go back to my coffee and code a little bit. I see all these new features on Stripe,
20:44 making workflows and stuff, and I think it's very cool, but I don't have time to do this stuff
20:48 because it's not that important for me. I think our perspective is, you should be able
20:51 to get started with anything instantly. You shouldn't even need to integrate an API.
20:57 You should just be able to send a Payment Link, something like that. Exactly. That's amazing,
21:00 I'm always saying to people that generally, people will not even want to start
21:03 by integrating the API, they'll want to start by sending people
21:06 to a hosted page— Yeah, that's what I do now like a Payment Link.
21:09 But you will, over time... We think the workflow engine is really cool,
21:11 because if you want to build something complex, you don't have to build it yourself.
21:14 But if someone is starting with the workflow engine... Exactly. ...then something's gone horribly wrong.
21:18 You know what I mean? I think the challenge is exposing them slowly
21:21 to all the stuff that's possible. Exactly Last question. If we're back here in five years,
21:26 will things be similar, where you've worked on a bunch of projects
21:30 that are working really nicely? Will things be different, where maybe you've sold a few of the projects?
21:35 Maybe you've started a VC-funded startup, and raised a million dollars
21:37 from SoftBank. That would be, like... Exactly. But I'm just curious, what does the next five years hold?
21:42 Man, I have no clue. It would be so funny if you become VC. I've been starting to invest,
21:48 and every time I invest, I feel bad, because I feel like a faker, you know?
21:54 But I invested in Cursor, for example, very nice. That seems like that that'll do okay for you.
22:00 Well, who knows? But yeah, it's fun to... I think you need to be
22:05 a little bit flexible with your neurons, and you can change your ways a little bit.
22:10 And it's interesting to try different stuff. But, yeah, I'm really enjoying life with my girlfriend now.
22:17 We're still traveling a lot. It's fun. We meet all these cool people here,
22:20 and I want that to continue. I'm just very happy. I'm every day grateful to be able to live this life,
22:29 and it's so good. So thank you. Thanks for coming by. Thank you for having me.
