you2idea@video:~$ watch V0ej29G7ZGg [1:20:07]
// transcript — 1968 segments
0:10 are you intimidated why are you he said he took a run before this
0:14 because he was nervous now no because i've been on a lot of podcasts but like
0:16 they're usually kind of small you know it's like i see you guys as like joe
0:20 rogan for business so it's like there's one step but wow above is like joe rogan
0:23 and then there's you guys and then below it's like yeah i don't want to dis all
0:26 the podcasts i've been on they're amazing but you know like this is like a
0:30 level so uh but it's good you know i mean computer levels so
0:35 and you also don't know what sam might ask you because sam might just come out
0:38 of left field and be like but that's the thing i was thinking like sam is like
0:41 he's not a regular uh interviewer you know he adds some crazy [ __ ] so wait me
0:46 first of all i i don't know if that's true i don't know if we first of all
0:50 it's not just me it's you too sean that asks weird stuff but also
0:54 i don't think we asked that weird questions i think we asked the questions
0:57 that everyone's thinking no that's true but i mean you're not
1:00 just man like you know there's yes man podcast where like they just it's kind
1:04 of like a fan thing obviously that's not you guys you have real [ __ ] real
1:06 questions and that's i think it's more interesting as well can we sam can we share the thing you
1:12 were just telling us in slack can i share that on here on the pod yeah which
1:15 one the sampar strategy for networking this is um you know you can go to harvard you can
1:23 go to stanford like you know it's a very small little tweak but it's just so sam that it just
1:34 is awesome so if you're if sam wants to hang out with you he'll text you just
1:38 like a normal person would but and he doesn't need to even know you he's just
1:41 like interested in you maybe maybe it's a cold dm maybe it's a text message
1:44 maybe he got your number from somebody else like hey it's sam
1:48 uh you know i'm in san francisco but instead of saying wanna hang sam will
1:54 just go i'm in san francisco let's do this he sent me some [ __ ] that i won't
2:00 say out loud but yeah but i think it worked yeah so sam what
2:06 what is this and why does it work so well it's like a phrase like you know
2:09 like people will be like uh you know i [ __ ] with that guy like i [ __ ] with
2:13 drake i like drake it extends from that and i just say it and people uh they reply i don't know i
2:20 just yeah this particular one i it was a ceo of a multi-billion dollar company
2:25 who i'm friendly with i just said what's up i'm in your hood let's
2:29 andy goes down when like it worked out it's amazing and now so normally we try to play cool but
2:36 we've actually been chasing you peter we've been we've been talking about your
2:39 projects we've been being like hey we got to get this guy in the pod sam is a
2:44 fan of you for sure i would say i am less of a fan than sam but i am a that
2:49 doesn't mean i like you it's just i'm more in the closet about it whereas sam
2:54 is very open sam's like this guy's amazing this guy's like an artist thanks
2:58 man this guy's got great hair and you do have great hair so it's all true and now
3:02 we finally got you here and it was hard i think right because you like don't do
3:05 you don't schedule or something like that like i mean it it like it looks like being an
3:11 ass right on instagram if you do that but i like like you guys i would get so many
3:15 dms and they're all like i mean generally they're very low quality dms right like i want to
3:19 collaborate but i don't want to invest i don't want to like people want something from you i
3:23 think it's like being a hot girl in the club like people want something for you
3:26 but they don't want to invest the time to actually get to know you or you know
3:30 you feel like an object and i don't like to feel like that and i want to um
3:35 spend more time with you know like with my friends in real life with uh my
3:40 girlfriend or something i want to spend time on in the gym you know on my health
3:44 and cooking food and and that kind of stuff go for walks and
3:49 uh i think because i because i've been doing this for 10 years like startups like eight years and
3:53 now i get the money is going well so i don't really need to do any calls
3:57 anymore any dms so i'm just trying to create a more chill life
4:01 and i'm not an [ __ ] it just means like i don't have time to met to reply
4:06 to everybody so i close my dms and and then people get really angry on
4:09 tweets they're like why don't you why you close your dms are you arrogant and
4:12 stuff so i wrote a blog post like kind of explaining my day and my routine and
4:16 what i do in the day and that i don't really have time if i do all the things
4:20 i do now to also dm everybody reply everybody and do calls and stuff
4:24 um and that's pretty much the argument or even let's give the context so let's
4:28 explain who the heck you are so uh your name is peter lovells you're
4:33 known on um twitter as levels io right yeah that's the uh that's the right way
4:37 to say it i saw you a while back i'm just gonna say some interesting things
4:41 about you i believe that you can correct me if i have any of these wrong i
4:43 believe you publish how much you make every year and in fact it's in your
4:48 twitter bio in your location there's like a meter that's like your road to three million a
4:52 year yeah and it says 2.7 million so your meter is almost all the way filled up
4:59 um you build a bunch of random small projects usually around
5:04 some things you like or believe or your lifestyle which is kind of a nomadic
5:08 lifestyle so i believe i think you you you hop around or you
5:11 don't have like a home base so you live you know you could be like in bali and
5:15 then you could be in the netherlands you could be a different place all the time
5:19 and you make these small websites or apps and it says in your bio that you have 13
5:25 million monthly active users um and i've i remember seeing you
5:29 because you did a community like a like a nomad community a slack community
5:33 really early on like slack had just come out and i was like this guy's like charging
5:38 10 bucks i think it was 10 bucks a month or something to get into this thing i
5:40 was like he's got like a thousand people here wow this is actually this guy's
5:44 making good money doing this um like just by making a slack group and you
5:48 just do a bunch of small experiments like that um that's what i know sam what
5:51 did i do i'll give pe peter let me give like the outsider's perspective that's a little more
5:57 holistic so basically there's two things that are interesting to you the first
6:01 one is your businesses which actually are the least the lesser of the two
6:05 interesting things so you have roughly five or s yeah you have seven different
6:10 businesses uh ranging from nomad list which makes uh 2.1 million dollars in
6:15 the last 12 months that's a that's a a job board you have another job board
6:19 called remote okay that's making 115 dollars a month you have read mate read
6:23 make which looks like it's like an ebook something like that yeah it's like an
6:26 ebook yeah yeah 60k a month then you have got like a bunch of really you're
6:29 seeing these numbers because he publishes them where do you publish
6:32 these he publishes all of them on like the the url uh go to his twitter profile
6:36 and we'll let you talk sorry peter in a second but go to his profile
6:40 go to his twitter profile and then like click off and it's like uh open revenue
6:43 at the very bottom but i'm reading off of our notes so and then you have like a
6:47 qr menu creator then you have like an inflation chart which doesn't seem like
6:51 it makes money but tracks uh inflation and then you have rebase which is a
6:55 platform to help people become a citizen of uh portugal help them re relocate the
7:00 portugal so what's the first part is those businesses like i said you have
7:03 those that are interesting i would narrow it down to say you have a series
7:08 of job boards for nomadic or remote work that are pretty profitable but the second thing
7:12 that's even more interesting is the way that you do these things so you do a few
7:15 things that are interesting the first thing is i think you're the only
7:18 full-time employee right and you use a team of contractors and second of all
7:22 you have this weird personality that's very embedded in everything you do so that's
7:30 kind of like my big intro of what you do i could see a website and i could know
7:33 you built it without you having an about page which is kind of
7:37 clunky right it looks a little no it's like no but it doesn't have a nice way i
7:42 guess yeah it's another designer yeah no i think it's accurate description um
7:46 it's like like i'm not very nomadic anymore like i'm slowly settling down
7:49 right but i started very nomadically i was like moving around every month
7:52 um i started like in 2014 i started nomading and i uh went to all these
8:00 places and i started building these apps these little websites little products to
8:02 validate and i remember i mean i told the story so many times but i was following patrick
8:08 mckenzie patio 11 on hacker news famous hacker news a guy and now he works for
8:12 stripe and he would do he would share his revenue on his blog about all his
8:16 little products he made and it was like appointment reminder for barbershop so
8:19 you got to sms just before your appointment so you don't forget it that
8:23 kind of stuff and i was really inspired like okay this is not like some big vc
8:26 funded guy he's just like an indie guy was just on his laptop kind of building stuff
8:33 and i kind of mixed that with the nomad thing where like building from your
8:38 laptop from your backpack moving around i think also getting inspired from
8:40 different places because if you move around you i mean i know sam moves
8:44 around a little bit as well uh you your life becomes very unique because
8:48 you meet different kinds of people you you're in different kinds of places you
8:51 see different kinds of products like in shops like if you're in asia you see
8:55 some futuristic [ __ ] you don't see in europe and america
8:58 and all that stuff kind of it helps for inspiration for creating
9:02 products in some indirect ways as well um so that's pretty much what i've been
9:06 doing and i think it's i've been trying to be like radically honest like i know
9:10 this this american guy who pushes the radical honesty movement um so i'm
9:14 trying to do that in my personal life i'm trying to do it on the internet i'm
9:16 not perfect but i'm trying to be as honest and open as possible
9:19 uh because i don't like this fake corporate stuff and it's because i started
9:25 business administration and i have a master's degree in it so i know all the
9:29 management consultancy [ __ ] you know i've been there i've done that i know
9:32 that's where my friends work i know investment bankers and i hate that that
9:36 a lot of that world where it's like fake and not real and i uh want to be very open and honest and i
9:41 think it's also a little bit of a european thing not to slack off
9:45 americans i love america but like um in europe people are very uh
9:50 a little bit more direct and a little bit more uh straightforward
9:53 and uh i think that comes across in my in the stuff i do a little bit so what's the
9:59 total size of all your of all your projects in terms of top line and bottom
10:03 line revenue and isn't it true that you're the only full-time person and how
10:07 many contractors are you using yeah so i have one customer support contractor
10:11 part-time uh isabelle and she works for all my projects um and i have a
10:16 moderator for the slack group because dude slack groups they there's some
10:20 drama in there like i've had some crazy drama in these sledge groups in
10:23 communities so you need to have a moderator you need to have rules and you
10:26 need to have a you cannot just automate this moderation away like i tried that
10:30 but you need a real person there to you know check on messages and stuff
10:34 um and then i have a devops guy he's my best friend daniel and he uh
10:41 works kind of like a sls sla like a service level agreement where if the
10:44 server goes down he gets a message you know if i'm sleeping with something he
10:48 brings it back up but the problem is never was down anymore like it doesn't
10:52 we haven't really had that for years so um he does security updates and stuff
10:55 you know like because i have a vps i don't use amazon i use a vps on
11:00 digitalocean and linode um and he kind of keeps that stuff safe you
11:03 know so that's good and how big is the business top playing i'm sorry how big is the business um
11:09 so remote case the job board it's the biggest business makes the most money
11:12 normally this is starting to grow though it's like it's past i think 100k this
11:17 month 100k a month um so almost like a million dollar business
11:21 um remote case 1.6 million a year i think um and rebase is a new business it's an
11:27 immigration agency so i want to help remote workers immigrate to
11:30 countries that want to attract remote workers with like you know beneficial
11:34 tax stuff uh portugal is one of the first ones to do that um so those are
11:38 the three businesses really make money and the rest doesn't really make money a
11:42 lot like the book makes like i think like 4k a month so but everything you do
11:48 is part of one flywheel so i've looked at your kind of like system
11:53 and i've looked at a bunch of people because i got into a little pickle where
11:57 i was like god i'm doing so many things and i want to do all these things i'm
12:00 interested in all these things but [ __ ] you know am i going to be able
12:04 to juggle five different things i got a podcast i have a vc fund i have my
12:08 e-commerce business i have a newsletter business i have um you know i don't even know what else
12:14 course business i got i got another [ __ ] right so it's like
12:17 uh am i going to be able to do this and what i saw that you did i like i have
12:20 this kind of like mental model of a solopreneur and a solopreneur nobody's
12:24 actually solo everybody's got like a little support team around them that's
12:28 like helpful some some in a big way some in a small way but basically it's like
12:32 somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit builds a successful
12:36 business and lifestyle around that and what i noticed was that you had this
12:39 formula which is i don't know if it's intentional or unintentional but i'll
12:42 say it out loud because here's my my read of your business it's basically
12:48 you ha he starts with the red pill so a red pill is like you know that scene in
12:52 the matrix where morpheus is holding out a blue pill a red bull he's like you
12:55 know do you want do you want the truth or do you want to you take the blue pill
12:57 you could just go back to your normal life just as everything was you could
13:00 forget this ever happened and neil's like no i need to know the truth what's
13:04 the truth he takes the red pill and basically it's like every great solopreneur i think starts
13:09 with one truth so like uh tim ferriss's truth was basically that like
13:14 the nine to five work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like effing broken and you don't need
13:19 to do it that way like you could work four hours a week and live like a
13:23 millionaire and so that was like tim ferriss's red pill and yours was
13:26 basically like this idea of being a nomad a digital nomad um which was like
13:31 hey yeah you don't have to you know prescribe to the subscribe to
13:33 the normal way of living you pick a a place that's where you are from that's where
13:39 you live and you pay you know you just kind of stay where you
13:43 grew up and like and you go to an office every day and like you have to wear
13:45 shoes and whatever you're like no i wear flip-flops i walk around on beaches i
13:49 just kind of go wherever i feel like whenever i feel like and i carry a
13:53 little like backpack and that's my life um yeah so you start with the red pill then you
13:58 be then you create content around that red pill says you talking about that
14:02 lifestyle and sharing everything from like hey people always ask what i keep
14:05 in my backpack for the day here's what it is it's like yeah there's every bit
14:08 of content you can come up with that's like poppy that's like fits that red
14:13 pill so then you be that big gives you authority on that subject so you become
14:16 like a authority and so you know pomp became an authority around bitcoin and tim ferriss became an
14:23 authority around life hacking and you've become an authority around nomadism
14:28 and then you take that and then you basically spin off one of many
14:31 businesses that can come up with it but every one of those business either it's
14:35 a big money maker or it's just another funnel and more content more new
14:39 audience that's gonna like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that
14:44 you are like talking about and so it even though you're doing six things
14:47 they're all actually part of one flywheel and every one that you do is
14:51 gonna feed it either because it's gonna give you a bunch of cash that lets you
14:54 fund this lifestyle in a bigger and better way or it's gonna give you new
14:59 content new stories new things to be known about um that fit that lifestyle
15:03 as well that's how i see it i'm curious is that a good is that traffic is really
15:07 accurate and my thing started when i was i was blogging just like you said i was
15:12 blogging about like nomading um but i was blogging for my mom because
15:16 back then you had like travel bloggers like 2013 and i was going to travel
15:21 kinda and nomad and i wanted to you know every place i went i wrote a little
15:25 i was this city to live in and stuff and what happened all the crazy [ __ ] that
15:28 happened to me and my mom was reading that um but i wrote it in english
15:31 because my mom was obviously dutch but i was like okay she can read english so
15:34 it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff more audience but it wasn't
15:37 like super like a big idea it just kind of happened and then those blogs started showing up
15:41 on hacker news and i started writing more about like bootstrapping startups
15:45 as a nomad in in thailand or something or in asia and those started going on
15:49 hacking is really high and i think that was the time it was like 2013 2014 there
15:55 was a time when i noticed that um the developers in san francisco worked
15:58 for all the startups they also were realizing okay maybe i can start doing
16:02 this remotely because remote work was not cool back then and nobody was not
16:06 cool back then because you had the tim ferriss wave in 2008 it's like the first
16:10 nomad wave but there was i love tim ferriss but there was something about the the followers
16:15 there and the the business that were created they were kind of like
16:18 like shady there was a lot of shady [ __ ] i met i came across in asia in thailand
16:21 like americans and europeans it was like a lot of brain supplements and [ __ ] like
16:26 do it yes yes dudes yeah drug dealers online directories and like spam daxing
16:30 and like they're still shady [ __ ] but less and i
16:33 was like i really hate this shady [ __ ] i don't feel like part of the scene
16:37 uh i think it would be cool to make it more like uh you know mainstream like
16:42 reputable businesses reputable jobs that do it um so i kept blogging about it and
16:47 it kept taking off in hacker news and uh and you're right i think and then i went
16:50 on twitter and i think i kind of organically people started following me
16:53 and then a lot of people went nomad a lot of my friends went nomad because i was
16:58 blogging and they became my friends now um and yeah and then i started all those
17:02 businesses and but i think it's it's not like some it sounds very like a
17:06 constructive it's not a master plan no it's not a master plan it's very organic
17:09 like uh i kind of try i'm like user zero i try to build stuff for myself
17:15 and i always have like i have like new ideas like there's just like you said
17:18 red build there's like something that's a discongruence in society and what i'm
17:22 thinking and most people then think like okay there must be wrong something there must
17:27 be something wrong with me but i think like arrogance i think there must be
17:30 something wrong with society maybe this is like a new thing so i'll try and make
17:34 a little website about it like inflation like three years ago or two years ago i
17:37 was tweeting about inflation like this shit's gonna go crazy with all the fat
17:41 printing money and everyone's like nah inflation is fine stop stop whining
17:45 about it i'm like no i'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are
17:48 higher so i made this inflationchart.com website that shows the inflation numbers
17:52 are really high turned out to be true kind of now so yeah that's all great what what uh
1:34 is awesome so if you're if sam wants to hang out with you he'll text you just
1:38 like a normal person would but and he doesn't need to even know you he's just
1:41 like interested in you maybe maybe it's a cold dm maybe it's a text message
1:44 maybe he got your number from somebody else like hey it's sam
1:48 uh you know i'm in san francisco but instead of saying wanna hang sam will
1:54 just go i'm in san francisco let's do this he sent me some [ __ ] that i won't
2:00 say out loud but yeah but i think it worked yeah so sam what
2:06 what is this and why does it work so well it's like a phrase like you know
2:09 like people will be like uh you know i [ __ ] with that guy like i [ __ ] with
2:13 drake i like drake it extends from that and i just say it and people uh they reply i don't know i
2:20 just yeah this particular one i it was a ceo of a multi-billion dollar company
2:25 who i'm friendly with i just said what's up i'm in your hood let's
2:29 andy goes down when like it worked out it's amazing and now so normally we try to play cool but
2:36 we've actually been chasing you peter we've been we've been talking about your
2:39 projects we've been being like hey we got to get this guy in the pod sam is a
2:44 fan of you for sure i would say i am less of a fan than sam but i am a that
2:49 doesn't mean i like you it's just i'm more in the closet about it whereas sam
2:54 is very open sam's like this guy's amazing this guy's like an artist thanks
2:58 man this guy's got great hair and you do have great hair so it's all true and now
3:02 we finally got you here and it was hard i think right because you like don't do
3:05 you don't schedule or something like that like i mean it it like it looks like being an
3:11 ass right on instagram if you do that but i like like you guys i would get so many
3:15 dms and they're all like i mean generally they're very low quality dms right like i want to
3:19 collaborate but i don't want to invest i don't want to like people want something from you i
3:23 think it's like being a hot girl in the club like people want something for you
3:26 but they don't want to invest the time to actually get to know you or you know
3:30 you feel like an object and i don't like to feel like that and i want to um
3:35 spend more time with you know like with my friends in real life with uh my
3:40 girlfriend or something i want to spend time on in the gym you know on my health
3:44 and cooking food and and that kind of stuff go for walks and
3:49 uh i think because i because i've been doing this for 10 years like startups like eight years and
3:53 now i get the money is going well so i don't really need to do any calls
3:57 anymore any dms so i'm just trying to create a more chill life
4:01 and i'm not an [ __ ] it just means like i don't have time to met to reply
4:06 to everybody so i close my dms and and then people get really angry on
4:09 tweets they're like why don't you why you close your dms are you arrogant and
4:12 stuff so i wrote a blog post like kind of explaining my day and my routine and
4:16 what i do in the day and that i don't really have time if i do all the things
4:20 i do now to also dm everybody reply everybody and do calls and stuff
4:24 um and that's pretty much the argument or even let's give the context so let's
4:28 explain who the heck you are so uh your name is peter lovells you're
4:33 known on um twitter as levels io right yeah that's the uh that's the right way
4:37 to say it i saw you a while back i'm just gonna say some interesting things
4:41 about you i believe that you can correct me if i have any of these wrong i
4:43 believe you publish how much you make every year and in fact it's in your
4:48 twitter bio in your location there's like a meter that's like your road to three million a
4:52 year yeah and it says 2.7 million so your meter is almost all the way filled up
4:59 um you build a bunch of random small projects usually around
5:04 some things you like or believe or your lifestyle which is kind of a nomadic
5:08 lifestyle so i believe i think you you you hop around or you
5:11 don't have like a home base so you live you know you could be like in bali and
5:15 then you could be in the netherlands you could be a different place all the time
5:19 and you make these small websites or apps and it says in your bio that you have 13
5:25 million monthly active users um and i've i remember seeing you
5:29 because you did a community like a like a nomad community a slack community
5:33 really early on like slack had just come out and i was like this guy's like charging
5:38 10 bucks i think it was 10 bucks a month or something to get into this thing i
5:40 was like he's got like a thousand people here wow this is actually this guy's
5:44 making good money doing this um like just by making a slack group and you
5:48 just do a bunch of small experiments like that um that's what i know sam what
5:51 did i do i'll give pe peter let me give like the outsider's perspective that's a little more
5:57 holistic so basically there's two things that are interesting to you the first
6:01 one is your businesses which actually are the least the lesser of the two
6:05 interesting things so you have roughly five or s yeah you have seven different
6:10 businesses uh ranging from nomad list which makes uh 2.1 million dollars in
6:15 the last 12 months that's a that's a a job board you have another job board
6:19 called remote okay that's making 115 dollars a month you have read mate read
6:23 make which looks like it's like an ebook something like that yeah it's like an
6:26 ebook yeah yeah 60k a month then you have got like a bunch of really you're
6:29 seeing these numbers because he publishes them where do you publish
6:32 these he publishes all of them on like the the url uh go to his twitter profile
6:36 and we'll let you talk sorry peter in a second but go to his profile
6:40 go to his twitter profile and then like click off and it's like uh open revenue
6:43 at the very bottom but i'm reading off of our notes so and then you have like a
6:47 qr menu creator then you have like an inflation chart which doesn't seem like
6:51 it makes money but tracks uh inflation and then you have rebase which is a
6:55 platform to help people become a citizen of uh portugal help them re relocate the
7:00 portugal so what's the first part is those businesses like i said you have
7:03 those that are interesting i would narrow it down to say you have a series
7:08 of job boards for nomadic or remote work that are pretty profitable but the second thing
7:12 that's even more interesting is the way that you do these things so you do a few
7:15 things that are interesting the first thing is i think you're the only
7:18 full-time employee right and you use a team of contractors and second of all
7:22 you have this weird personality that's very embedded in everything you do so that's
7:30 kind of like my big intro of what you do i could see a website and i could know
7:33 you built it without you having an about page which is kind of
7:37 clunky right it looks a little no it's like no but it doesn't have a nice way i
7:42 guess yeah it's another designer yeah no i think it's accurate description um
7:46 it's like like i'm not very nomadic anymore like i'm slowly settling down
7:49 right but i started very nomadically i was like moving around every month
7:52 um i started like in 2014 i started nomading and i uh went to all these
8:00 places and i started building these apps these little websites little products to
8:02 validate and i remember i mean i told the story so many times but i was following patrick
8:08 mckenzie patio 11 on hacker news famous hacker news a guy and now he works for
8:12 stripe and he would do he would share his revenue on his blog about all his
8:16 little products he made and it was like appointment reminder for barbershop so
8:19 you got to sms just before your appointment so you don't forget it that
8:23 kind of stuff and i was really inspired like okay this is not like some big vc
8:26 funded guy he's just like an indie guy was just on his laptop kind of building stuff
8:33 and i kind of mixed that with the nomad thing where like building from your
8:38 laptop from your backpack moving around i think also getting inspired from
8:40 different places because if you move around you i mean i know sam moves
8:44 around a little bit as well uh you your life becomes very unique because
8:48 you meet different kinds of people you you're in different kinds of places you
8:51 see different kinds of products like in shops like if you're in asia you see
8:55 some futuristic [ __ ] you don't see in europe and america
8:58 and all that stuff kind of it helps for inspiration for creating
9:02 products in some indirect ways as well um so that's pretty much what i've been
9:06 doing and i think it's i've been trying to be like radically honest like i know
9:10 this this american guy who pushes the radical honesty movement um so i'm
9:14 trying to do that in my personal life i'm trying to do it on the internet i'm
9:16 not perfect but i'm trying to be as honest and open as possible
9:19 uh because i don't like this fake corporate stuff and it's because i started
9:25 business administration and i have a master's degree in it so i know all the
9:29 management consultancy [ __ ] you know i've been there i've done that i know
9:32 that's where my friends work i know investment bankers and i hate that that
9:36 a lot of that world where it's like fake and not real and i uh want to be very open and honest and i
9:41 think it's also a little bit of a european thing not to slack off
9:45 americans i love america but like um in europe people are very uh
9:50 a little bit more direct and a little bit more uh straightforward
9:53 and uh i think that comes across in my in the stuff i do a little bit so what's the
9:59 total size of all your of all your projects in terms of top line and bottom
10:03 line revenue and isn't it true that you're the only full-time person and how
10:07 many contractors are you using yeah so i have one customer support contractor
10:11 part-time uh isabelle and she works for all my projects um and i have a
10:16 moderator for the slack group because dude slack groups they there's some
10:20 drama in there like i've had some crazy drama in these sledge groups in
10:23 communities so you need to have a moderator you need to have rules and you
10:26 need to have a you cannot just automate this moderation away like i tried that
10:30 but you need a real person there to you know check on messages and stuff
10:34 um and then i have a devops guy he's my best friend daniel and he uh
10:41 works kind of like a sls sla like a service level agreement where if the
10:44 server goes down he gets a message you know if i'm sleeping with something he
10:48 brings it back up but the problem is never was down anymore like it doesn't
10:52 we haven't really had that for years so um he does security updates and stuff
10:55 you know like because i have a vps i don't use amazon i use a vps on
11:00 digitalocean and linode um and he kind of keeps that stuff safe you
11:03 know so that's good and how big is the business top playing i'm sorry how big is the business um
11:09 so remote case the job board it's the biggest business makes the most money
11:12 normally this is starting to grow though it's like it's past i think 100k this
11:17 month 100k a month um so almost like a million dollar business
11:21 um remote case 1.6 million a year i think um and rebase is a new business it's an
11:27 immigration agency so i want to help remote workers immigrate to
11:30 countries that want to attract remote workers with like you know beneficial
11:34 tax stuff uh portugal is one of the first ones to do that um so those are
11:38 the three businesses really make money and the rest doesn't really make money a
11:42 lot like the book makes like i think like 4k a month so but everything you do
11:48 is part of one flywheel so i've looked at your kind of like system
11:53 and i've looked at a bunch of people because i got into a little pickle where
11:57 i was like god i'm doing so many things and i want to do all these things i'm
12:00 interested in all these things but [ __ ] you know am i going to be able
12:04 to juggle five different things i got a podcast i have a vc fund i have my
12:08 e-commerce business i have a newsletter business i have um you know i don't even know what else
12:14 course business i got i got another [ __ ] right so it's like
12:17 uh am i going to be able to do this and what i saw that you did i like i have
12:20 this kind of like mental model of a solopreneur and a solopreneur nobody's
12:24 actually solo everybody's got like a little support team around them that's
12:28 like helpful some some in a big way some in a small way but basically it's like
12:32 somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit builds a successful
12:36 business and lifestyle around that and what i noticed was that you had this
12:39 formula which is i don't know if it's intentional or unintentional but i'll
12:42 say it out loud because here's my my read of your business it's basically
12:48 you ha he starts with the red pill so a red pill is like you know that scene in
12:52 the matrix where morpheus is holding out a blue pill a red bull he's like you
12:55 know do you want do you want the truth or do you want to you take the blue pill
12:57 you could just go back to your normal life just as everything was you could
13:00 forget this ever happened and neil's like no i need to know the truth what's
13:04 the truth he takes the red pill and basically it's like every great solopreneur i think starts
13:09 with one truth so like uh tim ferriss's truth was basically that like
13:14 the nine to five work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like effing broken and you don't need
13:19 to do it that way like you could work four hours a week and live like a
13:23 millionaire and so that was like tim ferriss's red pill and yours was
13:26 basically like this idea of being a nomad a digital nomad um which was like
13:31 hey yeah you don't have to you know prescribe to the subscribe to
13:33 the normal way of living you pick a a place that's where you are from that's where
13:39 you live and you pay you know you just kind of stay where you
13:43 grew up and like and you go to an office every day and like you have to wear
13:45 shoes and whatever you're like no i wear flip-flops i walk around on beaches i
13:49 just kind of go wherever i feel like whenever i feel like and i carry a
13:53 little like backpack and that's my life um yeah so you start with the red pill then you
13:58 be then you create content around that red pill says you talking about that
14:02 lifestyle and sharing everything from like hey people always ask what i keep
14:05 in my backpack for the day here's what it is it's like yeah there's every bit
14:08 of content you can come up with that's like poppy that's like fits that red
14:13 pill so then you be that big gives you authority on that subject so you become
14:16 like a authority and so you know pomp became an authority around bitcoin and tim ferriss became an
14:23 authority around life hacking and you've become an authority around nomadism
14:28 and then you take that and then you basically spin off one of many
14:31 businesses that can come up with it but every one of those business either it's
14:35 a big money maker or it's just another funnel and more content more new
14:39 audience that's gonna like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that
14:44 you are like talking about and so it even though you're doing six things
14:47 they're all actually part of one flywheel and every one that you do is
14:51 gonna feed it either because it's gonna give you a bunch of cash that lets you
14:54 fund this lifestyle in a bigger and better way or it's gonna give you new
14:59 content new stories new things to be known about um that fit that lifestyle
15:03 as well that's how i see it i'm curious is that a good is that traffic is really
15:07 accurate and my thing started when i was i was blogging just like you said i was
15:12 blogging about like nomading um but i was blogging for my mom because
15:16 back then you had like travel bloggers like 2013 and i was going to travel
15:21 kinda and nomad and i wanted to you know every place i went i wrote a little
15:25 i was this city to live in and stuff and what happened all the crazy [ __ ] that
15:28 happened to me and my mom was reading that um but i wrote it in english
15:31 because my mom was obviously dutch but i was like okay she can read english so
15:34 it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff more audience but it wasn't
15:37 like super like a big idea it just kind of happened and then those blogs started showing up
15:41 on hacker news and i started writing more about like bootstrapping startups
15:45 as a nomad in in thailand or something or in asia and those started going on
15:49 hacking is really high and i think that was the time it was like 2013 2014 there
15:55 was a time when i noticed that um the developers in san francisco worked
15:58 for all the startups they also were realizing okay maybe i can start doing
16:02 this remotely because remote work was not cool back then and nobody was not
16:06 cool back then because you had the tim ferriss wave in 2008 it's like the first
16:10 nomad wave but there was i love tim ferriss but there was something about the the followers
16:15 there and the the business that were created they were kind of like
16:18 like shady there was a lot of shady [ __ ] i met i came across in asia in thailand
16:21 like americans and europeans it was like a lot of brain supplements and [ __ ] like
16:26 do it yes yes dudes yeah drug dealers online directories and like spam daxing
16:30 and like they're still shady [ __ ] but less and i
16:33 was like i really hate this shady [ __ ] i don't feel like part of the scene
16:37 uh i think it would be cool to make it more like uh you know mainstream like
16:42 reputable businesses reputable jobs that do it um so i kept blogging about it and
16:47 it kept taking off in hacker news and uh and you're right i think and then i went
16:50 on twitter and i think i kind of organically people started following me
16:53 and then a lot of people went nomad a lot of my friends went nomad because i was
16:58 blogging and they became my friends now um and yeah and then i started all those
17:02 businesses and but i think it's it's not like some it sounds very like a
17:06 constructive it's not a master plan no it's not a master plan it's very organic
17:09 like uh i kind of try i'm like user zero i try to build stuff for myself
17:15 and i always have like i have like new ideas like there's just like you said
17:18 red build there's like something that's a discongruence in society and what i'm
17:22 thinking and most people then think like okay there must be wrong something there must
17:27 be something wrong with me but i think like arrogance i think there must be
17:30 something wrong with society maybe this is like a new thing so i'll try and make
17:34 a little website about it like inflation like three years ago or two years ago i
17:37 was tweeting about inflation like this shit's gonna go crazy with all the fat
17:41 printing money and everyone's like nah inflation is fine stop stop whining
17:45 about it i'm like no i'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are
17:48 higher so i made this inflationchart.com website that shows the inflation numbers
17:52 are really high turned out to be true kind of now so yeah that's all great what what uh
17:58 technology are you using to build those sites because they all do look alike and
18:02 you seem like you can spin them up like really quickly well that's really funny because i get a
18:07 lot of criticism for the technology i use i use php because that's the
18:10 language i knew because i was making a blog like right like wordpress so i knew
18:13 php a little bit so i was like okay i just need to write with the language i know because i don't
18:18 know under other languages and i did that and then i use javascript and i use
18:22 jquery so everybody starts laughing now because jquery is like way pass a but i
18:27 still use it because it's so easy to you know make a button bind an event to it
18:31 age exterior to the server to the php script does something with the database
18:34 sends it back and it works for me really well and i think it doesn't matter what you use but
18:39 as long as you use something that's really fast um feedback loop and iterative loop
18:45 where you can really quickly develop like i can make a new button in like you
18:48 know 20 seconds and deploy to the server it's really fast and i know other
18:53 developer friends of mine use a very big stack all those you know kubernetes and
18:56 all the stuff all these keywords i don't really know and for them it takes
19:00 sometimes like you know an hour or maybe even days to deploy a new feature
19:05 and i think what we learned from startup and lean startup is that the customer
19:08 feedback loop has to be very difficult to be very fast iterative so you can really quickly
19:15 change stuff and it also makes your customers really happy because they see
19:18 something they have a problem or a feature idea you can really quickly
19:21 build it and then they see it and that's i mean if you want happy customers
19:25 that's how you get it you make something for them they're like oh my god i
19:28 influenced this product and uh yeah so that works for me so very
19:32 very simple stack we won't laugh at you because not because we're nice we just we don't
19:38 know anything about i don't know what jquery is neither the samsung i mean nobody these
19:43 days you're safe here we're too dumb to to call you out on any
19:49 of your technical nice nice it's a good podcast what do you what do you think
19:53 what do you think this whole your whole thing's worth because
19:57 if you go okay so depends if you do 5x sorry sean go to his like sites and you
20:02 could see like it's like something slash open it's usually like the website slash
20:06 open and then like it says like so many stats most of which honestly are kind of
20:10 useless but it's just like it's cool uh it's like you know like how many seventy
20:13 percent of them are like you know the equivalent of like a step counter it's
20:18 like uh it's like oh how many dms did i get today how many uh no i don't need it
20:24 no you do you have it but it's collective it's like dm sense you know
20:27 it's collective events yeah but for example i'm on nomadlist.com which
20:30 you said yeah i think your biggest one slash open and on it you see the revenue
20:35 chart you see you know co2 removed from the atmosphere you see the full p l you
20:39 see a bunch of other things and one of them that you see is my okay so 73
20:45 profit margin your team says 0.78 so i guess that's like part part-time
20:49 yeah like full-time equivalent like fta yeah and then plus 492 bots
20:55 what is that service yeah yeah yeah so uh he has the valuation too he is if you
21:10 i mean it's not super accurate i did business but it's the pe ratio of public
21:13 companies that are similar in industry and i try like sync it to that sometimes
21:16 um but the dude it completely depends on the multiple somebody's going to pay for
21:21 it right like uh have you seen those those are extremely low no i've sold
21:27 i've been in selling processes with previous guests on your podcast
21:31 you know so uh but it kind of bounced off i'm just a lot of i think i'm just
21:35 going to guess it was andrew wilkinson because he loved manchester united yeah
21:39 because he loves john boards that that's just a guess i can't say anything but 80 i signed any
21:45 80 of the acquisitions they bounce off right so right now i'm like i don't really care
21:49 uh i like that i have cash flow and my life is nice and but i
21:54 until recently i was really like until like a few years ago i was like obsessed
21:57 by the selling because you build a startup like in the movie like social well not
22:01 the movie social network but in big movies about startups they're like oh my
22:04 god grow big and sell and you're a millionaire but then if you become millionaire
22:08 yourself with your cash flow you're like okay why does it matter actually
22:12 well let's actually talk about that because what's interesting about you is
22:15 you have a few that you could sell so like remote okay and nomad lists are
22:19 both pretty cool have you calculated like how much money you want and how long it's going to take
22:26 you to get there via cash flow and if it's better to like well why don't i
22:28 just sell one and i can get like an eight or ten million dollar lump sum but
22:31 then i still on this other one that's making like yeah three million dollars i
22:34 mean have you thought have you done that math and and what are you doing
22:38 the thing is most of my revenue is profit like the margins are really high
22:41 especially remote okay it's like it's like 94 margin uh pre-tax so it's very
22:45 high um so i'd say 10x after thanks gets interesting i think the problems with bootstrap
22:51 companies you usually get three four five x uh profit or review which is too low for
22:57 me it's like i can i might as well wait three years or four years and sit in
23:01 this chair and the sites will probably keep running because they're fully
23:04 automated and i barely need to work on them they kind of just keep going it's
23:07 like heavily automated like really heavy heavy uh it's just that i won't build
23:11 new features anymore then and the site will start looking a little bit
23:14 old because you know design trends change but generally it will keep
23:18 running so it doesn't make sense for me to sell for you know 5x or 4x if i might as well
23:24 wait and also like normal this is like my baby so if i sell it
23:28 uh they're gonna [ __ ] it up i already know because they always do
23:33 um like let's say a big a big remote startup buys it okay i know vc fund remote startups are cool
23:38 but they're also going to be bought by big boring companies later like
23:42 corporate companies right and they're going to shut this [ __ ] down
23:46 they're like and this is my contribution this is my life's work it's like a
23:50 legacy so uh remote okay i care less because it's a job board job is not very
23:52 interesting but normally this is like this whole movement and culture and and there's
23:57 like tens of thousands of people on there and my friends are on there and
23:59 it's like this work of love you know and um so yeah it's hard it would be hard to
24:05 sell that because people are going to [ __ ] it up
24:08 are you the largest go ahead sean well one thing i was going
24:11 to say you tweeted out something that said a 10-year overnight success which i
24:15 think is a common uh uh idea that most people don't don't realize which is
24:20 by the time you hear about something you don't know the 10 years of kind of
24:24 toiling and tweaking and iterating that it took before the big kind of
24:28 breakthroughs happen i had my life was the same way you know i started my first
24:32 startup when i was 20 21. and i made my first million by the time
24:36 i was 30 or 31 right like it wasn't it took 10 years and um and you know and then and then
24:41 every year since then a bunch of great stuff has happened but like it took a
24:44 long time to get that breakthrough and i was looking at your chart sam i don't
24:47 know if you saw this tweet that he has but the chart basically shows i think
24:51 you start the sum of all my revenue together in one chart yeah yeah it's all
24:54 your revenue from all your projects all together in one chart and it's looking
24:58 like it's like i don't know 2012 or 2013 start and basically if i go all the way up
25:04 until let's call it 2019 you're at maybe 600 700k and per year in revenue and only in the last
25:14 like like kind of the pandemic boom you know let's say 2020. from 2020 you
25:19 went from under a million dollars to 2.5 million a year right so you two and yeah
25:23 x and you like it's because it sounds amazing wow this dude's making almost
25:26 three million a year it's like yeah but he's also been building that momentum and stacking
25:33 these assets and it just really took off and which i'm guessing is like pandemic
25:36 fueled a lot of people wanting to be nomads and like you were there to catch
25:40 that wave you were the guy ready to catch yeah but now he this was coming
25:43 like right this was like i did this presentation in 2015 where i predicted there would be one
25:49 billion remote workers in 2030 and everybody laughed at me and i was
25:53 like even in the comments like youtube comments were like this is ridiculous
25:56 whereas your sources is [ __ ] and then confident happened and it suddenly
26:00 seems very reasonable and but nobody could have seen this coming and i had no
26:04 idea i was actually kind of like thinking like you know of it or what
26:11 but it kind of like it if you look at the chart it's kind of like you know it
26:14 doesn't really go anywhere and i was like thinking okay this is [ __ ] like
26:17 i i tried i tried everything to make it grow and sometimes it grew and sometimes it
26:23 didn't but generally it wasn't very it wasn't like a vc startup where like
26:27 well it looks like there's these p there's these run-ups and then a plateau
26:31 and run-up in a plateau which is by the way that's how all progress actually
26:35 looks if you zoom out and i remember that like during 2014 when i first moved to
26:40 silicon valley there was a small group of people like you this i think when you
26:44 created that first slack community that was like nah being a nomad is the way to
26:48 go and um yeah but those people were like freaks you know they were they were
26:52 very yes and but there were some people who took the red pill at that time i think steph
26:57 smith who was just also worked at the hustlers she met you in i don't know indonesia
27:05 or something like that because um she had i think probably during that
27:09 more like that time period 2014 15 16 something like that she was one of those
27:13 people that defected then whereas now there's like another wave and like if
27:17 you look at kind of like any lifestyle movement it happens this way it starts
27:20 with like very i could take crypto it starts with the the cypherpunks exactly
27:24 you're right yes they don't they hang out in cryptography forums and they took
27:28 the pill first yeah and then came you know the next the developers then came
27:32 the the finance bros and then it's the same with the next music like music
27:36 genres like hip-hop like early hip-hop and i come from electronic music so
27:39 drama-based music it was my previous career like music producer it's the same
27:44 thing like edm taking off in the us in 2009 2010 with dubstep that's what broke
27:50 edm and u.s that kind of stuff it you like these these movements these
27:54 scenes are almost dead and then suddenly something happens like
27:58 right and it's so unpredictable you have no clue what's going on you can only
28:01 surf it so i think the metaphor of surfing is very accurate it's better to serve these waves
28:06 in general i think life just surf waves stop trying to control it
28:10 uh just serve it and kind of like you know pivoting like pivoting startups
28:13 into that's pretty much just serving like steering the surfboard over the
28:16 waves because you cannot you cannot control the market at all you cannot
28:20 control society at all you know one of the things that bothers me about
28:25 the this indie hacker movement is well i i just i really i really like it i like
28:30 it but in general what i don't like about it is like people think pretty
28:34 small so they're like uh you know like there's it's kind of related to like the fire movement which
28:40 is like oh i just want to save a little bit of money so i can make 40 000 a year
28:45 in passive income and and i'm like oh that's cool like getting your first step
28:48 is cool but like that can't be it with life like you have to like you know
28:51 you're going to want more you want to do more things and contribute to society
28:55 and with a lot of these indie hackers they kind of come up with silly stuff
28:58 where it's like a small widget that they sell for four dollars a month and they
29:00 hope that they can get to a thousand dollars a month and i'm like man that's
29:03 like neat if you're just starting out but i think that this could be bigger
29:06 and you're actually one of the few people that i've seen go harder you know
29:10 you're going harder on this um are there any others like do you
29:14 think i'm going harder on it like well your numbers are bigger like
29:18 it's like like it's it's substantial like your numbers are nice already and
29:22 it could be survivor bias right well yeah definitely but i still think
29:29 that there's a mindset of like um like for example your twitter bio thing
29:34 says your meter is going to three million i would say most people who are
29:38 indie hackers and makers and kind of like the the sort of tinkerer community
29:43 they don't even have their meter to their their meter you know initially is
29:47 going to start much lower sixty thousand or seventy thousand a year yeah and
29:50 maybe yours did too but then you like oh cool i filled up that meter i leveled it
29:54 up so what was your like initial goal was it like making enough to not need a
29:59 job or where did you start when did you get more ambitious so i i mean back when i started i had a
30:04 youtube channel for this electronic music i was making and stuff and i was
30:07 making like a few thousand dollars from youtube adsense so i had some runway
30:12 uh some cash flow to live off of travel off and work on mini startups but it was
30:17 very fast it was shrinking because of the competitive like the copyright
30:20 claims on youtube in 2012 and stuff so it was pretty much becoming like below a
30:24 thousand dollars a month um but uh so i had that cash show but
30:30 to go to your question i think it's a power law like you always have a few
30:34 people in a scene who will make more money or get more successful and stuff
30:38 also there's a delay effect i started in 2013 or 2014. all these indeed this
30:44 indie scene didn't really it wasn't cool until maybe i think 2018 or something
30:49 2017. so these people that are going into it now they're just starting kind of and
30:54 i think the widget thing is interesting because you said it's only a widget
30:57 uh if you make one feature really well that solves like one problem you can get some
31:03 customers and you get some cash flow and then you can build a second feature and
31:07 you can slowly scale up uh to a bigger to a real business to real product
31:10 toolkit right and then i think another thing is you don't see a lot of people with
31:16 multi-million revenue because they will quickly raise pc like once you pass
31:20 a million dollars a year they will switch to okay let's go big let's go
31:25 become a billion dollar company and i think i'm the exception i'm like i don't
31:27 want to be building another company i'm fine like like this kind of chill um and
31:31 that's why you don't see those people a lot because i do know them and they
31:34 quickly disappear like this app we're using now uh riverside i think is raised pc now
31:41 started bootstrapped and then i think oprah winfrey used it and because it's
31:44 my friend nandov he makes it he's like dude overwhelmed for you so i'm like oh
31:47 my god this is crazy he's like yeah i think i'm gonna raise pc i'm like okay
31:51 yeah you should do that uh because they think this is like this
31:54 could be bigger than just a few million right so you tweeted something out the other
31:59 day that's related to this you go not sure if people realize it but if your
32:02 app does twenty thousand a month on revenue you're probably already a
32:05 millionaire twenty thousand dollars per month times twelve months assume you could sell for
32:11 let's call it four or five multiple yeah that's a million dollar selling price
32:14 right you're sitting on a million dollar asset and when you put it that way i
32:18 think that sounds and it is way more achievable than this idea of like i got to build a
32:24 million dollar business like i don't know i don't do i have the big idea
32:27 whatever but getting something to 20 to 30 000 a month in revenue seems approachable
32:33 right it's approachable and that's kind of awesome i think that's an amazing
32:37 like just a like you didn't all you did is you said something that was true out loud and i
32:43 think if more people heard that that's why i'm kind of bring it up here i think
32:46 if more people heard that that is a pathway to a millionaire status that does not
32:52 require like winning the startup lottery of like inventing the next big thing
32:57 or working and saving and you know paying your crazy w-2 taxes for like you
33:02 know 15-20 years to get the same same outcome yeah exactly yeah i agree yeah and i think
33:08 it's it's reachable especially if you think about high automation very high
33:13 margins so software business you you're not going to hire a big team of 10
33:16 people immediately you work with part-time contracts like i do
33:21 and you keep your margins very very high because then you can sell for 5x right
33:24 then your revenue is almost your profit so it's the same um yeah i think 20k brainstorm or business
33:31 together that could get to 20k so what's an idea that you you're not currently building but you
33:36 thought of because i'm sure you're an idea guy and you think uh you can make a
33:40 website that does x or you could make nomad lists for this other niche or you
33:44 could make you know um the the immigration one for this other thing so
33:49 what's a business let's brainstorm a business together what's a business that
33:52 you think could get somebody to this millionaire status dude i think what's man it's like again
33:57 this is so personal so i've been living like i used to live in hostels right in
34:03 like dorms in 2014 i didn't have money shared with six people like crazy then i
34:07 started like private rooms in hotels then the rooms got a little bit more
34:09 luxurious because i had more money and then i started discovering like
34:13 apartment hotels and it sounds like [ __ ] but it works so
34:17 well with remote work so i mean i was part of the hotel right now in europe on
34:21 the beach and there's a kitchen what's an apartment hotel what does that mean
34:23 sorry apartment hotel is essentially a hotel so full service
34:29 furnished nice interior hotel room but you also have a kitchen you have a
34:32 bedroom you have a living room you have it you know it's very big it's pretty
34:36 much like an airbnb but you pay per month or per night or whatever you pay
34:39 per month well you can pay for a night you can pay for a month it's just like
34:41 sean um it's like that guy or whatever yeah it's like saunder and it's like all uh i
34:46 forget the other one the guy was supposed to come on the podium canceled
34:49 you did one of these in nashville right or something where you're like this is
34:52 awesome it's working yeah it's like a it's basically just an
34:58 apartment that you can rent for five days and they're pretty cool i do i do
35:01 them all the time the problem that i've experienced is within new york it's like
35:06 10 grand a month and it's like 600 square feet so that's why i tend to go
35:10 airbnb but i'm in smaller less expensive cities you can get like a thousand
35:13 square foot place for like six thousand a month and it's just it's basically uh
35:18 an apart apartment building that has one floor or all floors dedicated to airbnbs
35:24 yeah the problem of airbnb is that i've noticed the quality is very very
35:29 high there's a big range of quality and there's problems there's no daily
35:31 cleaning it's it feels too much like um unexpected like you don't know what's
35:39 gonna happen the water stuff might break if things break here you just get a new
35:43 apartment right and i've done this in europe and i've done this in asia too in
35:48 thailand and i spend about you see two to three k three and a half k so it's a
35:52 lot of money it's more than normal rent but the cool thing is that it it solves
35:55 a lot of problems you have in your daily life um because it's surface and stuff
35:59 and it's it's a huge thing in asia it's a huge thing in in southeast asia even in
36:05 korea taiwan and stuff so i think that's going to be bigger because of remote work because
36:10 you have remote workers even with families with kids and you don't want to
36:14 live in a hotel or a hotel room is very depressing like i go insane in hotel
36:18 rooms it's just like a bed and you can barely walk around the bed there's no
36:21 space i need to cook food i need to buy steak from the local butcher i need to
36:25 cook it with broccoli and spinach and with my friends and stuff and you can do
36:30 it in an apartment hotel and i think the if you target it's a high-end market i
36:34 think of remote workers that make a lot of money like 200k or 100k something
36:39 if you target them you can make a lot of money because it's um
36:43 service furnished so what would you build you'd actually build an apartment
36:45 hotel or you'd build a digital product that's a big question because i i'm a
36:50 software guy i don't wanna i don't wanna own stuff i don't wanna have all this i
36:53 don't even wanna buy land i don't even want to buy a house i want to be able to
36:57 be a consumer a customer of these kind of things right but i wanted long term i
37:01 want to be able to rent for like six months you know or 12 months even
37:05 i want to be guaranteed to stay so we uh my wife and i are like we're at
37:09 the point where we're gonna start having kids soon and i live not like you
37:14 entirely but a little bit where we spend we spend half the year one place half a
37:17 year at the other place and what we're going to do next year is
37:21 just rent do a 12 month month lease in new york and just not be there all the
37:26 time but i'm looking to rent all of my furniture and i've been looking at a
37:29 place where i was like all right i just want to like book this one place and i want to pay
37:35 someone like three grand a month but they have to show up before i arrive
37:38 they've got to completely set it up yes and it's gonna be 100 furnished for me
37:41 and i've been looking at these and there's a few startups in the space that
37:45 are doing furniture rental and furniture rental is not popular right now and i
37:48 tell people all the time i'm like i just want to rent all my furniture i don't
37:52 want to own any of it and they they think it's nonsense and they think
37:56 it's crazy but if you run the math it's significantly like it's about the same
38:00 in terms of price but in terms of headache i think it's a thousand times better and that's another
38:07 yeah yes yeah so it's it's all about the headaches so if you can afford it you
38:12 can reduce the headaches of ownership and ownership uh it sounds so
38:17 privileged though but whatever it ownership is a big hassle [ __ ] breaks
38:21 all the time and if you are like if i spend my time on my laptop building on these apps it's
38:27 probably better use of my time than managing all this this stuff and
38:31 if a company can specialize in you know managing this stuff and renting it to
38:35 you it's much better i think that's a real you're on point that's a real
38:38 business and um imagine you can go to a website you can say like okay you can choose
38:42 different sets of furniture different interior stuff paintings on the wall or whatever and
38:46 you can just click and you arrive and it's already done for you like you said
38:50 i think that would be really interesting uh yeah what what else
38:54 yeah things that you're interested in either kind of niche categories or
38:58 things in your lifestyle that you're like huh i do this lifestyle thing
39:02 differently than people this could be you could build a business around this
39:06 i think that the biggest problem with the digital nomad thing is that there's
39:10 a maybe it's a good big podcast just to say that uh there's a perception that
39:14 people travel really fast and i have the data that they don't travel fast they
39:17 travel like every few months or even i think the average is seven months now
39:21 it's very slow so the the word digital moment is it's a horrible word of course
39:26 we have so many connotations but it's mostly remote working people
39:29 who want a little bit of a different life want to see different places a
39:32 little bit um you know they have boyfriends girlfriends wives husbands
39:35 they have kids even this family is doing this as well moving around every week doesn't really
39:39 work being very slow is big and if people are more aware of that they
39:44 can find a lot of products built for this long term slow mad market which most of us
39:51 are we're mostly slo-mats and i'm a little mad also slow meds yes think about education
39:56 think about like homeschooling is taking off also because of remote work uh if i
40:00 have kids i i don't know if i want to put him in a regular school maybe you
40:03 know elon musk builds his own school that's kind of cool but you can do things in a different way
40:07 and like now it's still very we're still niche like this remote work thing is
40:12 still niche it's going to get only bigger there's only going to be more
40:15 more people doing this once physical jobs get automated so um if you make products i have no
40:20 specific product but if you know if you build products for those people
40:24 that's a high-end market of like tech workers that are most so
40:28 if you don't but you said that you don't own stuff or you you kind of said like you don't like
40:34 owning stuff you said that you you said that you don't want to own
40:38 real estate so if you're making two and a half million dollars a year in profit
40:41 this is a question that sean always asks that i'm stealing it which is what do
40:45 you do with your money then yeah so i'm heavy in etfs um i read a blog post by
40:52 what's his name the guy from google that does seo and he's like i just put
40:57 everything into in etfs so vanguard etfs s p 500 um but also i'm heavily invested
41:02 in asia because i believe in asia i believe in the future i know
41:05 the west there's a lot of things about asia that are good but it's very i still
41:09 think it's very futuristic and um i also invest in crypto like i hold bitcoin and
41:13 ethereum um it's always scared to say those things on the podcast right but it's all like
41:18 very secure and stuff so it's not exactly the most shocking thing
41:21 to us every tech guy every tech girl is crypto yeah exactly but i i mostly you're
41:27 actually not allowed to have that haircut if you don't own like three yeah
41:32 you can't have a high fade with like long top hair yeah yeah if you don't on
41:35 three um i spend about like four five k a month or something that's it so most of
41:41 it is just uh i do need to pay tax but after that most of it goes to you know
41:45 etfs and stuff it's scary to invest now because it's a scary time but
41:48 generally i'm like i want to do this for 20 30 years in etf invested and stuff
41:52 and sometimes stocks but my i did a benchmark my s p 500 etf
41:58 outperformed all my stock decisions over the last two years so i'm stupid just
42:02 like most people sean you want to tell them what you did recently
42:07 what oh selling with your stocks yeah yeah so i sold not everything but
42:12 pretty much everything sold maybe 70 80 of the stocks that i hold
42:17 um i get that i mean yeah but yeah i'm scared they always say like
42:21 don't try and time the market so i'm like okay i'll just sit and just crash
42:25 with the you know why didn't you do that why don't you just like chill
42:31 uh two reasons one i didn't want to risk a margin call because i borrowed a
42:34 little bit against my stock portfolio but and you know to what i felt was
42:38 extremely safe and it's still safe but i was like ah look if this drops another you know 20
42:44 then all of a sudden i'm having a headache that i don't want
42:47 to deal with i don't want to have to deal with freeing up a bunch of cash
42:51 just to buffer this so i was like i noticed that every morning i was waking
42:54 up and i was checking it and i was like okay logically i know
42:59 i'm in pretty good shape here but the stress of having to think about this is
43:03 taking away from my like you know my day-to-day quality of life it's like
43:06 that's the opposite of what i want money to do i don't want money to give me
43:09 stress my money's supposed to take away my stress so what did you do with the
43:12 money the opposite what did you do with it where is that it's in cash right now um like i might
43:18 do something like whatever some short term you know fixed incomes type stuff
43:22 but like for now i was like again i don't care like i don't need the two
43:25 percent i needed the peace of mind and so that was the first thing the second
43:28 thing was i thought what will i regret more what do i believe more do i believe that this
43:33 is the bottom or do i believe that this is kind of like actually
43:37 thinking that this is the bottom you know six months in and that it's all
43:41 going to get better soon but basically like there's three paths
43:44 either it gets better now it stays this is about the bottom but we stay
43:51 here for an extended period of time one two three four years
43:55 or it has further down to go and i basically thought that it getting
44:00 things going up soon seemed like the least likely thing like i would i
44:03 would actually be betting against that heavily and so i thought okay i have
44:07 nothing to lose here in terms of upside because i just fundamentally don't think
44:10 that stocks and everything's just going to go ripped back up again and we're all
44:14 going to pretend like you know that was it we just had a few months of pain and
44:17 then it all went right back up and and remember things go things are all green
44:20 again so i thought either it's gonna be flats boring and sideways for a period
44:27 of time or it's gonna go down more and i thought well in either case then i
44:32 won't regret being in cash because a i don't have to sweat it every day i don't
44:35 have to think about it every day and b i'm there's no i'm not losing anything
44:39 during you know by doing this and so that was my thought process and i
44:42 figured okay there's going to be these little bear market rallies so just sell
44:46 at the top of the next so that's what i did everything rallied five percent i
44:50 just sold and i kept like i don't know twenty percent still in the market and i
44:54 just put left the other eighty percent in uh and you know not thinking about it cash
44:59 but i held my crypto i didn't sell my crypto that's good yeah
45:03 are you guys mostly invested in the american uh stock market or worldwide
45:07 yeah like you said i believe in asia i'm like yeah i believe in asia too but i
45:09 don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about how do i go invest in asia and
45:12 where would i invest i don't even know what what does that mean are you buying
45:16 the equivalent of like an etf for like japan or something what are you doing
45:19 dude i had a vanguard etf china and then suddenly disappeared from my broker app
45:22 and i'm like what the [ __ ] is happening and i get this message they're like
45:25 vanguard left china in march or something because they were like this is
45:30 i don't know got something like yeah no privatize or did something
45:35 made private companies public or something yeah no they they [ __ ] jack
45:40 ma for sure there's a lot of weird [ __ ] happening but i still think i should be
45:44 invested in in those markets and uh um have i told you about the jack mom
45:47 thing how it's crazy that the third richest man in the world that they were trying
45:54 to was like hey dude shut up and he's like yes sir they just took jack
46:01 my brother-in-law calls me like so we had one moment where like a month in
46:05 when people started noticing jack ma's missing and my brother-in-law in the car one day
46:09 was just like where's jack ma like if he was in the car but he's like bro
46:13 why aren't we talking about this he's like where's jack and we just started
46:17 laughing like how crazy is that that jack ma is just not like what if you
46:20 just couldn't find elon musk because he said something you know that that biden
46:24 didn't like like that the idea is crazy they did it with the tennis player too
46:28 yeah i saw that my brother-in-law still calls me he'll be like he'll just call
46:31 me out of the blue it's been like a year now he'll be like yo where's jack ma and then he'll hang
46:36 up and like that's the whole call it's so great you just feel like he's yelling
4:52 year yeah and it says 2.7 million so your meter is almost all the way filled up
4:59 um you build a bunch of random small projects usually around
5:04 some things you like or believe or your lifestyle which is kind of a nomadic
5:08 lifestyle so i believe i think you you you hop around or you
5:11 don't have like a home base so you live you know you could be like in bali and
5:15 then you could be in the netherlands you could be a different place all the time
5:19 and you make these small websites or apps and it says in your bio that you have 13
5:25 million monthly active users um and i've i remember seeing you
5:29 because you did a community like a like a nomad community a slack community
5:33 really early on like slack had just come out and i was like this guy's like charging
5:38 10 bucks i think it was 10 bucks a month or something to get into this thing i
5:40 was like he's got like a thousand people here wow this is actually this guy's
5:44 making good money doing this um like just by making a slack group and you
5:48 just do a bunch of small experiments like that um that's what i know sam what
5:51 did i do i'll give pe peter let me give like the outsider's perspective that's a little more
5:57 holistic so basically there's two things that are interesting to you the first
6:01 one is your businesses which actually are the least the lesser of the two
6:05 interesting things so you have roughly five or s yeah you have seven different
6:10 businesses uh ranging from nomad list which makes uh 2.1 million dollars in
6:15 the last 12 months that's a that's a a job board you have another job board
6:19 called remote okay that's making 115 dollars a month you have read mate read
6:23 make which looks like it's like an ebook something like that yeah it's like an
6:26 ebook yeah yeah 60k a month then you have got like a bunch of really you're
6:29 seeing these numbers because he publishes them where do you publish
6:32 these he publishes all of them on like the the url uh go to his twitter profile
6:36 and we'll let you talk sorry peter in a second but go to his profile
6:40 go to his twitter profile and then like click off and it's like uh open revenue
6:43 at the very bottom but i'm reading off of our notes so and then you have like a
6:47 qr menu creator then you have like an inflation chart which doesn't seem like
6:51 it makes money but tracks uh inflation and then you have rebase which is a
6:55 platform to help people become a citizen of uh portugal help them re relocate the
7:00 portugal so what's the first part is those businesses like i said you have
7:03 those that are interesting i would narrow it down to say you have a series
7:08 of job boards for nomadic or remote work that are pretty profitable but the second thing
7:12 that's even more interesting is the way that you do these things so you do a few
7:15 things that are interesting the first thing is i think you're the only
7:18 full-time employee right and you use a team of contractors and second of all
7:22 you have this weird personality that's very embedded in everything you do so that's
7:30 kind of like my big intro of what you do i could see a website and i could know
7:33 you built it without you having an about page which is kind of
7:37 clunky right it looks a little no it's like no but it doesn't have a nice way i
7:42 guess yeah it's another designer yeah no i think it's accurate description um
7:46 it's like like i'm not very nomadic anymore like i'm slowly settling down
7:49 right but i started very nomadically i was like moving around every month
7:52 um i started like in 2014 i started nomading and i uh went to all these
8:00 places and i started building these apps these little websites little products to
8:02 validate and i remember i mean i told the story so many times but i was following patrick
8:08 mckenzie patio 11 on hacker news famous hacker news a guy and now he works for
8:12 stripe and he would do he would share his revenue on his blog about all his
8:16 little products he made and it was like appointment reminder for barbershop so
8:19 you got to sms just before your appointment so you don't forget it that
8:23 kind of stuff and i was really inspired like okay this is not like some big vc
8:26 funded guy he's just like an indie guy was just on his laptop kind of building stuff
8:33 and i kind of mixed that with the nomad thing where like building from your
8:38 laptop from your backpack moving around i think also getting inspired from
8:40 different places because if you move around you i mean i know sam moves
8:44 around a little bit as well uh you your life becomes very unique because
8:48 you meet different kinds of people you you're in different kinds of places you
8:51 see different kinds of products like in shops like if you're in asia you see
8:55 some futuristic [ __ ] you don't see in europe and america
8:58 and all that stuff kind of it helps for inspiration for creating
9:02 products in some indirect ways as well um so that's pretty much what i've been
9:06 doing and i think it's i've been trying to be like radically honest like i know
9:10 this this american guy who pushes the radical honesty movement um so i'm
9:14 trying to do that in my personal life i'm trying to do it on the internet i'm
9:16 not perfect but i'm trying to be as honest and open as possible
9:19 uh because i don't like this fake corporate stuff and it's because i started
9:25 business administration and i have a master's degree in it so i know all the
9:29 management consultancy [ __ ] you know i've been there i've done that i know
9:32 that's where my friends work i know investment bankers and i hate that that
9:36 a lot of that world where it's like fake and not real and i uh want to be very open and honest and i
9:41 think it's also a little bit of a european thing not to slack off
9:45 americans i love america but like um in europe people are very uh
9:50 a little bit more direct and a little bit more uh straightforward
9:53 and uh i think that comes across in my in the stuff i do a little bit so what's the
9:59 total size of all your of all your projects in terms of top line and bottom
10:03 line revenue and isn't it true that you're the only full-time person and how
10:07 many contractors are you using yeah so i have one customer support contractor
10:11 part-time uh isabelle and she works for all my projects um and i have a
10:16 moderator for the slack group because dude slack groups they there's some
10:20 drama in there like i've had some crazy drama in these sledge groups in
10:23 communities so you need to have a moderator you need to have rules and you
10:26 need to have a you cannot just automate this moderation away like i tried that
10:30 but you need a real person there to you know check on messages and stuff
10:34 um and then i have a devops guy he's my best friend daniel and he uh
10:41 works kind of like a sls sla like a service level agreement where if the
10:44 server goes down he gets a message you know if i'm sleeping with something he
10:48 brings it back up but the problem is never was down anymore like it doesn't
10:52 we haven't really had that for years so um he does security updates and stuff
10:55 you know like because i have a vps i don't use amazon i use a vps on
11:00 digitalocean and linode um and he kind of keeps that stuff safe you
11:03 know so that's good and how big is the business top playing i'm sorry how big is the business um
11:09 so remote case the job board it's the biggest business makes the most money
11:12 normally this is starting to grow though it's like it's past i think 100k this
11:17 month 100k a month um so almost like a million dollar business
11:21 um remote case 1.6 million a year i think um and rebase is a new business it's an
11:27 immigration agency so i want to help remote workers immigrate to
11:30 countries that want to attract remote workers with like you know beneficial
11:34 tax stuff uh portugal is one of the first ones to do that um so those are
11:38 the three businesses really make money and the rest doesn't really make money a
11:42 lot like the book makes like i think like 4k a month so but everything you do
11:48 is part of one flywheel so i've looked at your kind of like system
11:53 and i've looked at a bunch of people because i got into a little pickle where
11:57 i was like god i'm doing so many things and i want to do all these things i'm
12:00 interested in all these things but [ __ ] you know am i going to be able
12:04 to juggle five different things i got a podcast i have a vc fund i have my
12:08 e-commerce business i have a newsletter business i have um you know i don't even know what else
12:14 course business i got i got another [ __ ] right so it's like
12:17 uh am i going to be able to do this and what i saw that you did i like i have
12:20 this kind of like mental model of a solopreneur and a solopreneur nobody's
12:24 actually solo everybody's got like a little support team around them that's
12:28 like helpful some some in a big way some in a small way but basically it's like
12:32 somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit builds a successful
12:36 business and lifestyle around that and what i noticed was that you had this
12:39 formula which is i don't know if it's intentional or unintentional but i'll
12:42 say it out loud because here's my my read of your business it's basically
12:48 you ha he starts with the red pill so a red pill is like you know that scene in
12:52 the matrix where morpheus is holding out a blue pill a red bull he's like you
12:55 know do you want do you want the truth or do you want to you take the blue pill
12:57 you could just go back to your normal life just as everything was you could
13:00 forget this ever happened and neil's like no i need to know the truth what's
13:04 the truth he takes the red pill and basically it's like every great solopreneur i think starts
13:09 with one truth so like uh tim ferriss's truth was basically that like
13:14 the nine to five work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like effing broken and you don't need
13:19 to do it that way like you could work four hours a week and live like a
13:23 millionaire and so that was like tim ferriss's red pill and yours was
13:26 basically like this idea of being a nomad a digital nomad um which was like
13:31 hey yeah you don't have to you know prescribe to the subscribe to
13:33 the normal way of living you pick a a place that's where you are from that's where
13:39 you live and you pay you know you just kind of stay where you
13:43 grew up and like and you go to an office every day and like you have to wear
13:45 shoes and whatever you're like no i wear flip-flops i walk around on beaches i
13:49 just kind of go wherever i feel like whenever i feel like and i carry a
13:53 little like backpack and that's my life um yeah so you start with the red pill then you
13:58 be then you create content around that red pill says you talking about that
14:02 lifestyle and sharing everything from like hey people always ask what i keep
14:05 in my backpack for the day here's what it is it's like yeah there's every bit
14:08 of content you can come up with that's like poppy that's like fits that red
14:13 pill so then you be that big gives you authority on that subject so you become
14:16 like a authority and so you know pomp became an authority around bitcoin and tim ferriss became an
14:23 authority around life hacking and you've become an authority around nomadism
14:28 and then you take that and then you basically spin off one of many
14:31 businesses that can come up with it but every one of those business either it's
14:35 a big money maker or it's just another funnel and more content more new
14:39 audience that's gonna like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that
14:44 you are like talking about and so it even though you're doing six things
14:47 they're all actually part of one flywheel and every one that you do is
14:51 gonna feed it either because it's gonna give you a bunch of cash that lets you
14:54 fund this lifestyle in a bigger and better way or it's gonna give you new
14:59 content new stories new things to be known about um that fit that lifestyle
15:03 as well that's how i see it i'm curious is that a good is that traffic is really
15:07 accurate and my thing started when i was i was blogging just like you said i was
15:12 blogging about like nomading um but i was blogging for my mom because
15:16 back then you had like travel bloggers like 2013 and i was going to travel
15:21 kinda and nomad and i wanted to you know every place i went i wrote a little
15:25 i was this city to live in and stuff and what happened all the crazy [ __ ] that
15:28 happened to me and my mom was reading that um but i wrote it in english
15:31 because my mom was obviously dutch but i was like okay she can read english so
15:34 it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff more audience but it wasn't
15:37 like super like a big idea it just kind of happened and then those blogs started showing up
15:41 on hacker news and i started writing more about like bootstrapping startups
15:45 as a nomad in in thailand or something or in asia and those started going on
15:49 hacking is really high and i think that was the time it was like 2013 2014 there
15:55 was a time when i noticed that um the developers in san francisco worked
15:58 for all the startups they also were realizing okay maybe i can start doing
16:02 this remotely because remote work was not cool back then and nobody was not
16:06 cool back then because you had the tim ferriss wave in 2008 it's like the first
16:10 nomad wave but there was i love tim ferriss but there was something about the the followers
16:15 there and the the business that were created they were kind of like
16:18 like shady there was a lot of shady [ __ ] i met i came across in asia in thailand
16:21 like americans and europeans it was like a lot of brain supplements and [ __ ] like
16:26 do it yes yes dudes yeah drug dealers online directories and like spam daxing
16:30 and like they're still shady [ __ ] but less and i
16:33 was like i really hate this shady [ __ ] i don't feel like part of the scene
16:37 uh i think it would be cool to make it more like uh you know mainstream like
16:42 reputable businesses reputable jobs that do it um so i kept blogging about it and
16:47 it kept taking off in hacker news and uh and you're right i think and then i went
16:50 on twitter and i think i kind of organically people started following me
16:53 and then a lot of people went nomad a lot of my friends went nomad because i was
16:58 blogging and they became my friends now um and yeah and then i started all those
17:02 businesses and but i think it's it's not like some it sounds very like a
17:06 constructive it's not a master plan no it's not a master plan it's very organic
17:09 like uh i kind of try i'm like user zero i try to build stuff for myself
17:15 and i always have like i have like new ideas like there's just like you said
17:18 red build there's like something that's a discongruence in society and what i'm
17:22 thinking and most people then think like okay there must be wrong something there must
17:27 be something wrong with me but i think like arrogance i think there must be
17:30 something wrong with society maybe this is like a new thing so i'll try and make
17:34 a little website about it like inflation like three years ago or two years ago i
17:37 was tweeting about inflation like this shit's gonna go crazy with all the fat
17:41 printing money and everyone's like nah inflation is fine stop stop whining
17:45 about it i'm like no i'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are
17:48 higher so i made this inflationchart.com website that shows the inflation numbers
17:52 are really high turned out to be true kind of now so yeah that's all great what what uh
17:58 technology are you using to build those sites because they all do look alike and
18:02 you seem like you can spin them up like really quickly well that's really funny because i get a
18:07 lot of criticism for the technology i use i use php because that's the
18:10 language i knew because i was making a blog like right like wordpress so i knew
18:13 php a little bit so i was like okay i just need to write with the language i know because i don't
18:18 know under other languages and i did that and then i use javascript and i use
18:22 jquery so everybody starts laughing now because jquery is like way pass a but i
18:27 still use it because it's so easy to you know make a button bind an event to it
18:31 age exterior to the server to the php script does something with the database
18:34 sends it back and it works for me really well and i think it doesn't matter what you use but
18:39 as long as you use something that's really fast um feedback loop and iterative loop
18:45 where you can really quickly develop like i can make a new button in like you
18:48 know 20 seconds and deploy to the server it's really fast and i know other
18:53 developer friends of mine use a very big stack all those you know kubernetes and
18:56 all the stuff all these keywords i don't really know and for them it takes
19:00 sometimes like you know an hour or maybe even days to deploy a new feature
19:05 and i think what we learned from startup and lean startup is that the customer
19:08 feedback loop has to be very difficult to be very fast iterative so you can really quickly
19:15 change stuff and it also makes your customers really happy because they see
19:18 something they have a problem or a feature idea you can really quickly
19:21 build it and then they see it and that's i mean if you want happy customers
19:25 that's how you get it you make something for them they're like oh my god i
19:28 influenced this product and uh yeah so that works for me so very
19:32 very simple stack we won't laugh at you because not because we're nice we just we don't
19:38 know anything about i don't know what jquery is neither the samsung i mean nobody these
19:43 days you're safe here we're too dumb to to call you out on any
19:49 of your technical nice nice it's a good podcast what do you what do you think
19:53 what do you think this whole your whole thing's worth because
19:57 if you go okay so depends if you do 5x sorry sean go to his like sites and you
20:02 could see like it's like something slash open it's usually like the website slash
20:06 open and then like it says like so many stats most of which honestly are kind of
20:10 useless but it's just like it's cool uh it's like you know like how many seventy
20:13 percent of them are like you know the equivalent of like a step counter it's
20:18 like uh it's like oh how many dms did i get today how many uh no i don't need it
20:24 no you do you have it but it's collective it's like dm sense you know
20:27 it's collective events yeah but for example i'm on nomadlist.com which
20:30 you said yeah i think your biggest one slash open and on it you see the revenue
20:35 chart you see you know co2 removed from the atmosphere you see the full p l you
20:39 see a bunch of other things and one of them that you see is my okay so 73
20:45 profit margin your team says 0.78 so i guess that's like part part-time
20:49 yeah like full-time equivalent like fta yeah and then plus 492 bots
20:55 what is that service yeah yeah yeah so uh he has the valuation too he is if you
21:10 i mean it's not super accurate i did business but it's the pe ratio of public
21:13 companies that are similar in industry and i try like sync it to that sometimes
21:16 um but the dude it completely depends on the multiple somebody's going to pay for
21:21 it right like uh have you seen those those are extremely low no i've sold
21:27 i've been in selling processes with previous guests on your podcast
21:31 you know so uh but it kind of bounced off i'm just a lot of i think i'm just
21:35 going to guess it was andrew wilkinson because he loved manchester united yeah
21:39 because he loves john boards that that's just a guess i can't say anything but 80 i signed any
21:45 80 of the acquisitions they bounce off right so right now i'm like i don't really care
21:49 uh i like that i have cash flow and my life is nice and but i
21:54 until recently i was really like until like a few years ago i was like obsessed
21:57 by the selling because you build a startup like in the movie like social well not
22:01 the movie social network but in big movies about startups they're like oh my
22:04 god grow big and sell and you're a millionaire but then if you become millionaire
22:08 yourself with your cash flow you're like okay why does it matter actually
22:12 well let's actually talk about that because what's interesting about you is
22:15 you have a few that you could sell so like remote okay and nomad lists are
22:19 both pretty cool have you calculated like how much money you want and how long it's going to take
22:26 you to get there via cash flow and if it's better to like well why don't i
22:28 just sell one and i can get like an eight or ten million dollar lump sum but
22:31 then i still on this other one that's making like yeah three million dollars i
22:34 mean have you thought have you done that math and and what are you doing
22:38 the thing is most of my revenue is profit like the margins are really high
22:41 especially remote okay it's like it's like 94 margin uh pre-tax so it's very
22:45 high um so i'd say 10x after thanks gets interesting i think the problems with bootstrap
22:51 companies you usually get three four five x uh profit or review which is too low for
22:57 me it's like i can i might as well wait three years or four years and sit in
23:01 this chair and the sites will probably keep running because they're fully
23:04 automated and i barely need to work on them they kind of just keep going it's
23:07 like heavily automated like really heavy heavy uh it's just that i won't build
23:11 new features anymore then and the site will start looking a little bit
23:14 old because you know design trends change but generally it will keep
23:18 running so it doesn't make sense for me to sell for you know 5x or 4x if i might as well
23:24 wait and also like normal this is like my baby so if i sell it
23:28 uh they're gonna [ __ ] it up i already know because they always do
23:33 um like let's say a big a big remote startup buys it okay i know vc fund remote startups are cool
23:38 but they're also going to be bought by big boring companies later like
23:42 corporate companies right and they're going to shut this [ __ ] down
23:46 they're like and this is my contribution this is my life's work it's like a
23:50 legacy so uh remote okay i care less because it's a job board job is not very
23:52 interesting but normally this is like this whole movement and culture and and there's
23:57 like tens of thousands of people on there and my friends are on there and
23:59 it's like this work of love you know and um so yeah it's hard it would be hard to
24:05 sell that because people are going to [ __ ] it up
24:08 are you the largest go ahead sean well one thing i was going
24:11 to say you tweeted out something that said a 10-year overnight success which i
24:15 think is a common uh uh idea that most people don't don't realize which is
24:20 by the time you hear about something you don't know the 10 years of kind of
24:24 toiling and tweaking and iterating that it took before the big kind of
24:28 breakthroughs happen i had my life was the same way you know i started my first
24:32 startup when i was 20 21. and i made my first million by the time
24:36 i was 30 or 31 right like it wasn't it took 10 years and um and you know and then and then
24:41 every year since then a bunch of great stuff has happened but like it took a
24:44 long time to get that breakthrough and i was looking at your chart sam i don't
24:47 know if you saw this tweet that he has but the chart basically shows i think
24:51 you start the sum of all my revenue together in one chart yeah yeah it's all
24:54 your revenue from all your projects all together in one chart and it's looking
24:58 like it's like i don't know 2012 or 2013 start and basically if i go all the way up
25:04 until let's call it 2019 you're at maybe 600 700k and per year in revenue and only in the last
25:14 like like kind of the pandemic boom you know let's say 2020. from 2020 you
25:19 went from under a million dollars to 2.5 million a year right so you two and yeah
25:23 x and you like it's because it sounds amazing wow this dude's making almost
25:26 three million a year it's like yeah but he's also been building that momentum and stacking
25:33 these assets and it just really took off and which i'm guessing is like pandemic
25:36 fueled a lot of people wanting to be nomads and like you were there to catch
25:40 that wave you were the guy ready to catch yeah but now he this was coming
25:43 like right this was like i did this presentation in 2015 where i predicted there would be one
25:49 billion remote workers in 2030 and everybody laughed at me and i was
25:53 like even in the comments like youtube comments were like this is ridiculous
25:56 whereas your sources is [ __ ] and then confident happened and it suddenly
26:00 seems very reasonable and but nobody could have seen this coming and i had no
26:04 idea i was actually kind of like thinking like you know of it or what
26:11 but it kind of like it if you look at the chart it's kind of like you know it
26:14 doesn't really go anywhere and i was like thinking okay this is [ __ ] like
26:17 i i tried i tried everything to make it grow and sometimes it grew and sometimes it
26:23 didn't but generally it wasn't very it wasn't like a vc startup where like
26:27 well it looks like there's these p there's these run-ups and then a plateau
26:31 and run-up in a plateau which is by the way that's how all progress actually
26:35 looks if you zoom out and i remember that like during 2014 when i first moved to
26:40 silicon valley there was a small group of people like you this i think when you
26:44 created that first slack community that was like nah being a nomad is the way to
26:48 go and um yeah but those people were like freaks you know they were they were
26:52 very yes and but there were some people who took the red pill at that time i think steph
26:57 smith who was just also worked at the hustlers she met you in i don't know indonesia
27:05 or something like that because um she had i think probably during that
27:09 more like that time period 2014 15 16 something like that she was one of those
27:13 people that defected then whereas now there's like another wave and like if
27:17 you look at kind of like any lifestyle movement it happens this way it starts
27:20 with like very i could take crypto it starts with the the cypherpunks exactly
27:24 you're right yes they don't they hang out in cryptography forums and they took
27:28 the pill first yeah and then came you know the next the developers then came
27:32 the the finance bros and then it's the same with the next music like music
27:36 genres like hip-hop like early hip-hop and i come from electronic music so
27:39 drama-based music it was my previous career like music producer it's the same
27:44 thing like edm taking off in the us in 2009 2010 with dubstep that's what broke
27:50 edm and u.s that kind of stuff it you like these these movements these
27:54 scenes are almost dead and then suddenly something happens like
27:58 right and it's so unpredictable you have no clue what's going on you can only
28:01 surf it so i think the metaphor of surfing is very accurate it's better to serve these waves
28:06 in general i think life just surf waves stop trying to control it
28:10 uh just serve it and kind of like you know pivoting like pivoting startups
28:13 into that's pretty much just serving like steering the surfboard over the
28:16 waves because you cannot you cannot control the market at all you cannot
28:20 control society at all you know one of the things that bothers me about
28:25 the this indie hacker movement is well i i just i really i really like it i like
28:30 it but in general what i don't like about it is like people think pretty
28:34 small so they're like uh you know like there's it's kind of related to like the fire movement which
28:40 is like oh i just want to save a little bit of money so i can make 40 000 a year
28:45 in passive income and and i'm like oh that's cool like getting your first step
28:48 is cool but like that can't be it with life like you have to like you know
28:51 you're going to want more you want to do more things and contribute to society
28:55 and with a lot of these indie hackers they kind of come up with silly stuff
28:58 where it's like a small widget that they sell for four dollars a month and they
29:00 hope that they can get to a thousand dollars a month and i'm like man that's
29:03 like neat if you're just starting out but i think that this could be bigger
29:06 and you're actually one of the few people that i've seen go harder you know
29:10 you're going harder on this um are there any others like do you
29:14 think i'm going harder on it like well your numbers are bigger like
29:18 it's like like it's it's substantial like your numbers are nice already and
29:22 it could be survivor bias right well yeah definitely but i still think
29:29 that there's a mindset of like um like for example your twitter bio thing
29:34 says your meter is going to three million i would say most people who are
29:38 indie hackers and makers and kind of like the the sort of tinkerer community
29:43 they don't even have their meter to their their meter you know initially is
29:47 going to start much lower sixty thousand or seventy thousand a year yeah and
29:50 maybe yours did too but then you like oh cool i filled up that meter i leveled it
29:54 up so what was your like initial goal was it like making enough to not need a
29:59 job or where did you start when did you get more ambitious so i i mean back when i started i had a
30:04 youtube channel for this electronic music i was making and stuff and i was
30:07 making like a few thousand dollars from youtube adsense so i had some runway
30:12 uh some cash flow to live off of travel off and work on mini startups but it was
30:17 very fast it was shrinking because of the competitive like the copyright
30:20 claims on youtube in 2012 and stuff so it was pretty much becoming like below a
30:24 thousand dollars a month um but uh so i had that cash show but
30:30 to go to your question i think it's a power law like you always have a few
30:34 people in a scene who will make more money or get more successful and stuff
30:38 also there's a delay effect i started in 2013 or 2014. all these indeed this
30:44 indie scene didn't really it wasn't cool until maybe i think 2018 or something
30:49 2017. so these people that are going into it now they're just starting kind of and
30:54 i think the widget thing is interesting because you said it's only a widget
30:57 uh if you make one feature really well that solves like one problem you can get some
31:03 customers and you get some cash flow and then you can build a second feature and
31:07 you can slowly scale up uh to a bigger to a real business to real product
31:10 toolkit right and then i think another thing is you don't see a lot of people with
31:16 multi-million revenue because they will quickly raise pc like once you pass
31:20 a million dollars a year they will switch to okay let's go big let's go
31:25 become a billion dollar company and i think i'm the exception i'm like i don't
31:27 want to be building another company i'm fine like like this kind of chill um and
31:31 that's why you don't see those people a lot because i do know them and they
31:34 quickly disappear like this app we're using now uh riverside i think is raised pc now
31:41 started bootstrapped and then i think oprah winfrey used it and because it's
31:44 my friend nandov he makes it he's like dude overwhelmed for you so i'm like oh
31:47 my god this is crazy he's like yeah i think i'm gonna raise pc i'm like okay
31:51 yeah you should do that uh because they think this is like this
31:54 could be bigger than just a few million right so you tweeted something out the other
31:59 day that's related to this you go not sure if people realize it but if your
32:02 app does twenty thousand a month on revenue you're probably already a
32:05 millionaire twenty thousand dollars per month times twelve months assume you could sell for
32:11 let's call it four or five multiple yeah that's a million dollar selling price
32:14 right you're sitting on a million dollar asset and when you put it that way i
32:18 think that sounds and it is way more achievable than this idea of like i got to build a
32:24 million dollar business like i don't know i don't do i have the big idea
32:27 whatever but getting something to 20 to 30 000 a month in revenue seems approachable
32:33 right it's approachable and that's kind of awesome i think that's an amazing
32:37 like just a like you didn't all you did is you said something that was true out loud and i
32:43 think if more people heard that that's why i'm kind of bring it up here i think
32:46 if more people heard that that is a pathway to a millionaire status that does not
32:52 require like winning the startup lottery of like inventing the next big thing
32:57 or working and saving and you know paying your crazy w-2 taxes for like you
33:02 know 15-20 years to get the same same outcome yeah exactly yeah i agree yeah and i think
33:08 it's it's reachable especially if you think about high automation very high
33:13 margins so software business you you're not going to hire a big team of 10
33:16 people immediately you work with part-time contracts like i do
33:21 and you keep your margins very very high because then you can sell for 5x right
33:24 then your revenue is almost your profit so it's the same um yeah i think 20k brainstorm or business
33:31 together that could get to 20k so what's an idea that you you're not currently building but you
33:36 thought of because i'm sure you're an idea guy and you think uh you can make a
33:40 website that does x or you could make nomad lists for this other niche or you
33:44 could make you know um the the immigration one for this other thing so
33:49 what's a business let's brainstorm a business together what's a business that
33:52 you think could get somebody to this millionaire status dude i think what's man it's like again
33:57 this is so personal so i've been living like i used to live in hostels right in
34:03 like dorms in 2014 i didn't have money shared with six people like crazy then i
34:07 started like private rooms in hotels then the rooms got a little bit more
34:09 luxurious because i had more money and then i started discovering like
34:13 apartment hotels and it sounds like [ __ ] but it works so
34:17 well with remote work so i mean i was part of the hotel right now in europe on
34:21 the beach and there's a kitchen what's an apartment hotel what does that mean
34:23 sorry apartment hotel is essentially a hotel so full service
34:29 furnished nice interior hotel room but you also have a kitchen you have a
34:32 bedroom you have a living room you have it you know it's very big it's pretty
34:36 much like an airbnb but you pay per month or per night or whatever you pay
34:39 per month well you can pay for a night you can pay for a month it's just like
34:41 sean um it's like that guy or whatever yeah it's like saunder and it's like all uh i
34:46 forget the other one the guy was supposed to come on the podium canceled
34:49 you did one of these in nashville right or something where you're like this is
34:52 awesome it's working yeah it's like a it's basically just an
34:58 apartment that you can rent for five days and they're pretty cool i do i do
35:01 them all the time the problem that i've experienced is within new york it's like
35:06 10 grand a month and it's like 600 square feet so that's why i tend to go
35:10 airbnb but i'm in smaller less expensive cities you can get like a thousand
35:13 square foot place for like six thousand a month and it's just it's basically uh
35:18 an apart apartment building that has one floor or all floors dedicated to airbnbs
35:24 yeah the problem of airbnb is that i've noticed the quality is very very
35:29 high there's a big range of quality and there's problems there's no daily
35:31 cleaning it's it feels too much like um unexpected like you don't know what's
35:39 gonna happen the water stuff might break if things break here you just get a new
35:43 apartment right and i've done this in europe and i've done this in asia too in
35:48 thailand and i spend about you see two to three k three and a half k so it's a
35:52 lot of money it's more than normal rent but the cool thing is that it it solves
35:55 a lot of problems you have in your daily life um because it's surface and stuff
35:59 and it's it's a huge thing in asia it's a huge thing in in southeast asia even in
36:05 korea taiwan and stuff so i think that's going to be bigger because of remote work because
36:10 you have remote workers even with families with kids and you don't want to
36:14 live in a hotel or a hotel room is very depressing like i go insane in hotel
36:18 rooms it's just like a bed and you can barely walk around the bed there's no
36:21 space i need to cook food i need to buy steak from the local butcher i need to
36:25 cook it with broccoli and spinach and with my friends and stuff and you can do
36:30 it in an apartment hotel and i think the if you target it's a high-end market i
36:34 think of remote workers that make a lot of money like 200k or 100k something
36:39 if you target them you can make a lot of money because it's um
36:43 service furnished so what would you build you'd actually build an apartment
36:45 hotel or you'd build a digital product that's a big question because i i'm a
36:50 software guy i don't wanna i don't wanna own stuff i don't wanna have all this i
36:53 don't even wanna buy land i don't even want to buy a house i want to be able to
36:57 be a consumer a customer of these kind of things right but i wanted long term i
37:01 want to be able to rent for like six months you know or 12 months even
37:05 i want to be guaranteed to stay so we uh my wife and i are like we're at
37:09 the point where we're gonna start having kids soon and i live not like you
37:14 entirely but a little bit where we spend we spend half the year one place half a
37:17 year at the other place and what we're going to do next year is
37:21 just rent do a 12 month month lease in new york and just not be there all the
37:26 time but i'm looking to rent all of my furniture and i've been looking at a
37:29 place where i was like all right i just want to like book this one place and i want to pay
37:35 someone like three grand a month but they have to show up before i arrive
37:38 they've got to completely set it up yes and it's gonna be 100 furnished for me
37:41 and i've been looking at these and there's a few startups in the space that
37:45 are doing furniture rental and furniture rental is not popular right now and i
37:48 tell people all the time i'm like i just want to rent all my furniture i don't
37:52 want to own any of it and they they think it's nonsense and they think
37:56 it's crazy but if you run the math it's significantly like it's about the same
38:00 in terms of price but in terms of headache i think it's a thousand times better and that's another
38:07 yeah yes yeah so it's it's all about the headaches so if you can afford it you
38:12 can reduce the headaches of ownership and ownership uh it sounds so
38:17 privileged though but whatever it ownership is a big hassle [ __ ] breaks
38:21 all the time and if you are like if i spend my time on my laptop building on these apps it's
38:27 probably better use of my time than managing all this this stuff and
38:31 if a company can specialize in you know managing this stuff and renting it to
38:35 you it's much better i think that's a real you're on point that's a real
38:38 business and um imagine you can go to a website you can say like okay you can choose
38:42 different sets of furniture different interior stuff paintings on the wall or whatever and
38:46 you can just click and you arrive and it's already done for you like you said
38:50 i think that would be really interesting uh yeah what what else
38:54 yeah things that you're interested in either kind of niche categories or
38:58 things in your lifestyle that you're like huh i do this lifestyle thing
39:02 differently than people this could be you could build a business around this
39:06 i think that the biggest problem with the digital nomad thing is that there's
39:10 a maybe it's a good big podcast just to say that uh there's a perception that
39:14 people travel really fast and i have the data that they don't travel fast they
39:17 travel like every few months or even i think the average is seven months now
39:21 it's very slow so the the word digital moment is it's a horrible word of course
39:26 we have so many connotations but it's mostly remote working people
39:29 who want a little bit of a different life want to see different places a
39:32 little bit um you know they have boyfriends girlfriends wives husbands
39:35 they have kids even this family is doing this as well moving around every week doesn't really
39:39 work being very slow is big and if people are more aware of that they
39:44 can find a lot of products built for this long term slow mad market which most of us
39:51 are we're mostly slo-mats and i'm a little mad also slow meds yes think about education
39:56 think about like homeschooling is taking off also because of remote work uh if i
40:00 have kids i i don't know if i want to put him in a regular school maybe you
40:03 know elon musk builds his own school that's kind of cool but you can do things in a different way
40:07 and like now it's still very we're still niche like this remote work thing is
40:12 still niche it's going to get only bigger there's only going to be more
40:15 more people doing this once physical jobs get automated so um if you make products i have no
40:20 specific product but if you know if you build products for those people
40:24 that's a high-end market of like tech workers that are most so
40:28 if you don't but you said that you don't own stuff or you you kind of said like you don't like
40:34 owning stuff you said that you you said that you don't want to own
40:38 real estate so if you're making two and a half million dollars a year in profit
40:41 this is a question that sean always asks that i'm stealing it which is what do
40:45 you do with your money then yeah so i'm heavy in etfs um i read a blog post by
40:52 what's his name the guy from google that does seo and he's like i just put
40:57 everything into in etfs so vanguard etfs s p 500 um but also i'm heavily invested
41:02 in asia because i believe in asia i believe in the future i know
41:05 the west there's a lot of things about asia that are good but it's very i still
41:09 think it's very futuristic and um i also invest in crypto like i hold bitcoin and
41:13 ethereum um it's always scared to say those things on the podcast right but it's all like
41:18 very secure and stuff so it's not exactly the most shocking thing
41:21 to us every tech guy every tech girl is crypto yeah exactly but i i mostly you're
41:27 actually not allowed to have that haircut if you don't own like three yeah
41:32 you can't have a high fade with like long top hair yeah yeah if you don't on
41:35 three um i spend about like four five k a month or something that's it so most of
41:41 it is just uh i do need to pay tax but after that most of it goes to you know
41:45 etfs and stuff it's scary to invest now because it's a scary time but
41:48 generally i'm like i want to do this for 20 30 years in etf invested and stuff
41:52 and sometimes stocks but my i did a benchmark my s p 500 etf
41:58 outperformed all my stock decisions over the last two years so i'm stupid just
42:02 like most people sean you want to tell them what you did recently
42:07 what oh selling with your stocks yeah yeah so i sold not everything but
42:12 pretty much everything sold maybe 70 80 of the stocks that i hold
42:17 um i get that i mean yeah but yeah i'm scared they always say like
42:21 don't try and time the market so i'm like okay i'll just sit and just crash
42:25 with the you know why didn't you do that why don't you just like chill
42:31 uh two reasons one i didn't want to risk a margin call because i borrowed a
42:34 little bit against my stock portfolio but and you know to what i felt was
42:38 extremely safe and it's still safe but i was like ah look if this drops another you know 20
42:44 then all of a sudden i'm having a headache that i don't want
42:47 to deal with i don't want to have to deal with freeing up a bunch of cash
42:51 just to buffer this so i was like i noticed that every morning i was waking
42:54 up and i was checking it and i was like okay logically i know
42:59 i'm in pretty good shape here but the stress of having to think about this is
43:03 taking away from my like you know my day-to-day quality of life it's like
43:06 that's the opposite of what i want money to do i don't want money to give me
43:09 stress my money's supposed to take away my stress so what did you do with the
43:12 money the opposite what did you do with it where is that it's in cash right now um like i might
43:18 do something like whatever some short term you know fixed incomes type stuff
43:22 but like for now i was like again i don't care like i don't need the two
43:25 percent i needed the peace of mind and so that was the first thing the second
43:28 thing was i thought what will i regret more what do i believe more do i believe that this
43:33 is the bottom or do i believe that this is kind of like actually
43:37 thinking that this is the bottom you know six months in and that it's all
43:41 going to get better soon but basically like there's three paths
43:44 either it gets better now it stays this is about the bottom but we stay
43:51 here for an extended period of time one two three four years
43:55 or it has further down to go and i basically thought that it getting
44:00 things going up soon seemed like the least likely thing like i would i
44:03 would actually be betting against that heavily and so i thought okay i have
44:07 nothing to lose here in terms of upside because i just fundamentally don't think
44:10 that stocks and everything's just going to go ripped back up again and we're all
44:14 going to pretend like you know that was it we just had a few months of pain and
44:17 then it all went right back up and and remember things go things are all green
44:20 again so i thought either it's gonna be flats boring and sideways for a period
44:27 of time or it's gonna go down more and i thought well in either case then i
44:32 won't regret being in cash because a i don't have to sweat it every day i don't
44:35 have to think about it every day and b i'm there's no i'm not losing anything
44:39 during you know by doing this and so that was my thought process and i
44:42 figured okay there's going to be these little bear market rallies so just sell
44:46 at the top of the next so that's what i did everything rallied five percent i
44:50 just sold and i kept like i don't know twenty percent still in the market and i
44:54 just put left the other eighty percent in uh and you know not thinking about it cash
44:59 but i held my crypto i didn't sell my crypto that's good yeah
45:03 are you guys mostly invested in the american uh stock market or worldwide
45:07 yeah like you said i believe in asia i'm like yeah i believe in asia too but i
45:09 don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about how do i go invest in asia and
45:12 where would i invest i don't even know what what does that mean are you buying
45:16 the equivalent of like an etf for like japan or something what are you doing
45:19 dude i had a vanguard etf china and then suddenly disappeared from my broker app
45:22 and i'm like what the [ __ ] is happening and i get this message they're like
45:25 vanguard left china in march or something because they were like this is
45:30 i don't know got something like yeah no privatize or did something
45:35 made private companies public or something yeah no they they [ __ ] jack
45:40 ma for sure there's a lot of weird [ __ ] happening but i still think i should be
45:44 invested in in those markets and uh um have i told you about the jack mom
45:47 thing how it's crazy that the third richest man in the world that they were trying
45:54 to was like hey dude shut up and he's like yes sir they just took jack
46:01 my brother-in-law calls me like so we had one moment where like a month in
46:05 when people started noticing jack ma's missing and my brother-in-law in the car one day
46:09 was just like where's jack ma like if he was in the car but he's like bro
46:13 why aren't we talking about this he's like where's jack and we just started
46:17 laughing like how crazy is that that jack ma is just not like what if you
46:20 just couldn't find elon musk because he said something you know that that biden
46:24 didn't like like that the idea is crazy they did it with the tennis player too
46:28 yeah i saw that my brother-in-law still calls me he'll be like he'll just call
46:31 me out of the blue it's been like a year now he'll be like yo where's jack ma and then he'll hang
46:36 up and like that's the whole call it's so great you just feel like he's yelling
46:40 where is jack ma but dude that's the thing with asia and china like all the stuff is accurate
46:46 there's some crazy [ __ ] um but the other thing is also accurate that
46:51 there's there's lots of happening in in asia and i think in the west in europe
46:54 and america we have a blind spot because we get so much information that's
46:58 negative about asia especially about china and i'm i'm not a china spy or
47:01 something my friends call me china spy because of that but i think it's a blind
47:04 spot a little bit in the west uh we're gonna miss out on you know i mean
47:08 china is gonna be the biggest economy in 2030 i think by gdp
47:12 it's already the biggest economy people pitching power parity or something
47:17 um ignoring that just you know because there's a lot of arguments why we should
47:20 ignore china but it sounds like a blind spot in the west a little bit
47:24 to me do you uh er what well i'll do it we'll do an easy one do
47:32 you act you like tweeted out your calendar and it was like free for a week
47:37 or something like that and i know sean and i i i kind of like that sometimes i
47:41 don't like that because i'll do that for three days and i'm like oh my god i'm so
47:44 bored it are you is it real that you just don't play in anything
47:49 yeah so this is the only plan thing and it gives me stress because i'm like oh
47:53 [ __ ] this summer's coming up um but i mostly like i spend my days like i
47:56 live with my friends so my friends are my neighbors now so i brought all these
48:00 nomads friends to portugal and europe and we kind of live together a lot of a lot of them are in
48:05 the city near here whatever everyone's kind of near so we just have like
48:08 dinners outside and we cook food and the sunset on the beach and just this nice
48:13 chill life that i never had because i was alone in hotel rooms i had friends
48:17 but they were always around the world and now they're all kind of here so i
48:20 mostly do that so i don't want to do calls about like because what
48:23 am i going to call about like i like having calls with you guys what am i
48:26 going to call with other people about like new business i don't know don't you
48:29 get bored like no because i can i because i work on my websites right i open my make
48:34 coffee i make open my laptop meet my friend and we code a little bit together
48:38 make a new feature um you know then you go to the gym we go to sauna uh
48:42 we go swim uh that kind of like but that's very reason right this kind of chill life and
48:48 i don't get bored as long as i ship a little bit on my websites
48:54 i don't really get bored you're like the only rich per so basically it's almost
48:57 always the truth that no matter how hard you try the more income that you make your life your
49:05 lifestyle gets inflated uh maybe sometimes not as much but then other
49:10 times a ton and like i was like oh i'm gonna fight it like i can't imagine
49:13 spending more than ten thousand dollars on a car or whatever and then you make
49:16 more income you're like uh whatever who cares um you said you spend four or five
49:20 thousand dollars a month you're one of the few people that has acknowledged
49:24 that your lifestyle actually doesn't seem like it's been it's it's not no at
49:29 all it's 100 on purpose like it's very incidentally sometimes you spend more
49:35 right like last month was the hotels were really booked so we had to pay a
49:39 lot of money but now it's chill again um i think it's on purpose because i try to
49:41 follow like last one was like 10k or something that's still that's where you know we're
49:46 in lisbon you're making three million dollars a year yeah but paying 10k for a
49:49 hotel is ridiculous it doesn't make any sense like it should be the max like two
49:53 or three k for me personally but i've seen a lot of people um
49:56 do that lifestyle inflation because i know from corporate from again from
49:59 studying business i know the management management people and stuff they get
50:03 paid more and they get golden handcuffs right and they can't leave a lot of my
50:06 friends are like that and i don't want that to happen to me i mean can't have
50:09 it to me but you get what i mean um and i know that material goods don't
50:13 really make me happy so i buy a new shirt or something or i buy a new iphone
50:17 within two weeks i'm used to it and there's studies on this there's like
50:19 research about this stuff like if you buy a new car even if you get married
50:22 after six months you're the same happiness if you buy a house after six
50:26 months same happiness so if you know that stuff you know that
50:29 okay you don't really need to spend money so much you don't need to buy
50:33 stuff essentially and um generally it will probably make you
50:36 happier do you what do you think you would want to spend more on let's say
50:40 that like you know food like good food like organic uh you know free roaming i mean it's
50:46 cliche like joe rowan right but free roaming grass fat cow beef you know that are happy animals
50:53 organic vegetables uh you know that kind of stuff like not goods you know experiences right it's on
50:58 purpose i do this what what are some of my experiences that you think are worth
51:01 the money what sorry what are some experiences that are like worth the money that you
51:05 know no so that's yeah you're right so man you got me like you're trying to find
51:19 like stuff right yes i fly business guys because no exactly i'm done with uh i i
51:23 can't sit i only do it long haul and i only fly like i flew only once in the last 16
51:30 months and i flew business qatar really nice and you can lie down and sleep and
51:34 stuff but that's about it i think and you notice one thing i noticed like i
51:40 was in bangkok in this luxury kind of apartment hotel stuff but it was a
51:43 little bit too luxury for me you know and i was there for a month and you start
51:47 noticing that you don't meet as much interesting people like i met
51:51 one instant person who had this giant wheat farm the biggest wheat farm in
51:54 thailand because i just legalized it was kind of cool but generally it's a very
51:58 different it's more like a socialite kind of paris hilton audience you know
52:02 but in the hostels you would meet crazy people you would need backpackers but
52:06 also like researchers and entrepreneurs and fledgling entrepreneurs you know you
52:08 met generally more interesting people because you were more uh in those areas
52:14 and i found the problem yeah sorry did i tell you about did i tell you guys listen to this sean
52:22 did i tell you about sam corkos from levels level other levels uh what's
52:27 the oh yeah i know yeah levels so the the levels health the thing that goes in
52:30 your arm so this guy so he raised yeah that's right he raised
52:35 uh so he has a startup that makes eight figures in revenue it's worth i think it
52:39 was 400 million dollars so let's just say that he's worth 150 million on paper
52:44 not real on paper he came over to my house and he was with his girlfriend
52:48 and she made a comment like joking like oh you know he always gives me a hard
52:51 time because it takes me forever to pack but that's ridiculous i only had this
52:54 one carry-on and i was like well how long does it take you to pack sam he
52:57 goes oh i don't pack i was like what do you mean he's like well he had a
53:00 drawstring bag you know what a drawstring bag it's like a bag that like
53:04 where you can get these at conferences yes he had that's all he had was that bag
53:09 and he goes well you see i only own the clothes that i'm wearing right now which
53:13 is a white t-shirt a pair of pants socks underwear and shoes i only own that plus
53:18 another pair of underwear a jacket and uh this bag and my laptop which i have
53:23 right here on me that's literally the only thing that i own wait what he goes yeah i've been doing
53:28 i've been doing this for like eight years now or something like that and i
53:31 only live and like i do what you do he's like he does what you do peter he lives
53:36 in um like these airbnbs and hotel style setups and he's been doing it for years
53:40 and that's all he owned and i thought that was the craziest laundry every day
53:44 i don't understand how is he well i was like i was like so i was like well what
53:47 if you gotta go to a funeral what if you have to do this he goes well i just go
53:50 to a thrift store um when i need to go and i buy stuff and then i just bring it
53:55 back and he does it partly out of i think this is my guess he does it partly
53:58 out of um like convenience of not wanting to worry about stuff i also think that there's
54:04 like a philosophy like a very philosophical thing going on here
54:07 because it's like extreme but have you ever heard of anyone peter being that crazy
54:13 dude yes actually like in 2014 i was in chiang mai and it was an australian guy who
54:19 would fly from australia to thailand to chiang mai with only his macbook air and
54:24 the clothes he wore and not even a bag and he would buy everything he needed on
54:27 the spot and he would be there for like two or three months uh and he would
54:31 donate the clothes he wore to charity and then he would fly back to
54:34 australia with his macbook air in his hand i was so impressed
54:42 this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot
54:46 hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i
54:49 can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and here's a test
54:56 from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better that see that's cool i would do that
55:02 because i think that actually adds to the experience of traveling like
55:06 traveling fully light and then when you get there so yeah find what you need and
55:11 then giving it away when you leave like i'm i'd actually get down with that but
55:16 like i i rotate to underwear and i put no but i think it comes down to
55:24 philosophy and i do think it sounds pretentious but i don't care
55:28 uh it comes down to constraining your life in a certain way i think constraints are good in
55:35 creativity in life and stuff and um it makes you focus on the really
55:38 important things in life for you personally it must be different for
55:41 everybody you know for me that's like you know girlfriend friends health food
55:47 you know happiness all that stuff kind of and and creative work meaningful work very important like
55:52 i need to be able to i need to have something to do in my day i need to feel
55:56 like i'm contributing something like sam said and uh so what do you own
56:00 so i have a backpack i have a rolling suitcase though like a small one um i
56:04 have clothes i have a iphone macbook pro uh you can name all the things you own
56:19 right i have two stadia control controllers like gamepads you can use
56:22 stadia here it's kind of cool um yeah that's about it i think i mean
56:27 i mean i have like backup phones and stuff because you know two-factor
56:30 authentication stuff but it's not you think you're gonna do this
56:33 you mentioned you could talk about your family or not if you want but do you think you're
56:38 gonna do this when you have kids so what does doing it mean because i'm
56:41 mostly settled down i'm also in one place i'm just like trying to not by
56:47 doing it as in uh not owning stuff i mean like i i think your life is cool
56:52 but you have to acknowledge that this alternative in the sense of like you
56:56 know one percent of those but yeah yeah for sure for sure i think
56:59 it's interesting that like the stuff i do may or may not become a thing because a
57:04 lot of things i did eight years ago now are normal right so it might be that the things that who
57:09 cares become i mean if you're happy who cares if be oh no it's not about me it's more like
57:13 yeah it's more like it might become nature um i think uh i think even if you have kids
57:19 you can do it in an alternative way you can uh you know you can go to thrift store get
57:23 like secondhand toys or something secondhand clothes that kind of stuff
57:25 but it all doesn't have to be this so consumerist and and buying and you know
57:32 i mean it can we can do it in a different way and um i'm just trying to figure out like
57:36 how how i yeah i want to do that and we've trying to focus on yeah a
57:43 nomadless style red pill before briefly which was um my i forgot what it's called sam do you
57:48 remember the name of like the zero waste project or the zero
57:51 the zero project or something like that so basically my wife told me about this
57:54 she was like yeah you know there's like uh like in the city in the little town
57:57 we live in there's uh like this facebook group and what they do is it's just like
58:03 it's like a barter it's like oh it's not even a barter economy it's like a giving
58:07 economy so it's like if you have stuff you just give it into the giving circle
58:10 and other people can take it out and then they can give stuff in it's
58:13 basically like oh your kid i think it's a lot around kids stuff like my kids
58:17 grown out of this but that's it it doesn't make sense right yeah like craigslist randos it's
58:22 like yeah amongst this trusted group of people who buy nothing the same thing
58:27 but the buy nothing project yeah um and i think i might have butchered exactly
58:30 how it works sam do you do you know a little bit how well it's just the idea
58:35 of like um instead of like reduce reuse recycle it like for like consumer or for
58:39 like plastic and [ __ ] they're like no no let's just like uh reuse we're gonna
58:44 reuse everything so instead of buying a new toy we're gonna go get one for free
58:47 and then we're gonna give away when we're done it's just a mindset and then
58:51 there's uh there's a bunch of companies in the space but the big one is like
58:55 this uh buy nothing series of facebook groups we're just like i'm gonna give
58:57 away i'm giving away these children's clothes come get them yeah i think i mean it's that's nice
59:03 like it doesn't make any sense you have a baby and it grows out of its clothes
59:06 every month or something or every two months so why would you buy everything
59:10 new if you can ask your family for clothes they already wore whatever right
59:15 it makes more sense to me personally um yeah who do you want to be like who do you
59:20 who do you admire and who do you want to be like because like
59:24 the reason why people buy [ __ ] for their kids is because they want to have they
59:27 want their kids to have jordan so they look cool for other people because they
59:30 want to impress other people who do you want to impress and who do you want to
59:33 be like you think like who do you look up to i i like derek sivers i don't know if
59:42 you know derek sivers yeah he's uh tell me about him who is he
59:45 he's um he started a company called cd baby in the 90s i think or in early
59:50 2000s and which was like one of the first uh indie kind of music
59:54 distributors where you could send your music as any uh musician and they would
59:58 press the cds for you and they would send it to your customers and stuff and
60:02 and they also know on spotify and stuff and he stole those for 30 million
60:05 dollars i interviewed him for my best first thesis actually he's really nice
60:08 guy like the most nice guy in startups i think and he's very he writes a lot he writes a
60:13 lot of books now he's very philosophical also kind of nomadic he's been in like
60:16 living in singapore he lived in new zealand lived in u.s and stuff
60:20 and he's very um if you go to his website like derek severus.org surface.org i think
60:27 he writes very much kind of same concepts that i talk about like
60:34 um about simple life and and uh yeah it's hard to describe him but i
60:38 think that's a very inspirational guy to me and i don't really need to impress i think i
60:42 want to impress my parents just but they're already happy with me so it
60:49 i want to try and stay have like a stable you know happiness because i've been depressed a
60:55 lot i've been anxious i had like especially when traveling you go crazy
60:59 in these you know in hotel rooms alone like um traveling can can it brings you very
61:06 deep into your own self and stuff and i think the most important of me is to
61:10 impress myself by just you know being stable and and having a stable happy
61:15 life with with people around me and uh yeah like kind of wholesome life you
61:18 know and that's my what part of your life are you not impressed by
61:23 for your either yourself or derek sivers or if any if any of those people right
61:27 you just mentioned like the lifestyle you mean yeah what part of your life is
61:31 not at that point where they're you you feel like it's not impressive in that
61:35 way that that like well like i want to have a family too like you
61:41 guys uh and that's what i'm working on um and yeah that's like that's more of a focus
61:46 now you know like pretty easy by the way you just got to do one thing
61:49 i'll tell you to find the right girlfriend you know and then you need to
61:52 see if they're not crazy you need to like connect and all this stuff and i
61:55 think uh yeah that's that's it don um dude sean you have a yeah go ahead go
62:01 ahead go ahead i wanna hear what you say no i mean like a little bit like you say
62:04 like like i think about elon musk every time elon musk presents something you're like
62:09 oh [ __ ] like that's so cool like why am i building shitty internet websites this
62:14 is my only life i have i'm gonna die i should do something bigger but then i
62:17 have to like bring myself back to like no it's cool you're doing okay like
62:21 doesn't really need to be bigger but i mean everybody wants to make like space
62:24 rockets i guess but it's just so hard to do that you know sean you um you have a
62:30 you have a dog right a little dog yep i've got a big dog how do i love
62:35 yeah yeah so you like animals i love owning animals like big aggressive
62:39 looking dogs that's what that's my thing it's like i'm a weirdo
62:43 how do you live this the the i want to live a little bit more like you it's and
62:48 i can do it uh a now because i have a little bit of money so i can just like
62:50 pay for fancier airbnbs that are pet friendly and b i can only do it basically in america
62:57 doing this lifestyle abroad with an animal even in america i drive you
63:01 either have to fly private or you have to drive most places um i drive most
63:05 places how do you how do you live this life with an animal i don't have animals
63:11 but i want them i had i had two cats with my ex-girlfriend and it was
63:14 actually interesting we went to in bangkok to this this luxury apartment
63:17 hotel and they were cat friendly and it was like this you know high society of
63:22 bangkok people with cute cats and cute dogs and asia all the dogs are small
63:25 they like small dogs i like big dogs too like you sam but uh and they walk around
63:30 in the hotel and it's super cute and they have like cats and dog ice cream
63:33 and stuff and food and they have little like a little beds for them to sleep in and
63:39 stuff and everything is serviced and that's another big market i think you
63:42 know tech people with pets and stuff they want to travel as well dude sean have
63:46 you looked into have you guys looked into flying in america with an animal so
63:49 basically if you're why do you think i don't go places dude your animal's under 20 pounds right
63:57 yeah she is but like that also means like she's not like tough enough to do
64:01 all this stuff like we're like oh god how's she gonna handle
64:04 this experience um you know of going on a seven-hour flight or
64:09 whatever yeah but she she's the dog's able to so like in term i don't i don't
64:12 know if she's physically able to but she's allowed to you could put it in a
64:16 carrier and put it on your lap or like in the above whatever the suitcase thing and if you
64:21 have an animal that's above 20 pounds who's putting their dog in the above
64:26 thing you can put your dog down i don't know dude it's like it's like
64:29 putting a blanket over a it's like putting a blanket over a bird cage it's
64:32 i i don't know that's just what you put it underneath you you put it underneath
64:36 there whatever you [ __ ] do i don't know i don't have one of these things
64:39 but uh that's what they say on the directions when you look online but uh uh like if
64:46 you have an animal above 20 pounds you cannot bait you basically cannot this
64:50 whole emotional support animal thing that's kind of nonsense it's kind of
64:54 getting phased out you cannot bring an animal a dog on a flight i i'm always
64:59 amazed that for popular routes they don't have like a once a month or twice
65:03 a month animal friendly right it's gonna happen it's absolutely gonna happen it's
65:07 a huge growing market i think because a lot of something rich people are not
65:11 having kids sorry right i was gonna say i read something that one airline is
65:15 like being like yeah we'll fly pets like i think they do a lot of pets in the
65:18 cargo or whatever because most airlines have been phasing that out and one i
65:21 think it's southwest i forgot which airline some airline is making bank
65:25 because they take all the pets and uh it was like a differentiator it's like you
65:28 know bags fly free but it's like hey we let you fly your pet and everybody else
65:32 is saying no nowadays man i think you can do it you can i think it's all about slow matting so if
65:37 you do if you move like every let's say every six months it's not that bad for the dog or the cat
65:43 uh and you you give them a stable life in where you arrive and not too much
65:47 chaos and stuff i think it's okay i think it's not okay if you keep moving
65:50 like every week or every month this might be a little bit stressful for the
65:53 dog and the cat right but six months like yeah it's okay and especially if
65:58 you get a tweet you had a great tweet it was if you don't have a dog in your profile
66:04 picture on twitter are you even trying it's a growth hack it's the biggest
66:07 growth right sam has one right you have a facebook picture i think uh yeah you
66:11 can guys use this on tinder right this was a dinner dating trick like you you
66:15 because they swipe right for the dog not for you but they still swipe right so
66:19 yeah i've noticed there's like two hacks when i was single if like if i ever walk
66:23 around with like a niece or a nephew or like a kid uh that's like an automatic
66:27 door opener to meet women and then the other one was having a a
66:32 an aggressive but nice looking dog it's like doors i'm all they're disarmed we're
66:37 good you know and why does that be aggressive but aggressive looking but nice is that one
66:42 of those things where it's like dog owners look like they're pets and so
66:45 if your dog looks a certain way they'll think that about you
66:48 they want to heal you you know like women want to heal you sometimes they're
66:52 like it's like seeing a guy with like a sleeve tattoos who smokes cigarettes in
66:58 a tattoo under his eye who like you know just wants to like spend time and cuddle
67:01 you know like it's like so it's really good it's you know you're
67:04 you're you're eclectic i don't know it just works don't ask me
67:09 uh that just works yeah um so dude i love summer yet dogs by the
67:15 way the big white polar bear dog right and i think it's very strange like it's
67:19 it's so fluffy it's like that's a very asian move of you that's they're very
67:23 popular in asia right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i've seen him here too yet but yeah
67:28 what are some is there anything that people assume about your life and your lifestyle and
67:34 your businesses uh that you like for example with the hustle as well as sean's milk road a lot
67:40 of people are like oh that's it it's just a [ __ ] newsletter you just write
67:43 these these words and you just hit send that's so easy anyone can do it and it's
67:47 like well no it's actually like a user acquisition play like you gotta know how
67:50 to do that and then it's also like you're just not good at writing like you
67:52 have to be good and that's just talent you either have it or you don't and so
67:55 that that's like some misconceptions about our businesses what about yours is
67:59 there anything that um people always assume and you're like no
68:03 because like people can anyone can copy you yeah i think generally people think that
68:07 every uh website or app or company they're a customer of that it's more
68:12 simple than actually is because you can't see behind the hood and it's
68:15 actually way more complicated than you think because there's so many edge cases
68:19 in every business that you need to code like if statements for or build like
68:23 little scripts for special features it's much more complicated and i think
68:28 people realize that when they start because people always clone you right
68:31 like they make a copycat of your website and somehow doesn't take off because
68:35 they've been able to copy the outside of it the aesthetic kind of but they don't
68:38 know what's happening under the hood so it's um it's much more complicated like dude a
68:44 job board is much more complicated uh than you think like um [ __ ] how do you explain this there's
68:49 so many little parts that you know especially companies want
68:52 they want you know invoices for every little thing they add the price is dynamic that kind of stuff
68:58 i i changed job post pricing based on how many people post jobs on my site for
69:02 example there's so much stuff happening behind the curtains that you don't see
69:07 yeah it's much more complicated i was thinking about the misconception about
69:09 yeah sorry and a lot of your stuff is automated to where like you don't have to be involved
69:14 it kind of runs itself you said everything's automated i think 99.99
69:19 and to post on your job board it ranges from a hundred to a thousand dollars i
69:22 think whatever the huge range for sure yeah yeah how would you for the like i'm
69:27 i'm tinkering with something that costs many many thousands of dollars a year is
69:31 there how would you figure out how to do that like and so in my head i'm like [ __ ] i gotta
69:36 hire a bunch of sales people that sucks do you think that you could automate
69:40 most things even that are high ticketed items oh for sure dude i sell job post bundles
69:46 for like 50k via stripe which is like amazing for me to me like i'm like how do you do that that
69:52 works so you make a page called buy bundle and you have the this you can go to remote
69:58 okay dot com slash buy bundle and you'll see like a slider where you can make your own bundle and
70:06 get a discount based on it and it's all automated and you add your credit cards and then
70:10 you pay you know 50k or 40k whatever and how many people do that
70:16 oh yeah it's it's like a lot of it's like 30 of the revenue i think bundles
70:20 no [ __ ] so someone's use yeah using a debit card or whatever for 50k yeah dude
70:25 these company cards this is what this is lagging information people don't
70:27 know the company cards have been upgraded i think because they're using
70:31 it for much more these days really like it's a lot of money and
70:36 i have no idea like i never thought like i don't i'm not hiring people i don't
70:39 know how this works i just tried like okay maybe i think companies ask me like
70:43 can we buy a few job posts for in the future i'm like okay i'll make this
70:45 thing and a lot of companies use this so you figure out the features that people want
70:50 based on uh talking to them of course dude i'm looking at the sales pages by
70:56 bundle so by 25 25 jobs is 22 000 you do something interesting on your
70:59 sales pages is you just pack it with information that's totally the right
71:02 move but you pack it with text like you use icons to kind of break it up the emojis
71:10 yeah i use emojis a lot yeah no it looks like a circus right but
71:15 it kind of works it's not like well-designed right it's not like minimalist design it's just
71:19 like i just add stuff every day and it just keeps growing but it works kind of
71:25 what's the biggest purchase someone has made i can scroll up i got to jump
71:29 through it i got another call i got i gotta run too peter this has been
71:32 amazing i gotta go yeah nice to meet you sean see ya what's uh what what has been the biggest
71:38 purchase that you've had this scrolls all the way up to 150 000.
71:42 i think 50k or something around 50k maybe 49. but that happens that happens
71:45 a lot yeah yeah yeah yeah this is crazy yeah i'm working on this
71:51 thing and like it's like 10k a year and i'm like oh man i'm gonna have to like
71:55 get on the phone all the time yeah seeing you is quite in inspiring
72:00 but i get annoyed if i if i need to use like i want to use these uh location
72:04 service apis to figure out where are people traveling to for example and it's
72:07 always like you need to do a sales call you need to like contact us and stuff
72:10 and i get so annoyed with it and i know people on twitter get annoyed with it
72:14 that they can't get a price directly and sign up you know um
72:19 yeah i think it's much easier to do like this like a sales flow
72:25 um i think it's easier i would argue maybe for me it's easier for you but i would actually
72:30 argue there's there's a world where it's not effect as effective though because i would i'm in
72:35 the same boat as use i don't want to have to do all this crap and i'm not
72:38 naturally a sales person but when i hired a sales team and uh they they
72:43 shockingly were shockingly good at drumming up demand and i remember a cool
72:48 podcast with the founder of squarespace i think it was and he was like you he's
72:51 an engineer he's like i don't want to leave my room i don't like talking to
72:55 people i like freedom and he goes and he goes the biggest one
73:00 a huge mistake i made was i looked down on sales people and i looked down on
73:03 this like type of pricing where i think i got to get him on the phone but
73:07 he was like i looked down on it and i was wrong it was effective they dr they
73:12 created demand for a product and that surprised me most so like yeah
73:16 i don't know i think so i think you're right i think my problem is that it's
73:20 it's been it's very hard to meet good salespeople or to find them and it's unclear for me
73:26 how i how i can hire them and um you know i how can i rate a person to hire them uh as a good
73:33 salesperson i don't know what's a good salesperson and i i've never done outbound almost never
73:40 done outreach and stuff um and i'm scared that if i hire sales
73:43 people i need to manage them and then you know they might [ __ ] up they might
73:46 start spamming everywhere in linkedin and then it becomes like a screenshot
73:48 thing on twitter like look peter levels is spamming with his website and stuff
73:52 that might turn bad and i think you're right if you get the right sales people it can work
73:57 i just i'd never been able to you know find those people it just matters what you're optimizing
74:03 for if you're optimizing for happiness and a well if you're opting for
74:07 happiness and like a good life do it your way your way is working really well
74:11 if you want to like grow at a certain rate per year and you want to really push it i i do think a
74:18 sales person is is you do need a sales team but that's not what you're
74:21 optimizing for you're optimizing for freedom so and happiness yeah and i also
74:25 think that there's this there's different types of companies for example
74:27 there's companies that ask for a lot of forms like they want like a w8 form like
74:31 all these us irs forms and stuff they want you to sign everything they want
74:35 you to sign an nda and and there's some companies that just you know enter their
74:38 credit card on stripe and it's done and it's different customers and the
74:41 customers that ask for a lot of questions on email they generally
74:43 convert less for me they pay less money and they are more of a hassle to you know do customer
74:49 support for and stuff um so you also you get different types of
74:53 customers if you do it all automatically you get more kind of modern customers
74:59 that are easier to deal with i think is there anything that we didn't talk
75:04 about that you wanted to talk about um no i think i think we
75:09 maybe transparency like the reason i'm so transparent is uh i think it's very like i said i think
75:18 it's very important to to to be honest and to to show other people that you can
75:23 build a a nice indie company like this um by sharing every like ups and downs of
75:28 it um and instead of because everybody else is only sharing like the good
75:32 things and the we're growing so fast and we're hiring and we're funded and blah
75:36 blah and i think it would be cool if we did business in a maybe in a more
75:41 wholesome way where we uh you know share everything and share the ups and
75:46 downs and uh yeah maybe not grow super super super big but more in a you know
75:50 wholesome manner i have a i like that but i have a few critiques the first is yeah i think that
75:57 if you're high so you remember buffer so buffer uh they did the whole stick they did it
76:02 even more extra well equally as extreme as you i would say but they revealed one
76:06 of my inspirations for sure yeah but they revealed everyone's salary and
76:10 they did that yeah i think they did it as a marketing shtick they did it
76:13 because they're like well like you know like our products okay it's good enough
76:16 but like let's come up with a cool shtick so we stick out and it aligns
76:19 with our philosophy it's great and it worked really well for them but i
76:22 actually think that it probably hurts them after a while it's really hard to
76:26 do that after 100 or 150 i don't know what the number is some amount of
76:29 employees because you're like dude i don't want my [ __ ] all out there and
76:34 when if i was you like i don't like like when we sold our company i didn't
76:38 exactly reveal how much i made because i'm like man i don't want to be a target
76:41 i don't want people to take advantage of me i don't want to be judged in a
76:44 particular way i don't want that type of attention so i'd rather just say like round whole
76:50 numbers instead of like exactly no there's a real there's a real security
76:53 risk for sure yeah like you don't want to talk about where you are right now yeah yeah part of it
76:58 is because yeah for sure 100 yeah yeah 100 part of the downside but at the same
77:05 time it's a marketing it's maybe it's agree it agrees with your with your life
77:11 philosophy and also it's a pretty sick marketing stick like yeah thank you yeah
77:17 i think it's all it's hard to stop it because i've been doing it for so long
77:20 it's become part of my identity it would be hard to like hide all this stuff now
77:22 and they're like where did this open page go like why are you not sharing
77:25 anymore i'm like i'm just done with it now um you know yeah and i don't think it's it's this
77:32 recurring marketing machine that i think is a big part of why uh my businesses
77:37 work became successful and why i got a lot of audience on twitter it's because
77:39 of this i cannot deny that so it's very hard to quit that right once you've been doing
77:45 it for so long yeah that's why i'm nervous about even doing it in the first place yeah yeah
77:51 yeah you know it's kind of like a i haven't gone hard on youtube or any other social
77:55 platform because i'm like oh i don't want a commitment uh like you gotta keep
77:59 up i wanted to do youtube as well and i have the same problem yeah i'm like this
78:02 is gonna be a new recurring like activity i need to do every week i need
78:07 to upload a video make a video yeah i think there's a world where you could do
78:11 seasons you know like a tv show has a season i think there's a world where you
78:14 could do seasons and do quite well but uh the majority of people do it like
78:19 regularly and i'm like oh man i don't want to get on that treadmill that's
78:22 scary no i think it burns you out like look at all the youtubers burning out
78:25 it's uh they all bail extreme yeah yeah yeah it's extreme schedule yeah i think
78:28 this is my i think it might be interesting if i just sit in front of
78:31 the laptop like this and i just tell the stuff i i know and i think and instead
78:34 of writing it down and just making like little videos uh derek savers also did
78:38 that he makes little videos about small topics you know five minutes explain
78:43 something in the next video and so alex for mostly is doing it uh the guy on our
78:46 pod he came on our podcast alex for mosey he's been doing it lately and he
78:51 loves it and he and it seems it seems like a lot kind of a lot of work but not
78:54 that much work no more work in this podcast and i don't consider this
78:57 podcast to be too much work um but it works well but uh dude thanks for
79:03 coming on this has been fun i uh i hope you you will come on more often and
79:07 we'll do a little more brainstorming this time yeah there was super fun
79:10 thanks for having me yeah hopefully we didn't you you said you were nervous because we were going
79:15 to ask you no but no i don't think we asked anything because we didn't ask
79:19 anything crazy yeah cool there's not much to ask when you tell everyone on the internet about
79:23 everything you do yeah this is always when the good part of the podcast starts right because you
79:30 end it and then like the the real [ __ ] hopefully not
79:33 the real stuff i hope was was going on the whole time it was great um yeah dude thanks this is
79:39 awesome um pimp out your stuff so it's at levels yeah it's a twitter.com levels io so
79:45 l-e-v-e-l-s-i-o um and there's all the links for my websites there so you can click from
79:52 there thanks dude thanks for coming
$

This Is What Real Freedom Looks Like - Pieter Levels

@levelsio 1:20:07 13 chapters
[solo founder and bootstrapping][content creation and YouTube][open source and self-hosting][marketing and growth hacking][product development and MVP]
// chapters
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No more small boy spreadsheets, build your business on the free HubSpot CRM: https://mfmpod.link/hrd - Shaan Puri (@shaanvp - https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr - https://twitter.com/theSamParr) talk to Pieter Levels (@levelsio - https://twitter.com/levelsio) about being a solopreneur who makes nearly $3M a year with no employees while living a nomadic lifestyle. Also, want $5,000? Check out the My First Million Clips contest (https://www.mfmpod.com/p/clips/). ----- Links: *

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