Pieter Levels spent his twenties training as a techno DJ in Amsterdam.
When the music career stalled, he just left. Packed a bag, bought a laptop, and started wandering through Asia building small internet projects from whatever café had decent wifi.
For a couple of years, almost everything he built failed.
He eventually committed to a public challenge: twelve startups in twelve months (the same program that we saw Yongfook take up in last week’s article).
Somewhere in the middle of all that failure, one project gained traction.
That single project would become the blueprint for a six-product portfolio generating $3.6 million a year, all run by one person who has never once picked up a sales call.
The spreadsheet that makes $600,000 a year
Levels grew up in Amsterdam. His father, raised in post-war Rotterdam where the city had been bombed flat, told his kids to do whatever made them happy because he himself had been forced into medicine.
That level of permission is what carried Levels through music school, through the DJ years, and eventually into a nomadic life spent coding from hostels and co-working spaces across Southeast Asia.
He spent a couple of years there building small internet projects.
Websites, apps, side experiments.
He’d ship something, watch it go nowhere, and then move on to the next idea.
Around that time he decided to take on the same “12 startups in 12 months” challenge that Yongfook had, the creator I wrote about last week.
One new project every month, shipped publicly, no time to overthink.
He hit the pace. Project after project, month after month.
Most of them made nothing. A few scraped together a couple of hundred dollars.
He described the period as coding in cafés while traveling, pushing products live, then refreshing analytics hoping something would connect.
The project that eventually did connect came from something mundane.
While traveling, he kept running into the same problem. Every time he needed to pick his next city, he’d spend hours clicking through scattered websites comparing costs, internet speeds, safety, and weather.
So he built a spreadsheet that ranked cities based on the things that actually mattered to someone working from a laptop overseas.
He shared it on Hacker News and Product Hunt and the response was immediate.
Thousands of digital nomads had the same problem and nothing that solved it well.
Before long, the spreadsheet had become a site called Nomad List, and Levels added a paid membership layer that unlocked deeper data and community features.
Finally revenue was coming in.
Then he noticed the next problem.
The people around him wanted remote work and had no efficient way to find it. So he built Remote OK, a job board where companies paid to reach remote workers.
Same filter – a problem he personally had, turned into a tool that other people would pay for.
By 2018, those two products were generating $50,000 a month.
For most creators, that’s the finish line. A solo business clearing $600,000 a year with margins above 80%.
But Levels kept building.
When It Makes Sense To Charge
What Levels built over the next seven years looks complicated from the outside.
Six products spanning travel, remote work, AI tools, and a book. Combined revenue is around $3.6 million a year.
From the inside, every product follows the same pattern he had stumbled onto with Nomad List.
He runs into a problem he’s experienced personally.
Then he builds a tool to solve it, puts a price on it and makes sure the whole thing can run without him being involved in every transaction.
The interesting part is where the money actually comes from.
Take Nomad List.
Anyone can browse the site for free.
City rankings, cost data, safety scores, internet speeds. All of it is right there.
The paywall only kicks in when someone tries to use the social features: community chat, trip planning, connecting with other nomads.
By the time a user hits that gate, they’ve already spent time exploring cities and building a picture of where they want to go next.
The $99 lifetime membership feels like a natural next step because they’re already invested in the platform.
Levels has said the average user stays active for about three months.
If he charged $30 a month, that same person would pay $90 and then cancel.
Lifetime pricing captures more per customer and eliminates the headache of managing cancellations, so the pricing is shaped around how people actually use the product.
Remote OK works differently.
Companies pay to post jobs, and the pricing shifts based on how many listings are live that week.
A post can start around $600 and climb past $4,000 with add-ons like highlighted placement or extended visibility.
Even adding a company logo costs extra.
That structure keeps the board from being flooded with low-effort listings.
Higher prices filter for companies that are serious about hiring, which keeps the quality of jobs high, which keeps half a million remote workers coming back to browse each month.
The pricing protects the product.
Photo AI adds another $1.6 million a year through monthly subscriptions.
Alongside those sit a book called MAKE that teaches his approach to building products, a couple of smaller AI tools, and a browser-based flight simulator that hit $1 million in annual revenue within seventeen days by selling sponsorship placements inside the game.
Across all of them, the conversion works the same way.
There’s no email sequence, no webinar, no sales page doing the persuading.
Someone uses the free layer until their needs outgrow it, and then they hit a payment gate at the moment they’re most willing to pay.
The product does the selling.
The front-end of this business is Levels himself.
He’s spent over a decade sharing what he’s building on X, showing revenue milestones, shipping updates and opinions about how businesses should run.
He doesn’t blog, doesn’t podcast or run a strict content calendar.
The act of building products in public is the content marketing and it’s grown his following to over 400,000 people.
That audience is the distribution channel for everything he sells and the products do the rest.
Why He Builds With The Basics
The products that survived share three traits.
The first is speed.
Like Yongfook, Levels builds with simple, outdated tools that most professional developers would laugh at. He’s talked about this openly and caught plenty of criticism for it online.
He keeps using them because he can maintain every product in the portfolio by himself.
There’s no team to coordinate, no complex systems to manage, no slow approval process when he wants to ship something new.
When AI tools exploded in late 2022, he was experimenting with image generation within days.
A few weeks later he had a paid product live. A few months after that, Photo AI was generating six figures a month.
Funded competitors with full teams were still planning their roadmaps.
The second is how the products feed each other.
The six products don’t sit in a sequence.
There’s no starter offer that leads to a premium tier that leads to a high-ticket package.
They sit side by side, each one catching a different type of person from the same broad audience.
A digital nomad lands on Nomad List. An employer looking for remote talent finds Remote OK. An aspiring builder picks up MAKE. Someone who needs a professional headshot subscribes to Photo AI.
Each product has its own revenue, its own customers, and its own reason for existing.
When Levels shares any one of them on X, curious followers discover the others through his profile and his sites.
The portfolio cross-pollinates through his presence rather than through upsell sequences.
The third is how the portfolio absorbs risk.
When global travel collapsed during COVID, Remote OK surged as companies shifted to remote hiring.
His costs were close to zero, his savings were deep, and he had no staff to lay off and no investors to answer to.
That cost structure is possible because the products are designed to run themselves.
Employers on Remote OK find the site, choose a listing tier, pay through an automated checkout, and the job goes live.
Billing and renewals happen automatically.
Customer support across the entire portfolio runs through FAQ pages and a simple feedback form that goes to his phone.
There’s nobody processing orders, managing accounts, or chasing leads. The products do that work.
He posted about it at the time: “Most people have told me repeatedly over the years to hire and spend more, but I did the opposite.”
Each product in the portfolio can absorb a hit because the others keep generating revenue, and the whole thing stays standing because none of it depends on his daily involvement to function.
Forty Swings
Levels has shipped over forty products during his career. The vast majority failed.
That number is easy to skip past, so it’s worth sitting with for a moment.
Forty attempts. Most of them made nothing.
The portfolio generating $3.6 million a year is built on top of a pile of projects that didn’t work out.
He just kept launching anyway.
When he started experimenting with AI image generation in late 2022, the output quality was, in his own words, “terrible.”
He charged for it anyway, and people paid.
He then improved the product based on what paying customers actually told him they needed.
A price tag taught him more in a few weeks than months of planning would have.
For creators stuck in the cycle of perfecting something before putting it out into the world, that might be the most useful thing Levels demonstrates.
The cost of launching something rough is almost always lower than the cost of waiting until it feels ready.
The second thing worth paying attention to is where his payment gates sit.
Most creators either give everything away for free hoping it builds enough trust to sell something later, or they lock everything behind a complex funnel designed to warm people up before asking for money.
Levels does neither.
His products give real value upfront.
You can browse Nomad List’s city data for hours. You can scroll through every job on Remote OK.
The payment gate only appears when your needs grow past what the free layer offers.
That placement is a decision most creators never think about carefully enough.
If your audience can get everything they need without paying, there’s no reason to upgrade.
If they can’t get anything without paying, there’s no reason to trust you.
The gate has to sit at the point where someone has already experienced enough value to know the paid version is worth it.
The third is the filter that ties everything together.
Every product Levels has ever built started as something he personally needed.
A way to compare cities. A place to find remote jobs. A tool to generate headshots without hiring a photographer.
He didn’t research markets or survey audiences. He noticed his own frustrations and asked whether other people shared them.
That filter is what makes the whole portfolio work.
It’s why he can build quickly, because he already understands the problem.
It’s why the products feel genuine, because they are.
And it’s why he’s been able to sustain this for over a decade, because he’s solving problems he actually cares about.
You don’t need his audience, his timing, or his technical skills to apply the same filter.
You just need to pay closer attention to the problems you’re already solving for yourself every day, and ask whether anyone else would pay for that solution.