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Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

295 points by Pete-Codes 6y ago

Pete-Codes 6y ago
Not bad for a PHP in one file guy, huh?
- sturza 6y ago
  well, your output is result driven, no matter how you get there, so kudos!
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  All programming is programming, it could be in C and I d be fine with it
brainless 6y ago
I am a solo founder and I recently saw the post of solo founder persistence, which I am yet to read in full. Pieter is one of those that can consistently deliver. He has been doing that for years now. I admire him and what he does, yet I know I can not. I am plagued by mental, emotional issues that break my routine every few months. I started focusing on perseverance and I am happy with where I am now. There is still a long way to go for me and Pieter will stay an inspiration.
- pieterhg 6y ago
  Hey :) you should see my brain and discover what I'm plagued by! I struggle with moderate anxiety and depression on and off too and esp this year has been quite hard. Work is quite therapeutical for me because it keeps me creative, active and have goals. It keeps me on the rails really. Daily creative stuff to work on. My dad does the same as he's always renovating the house, doing woodworking, or studying film history. Just tasks to do. Even if those tasks feeling meaningless and motivation drops (eg symptoms of sneaking up depression, especially during this crazy year), getting one task done usually helps to alleviate that and get back into it. That and a supportive girlfriend, working out a lot and trying to eat healthy. I think it's much more common especially in entrepreneurship and ambitious pursuits than we think, so the moment I drop the word depression or anxiety people are like "omg are you okay?", but it's just a part of my and many people's existence I think. So just so you know, while it might look like my brain has it together from afar, it's somewhat of a struggle on and off and will be the rest of my life, and I think for many people. And my work might just be a result of trying to deal with that, instead of an obstacle.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    I know this doesn't help you a single bit wrt depression, but anyway: I'm sure I'm not the only entrepreneur you're an inspiration for. I have a tendency to overengineer things, and I find that thinking "what would Pieter Levels do?" helps me get my feet back on the ground :-) Godspeed and I hope that someday you'll grow over the worst parts of those mental issues.
  - peterburkimsher 6y ago
    Well done for persisting and releasing your projects! I have plenty of ideas too, I usually only get around to writing them up when I'm applying for jobs. My Show HN front-ends are functional but plain; I'm impressed that you made Nomadlist look so pretty! Have you found that travel helps emotionally? Getting on a Plane is my "Plan E" - most problems don't carry long-distance. Nomadlist makes it easy to compare the things that can be measured about choosing a place to go; CouchSurfing/BeWelcome/Trustroots helped me to find people in those places so I would land on my feet. The hospex community is also just generally very supportive, in my experience. Musician fan clubs too; remote work has allowed me to see many of my favourite bands live. I guess you saw the map of the Cost of 1 GB of mobile data; any plan to integrate that data into Nomadlist? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247561
    - pieterhg 6y ago
      Oh for sure, yes. Simply "doing stuff" helps, and the novelty of traveling and experiencing new places is very exciting. The challenge is that it's like a drug, and it stops working if you keep traveling because your dopamine receptors get usd to it and then you feel the same, so it's not really a long term fix. You see that with nomads especially: 1) go nomad 2) omg life's amazing 3) yeah 4) oh shit why am i depressed?!!! Then again, travel can give you permanent solutions, like you might meet a new partner(s), or people that you will build something new with, etc. Those interactions can change the course of your life and many of us need to move out of our own home bubble to a new place to realize the possibilities that life has to offer, outside of your usual routine. I do think a creative pursuit (because it's endless) and being around people you love (difficult these days) and working out (lifting weights esp and cardio) and eating healthy (organic, and lots of vegetables) are the most probable ways to feel somewhat satisfied. But it's not like I or anyone else really has it solved I think. And with corona now I'm failing on about half of those things. P.S. Nomad List was also very very basic and barely functional and it took ~6 years to be somewhat pretty and properly functional and it still has bugs, so it's just a daily iterative process of fixing small things like a button.
- RikNieu 6y ago
  > I admire him and what he does, yet I know I can not. Of course you can! I'm like you in that I haven't had a successful project yet, but it'll only happen if we keep trying! And like Pieter said in his reply to you, pretty much everyone struggles with mental stuff, even him and people like Tim Ferriss. So don't let that hold you back. Acknowledge the hardships and then keep on going. You can do this!
break_the_bank 6y ago
Link to tweet by Pieter where he mentions monthly revenue that totals to $1m/year [0] His entire empire runs on one VPS that costs him just $320 a month. [0]https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/1134089856265494528?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/11340898562654945...
- spiderfarmer 6y ago
  My (smaller) 'empire' runs comfortably on 3 VPS servers because I have more media and data IO, but that also totals around 400k. It's amazing what you can do with VPS servers when compared to 15 years ago.
  - Pete-Codes 6y ago
    Good to know!
gargron 6y ago
I don't think it's at all surprising that there is no relation between tech stack and business success. End-users don't care if you use a single PHP file or a Go binary, they never get to see that anyway. So I don't really see "it was all a single PHP file" as a gotcha. The whole thing could've been coded in Assembly, the difference is in the effort required for development, ease of maintenance/scaling up and how well-guarded you are against vulnerabilities.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  If you don't get why the fact a high successful venture is using such a barebones tech stack is not noteworthy, you must be following a different tech industry than I am
  - christophilus 6y ago
    I mostly follow HN, a successful tech forum that is written in a single lisp file and runs on a single server. It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack. The opposite is more surprising.
    - krapp 6y ago
      Any application can be said to be written in a single file if you ignore all of the libraries and just dump everything else into a single file, HN included. That's not a rational measure of simplicity, elegance or efficiency.
      - jermaustin1 6y ago
        What the parent and original post seem to be implying is that simplicity, efficiency, tech stack (or lack there of), isn't what drives success in a business, it is instead the customers paying. Sure having a modern infrastructure that is able to process thousands of requests per second is better than something that can only do a few hundred, but if you strip out a bunch of excess requests, you will process less per user, and thus reach the same level of scale on a less efficient stack.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Levels is quite transparent about how to build and monetize communities. I 'd expect he 'll receive a lot of hate if blogs like this make him a posterchild about "making money without a degree". He is talented, which the blog fails to mention, not everyone with or without a CS degree is talented. I also like his opinionated approach of not engagint with haters.
- Pete-Codes 6y ago
  Actually, he sent a DM to say he liked the article. I would re-think talent. Pieter works hard. Talent can lead you to think people are born to be successful. Pieter just works hard. Work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.
heipei 6y ago
Well-deserved in my opinion. His no-nonsense and unpretentious way of building products, often out in the open, should be a source of motivation for others who can come up with a dozen reasons why they shouldn't attempt to do X. His blog-posts and Tweets are not hustle-porn but just straight-up "works for me, I honestly don't care what you say". A quote that I recently read applies to him very much: "Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money". Pieter doesn't try to sound smart, after all what could possibly sound smarter than making this amount of revenue as a solo founder.
- Pete-Codes 6y ago
  Wow, how did I miss those quotes! Yeah, he is the best :) No BS or hustle p0rn
- Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
  Yeah a lot of people get stuck in the loop of worrying whether they're using the right framework or programming patterns or whether their blog will scale to 1 million daily hits. They rarely ship anything. If you never put your work out there, you'll never be successful, so the key is to stop messing around and just build. If it's shit, it's shit, no one can see the code, if you want to rewrite it then ship it and do it after. The quicker it's out there, the better it is for you, and it's also incredibly motivating to get feedback ASAP without guessing what people might want from your product.
  - chrisjarvis 6y ago
    I'm bookmarking this!
langitbiru 6y ago
I'm collecting these kind of success stories (without the helping from VC). The other story which is very inspiring as well is the Tailwind CSS (https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduct-to-multi-mullion-dollar-business/?ref=heydesigner https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...)
- herrgigglung 6y ago
  I met a guy travelling in South Africa / Namibia in 2013 who had two web businesses (https://www.replacementkeys.co.uk/ https://www.replacementkeys.co.uk/ and InternetRadio.com). Had No Degree, just self taught / on the job training. He had written most of his stuff in Perl :o! Similar philosophy to this to Pieter Levels!
- Pete-Codes 6y ago
  If you don't know it already, indiehackers.com is awesome - especially the podcast
sdoering 6y ago
> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic. > The SQLite website (https://www.sqlite.org/ https://www.sqlite.org/) uses SQLite > itself, of course, and as of this writing (2015) it handles > about 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of > which are dynamic pages touching the database. Dynamic > content uses about 200 SQL statements per webpage. This > setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server > with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below > 0.1 most of the time." (Source: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html) So SQlite is quite a valid choice if you need a database and stay below ~500k HTTP requests per day. So it probably is "production ready" for many a site.
- Pete-Codes 6y ago
  hey, I posted the article. Good to know! I'm sure I had read it somewhere on their site. Maybe it was just from other developers that I got the impression it wasn't meant from production. Thanks
  - DZittersteyn 6y ago
    I also used to have this impression, I think I got this from Rails and Django docs, maybe you read something similar? > Rails comes with built-in support for SQLite, which is a lightweight serverless database application. While a busy production environment may overload SQLite, it works well for development and testing. Rails defaults to using a SQLite database when creating a new project, but you can always change it later. > By default, the configuration uses SQLite. If you’re new to databases, or you’re just interested in trying Django, this is the easiest choice. SQLite is included in Python, so you won’t need to install anything else to support your database. When starting your first real project, however, you may want to use a more scalable database like PostgreSQL, to avoid database-switching headaches down the road.
deltron3030 6y ago
He didn't just develop an app, but an entire movement.
- BrianOnHN 6y ago
  Which movement was that?
  - Pete-Codes 6y ago
    He's done a lot on promoting remote work/ digital nomadism.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    I think GP is referring to digital nomads. Pieter didn't start that for sure, but I can imagine more people took the dive because of Nomad List + Pieter's open and honest sharing about his own digital nomad life.
deleted 6y ago
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sushshshsh 6y ago
I would say that for every Pieter on this planet, there are thousands of failed Pieters. The success of his business niche doesn't have much to do with tech stack or even programming, but rather Instagram style lifestyle businesses.
- kiza 6y ago
  Agreed, almost any developer could build the same products. The real reason for success is by selling the nomad lifestyle via social media. People buy into the dream.
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    And it's a very tenuous dream at that, I'd say. It requires constant handholding, upkeep, juggling, whatever you want to call it, to manage all of the visas, plane tickets, bookings, finding remote work, finding a network of people for which reason you allegedly moved to the country :) Call me square but it's much easier to just overpay for rent in the USA and just focus on building "bulletproof" skills for a long career here. After all, nobody stands up postgres on EC2 anymore right, we all just use redshift and lambdas? right? ok well maybe not all of us :)
- sbarre 6y ago
  These are fair points, and you are very likely correct about the ratio of success to failure. Survival bias is strong on HN. I would add though that "shipping it" greatly increases your odds of success, and choosing a simple stack that lets you ship an idea quickly is a good thing. I feel like his choice of a super basic tech stack likely contributed to Pieter's success in some way.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I'm making massive assumptions and generalizations here, but, a lot of developers are pretty introverted and really dislike being in the spotlights, whereas instagram people are the opposite. Without trying to make the term sound negative (it's a personality trait IMO, not a value judgment), it's a narcissistic trait that not everyone has. I mean I'm working remotely at the moment because of the 'rona and it's not glamorous at all. My desk doesn't look like a generic marketing photo (you know the type, top-down view on a wood grain desk, clean Macbook, steaming cup of coffee, phone, Moleskin notebook, random plant), I don't spend my time lounging and networking (a beer in the back yard at night maybe), I just go upstairs, do my thing for eight hours, etc. Extroverts and narcissists make software development look a lot sexier, because they have no qualms with putting themselves forward and advertising themselves and their lifestyle. Me, I hide behind an online moniker and shitpost on HN, often not even looking whether anyone replied to my comments because What If I'm confronted with something. I'm sure I'd have a much cushier job if I was more extroverted (alongside my current skill level, I'm no genius but I get the job done). Maybe one day I'll go self-employed or work remote for wealthy US companies, idk.
umaar 6y ago
Sometimes I think it's fascinating the rabbit holes we'll go down, when ultimately, the user just doesn't care. TypeScript vs. plain JS Logic-less templates like Mustache vs. Handlebars Vue vs. React Using async/await, and adding the relevant infrastructure to support that (transpiler) Clean code practices in general Unit tests, end to end tests CSS BEM vs. tailwind You can make indirect connections to imply the user does care, e.g. E2E tests catch a bug which meant the user didn't see it, but generally, these things are meaningless to them. For my first course, I put time into those things - time taken away from making content. The more I think about it for my new course, the more I wonder should I just sell on a platform which already handles all of that, like gumroad. Where's the line though? When is gumroad or squarespace not the answer?
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Yeah that is what it boils down to often; the user doesn't care. It's more about what's best for the developer. The problem is that a lot of developers want to work with what is 'sexy' at the moment. That's one factor that also drives e.g. job adverts; most vacancies I've seen will have "cryptocurrency" and "IoT" sprinkled in, just for the sake of looking attractive. And old applications get rewritten in newer tech because of a combination of technical debt and developers going "I did not write this so I cannot read it and do not want to work with it". Granted, newer programming languages (or versions thereof) often have better developer ergonomics (I spent my morning trying to get a C codebase to work while with my new Go codebase it should be a matter of installing the Go tools and doing 'go build'). Another factor is the perception of productivity; rebuilding software greenfield will feel super productive for at least the first six months to a year, after which things become more of a slog as the backlog fills with bug reports and change requests, instead of new features. Source: I've seen this happen a number of times. Disclaimer: I'm in a rebuild project myself now, the old codebase is nearly 200K of very poorly written PHP / JS, and the Decision was made to rewrite it from scratch. I'm going with Go and React at the moment; Go because it's unsurprising and boring code that should be fine for the next decade, and React because it's a de facto standard now and should be fine for the next 3-5 years as well. Both tools were decided on in part for future developers that will work alongside or to replace me. But I'm sure in a few years my opinion on what is the best tech stack may change, idk.
sixQuarks 6y ago
I don’t usually like to toot my own horn, but I make $600k/year off a plain HTML static site that isn’t even coded well, in-line CSS, many pages not responsive, broken links, etc.
- kreetx 6y ago
  What site is that? :)
  - sixQuarks 6y ago
    I knew someone would ask. Sorry but I’m not gonna reveal it, don’t want competition. I will say it’s been online for over a decade, information rich, with affiliate lead generation as the main source of income.
    - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
      If it's the Milliondollarhomepage.com then it isn't quite living up to its legacy ;)
      - sixQuarks 6y ago
        Actually, the founder of that site started calm.com - which is valued at over $1 billion now. Not too shabby
    - kreetx 6y ago
      Hah! But great work otherwise then. But did it start out as a hobby, or was it entirely planned as a business?
      - sixQuarks 6y ago
        It was planned as a business from the start. I was running a different site that started as a hobby, and one of the affiliate links was performing well even though it wasn’t highly targeted to the audience. I knew there was a biz opportunity there.
pc86 6y ago
If you don't know who Pieter Levels is, the title makes it sound like this person makes $600k doing remote coding work on jobs found on Nomad List and Remote OK. In actuality, he is an MBA who runs these two businesses.
- bilbopotter 6y ago
  Also he's up to about 900k now the video referred to is old.
  - swyx 6y ago
    that's run rate - he had a recent spike up to 1m run rate. his biz is quite volatile.
    - pieterhg 6y ago
      Yep, it's about $710k/y with Nomad List and Remote OK only now. Add to that more side income from MAKE book, other smaller projects and investments
- mbesto 6y ago
  > In actuality, he is an MBA who runs these two businesses. No snark, what does having an MBA have to do with running those businesses? Curious why you chose to include that?
  - pb7 6y ago
    I took it as attributing education, expertise, or knowledge to him which seemingly would be helpful in running a business. Would it not?
nstart 6y ago
I am super inspired by Pieter. At the same time, I'm also not a believer of a one size fits all approach. A lot of Pieter's work these days is built around remote working communities. His first ideas when he was doing 12 months, 12 startups were very singular in focus. Nothing wrong with that at all. At the same time, Pieter's approach has not been used across a broad range of products in terms of product complexity. I'm basically curious which larger products have been made with this kind of relatively ultra-light technological approach and have still succeeded. I'm particularly curious if there are products that started out as a super simple application and then grew in complexity while maintaining this kind of approach. At what point did it break? Are there examples where it did not break? Edit - by growing in complexity I mean feature/product complexity while maintaining technical "simplicity". Or am I thinking about this backwards? If you are a single developer, you use your basic tools, and launch products that are light on complexity where the focus is to ensure it earns money and that's it.
- swyx 6y ago
  i mean, facebook started as a very light php app and then they just built layer upon layer upon layer on top of it until they basically now have their own fork of php.
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    To my knowledge Facebook doesn't use any PHP since years. (Hack is not a "PHP fork"). Also I would be very surprised if there is any code left form the early days. FB was (to my knowledge) rebuild "form scratch" several times during it's life-time. Also I don't think one could build a website with PHP and SQLite and scale this out unmodified to millions of concurrent users for example. But most websites don't have millions of concurrent users, and it's true that some very "basic" tech is more than enough to server one's users well in the majority of cases. The horrible amounts of over-engineering one can see "everywhere" are imho a result of two issues: People building stuff and using tech they don't actually need! Most people don't have the problems Google or FB have for example. Still people are running static websites on Kubernetes nowadays, and things like that. (You know, in case you need to quickly scale things out this makes perfect sense, doesn't it? ;-)). IMHO one of the main points of good engineering is to choose the right tool for the job. This means that in 99% of the cases you're actually perfectly fine with even a "bare metal PHP / MySQL" stack (or similar). Especially if you're just trying get something up the ground. On the other hand's side a good engineer should know upfront when this won't lead to the desired result. As an engineer you should know all of your tools. The simple day to day ones but also the complex and advanced ones — you need to choose wisely which to use when. If you don't think about all of the possible design space, and all the pros & cons of going some direction, you're otherwise just a guy with a hammer; and not an engineer… So it makes imho a big difference whether it is an informed choice to use "low tech" or just the result of "I don't know better". No matter the (first) outcome may look quite similar. In the first case there is a chance that the people that did that will be able to "scale shit out" or add all kinds of features in a clean way. In the second case one can expect that the people that "just had an hammer" will create in the future the usual "layers and layers of mess" all over the place when tasked to extend or scale their system, as they just don't know better. As a bottom line: Software engineering is hard, very hard. To arrive at a simple but correct solution is almost an art and requires the most skilled and knowledgeable engineers money can buy. It was a genius btw who insisted on things being as simple as possible, but not simpler. Coming up with "a simple solution" (ignoring half of the problem) or "killing flies with Bazookas" is trivial, everybody can do that. But that's not proper engineering, imho.
devit 6y ago
I don't think this has anything to do with tech stack. React is generally easier to use correctly than plain JavaScript, PostgreSQL is as easy to use as SQLite (and more powerful), Node is as easy to use as PHP (but has more libraries, and you can use TypeScript which makes it easier to write correct code), etc. The only actually simplifying choice seems to be using a single VPS instead of a Kubernetes-based cluster. It's far more likely that both the financial success and the tech stack are caused by a pragmatic attitude focusing on the business itself rather than tech details, rather than the tech stack being the cause of the success.
- gauchojs 6y ago
  I agree - for me, its about continuing to use React/Python/Go/Node for new projects, instead of trying (say) Elixir or Clojure. I'm already much less focused.. For Pieter its about staying with PHP.
- ShorsHammer 6y ago
  > PostgreSQL is as easy to use as SQLite Absolutely disagree. One is incredibly secure out of the box, the other is certainly not, they probably shouldn't even be compared. We can check Shodan if you want some empirical evidence for this.
thrownomadaway 6y ago
I am going to take the opposing side of HN's groupthink and tell why I don't like that this guy is celebrated as a hero. I haven't checked since a while but a long time ago when I tried to sign up to his site it was a showcase of dark patterns. What I specifically remember is that it sucked in all my data on a sign up form before telling me that I actually have to pay for access. I specifically checked every square inch of the opening site beforehand to see if it's a paid system. But it was filled to the rim with all the other usual dishonest marketing psychology bullshit too. Usually it's best to avoid anybody who does any business with "digital nomad" in its description. So many hustlers preying on clueless people who are sucked into the promise of easily setting up an online passive income while travelling the world. Coaches, masterminds and paid-for online communities are the worst: newcomers pay access to people who are either essentially in the same shoes as themselves or are only part of the community to make a profit out of it. Obviously the ones who are willing to pay for this (and fall for the above described dark patterns) are the ones who want to get value out of it, not the ones who can provide. Why would any serious "digital nomad" pay to be part of such a community? Also the original nomad list site was like a distillation of everything that's wrong with the lean startup ideology. The content was not only thin, it actually looked like it was totally made up. Whenever I saw someone link it as some authority on a location I always wondered whether anybody who has ever been to that place had any input on it. But it didn't matter, it was sleek and easy to digest so it took off. And then could be used as a traffic source for the other ventures under the same umbrella. So the guy is now making half a million a year based on a site spreading completely useless and misleading information and riding the hope of a better life of newb digital nomads. Yes I am bitter that I am not his position. But I am also bitter that this is the kind of business practice that makes money nowadays.
kelvin0 6y ago
I did not know if this person until today, very glad for their monetary success. However, the technological choices that he makes seem fine for the type of web applications he's building: seemingly simple, one-off projects to which he adds more features as needed. I don't know if that approach would work on maintaining a large code base in the case of a meatier project that needs to be maintained for the long term. My own experience doing web dev (which is not my specialty) is that HTML,CSS,JS quickly become unmaintainable when you try to scale them without a well though out architecture and some prior experience. Once again, glad for him!
xwdv 6y ago
It's worth remembering that while his tech stack is low tech stuff, the methods Pieter used to build a community is basically the marketing equivalent of using React, powered by a microservices architecture using multiple languages and feeding data from a sharded database with multiple points of redundancy and cache layers.
techslave 6y ago
i think this deserves a nitpick. when we say “makes” wrt a person, it means their gross salary/income. here, it refers to revenue. that’s misleading.
- tome 6y ago
  They must be pretty close for those kinds of sites, no?
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Having done exactly opposite to what Pieter has done as a solopreneur for many years - i.e. • Best Engineering practices set by industry leaders. • Using state of the art tools, libraries, architectures etc. • Being paranoid about Technical Debt. I would say Pieter's strategy is a better if you're a serial-solopreneur. I had a CS degree, so its even hard to think of such a route and I considered my startup to be a long haul but there are valuable lessons to take from no-code/non-CS community; after all they solve problems for their consumers and make money from it. But, I wish every solopreneur knew and suggests one advise in every interview they give 'Buy a fat health insurance, largest you can afford, take care of your health as when you go down your startup goes down and no amount of automation can save it' and that's what happened with my startup.
maxdo 6y ago
Why this ad posted on HN?
deleted 6y ago
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refresher 6y ago
Something jarring about the 'Dracula PRO' colour scheme unlabelled advertisement in the middle of the article.
- giarc 6y ago
  Yes it was really out of place. Same with the No CS Degree job advertisement. It was even more out of place since the main article was about a guy creating job boards, I thought perhaps Pieter had made a new one?
dvh1990 6y ago
Pieter's businesses are impressive, but IMO not using React nowadays is actually harder than using it. Building stuff vanilla takes more time, effort and knowledge.
- ShorsHammer 6y ago
  > effort and knowledge Probably the sort of thing you want over time from your devs. I'm no front-end guru but vanilla.js seems like all that most companies really need to do their job. Having done more than enough time at $BIGCORP you'd be amazed at how much work is self-created, self-perpetuating and the lengths people will go to protecting that. I'd even argue a crap employee who documents everything and eats vanilla icecream is probably worth far more than a superstar that builds impenetrable silos to artificially make themselves invaluable while instagramming themselves with boutique gelato.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  > not using React nowadays is actually harder than using it For a solo dev, the only thing React makes simpler is dealing with JS that has to manipulate a lot of HTML. If your app doesn't do that (IDK if nomadlist does or not), then React is overkill and unnecessary. Even if you want reusable components, for many simple usecases the React lifecycle is complex and unnecessary.
dsbleia 6y ago
This is exactly how I learned to code. Started with simple coding projects online then built a personal website now building web apps. Although, I do think it is important to learn React now a days. I started teaching myself React a few weeks ago via this same process. Incredibly powerful for web dev
RhodesianHunter 6y ago
I haven't visited either site, but I sure hope he doesn't have logins or gather any sensitive user information if he has no CS background, no prior dev experience, and is running entirely on vanilla JS/PHP using no frameworks. That combo sounds like an ideal recipe for a security nightmare.
person_of_color 6y ago
I don't get it. One guy makes a job board and makes 300k/year. Not exactly a hard problem to solve. What's stopping a proliferation of job boards to arbitrage away his revenue?
- ativzzz 6y ago
  Network effects. The value of a job board is the amount of companies and potential workers that use it. Being tied to his digital nomad community brings in a supply of workers and companies that work remotely.
deleted 6y ago
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vmception 6y ago
I have a broken bootstrap template that I've recycled for over half a decade to make landing pages for new products. It's always funny when junior developers come to support the product and balk at the code. Yessir, its a one page static website that just got me $1,000,000 in three weeks and your attention and ability to pay you. Funnier because I used to be that junior developer. The memes that recognize this are so good and spot on: the pedantic guy with glasses and out of place bowtie complaining about some irrelevant best practice, while money printer go brrrrrrr
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  what bootstrap version?
  - vmception 6y ago
    3.3.4 from 2011, but this was in use for a very long time before the real flurry of upgrades started coming out. I've been using a template since 2014-2015
nikolastojkov 6y ago
This has nothing to do with Tech and everything to do with his MBA and business knowledge. The way he markets, writes copy and actually builds communities is what is making him a shit ton of money, not the single index.php
davidbrennerjr 6y ago
sqlite can't be compared to postgresql since sqlite was specifically designed as file-based DB for embedded applications not as a full-featured RDMS

295 points by Pete-Codes 6y ago

Pete-Codes 6y ago

Not bad for a PHP in one file guy, huh?

sturza 6y ago
well, your output is result driven, no matter how you get there, so kudos!
cblconfederate 6y ago
All programming is programming, it could be in C and I d be fine with it

brainless 6y ago

I am a solo founder and I recently saw the post of solo founder persistence, which I am yet to read in full. Pieter is one of those that can consistently deliver. He has been doing that for years now. I admire him and what he does, yet I know I can not. I am plagued by mental, emotional issues that break my routine every few months. I started focusing on perseverance and I am happy with where I am now. There is still a long way to go for me and Pieter will stay an inspiration.

pieterhg 6y ago
Hey :) you should see my brain and discover what I'm plagued by! I struggle with moderate anxiety and depression on and off too and esp this year has been quite hard. Work is quite therapeutical for me because it keeps me creative, active and have goals. It keeps me on the rails really. Daily creative stuff to work on. My dad does the same as he's always renovating the house, doing woodworking, or studying film history. Just tasks to do. Even if those tasks feeling meaningless and motivation drops (eg symptoms of sneaking up depression, especially during this crazy year), getting one task done usually helps to alleviate that and get back into it. That and a supportive girlfriend, working out a lot and trying to eat healthy. I think it's much more common especially in entrepreneurship and ambitious pursuits than we think, so the moment I drop the word depression or anxiety people are like "omg are you okay?", but it's just a part of my and many people's existence I think. So just so you know, while it might look like my brain has it together from afar, it's somewhat of a struggle on and off and will be the rest of my life, and I think for many people. And my work might just be a result of trying to deal with that, instead of an obstacle.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  I know this doesn't help you a single bit wrt depression, but anyway: I'm sure I'm not the only entrepreneur you're an inspiration for. I have a tendency to overengineer things, and I find that thinking "what would Pieter Levels do?" helps me get my feet back on the ground :-) Godspeed and I hope that someday you'll grow over the worst parts of those mental issues.
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  Well done for persisting and releasing your projects! I have plenty of ideas too, I usually only get around to writing them up when I'm applying for jobs. My Show HN front-ends are functional but plain; I'm impressed that you made Nomadlist look so pretty! Have you found that travel helps emotionally? Getting on a Plane is my "Plan E" - most problems don't carry long-distance. Nomadlist makes it easy to compare the things that can be measured about choosing a place to go; CouchSurfing/BeWelcome/Trustroots helped me to find people in those places so I would land on my feet. The hospex community is also just generally very supportive, in my experience. Musician fan clubs too; remote work has allowed me to see many of my favourite bands live. I guess you saw the map of the Cost of 1 GB of mobile data; any plan to integrate that data into Nomadlist? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24247561
  - pieterhg 6y ago
    Oh for sure, yes. Simply "doing stuff" helps, and the novelty of traveling and experiencing new places is very exciting. The challenge is that it's like a drug, and it stops working if you keep traveling because your dopamine receptors get usd to it and then you feel the same, so it's not really a long term fix. You see that with nomads especially: 1) go nomad 2) omg life's amazing 3) yeah 4) oh shit why am i depressed?!!! Then again, travel can give you permanent solutions, like you might meet a new partner(s), or people that you will build something new with, etc. Those interactions can change the course of your life and many of us need to move out of our own home bubble to a new place to realize the possibilities that life has to offer, outside of your usual routine. I do think a creative pursuit (because it's endless) and being around people you love (difficult these days) and working out (lifting weights esp and cardio) and eating healthy (organic, and lots of vegetables) are the most probable ways to feel somewhat satisfied. But it's not like I or anyone else really has it solved I think. And with corona now I'm failing on about half of those things. P.S. Nomad List was also very very basic and barely functional and it took ~6 years to be somewhat pretty and properly functional and it still has bugs, so it's just a daily iterative process of fixing small things like a button.
RikNieu 6y ago
> I admire him and what he does, yet I know I can not. Of course you can! I'm like you in that I haven't had a successful project yet, but it'll only happen if we keep trying! And like Pieter said in his reply to you, pretty much everyone struggles with mental stuff, even him and people like Tim Ferriss. So don't let that hold you back. Acknowledge the hardships and then keep on going. You can do this!

break_the_bank 6y ago

Link to tweet by Pieter where he mentions monthly revenue that totals to $1m/year [0] His entire empire runs on one VPS that costs him just $320 a month. [0]https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/1134089856265494528?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/11340898562654945...

spiderfarmer 6y ago
My (smaller) 'empire' runs comfortably on 3 VPS servers because I have more media and data IO, but that also totals around 400k. It's amazing what you can do with VPS servers when compared to 15 years ago.
- Pete-Codes 6y ago
  Good to know!

gargron 6y ago

I don't think it's at all surprising that there is no relation between tech stack and business success. End-users don't care if you use a single PHP file or a Go binary, they never get to see that anyway. So I don't really see "it was all a single PHP file" as a gotcha. The whole thing could've been coded in Assembly, the difference is in the effort required for development, ease of maintenance/scaling up and how well-guarded you are against vulnerabilities.

BoorishBears 6y ago
If you don't get why the fact a high successful venture is using such a barebones tech stack is not noteworthy, you must be following a different tech industry than I am
- christophilus 6y ago
  I mostly follow HN, a successful tech forum that is written in a single lisp file and runs on a single server. It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack. The opposite is more surprising.
  - krapp 6y ago
    Any application can be said to be written in a single file if you ignore all of the libraries and just dump everything else into a single file, HN included. That's not a rational measure of simplicity, elegance or efficiency.
    - jermaustin1 6y ago
      What the parent and original post seem to be implying is that simplicity, efficiency, tech stack (or lack there of), isn't what drives success in a business, it is instead the customers paying. Sure having a modern infrastructure that is able to process thousands of requests per second is better than something that can only do a few hundred, but if you strip out a bunch of excess requests, you will process less per user, and thus reach the same level of scale on a less efficient stack.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Levels is quite transparent about how to build and monetize communities. I 'd expect he 'll receive a lot of hate if blogs like this make him a posterchild about "making money without a degree". He is talented, which the blog fails to mention, not everyone with or without a CS degree is talented. I also like his opinionated approach of not engagint with haters.

Pete-Codes 6y ago
Actually, he sent a DM to say he liked the article. I would re-think talent. Pieter works hard. Talent can lead you to think people are born to be successful. Pieter just works hard. Work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

heipei 6y ago

Well-deserved in my opinion. His no-nonsense and unpretentious way of building products, often out in the open, should be a source of motivation for others who can come up with a dozen reasons why they shouldn't attempt to do X. His blog-posts and Tweets are not hustle-porn but just straight-up "works for me, I honestly don't care what you say". A quote that I recently read applies to him very much: "Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money". Pieter doesn't try to sound smart, after all what could possibly sound smarter than making this amount of revenue as a solo founder.

Pete-Codes 6y ago
Wow, how did I miss those quotes! Yeah, he is the best :) No BS or hustle p0rn
Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
Yeah a lot of people get stuck in the loop of worrying whether they're using the right framework or programming patterns or whether their blog will scale to 1 million daily hits. They rarely ship anything. If you never put your work out there, you'll never be successful, so the key is to stop messing around and just build. If it's shit, it's shit, no one can see the code, if you want to rewrite it then ship it and do it after. The quicker it's out there, the better it is for you, and it's also incredibly motivating to get feedback ASAP without guessing what people might want from your product.
- chrisjarvis 6y ago
  I'm bookmarking this!

langitbiru 6y ago

I'm collecting these kind of success stories (without the helping from VC). The other story which is very inspiring as well is the Tailwind CSS (https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduct-to-multi-mullion-dollar-business/?ref=heydesigner https://adamwathan.me/tailwindcss-from-side-project-byproduc...)

herrgigglung 6y ago
I met a guy travelling in South Africa / Namibia in 2013 who had two web businesses (https://www.replacementkeys.co.uk/ https://www.replacementkeys.co.uk/ and InternetRadio.com). Had No Degree, just self taught / on the job training. He had written most of his stuff in Perl :o! Similar philosophy to this to Pieter Levels!
Pete-Codes 6y ago
If you don't know it already, indiehackers.com is awesome - especially the podcast

sdoering 6y ago

> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking, any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic. > The SQLite website (https://www.sqlite.org/ https://www.sqlite.org/) uses SQLite > itself, of course, and as of this writing (2015) it handles > about 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of > which are dynamic pages touching the database. Dynamic > content uses about 200 SQL statements per webpage. This > setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server > with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below > 0.1 most of the time." (Source: https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html) So SQlite is quite a valid choice if you need a database and stay below ~500k HTTP requests per day. So it probably is "production ready" for many a site.

Pete-Codes 6y ago
hey, I posted the article. Good to know! I'm sure I had read it somewhere on their site. Maybe it was just from other developers that I got the impression it wasn't meant from production. Thanks
- DZittersteyn 6y ago
  I also used to have this impression, I think I got this from Rails and Django docs, maybe you read something similar? > Rails comes with built-in support for SQLite, which is a lightweight serverless database application. While a busy production environment may overload SQLite, it works well for development and testing. Rails defaults to using a SQLite database when creating a new project, but you can always change it later. > By default, the configuration uses SQLite. If you’re new to databases, or you’re just interested in trying Django, this is the easiest choice. SQLite is included in Python, so you won’t need to install anything else to support your database. When starting your first real project, however, you may want to use a more scalable database like PostgreSQL, to avoid database-switching headaches down the road.

deltron3030 6y ago

He didn't just develop an app, but an entire movement.

BrianOnHN 6y ago
Which movement was that?
- Pete-Codes 6y ago
  He's done a lot on promoting remote work/ digital nomadism.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  I think GP is referring to digital nomads. Pieter didn't start that for sure, but I can imagine more people took the dive because of Nomad List + Pieter's open and honest sharing about his own digital nomad life.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sushshshsh 6y ago

I would say that for every Pieter on this planet, there are thousands of failed Pieters. The success of his business niche doesn't have much to do with tech stack or even programming, but rather Instagram style lifestyle businesses.

kiza 6y ago
Agreed, almost any developer could build the same products. The real reason for success is by selling the nomad lifestyle via social media. People buy into the dream.
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  And it's a very tenuous dream at that, I'd say. It requires constant handholding, upkeep, juggling, whatever you want to call it, to manage all of the visas, plane tickets, bookings, finding remote work, finding a network of people for which reason you allegedly moved to the country :) Call me square but it's much easier to just overpay for rent in the USA and just focus on building "bulletproof" skills for a long career here. After all, nobody stands up postgres on EC2 anymore right, we all just use redshift and lambdas? right? ok well maybe not all of us :)
sbarre 6y ago
These are fair points, and you are very likely correct about the ratio of success to failure. Survival bias is strong on HN. I would add though that "shipping it" greatly increases your odds of success, and choosing a simple stack that lets you ship an idea quickly is a good thing. I feel like his choice of a super basic tech stack likely contributed to Pieter's success in some way.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I'm making massive assumptions and generalizations here, but, a lot of developers are pretty introverted and really dislike being in the spotlights, whereas instagram people are the opposite. Without trying to make the term sound negative (it's a personality trait IMO, not a value judgment), it's a narcissistic trait that not everyone has. I mean I'm working remotely at the moment because of the 'rona and it's not glamorous at all. My desk doesn't look like a generic marketing photo (you know the type, top-down view on a wood grain desk, clean Macbook, steaming cup of coffee, phone, Moleskin notebook, random plant), I don't spend my time lounging and networking (a beer in the back yard at night maybe), I just go upstairs, do my thing for eight hours, etc. Extroverts and narcissists make software development look a lot sexier, because they have no qualms with putting themselves forward and advertising themselves and their lifestyle. Me, I hide behind an online moniker and shitpost on HN, often not even looking whether anyone replied to my comments because What If I'm confronted with something. I'm sure I'd have a much cushier job if I was more extroverted (alongside my current skill level, I'm no genius but I get the job done). Maybe one day I'll go self-employed or work remote for wealthy US companies, idk.

umaar 6y ago

Sometimes I think it's fascinating the rabbit holes we'll go down, when ultimately, the user just doesn't care. TypeScript vs. plain JS Logic-less templates like Mustache vs. Handlebars Vue vs. React Using async/await, and adding the relevant infrastructure to support that (transpiler) Clean code practices in general Unit tests, end to end tests CSS BEM vs. tailwind You can make indirect connections to imply the user does care, e.g. E2E tests catch a bug which meant the user didn't see it, but generally, these things are meaningless to them. For my first course, I put time into those things - time taken away from making content. The more I think about it for my new course, the more I wonder should I just sell on a platform which already handles all of that, like gumroad. Where's the line though? When is gumroad or squarespace not the answer?

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Yeah that is what it boils down to often; the user doesn't care. It's more about what's best for the developer. The problem is that a lot of developers want to work with what is 'sexy' at the moment. That's one factor that also drives e.g. job adverts; most vacancies I've seen will have "cryptocurrency" and "IoT" sprinkled in, just for the sake of looking attractive. And old applications get rewritten in newer tech because of a combination of technical debt and developers going "I did not write this so I cannot read it and do not want to work with it". Granted, newer programming languages (or versions thereof) often have better developer ergonomics (I spent my morning trying to get a C codebase to work while with my new Go codebase it should be a matter of installing the Go tools and doing 'go build'). Another factor is the perception of productivity; rebuilding software greenfield will feel super productive for at least the first six months to a year, after which things become more of a slog as the backlog fills with bug reports and change requests, instead of new features. Source: I've seen this happen a number of times. Disclaimer: I'm in a rebuild project myself now, the old codebase is nearly 200K of very poorly written PHP / JS, and the Decision was made to rewrite it from scratch. I'm going with Go and React at the moment; Go because it's unsurprising and boring code that should be fine for the next decade, and React because it's a de facto standard now and should be fine for the next 3-5 years as well. Both tools were decided on in part for future developers that will work alongside or to replace me. But I'm sure in a few years my opinion on what is the best tech stack may change, idk.

sixQuarks 6y ago

I don’t usually like to toot my own horn, but I make $600k/year off a plain HTML static site that isn’t even coded well, in-line CSS, many pages not responsive, broken links, etc.

kreetx 6y ago
What site is that? :)
- sixQuarks 6y ago
  I knew someone would ask. Sorry but I’m not gonna reveal it, don’t want competition. I will say it’s been online for over a decade, information rich, with affiliate lead generation as the main source of income.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    If it's the Milliondollarhomepage.com then it isn't quite living up to its legacy ;)
    - sixQuarks 6y ago
      Actually, the founder of that site started calm.com - which is valued at over $1 billion now. Not too shabby
  - kreetx 6y ago
    Hah! But great work otherwise then. But did it start out as a hobby, or was it entirely planned as a business?
    - sixQuarks 6y ago
      It was planned as a business from the start. I was running a different site that started as a hobby, and one of the affiliate links was performing well even though it wasn’t highly targeted to the audience. I knew there was a biz opportunity there.

pc86 6y ago

If you don't know who Pieter Levels is, the title makes it sound like this person makes $600k doing remote coding work on jobs found on Nomad List and Remote OK. In actuality, he is an MBA who runs these two businesses.

bilbopotter 6y ago
Also he's up to about 900k now the video referred to is old.
- swyx 6y ago
  that's run rate - he had a recent spike up to 1m run rate. his biz is quite volatile.
  - pieterhg 6y ago
    Yep, it's about $710k/y with Nomad List and Remote OK only now. Add to that more side income from MAKE book, other smaller projects and investments
mbesto 6y ago
> In actuality, he is an MBA who runs these two businesses. No snark, what does having an MBA have to do with running those businesses? Curious why you chose to include that?
- pb7 6y ago
  I took it as attributing education, expertise, or knowledge to him which seemingly would be helpful in running a business. Would it not?

nstart 6y ago

I am super inspired by Pieter. At the same time, I'm also not a believer of a one size fits all approach. A lot of Pieter's work these days is built around remote working communities. His first ideas when he was doing 12 months, 12 startups were very singular in focus. Nothing wrong with that at all. At the same time, Pieter's approach has not been used across a broad range of products in terms of product complexity. I'm basically curious which larger products have been made with this kind of relatively ultra-light technological approach and have still succeeded. I'm particularly curious if there are products that started out as a super simple application and then grew in complexity while maintaining this kind of approach. At what point did it break? Are there examples where it did not break? Edit - by growing in complexity I mean feature/product complexity while maintaining technical "simplicity". Or am I thinking about this backwards? If you are a single developer, you use your basic tools, and launch products that are light on complexity where the focus is to ensure it earns money and that's it.

swyx 6y ago
i mean, facebook started as a very light php app and then they just built layer upon layer upon layer on top of it until they basically now have their own fork of php.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  To my knowledge Facebook doesn't use any PHP since years. (Hack is not a "PHP fork"). Also I would be very surprised if there is any code left form the early days. FB was (to my knowledge) rebuild "form scratch" several times during it's life-time. Also I don't think one could build a website with PHP and SQLite and scale this out unmodified to millions of concurrent users for example. But most websites don't have millions of concurrent users, and it's true that some very "basic" tech is more than enough to server one's users well in the majority of cases. The horrible amounts of over-engineering one can see "everywhere" are imho a result of two issues: People building stuff and using tech they don't actually need! Most people don't have the problems Google or FB have for example. Still people are running static websites on Kubernetes nowadays, and things like that. (You know, in case you need to quickly scale things out this makes perfect sense, doesn't it? ;-)). IMHO one of the main points of good engineering is to choose the right tool for the job. This means that in 99% of the cases you're actually perfectly fine with even a "bare metal PHP / MySQL" stack (or similar). Especially if you're just trying get something up the ground. On the other hand's side a good engineer should know upfront when this won't lead to the desired result. As an engineer you should know all of your tools. The simple day to day ones but also the complex and advanced ones — you need to choose wisely which to use when. If you don't think about all of the possible design space, and all the pros & cons of going some direction, you're otherwise just a guy with a hammer; and not an engineer… So it makes imho a big difference whether it is an informed choice to use "low tech" or just the result of "I don't know better". No matter the (first) outcome may look quite similar. In the first case there is a chance that the people that did that will be able to "scale shit out" or add all kinds of features in a clean way. In the second case one can expect that the people that "just had an hammer" will create in the future the usual "layers and layers of mess" all over the place when tasked to extend or scale their system, as they just don't know better. As a bottom line: Software engineering is hard, very hard. To arrive at a simple but correct solution is almost an art and requires the most skilled and knowledgeable engineers money can buy. It was a genius btw who insisted on things being as simple as possible, but not simpler. Coming up with "a simple solution" (ignoring half of the problem) or "killing flies with Bazookas" is trivial, everybody can do that. But that's not proper engineering, imho.

devit 6y ago

I don't think this has anything to do with tech stack. React is generally easier to use correctly than plain JavaScript, PostgreSQL is as easy to use as SQLite (and more powerful), Node is as easy to use as PHP (but has more libraries, and you can use TypeScript which makes it easier to write correct code), etc. The only actually simplifying choice seems to be using a single VPS instead of a Kubernetes-based cluster. It's far more likely that both the financial success and the tech stack are caused by a pragmatic attitude focusing on the business itself rather than tech details, rather than the tech stack being the cause of the success.

gauchojs 6y ago
I agree - for me, its about continuing to use React/Python/Go/Node for new projects, instead of trying (say) Elixir or Clojure. I'm already much less focused.. For Pieter its about staying with PHP.
ShorsHammer 6y ago
> PostgreSQL is as easy to use as SQLite Absolutely disagree. One is incredibly secure out of the box, the other is certainly not, they probably shouldn't even be compared. We can check Shodan if you want some empirical evidence for this.

thrownomadaway 6y ago

I am going to take the opposing side of HN's groupthink and tell why I don't like that this guy is celebrated as a hero. I haven't checked since a while but a long time ago when I tried to sign up to his site it was a showcase of dark patterns. What I specifically remember is that it sucked in all my data on a sign up form before telling me that I actually have to pay for access. I specifically checked every square inch of the opening site beforehand to see if it's a paid system. But it was filled to the rim with all the other usual dishonest marketing psychology bullshit too. Usually it's best to avoid anybody who does any business with "digital nomad" in its description. So many hustlers preying on clueless people who are sucked into the promise of easily setting up an online passive income while travelling the world. Coaches, masterminds and paid-for online communities are the worst: newcomers pay access to people who are either essentially in the same shoes as themselves or are only part of the community to make a profit out of it. Obviously the ones who are willing to pay for this (and fall for the above described dark patterns) are the ones who want to get value out of it, not the ones who can provide. Why would any serious "digital nomad" pay to be part of such a community? Also the original nomad list site was like a distillation of everything that's wrong with the lean startup ideology. The content was not only thin, it actually looked like it was totally made up. Whenever I saw someone link it as some authority on a location I always wondered whether anybody who has ever been to that place had any input on it. But it didn't matter, it was sleek and easy to digest so it took off. And then could be used as a traffic source for the other ventures under the same umbrella. So the guy is now making half a million a year based on a site spreading completely useless and misleading information and riding the hope of a better life of newb digital nomads. Yes I am bitter that I am not his position. But I am also bitter that this is the kind of business practice that makes money nowadays.

kelvin0 6y ago

I did not know if this person until today, very glad for their monetary success. However, the technological choices that he makes seem fine for the type of web applications he's building: seemingly simple, one-off projects to which he adds more features as needed. I don't know if that approach would work on maintaining a large code base in the case of a meatier project that needs to be maintained for the long term. My own experience doing web dev (which is not my specialty) is that HTML,CSS,JS quickly become unmaintainable when you try to scale them without a well though out architecture and some prior experience. Once again, glad for him!

xwdv 6y ago

It's worth remembering that while his tech stack is low tech stuff, the methods Pieter used to build a community is basically the marketing equivalent of using React, powered by a microservices architecture using multiple languages and feeding data from a sharded database with multiple points of redundancy and cache layers.

techslave 6y ago

i think this deserves a nitpick. when we say “makes” wrt a person, it means their gross salary/income. here, it refers to revenue. that’s misleading.

tome 6y ago
They must be pretty close for those kinds of sites, no?

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

Having done exactly opposite to what Pieter has done as a solopreneur for many years - i.e. • Best Engineering practices set by industry leaders. • Using state of the art tools, libraries, architectures etc. • Being paranoid about Technical Debt. I would say Pieter's strategy is a better if you're a serial-solopreneur. I had a CS degree, so its even hard to think of such a route and I considered my startup to be a long haul but there are valuable lessons to take from no-code/non-CS community; after all they solve problems for their consumers and make money from it. But, I wish every solopreneur knew and suggests one advise in every interview they give 'Buy a fat health insurance, largest you can afford, take care of your health as when you go down your startup goes down and no amount of automation can save it' and that's what happened with my startup.

maxdo 6y ago

Why this ad posted on HN?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

refresher 6y ago

Something jarring about the 'Dracula PRO' colour scheme unlabelled advertisement in the middle of the article.

giarc 6y ago
Yes it was really out of place. Same with the No CS Degree job advertisement. It was even more out of place since the main article was about a guy creating job boards, I thought perhaps Pieter had made a new one?

dvh1990 6y ago

Pieter's businesses are impressive, but IMO not using React nowadays is actually harder than using it. Building stuff vanilla takes more time, effort and knowledge.

ShorsHammer 6y ago
> effort and knowledge Probably the sort of thing you want over time from your devs. I'm no front-end guru but vanilla.js seems like all that most companies really need to do their job. Having done more than enough time at $BIGCORP you'd be amazed at how much work is self-created, self-perpetuating and the lengths people will go to protecting that. I'd even argue a crap employee who documents everything and eats vanilla icecream is probably worth far more than a superstar that builds impenetrable silos to artificially make themselves invaluable while instagramming themselves with boutique gelato.
ativzzz 6y ago
> not using React nowadays is actually harder than using it For a solo dev, the only thing React makes simpler is dealing with JS that has to manipulate a lot of HTML. If your app doesn't do that (IDK if nomadlist does or not), then React is overkill and unnecessary. Even if you want reusable components, for many simple usecases the React lifecycle is complex and unnecessary.

dsbleia 6y ago

This is exactly how I learned to code. Started with simple coding projects online then built a personal website now building web apps. Although, I do think it is important to learn React now a days. I started teaching myself React a few weeks ago via this same process. Incredibly powerful for web dev

RhodesianHunter 6y ago

I haven't visited either site, but I sure hope he doesn't have logins or gather any sensitive user information if he has no CS background, no prior dev experience, and is running entirely on vanilla JS/PHP using no frameworks. That combo sounds like an ideal recipe for a security nightmare.

person_of_color 6y ago

I don't get it. One guy makes a job board and makes 300k/year. Not exactly a hard problem to solve. What's stopping a proliferation of job boards to arbitrage away his revenue?

ativzzz 6y ago
Network effects. The value of a job board is the amount of companies and potential workers that use it. Being tied to his digital nomad community brings in a supply of workers and companies that work remotely.

deleted 6y ago

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vmception 6y ago

I have a broken bootstrap template that I've recycled for over half a decade to make landing pages for new products. It's always funny when junior developers come to support the product and balk at the code. Yessir, its a one page static website that just got me $1,000,000 in three weeks and your attention and ability to pay you. Funnier because I used to be that junior developer. The memes that recognize this are so good and spot on: the pedantic guy with glasses and out of place bowtie complaining about some irrelevant best practice, while money printer go brrrrrrr

cblconfederate 6y ago
what bootstrap version?
- vmception 6y ago
  3.3.4 from 2011, but this was in use for a very long time before the real flurry of upgrades started coming out. I've been using a template since 2014-2015

nikolastojkov 6y ago

This has nothing to do with Tech and everything to do with his MBA and business knowledge. The way he markets, writes copy and actually builds communities is what is making him a shit ton of money, not the single index.php

davidbrennerjr 6y ago

sqlite can't be compared to postgresql since sqlite was specifically designed as file-based DB for embedded applications not as a full-featured RDMS