Pieter Levels: Making $2.7M A Year With No Employees

Are you intimidated? Why are you— he said he took a run before this because he was nervous.

Now he's like— No, because I've been on a lot of podcasts, but like they're usually kind of small, you know? It's like, I see you guys as like Joe Rogan for business. So it's like this one step above is like Joe Rogan and then it's you guys. And then below is like, yeah, I don't want to diss all the podcasts I've been on. They're amazing. You know, like this is like a level. So, but it's good, you know, I'm big on—

It's a few levels. So, and you also don't know what Sam might ask you because Sam might just come out of left field and be like—

No, but that's the thing I was thinking, like Sam is like, it's not a regular interviewer, you know, he asks some crazy shit.

So wait, me? First of all, I don't know if that's true. I don't know if we— first of all, it's not just me. It's you too, Sean, that asks weird stuff. But also I don't think we ask that weird of questions. I think we ask the questions that everyone's thinking.

No, that's true. But I mean, you're not yes-men. Like, you know, there's yes-men podcasts where like they just, it's kind of like a fan thing. Obviously that's not you guys. You have real shit, real questions. And that's, I think it's more interesting as well.

Can we, Sam, can we share the thing you were just telling us in Slack? Can I share that on here on the pod?

Yeah.

The Sam, which one? The Sam Parr strategy for networking. This is, um, You know, you can go to Harvard, you can go to Stanford, you're not going to learn this one. Sam has this habit where if, uh, like, you know, it's a very small little tweak, but it's just so Sam that it just is awesome. So if you're— if Sam wants to hang out with you, he'll text you just like a normal person would, but— and he doesn't need to even know you. He's just like interested in you. Maybe, maybe it's a cold DM, maybe it's a text message, maybe he got your number from somebody else. Be like, hey, it's Sam. You know, I'm in San Francisco. But instead of saying, wanna hang? Sam will just go, I'm in San Francisco. Let's fuck.

Dude, he sent me some shit that I won't say out loud. But yeah, but I think it works.

Yeah. So Sam, what is this and why does it work so well?

It's like a phrase. Like, you know, like people will be like, you know, I fuck with that guy. Like, I fuck with Drake. I like Drake. It extends from that. And I just say it and people, uh, they reply. I don't know. I just, yeah, this particular one, it was a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company who I'm friendly with. I just said, what's up? I'm in your hood. Let's fuck. And he goes, down, when? Like it worked out.

It's amazing. And now, so normally we try to play it cool, but we've actually been chasing you, Peter. We've been, We've been talking about your projects. We've been being like, hey, we got to get this guy on the pod. Sam is a fan of you for sure. I would say I am less of a fan than Sam, but I am a— I— that doesn't mean I like you. It's just I'm more in the closet about it, whereas Sam is very open. Sam's like, this guy's amazing. This guy's like an artist. Thanks, man. This guy's got great hair. And you do have great hair. So it's all true. And now we finally got you here. And it was hard, I think, right? Because you like don't do— you don't schedule or something like that.

Like I mean, it looks like being an ass, right? On the internet if you do that, but I, like you guys, I would get so many DMs and they're all like, I mean, generally very low quality DMs, right? Like I want to collaborate, but I don't want to invest. I don't want to, like people want something from you. I think it's like being a hot girl in the club. Like people want something from you, but they don't want to invest the time to actually get to know you or, you know, you feel like an object. And I don't like to feel like that. And I want to, I want to spend more time with, you know, like with my friends in real life, with my girlfriend or something. I want to spend time in the gym, you know, on my health and cooking food and that kind of stuff, go for walks. And I think because I've been doing this for 10 years, like startups, like 8 years, and now I get the money is going well. So I don't really need to do any calls anymore, any DMs. So I'm just trying to create a more chill life. And I'm not an asshole. It just means like I don't have time to reply to everybody. So I close my DMs and then people got really angry on Twitter. Like, why don't you, why do you close your DMs? Are you arrogant and stuff? So I wrote a blog post like kind of explaining my day and my routine and what I do in a day and that I don't really have time if I do all the things I do now to also DM everybody and reply everybody and do calls and stuff. And that's pretty much the argument for it.

Let's give the context. So let's explain who the heck you are. Uh, your name is Peter Lovells. You're known on, um, Twitter as @lovellsio, right? Yeah. That's the, uh, that's the right way to say it. I saw you a while back. I'm just going to say some interesting things about you. I believe, now you can correct me if I have any of these wrong. I believe you publish how much you make every year. And in fact, it's in your Twitter bio in your location. There's like a meter that's like your road to $3 million a year. Yeah. And it says $2.7 million. So your, your meter is almost all the way filled up. Um, you build a bunch of random small projects, usually around some things you like or believe or your lifestyle, which is kind of a nomadic lifestyle. So I believe, uh, I think you, you, you hop around or you don't have like a home base. So you live, you know, you could be like in Bali and then you could be in the Netherlands. You could be a different place all the time and you make these small websites or apps. And it says in your bio that you have 13 million monthly active users. And I've— I remember seeing you because you did a community, like a, like a Nomad community, a Slack community really early on. Like Slack had just come out and I was like, this guy's like charging $10. I think it was $10 a month or something to get into this thing. I was like, he's got like 1,000 people here.

Wow.

This is actually— this guy's making good money doing this. Like just by making a Slack group and you just do a bunch of small experiments like that. That's what I know.

It's like ebook. Yeah.

Yeah. $60K a month. Then you have got like a bunch of really—

you're seeing these numbers because he publishes them. Where do you publish these?

He publishes all of them on like the URL, uh, go to his Twitter profile and we'll let you talk. Sorry, Peter, in a second, but go to his Twitter profile, go to his Twitter profile and then like click off and it's like, uh, open revenue at the very bottom, but I'm reading off of our notes. So, and then you have like a QR menu creator. Then you have like an inflation chart, which doesn't seem like it makes money, but tracks, uh, inflation. And then you have Rebase, which is a platform to help people become a citizen of Portugal, help them relocate to Portugal. So what's the first part is those businesses. Like I said, you have those that are interesting. I would narrow it down to say you have a series of job boards for nomadic or remote work that are pretty profitable. But the second thing that's even more interesting is the way that you do these things. So you do a few things that are interesting. The first thing, is I think you're the only full-time employee, right? And you use a team of contractors. And second of all, you have this weird personality that's very embedded in everything you do. So that's kind of like my, my big intro of, of what you do.

Does that— I could see a website and I could know you built it without you having an about page, which is kind of the ultimate compliment.

It looks a little—

no, it's like, it's not in a nice way, I guess.

Yeah.

It's, it's 'cause I'm not a designer. Yeah, no, I think it's accurate description. It's like, I'm not very nomadic anymore. Like I'm slowly settling down, right? But I started very nomadically. I was like moving around every month. I started like in 2013, I started nomading and I went to all these places. And I started building these apps, these little websites, little products to validate. And I remember, I mean, I told the story so many times, but I was following Patrick McKenzie, Patio11 on Hacker News. Famous Hacker News guy and now he works for Stripe. And he would do, he would share his revenue on his blog about all his little products he made. And it was like appointment reminder for barbershops. So you got an SMS just before your appointment so you don't forget it, that kind of stuff. And I was really inspired like, okay, this is not like some big VC-funded guy. This is just like an indie guy who's just on his laptop kind of building stuff. And I kind of mixed that with the nomad thing where like building from your laptop, from your backpack, moving around. I think also getting inspired from different places because if you move around, you, I mean, I know Sam moves around a little bit as well. Your life becomes very unique because you meet different kinds of people, you're in different kinds of places, you see different kinds of products like in shops. Like if you're in Asia, you see some futuristic shit you don't see in Europe and America. And all that stuff kind of, it helps for inspiration for creating products in some indirect ways as well. So that's pretty much what I've been doing. And I think it's, I've been trying to be like radically honest. Like I know this American guy who pushes the radical honesty movement. So I'm trying to do that in my personal life. I'm trying to do it on the internet. I'm not perfect, but I'm trying to be as honest and open as possible because I don't like this fake corporate stuff. And it's because I studied business administration and I have a master's degree in it. So I know all the management consultancy bullshit I've been there, done that. I know, that's where my friends work. I know investment bankers. And I hate that, that a lot of that world where it's like fake and not real. And I want to be very open and honest. And I think it's also a little bit of a European thing, not to slag off America, I love America. But like, in Europe, people are very, a little bit more direct and a little bit more straightforward. And I think that comes across in my, and the stuff I do a little bit.

So what's the total size of all your projects in terms of top line and bottom line revenue? And isn't it true that you're the only full-time person and how many contractors are you using?

Yeah, so I have one customer support contractor part-time, Isabelle, and she works for all my projects. And I have a moderator for the Slack group 'cause dude, Slack groups, there's some drama in there. Like I've had some crazy drama in these Slack groups and communities. So you need to have a moderator, you need to have rules and you need to have a, You cannot just automate this moderation away. Like I tried that, but you need a real person there to, you know, check on messages and stuff. And then I have a DevOps guy, he's my best friend Daniel. And he works kind of like an SLA, like a service level agreement where if the server goes down, he gets a message. You know, if I'm sleeping or something, he brings it back up. But the problem is it never goes down anymore. Like it doesn't, we haven't really had that for years. So He does security updates and stuff, you know, like, because I have a VPS. I don't use Amazon, I use a VPS on DigitalOcean and Linode. And he kind of keeps that stuff safe, you know, so that's good.

And how big is the business?

Top line? Sorry, how big is the business? So Remote OK is the job board. It's the biggest business, makes the most money. Nomad List is starting to grow though. It's like, it's past, I think, $100K this month, $100K a month. So almost like a million dollar business. Remote OK is 1.6 million a year, I think. And Rebase is a new business, it's an immigration agency. So I want to help remote workers immigrate to countries that want to attract remote workers with like, you know, beneficial tax stuff. Portugal is one of the first ones to do that. So those are the 3 businesses that really make money and the rest doesn't really make money a lot. Like the book makes like, I think like 4K a month.

So. But everything you do is part of one flywheel. So I've looked at your kind of like system and I've looked at a bunch of people because I got into a little pickle where I was like, God, I'm doing so many things and I want to do all these things. I'm interested in all these things, but shit, you know, am I going to be able to juggle 5 different things? I got a podcast, I have a VC fund, I have my e-commerce business, I have a newsletter business. I have, um, you know, I don't even know what else, course business. I got, I got other shit. Right. And so it's like, Am I gonna be able to do this? And what I saw that you did, I, like, I have this kind of like mental model of a solopreneur and a solopreneur. Nobody's actually solo. Everybody's got like a little support team around them. That's like helpful. Some, some in a big way, some in a small way, but basically it's like somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit, builds a, a successful business and lifestyle around that. And what I noticed was that you had this formula, which is, I don't know if it's intentional or unintentional, but I'll say it out loud. Because here's my, my read of your business. It's basically, you have, you start with the red pill. So the, a red pill is like, you know, that scene in The Matrix where Morpheus is holding out a blue pill, red pill. He's like, you know, do you want, do you want the truth or do you want to, you take the blue pill, you could just go back to your normal life just as everything was. You could forget this ever happened. And Neo's like, no, I need to know the truth. What's the truth? He takes the red pill. And basically it's like every great solopreneur I think starts with one truth. So like, uh, Tim Ferriss's truth was basically that like the 9 to 5 work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like effing broken and you don't need to do it that way. Like you could work 4 hours a week and live like a millionaire. And so that was like Tim Ferriss's red pill. And yours was basically like this idea of being a nomad, a digital nomad, um, which was like, hey, yeah, you don't have to, you know, prescribe to the, uh, subscribe to the the normal way of living. You pick a, a place that's where you are from, that's where you live, and you pay, you know, you just kind of stay where you grew up and like, and you go to an office every day and like you have to wear shoes and whatever. You're like, no, I wear flip-flops, I walk around on beaches, I just kind of go wherever I feel like, whenever I feel like, and I carry a little like backpack and that's my life.

So you start with the red pill, then you be— then you create content around that red pill. So it's you talking about that lifestyle and sharing Everything from like, hey, people always ask what I keep in my backpack for the day. Here's what it is. It's like, yeah, there's every bit of content you can come up with that's like poppy, that's like fits that red pill. So then you be— that gives you authority on that subject. So you become like a, a, a authority. And so, you know, Pomp became an authority around Bitcoin and Tim Ferriss became an authority around life hacking and you've become an authority around nomadism and then you take that and then you basically spin off one of many businesses that can come up with it. But every one of those business, either it's a big moneymaker or it's just another funnel and more content, more new audience that's gonna like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that you are like talking about. And so it, even though you're doing 6 things, they're all actually part of one flywheel. And every one that you do is you gonna feed it either cuz it's gonna give you a bunch of cash that lets you fund this lifestyle in a better, bigger and better way. Or it's gonna give you new content, new stories, new things to be known about, um, that fit that lifestyle as well. That's how I see it. Uh, I'm curious, is that a good, is that true?

I think it's very accurate. And, and my thing started when I was, I was blogging, just like you said, I was blogging about like nomading. Um, but I was blogging for my mom cuz back then you had like travel bloggers, like 2013, and I was going to travel kind of and nomad and I wanted to, you know, every place I went I wrote a little how is this city to live in and stuff and what happened, all the crazy shit that happened to me. And my mom was reading that, but I wrote it in English 'cause my mom was obviously Dutch. But I was like, okay, she can read English, so it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff, more audience. But it wasn't like super like a big idea, it just kind of happened. And then those blogs started showing up on Hacker News and I started writing more about like bootstrapping startups as a nomad in Thailand or something or in Asia. And those started going on Hacker News really high. I think that was the time, it was like 2013, 2014. There was a time when I noticed that the developers in San Francisco working for all the startups, they also were realizing, okay, maybe I can start doing this remotely because remote work was not cool back then and nomading was not cool back then because you had the Tim Ferriss wave in 2008. It was like the first nomad wave, but there was, I love Tim Ferriss, but there was something about the followers there and the business that were created, they were kind of like, like shady, there was a lot of shady shit I met, I came across in Asia, in Thailand, like Americans and Europeans. It was like—

A lot of brain supplements and shit like that.

Dude, yes, yes, dude. Yeah, drug dealers, online drug dealers and like spamdexing and like, there's still shady shit but less. And I was like, I really hate this shady shit. I don't feel like part of this scene. I think it would be cool to make it more like, you know, mainstream, like reputable businesses, reputable jobs that do it. So I kept blogging about it and it kept taking off on Hacker News. And you're right, I think, and then I went on Twitter and I think I kind of organically, people started following me and then a lot of people went nomad. A lot of my friends went nomad because I was blogging and they became my friends now. And yeah, and then I started all those businesses. But I think it's not like some, it sounds very like a constructed—

It's not a master plan.

No, it's not a master plan. It's very organic. I kind of try, I'm like user zero. I try to build stuff for myself. And I always have like, I have like new ideas, like there's just like you said, red pill, there's like something that's a discongruence in society and what I'm thinking. And most people then think like, okay, there must be wrong something, there must be something wrong with me. But I think like arrogance, I think there must be something wrong with society. Maybe this is like a new thing. So I'll try and make a little website about it. Like inflation, like 3 years ago or 2 years ago, I was tweeting about inflation, like, this shit's going to go crazy with all the Fed printing money. And everyone's like, nah, inflation is fine. Stop whining about it. I'm like, no, I'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are higher. So I made this inflationchart.com website that shows the inflation numbers are really high. Turned out to be true kind of now.

So yeah, that's great.

What technology are you using to build those sites? Because they all do lookalikes and you seem like you can spend spin them up like really quickly.

Well, we won't laugh at you because, not because we're nice, we just, we don't know anything about, I don't know what jQuery is. Neither does Sam.

I mean, nobody these days knows jQuery anymore.

You're safe here. We're too dumb to call you out on any of your technical choices.

Nice, nice.

It's a good podcast.

What do you, what do you think? What do you think this whole, you're your whole thing's worth. Because if you go—

okay, so it depends if you do 5x, sorry.

Sean, go to his like sites and you could see like, it's like something slash open. It's usually like the website slash open. And then like, it says like so many stats, most of which honestly are kind of useless, but it's just like, it's cool. Uh, it's like, you know, like how many—

70% of them are like, you know, the equivalent of like a step counter. It's like, uh, it's like, oh, how many DMs did I get today? How many, uh, No, I don't have that. No, you do. You have—

it's, but it's collective. It's like DM sends, you know, it's collective events. Yeah.

But whatever.

Yeah.

For example, I'm on nomadlist.com, which you said is, I think your biggest one, slash open. And on it, you see the revenue chart, you see, you know, CO2 removed from the atmosphere, you see the full P&L, you see a bunch of other things. And one of them that you see is my pro— okay. So 73% profit margin. Your team says 0.78. So I guess that's like part-time, uh, yeah, like full-time equivalent, like FTE.

Yeah.

And then plus 492 bots. What is that?

Servers? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, uh, on the server, they also do like, he has a valuation too.

If you scroll down, it says if we sold for like X, uh, whatever the multiple is.

30X profit. If it was 30X profit, this would be $17 million.

So I tried to take the PE. I mean, it's not super accurate. I did business, but it's the PE ratio of public companies that are similar in industry. And I try to like sync it to that sometimes. Um, But dude, it completely depends on the multiples that someone's gonna pay for it, right?

Like, have you sold anything?

The multiples are extremely low. No, I've sold nothing. Do you have to sell anything? I've been in selling processes with previous guests on your podcast, you know? So, but it kind of bounced off.

I'm just gonna guess it was Andrew Wilkinson, 'cause he loves—

Andrew Schmilkenson.

Yeah, 'cause he loves job boards. That's just a guess.

I can't say anything, but 80%, I signed an NDA, 80% of the acquisitions, they bounce off, right? So right now I'm like, I don't really care. I like that I have cash flow and my life is nice. And, but I, until recently, I was really like, until like a few years ago, I was like obsessed by this selling because you build a startup, like in a movie, like social, well, not the movie Social Network, but in the big movies about startups, they're like, oh my God, grow big and sell and you're a millionaire. But then if you become a millionaire yourself with your cash flow, you're like, okay, why does it matter actually?

Uh, well, let's actually talk about that because what's interesting about you is you have a few that you could sell. So like Remote OK and Nomad List are both pretty cool. Have you calculated like how much money you want and how long it's going to take you to get there via cash flow? And if it's better to like, well, why don't I just sell one and I can get like an $8 or $10 million lump sum, but then I still own this other one that's making like $3 million a year. I mean, have you thought of, have you done that math and what have you?

Are you the largest? Go ahead, Sean.

Well, one thing I was gonna say, you tweeted out something that said a 10-year overnight success, which I think is a common, uh, uh, uh, idea that most people don't, don't realize, which is by the time you hear about something, you don't know the 10 years of kind of toiling and tweaking and iterating that it took before the big kind of breakthroughs happen. I had my, my life was the same way. You know, I started my first startup when I was 20, 21. Wow. And I made my first million by the time I was 30 or 31. Right. Like it wasn't, it took 10 years.

It's early, man. Yeah.

And, um, and you know, and then, and then every year since then, a bunch of great stuff has happened, but like it took a long time to get that breakthrough. And I was looking at your chart, Sam. I don't know if you saw this tweet that he has, but the chart basically shows, I think you start in—

it's like the sum of all my revenue together in one chart.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's all your revenue from all your projects all together in one chart. And it's looking like it's like, I don't know, 2012 or 2013 start. And basically if I go all the way up until, let's call it 2019, you're at maybe $600,000, $700,000 in per year in revenue. And only in the last, like, like kind of the pandemic boom, you know, let's say 2020, from 2020, you went from under $1 million to $2.5 million. A year, right? So you 2.5x'd and you like, it's cause it sounds amazing.

Wow.

This dude's making almost $3 million a year. It's like, yeah, but he's also been building that momentum and stacking these assets and it just really took off. And which I'm guessing is like pandemic fueled a lot of people wanting to be nomads and like you were there to catch that wave. You were the guy ready to catch that wave.

Yeah, but I had no idea this was coming.

Like, right.

With Fauci or what?

Exactly. With Fauci. But it kind of like, if you look at the chart, it's kind of like, you know, it doesn't really go anywhere. And I was like thinking, okay, this is bullshit.

Like I try, I tried everything to make it grow and sometimes it grew and sometimes it didn't, but generally it wasn't very, it wasn't like a VC startup where like, well, it looks like there's these, there's these run-ups and then a plateau and run-up and a plateau, which is, by the way, that's how all progress actually looks if you zoom out far enough. And I remember that like during 2014 when I first moved to Silicon Valley, there was a small group of people like you. This is, I think when you created that first Slack community that was like, No, being a nomad is the way to go.

And I have— yeah, but those people were like freaks, you know, they were very weird.

100%. Yes.

And, but there were some people who took the red pill at that time. I think Steph Smith, who works at the Hustlers, she met you in, I don't know, Indonesia or Bali or something like that because, um, she had, I think probably during that more like that time period, 2014, 15, 16, something like that. She was one of those people that defected then, whereas now there's like another wave. And like, if you look at kind of like any lifestyle movement, it happens this way. It starts with like very— I could take crypto. It starts with the cypherpunks. Exactly.

You're right.

Yes.

They don't—

they hang out on cryptography forums and they took the pill first.

Yeah.

And then came, you know, the next—

One of the things that bothers me about this indie hacker movement is, well, I really like it. I like it. But in general, what I don't like about it is like, people think pretty small. So they're like, uh, you know, like there's, it's kind of related to like the FIRE movement, which is like, oh, I just want to save a little bit of money so I can make $40,000 a year in passive income. And, and I'm like, oh, that's cool. Like getting your first step is cool, but like that can't be it with life. Like you have to like, you know, you're going to want more, you want to do more things and contribute to society. And with a lot of these indie hackers, they kind of come up with silly stuff where it's like, a small widget that they sell for $4 a month and they hope that they can get to $1,000 a month. And I'm like, man, that's like neat if you're just starting out, but I think that this could be bigger. And you're actually one of the few people that I've seen go harder. You know, you're going harder on this. Are there any others like you?

How do you think I'm going harder on it? Like, in which—

Well, your numbers are bigger. Like, it's substantial. Like, your numbers are nice already.

But it could be survivorship bias, right?

Well, yeah, definitely. But I still think that there's a mindset of like, um, like for example, your Twitter bio thing says your meter is going to 3 million.

I would say most people who are indie hackers and makers and kind of like the, the sort of tinkerer community, they don't even have their meter to there. Their meter, you know, initially is going to start much lower, $60,000 or $70,000 a year. And maybe yours did too, but then you like oh cool, I filled up that meter, I leveled it up. So what was your like initial goal? Was it like make enough to not need a job or what? Where did you start?

Yeah.

When did you get more ambitious?

So I mean, back when I started, I had a YouTube channel for this electronic music I was making and stuff, and I was making like a few thousand dollars from YouTube AdSense. So I had some runway, some cash flow to live off of, travel off and work on mini startups. But it was very fast, it was shrinking. Because of the competitive, like the copyright claims on YouTube in 2012 and stuff. So it was pretty much becoming like below $1,000 a month. But so I had that cash flow, but to go to your question, I think it's a power law. Like you always have a few people in a scene who will make more money or get more successful and stuff. Also, there's a delay effect. I started in 2013 or 2014. All these indie, this indie scene didn't really It wasn't cool until maybe, I think, 2018 or something, 2017. So these people that are going into it now, they're just starting kind of. And I think the widget thing is interesting because you said it's only a widget. If you make one feature really well that solves like one problem, you can get some customers and you get some cash flow and then you can build a second feature and you can slowly scale up to a bigger, to a real business, to a real product toolkit, right? And then I think another thing is you don't see a lot of people with multimillion revenue because they will quickly raise VC. Like once you pass a million dollars a year, they will switch to, okay, let's go big, let's go become a billion-dollar company. And I think I'm the exception. I'm like, I don't want to be a billion-dollar company. I'm fine like this kind of chill. And that's why you don't see those people a lot because I do know them and they quickly disappear. Like this app we're using now, Riverside, I think he's raised VC now, started bootstrapped. And then I think Oprah Winfrey used it. And because it's my friend Nadav, he makes it. He's like, dude, Oprah Winfrey used it. I'm like, oh my God, this is crazy. He's like, yeah, I think I'm going to raise VC. I'm like, okay, yeah, you should do that. Because they think this is like, this could be bigger than just a few million, right?

So you tweeted something out the other day that's related to this. You go, not sure if people realize it, but if your app does $20,000 a month in revenue, you're probably already a millionaire. $20,000 per month times 12 months. Assume you could sell for, let's call it, 4 or 5x multiple.

Yeah.

Brainstorm a business together that could get to 20K. So what's an idea that you, you're not currently building, but you thought of? Because I'm sure you're an idea guy and you, you think, uh, you could make a website that does X, or you could make Nomad List for this other niche, or you could make, yeah, you know, um, the, the, the immigration one for this other thing. So what's a business? Let's brainstorm a business together. What's a business that you think could get somebody to this millionaire status?

Dude, I think what's, man, it's like, again, this is so personal. So I've been living, like I used to live in hostels, right? In like dorms in 2013, I didn't have money, shared with 6 people, like crazy. Then I started like private rooms in hotels, then the rooms got a little bit more luxurious 'cause I had more money. And then I started discovering like apartment hotels and it sounds like bullshit, but it works so well with remote work. So I'm in an apartment hotel right now in Europe on the beach and there's a kitchen.

So what's an apartment hotel? What does that mean?

Sorry, apartment hotel is essentially a hotel. So full serviced, furnished, nice interior hotel room. But you also have a kitchen, you have a bedroom, you have a living room, you have a, you know, it's very big. It's pretty much like an Airbnb, but—

And you pay per month or per night or what?

You pay per month. Well, you can pay per night, you can pay per month.

It's just like a hotel. It's like Sean, it's like that guy. Sonder or whatever. Yeah, it's like Sonder and it's like all, I forget the other one. The guy was supposed to come on the pod, but he canceled last minute.

So you did one of these in Nashville, right? Or something where you're like, This is awesome. Like a lobby where everyone's working.

Yeah. It's like a, it's basically just an apartment that you can rent for 5 days. And they're pretty cool. I do, I do them all the time. The problem that I've experienced is in the New York, it's like $10,000 a month and it's like 600 square feet. So that's why I tend to go Airbnb, but I'm in smaller, less expensive cities. You can get like a 1,000 square foot place for like $6,000 a month. And it's just, it's basically a, an apartment building that has one floor or all floors dedicated to Airbnbs.

So what would you build? You'd actually build an apartment hotel or you'd build a digital product?

That's a big question because I'm a software guy. I don't want to own stuff. I don't want to have all this. I don't even want to buy land. I don't even want to buy a house. I want to be able to be a consumer, a customer of these kind of things, right? But I want it long-term. I want to be able to rent for like 6 months, you know, or 12 months even. I want to be guaranteed to stay.

So we, uh, my wife and I are like, we're at the point where we're gonna start having kids soon. And I live not like you entirely, but a little bit where we spend, we spend half the year one place, half a year the other place. And what we're going to do next year is just rent, do a 12-month lease in New York and just not be there all the time. But I'm looking to rent all of my furniture and I've been looking at a place where I was like, all right, I just want to like book this one place and I want to pay someone like $3,000 a month, but they have to show up before I arrive. They've got to completely set it up.

Yes.

And it's got to be 100% furnished for me. And I've been looking at these and there's a few startups in the space that are doing furniture rental and furniture rental is not popular right now. And I tell people all the time, I'm like, I just want to rent all my furniture. I don't want to own any of it. And they, they, they think it's nonsense and they think it's crazy., but if you run the math, it, it's significantly like, it, it's about the same in terms of price, but in terms of headache, I think it's 1,000 times better.

Yeah.

What else interests you? Yeah, things that you're interested in, either kind of niche categories or things in your lifestyle that you're like, huh, I do this lifestyle thing differently than people. This could be, you could build a business around this.

I think the biggest problem with the digital nomad thing is that there's a, maybe it's a good big podcast to say that there's a perception that people travel really fast. And I have the data that they don't travel fast. They travel like every few months or Even I think the average is 7 months now. It's very slow. So the, the word digital nomad is, it's a horrible word. Of course, we have so many connotations, but it's mostly remote working people who want a little bit of a different life, who want to see different places a little bit. Um, you know, they have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, they have kids even. There's families doing this as well. Moving around every week doesn't really work. Being very slow is big. And if people are more aware of that they can find a lot of products built for this long-term slow-mad market, which most of us are. We're mostly slow-mads and— Slow-mads. Slow-mads, yeah. Think about education. Think about like homeschooling is taking off also because of remote work. If I have kids, I don't know if I want to put them in a regular school. Maybe, you know, Elon Musk builds his own school. That's kind of cool. But you can do things in a different way. And like now it's still very— we're still niche. Like this remote work thing is still niche. It's going to get only bigger. There's only going to be more and more people doing this. Once physical jobs get automated. So, um, if you make products— I don't know specific product— but if you know, if you build products for those people, that's a high-end market of like tech workers that are remote.

So if you don't— but you said that you don't own stuff, or you, you kind of said like you don't like owning stuff. You said that you, you said that you don't want to own real estate. So if you're making $2.5 million a year in profit, the This is a question that Sean always asks that I'm stealing it, which is, what do you do with your money then?

Yeah, so I'm heavy in ETFs. I read a blog post by, what's his name, the guy from Google that does SEO. And he's like, I just put everything in ETFs. So Vanguard ETFs, S&P 500. But also I'm heavily invested in Asia because I believe in Asia, I believe in the future. I know the West, there's a lot of things about Asia that are good, but it's very, I still think it's very futuristic. I also invest in crypto, like I hold Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's always scared to say those things on the podcast, right? But it's all like very secure and stuff.

So it's not exactly the most shocking thing to every tech guy.

Every tech bro has crypto. Yeah, exactly. But I mostly—

you're actually not allowed to have that haircut if you don't own like— yeah.

What are you gonna have?

A high fade, like long top hair.

Yeah.

If you don't own 3 How much do you spend on your hobby?

I spend about like $4,000 or $5,000 a month or something. That's it. So most of it is just, I do need to pay tax. But after that, most of it goes to, you know, ETFs and stuff. It's scary to invest now because it's a scary time. But generally, I'm like, I want to do this for 20, 30 years in ETF invested and stuff and sometimes stocks. But I did a benchmark, my S&P 500 ETF outperformed all my stock decisions over the last 2 years. So I'm stupid, just like most people.

Sean, you want to tell them what you did recently?

What?

Oh, selling? With your stocks?

Yeah.

So I sold not everything, but pretty much everything. I sold maybe 70, 80% of the stocks that I hold.

Um, I get that. I mean, yeah, but I'm scared. They always say like, don't try and time the market. So I'm like, okay, I'll just sit and just crash with the, you know, why don't you do that?

Why don't you just like chill?

Uh, two reasons. One, I didn't want to risk a margin call because I borrowed a little bit against my stock portfolio, but, and, you know, to what I felt was extremely safe, and it's still safe, but I was like, ah, look, if this drops another, you know, 20%, then all of a sudden I'm having a headache that I don't want to deal with. I don't want to have to deal with freeing up a bunch of cash just to buffer this. So I was like, I noticed that every morning I was waking up and I was checking it, and I was like, okay, Logically, I know I'm in pretty good shape here, but the stress of think— having to think about this is taking away from my, like, you know, my day-to-day quality of life. It's like, that's the opposite of what I want money to do. I don't want money to give me stress. My money's supposed to take away my stress.

So what'd you do with the money?

The opposite.

What'd you do with it? Where is it?

It's just, it's in cash right now. Um, like I might do some, like, whatever, some short-term, you know, fixed income type stuff. But like, for now I was like, again, I, I don't care. Like, I don't need the 2%. I needed the peace of mind. And so that was the first thing. The second thing was I thought, what will I regret more? What do I believe more? Do I believe that this is the bottom or do I believe that this is kind of like actually thinking that this is the bottom, you know, 6 months in and that it's all going to get better soon? But basically, like, there's 3 paths. Either it gets better now, it stays— this is about the bottom, but we stay here for an extended period of time, 1, 2, 3, 4 years. Or it has further down to go. And I basically thought that it getting things going up soon seemed like the least likely thing. Like, I would, I would actually be betting against that heavily. And so I thought, okay, I don't have nothing to lose here in terms of upside because I just fundamentally don't think that stocks and everything is just going to go rip back up again. And we're all going to pretend like, you know, that was it. We just had a few months of pain and then it all went right back up. And, and remember, things go, things are all green again.. And so I thought either it's going to be flat, boring, and sideways for a period of time, or it's going to go down more. And I thought, well, in either case, then I won't regret being in cash because A, I don't have to sweat it every day. I don't have to think about it every day. And B, I'm, there's no, I'm not losing anything during, you know, by doing this. And so that was my thought process. And I figured, okay, there's going to be these little bear market rallies. So just sell at the top of the next bear market. So that's what I did. Everything rallied 5% and I just sold and I kept like, I don't know, 20% still in the market and I just left the other 80% in, uh, and you know, not thinking about it cash, but I held my crypto. I didn't sell my crypto.

That's good.

Yeah.

Are you guys mostly invested in the American, uh, stock market or worldwide?

Yeah. Like you said, I believe in Asia. I'm like, yeah, I believe in Asia too, but I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. How do I go invest in Asia and where would I invest? I don't even know what What does that mean? Are you buying the equivalent of like an ETF for like Japan or something?

What are you doing, dude? I had a Vanguard ETF China and then suddenly disappeared from my broker app and I'm like, what the fuck is happening? And I get this message. They're like, Vanguard left China in March or something because they were like, this is too crazy. So I had to buy a different ETF. I don't know.

Yeah, the government did some shit.

They did some shit.

They made private companies public or something.

Yeah, no, they fucked Jack Ma for sure. There's a lot of weird shit happening, but I still think I I should be invested in those markets. And, uh, um, Sam, have I told you about the Jack Ma thing?

How it's crazy that the third richest man in the world that they were in China was like, hey, dude, Jack, shut up. And he's like, yes, sir.

They just took Jack off. Yeah. My brother-in-law calls me like, uh, so we had one moment where like a month in when people started noticing Jack Ma is missing and my brother-in-law in the car one day was just like, Where's Jack Ma? Like, he was in the car, but he's like, bro, why aren't we talking about this?

He's like, where's Jack Ma?

And we just start laughing. Like, how crazy is that? That Jack Ma is just not— like, what if you just couldn't find Elon Musk because he said something, you know, that Biden didn't like? That idea is crazy.

They did it with the tennis player too.

Yeah.

And he's—

my brother-in-law still calls me. He'll be like, he'll just call 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 up. And like, that's the whole call.

So good.

Just be like yelling, where is Jack Ma?

But dude, that's the thing with Asia and China. Like, all this stuff is accurate. There's some crazy shit. But the other thing is also accurate that there's a lot of stuff happening in Asia. And I think in the West, in Europe and America, we have a blind spot because we get so much information that's negative about Asia, especially about China. And I'm not a China spy or something. My friends call me China spy because of that. But I think it's a blind spot a little bit in the West. There were we're gonna miss out on, you know, I mean, China's gonna be the biggest economy in 2030, I think by GDP. It's already the biggest economy by purchasing power parity or something. Ignoring that, just, you know, because there's a lot of arguments why we should ignore China, but it sounds like a blind spot in the West a little bit to me.

Do you, what, well, I'll do it, we'll do an easy one. Do you like tweeted out, your calendar and it was like free for a week or something like that. And I know Sean does that too. And I kind of like that. Sometimes I don't like that 'cause I'll do that for 3 days and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so bored. Is it real that you just don't plan anything?

Yeah, so this is the only planned thing and it gives me stress 'cause I'm like, oh shit, there's something's coming up. But I mostly, like I spend my days, like I live with my friends, so my friends are my neighbors now. I brought all these nomad friends to Portugal and Europe and we kind of live together. A lot of them are in the city near here or whatever. Everybody's kind of near. So we just have like dinners outside and we cook food and the sunsets on the beach and just this nice chill life that I never had 'cause I was always alone in hotel rooms. I had friends but they were always around the world and now they're all kind of here. So I mostly do that. So I don't wanna do calls about like, 'cause what am I gonna call about? Like I like having calls with you guys What am I gonna call with other people about? Like new business opportunities.

I don't know, don't you get bored?

Like— No, 'cause I can, 'cause I work on my websites, right? I open, I make coffee, I open my laptop, meet my friend and we code a little bit together, make a new feature, you know, then you go to the gym, we go to sauna, we go swim. They're kind of like, but that's very recent, right? This kind of chill life. And I don't get bored as long as I ship a little bit on my websites. Uh, I don't really get bored.

You're like the only rich per— so basically it's almost always the truth that no matter how hard you try, the more income that you make, your life, your lifestyle gets inflated. Uh, maybe sometimes not as much, but then other times a ton. And like, I was like, oh, I'm gonna fight it. Like, I can't imagine spending more than $10,000 on a car or whatever. And then you make more income, you're like, ah, whatever, who cares? You said you spend $4,000 or $5,000 a month. You're one of the few people that has acknowledged that your lifestyle actually doesn't seem like it's been, it's not lavish at all.

No, it's on purpose. It's 100% on purpose. Like it's very, it's not always true. Incidentally, sometimes you spend more, right? Like last month was, the hotels were really booked, so we had to pay a lot of money, but now it's chill again. I think it's on purpose.

How much?

Because I try to follow, like last month was like $10K or something for a hotel.

That's still nothing though.

We were in Lisbon.

You're making $3 million a year.

What do you think you would wanna spend more on? Let's say that like, you know— Food.

Like good food, like organic, uh, you know, free-roaming. I mean, it's cliché, like Joe Rogan, right? But free-roaming, grass-fed cow beef, you know, that are happy animals, organic vegetables, uh, you know, that kind of stuff. Like, not goods, you know, experiences. It's on purpose I do this.

What are some experiences that you think are worth the money?

What?

Sorry, what are some experiences that are like worth the money that, you know, Most experiences that are good don't even cost money, right?

Like, uh, life coach? What?

No, do you fly coach? Sorry. No, so that's, yeah, you're right. So man, you got me. Like, you're trying to find like stuff, right? Yes, I fly business class because no, exactly. I'm done with, uh, I can't sit. Well, I only do long haul and I only fly like, I flew only once in the last 16 months and I flew business Qatar, really nice. And you you can lie down and sleep and stuff. But that's about it, I think. And you know, there's one thing I noticed, like I was in Bangkok in this luxury kind of apartment hotel stuff, but it was a little bit too luxury for me, you know, and I was there for a month and you start noticing that you don't meet as much interesting people. Like I met one interesting person who had this giant weed farm, the biggest weed farm in Thailand, 'cause they just legalized it, it was kind of cool. But generally it's a very different, it's more like a socialite. Kind of Paris Hilton audience, you know. But in the hostels, you would meet crazy people, you would meet backpackers, but also like researchers and entrepreneurs and fledgling entrepreneurs, you know, you met generally more interesting people because you were more in those areas. And I think the problem—

Yeah.

Sorry. Did I tell you about— Did I tell you guys, listen to this, Sean, did I tell you about Sam Korkos from Levels, other Levels? What's the—

Oh yeah, I know. Yeah.

He does laundry every day? I don't understand.

How's he living off of laundry? Well, I was like, I was like, so I was like, well, what if you gotta go to a funeral? What if you have to do this? He goes, well, I just go to a thrift store. Um, when I need to go and I buy stuff and then I just bring it back and he does it partly out of, I think this is my guess. He does it partly out of, um, like convenience of not wanting to worry about stuff. I also think that there's like a philosophy, like a very philosophical thing going on here because it's like extreme, but have you ever heard of anyone, Peter, being that crazy?

Dude? Yes. Exactly. Actually, like in 2014, I was in Chiang Mai and there was an Australian guy. Who would fly from Australia to Thailand to Chiang Mai with only his MacBook Air and the clothes he wore and not even a bag. And he would buy everything he needed on the spot and he would be there for like 2 or 3 months. And he would donate the clothes he wore to charity and then he would fly back to Australia with his MacBook Air in his hand. That's crazy.

And I was so impressed.

This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa, I can see the client's whole history— calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed.

HubSpot, grow better.

That— see, that's cool. I would do that because I think that actually adds to the experience of traveling. Like, yeah, traveling fully light, and then when you get there, so yeah, buying what you need and then giving it away when you leave. Like, I'm— I'd actually get down with that. The, like, I rotate 2 underwear and I put my underwear in my bag with my MacBook. So I don't know about that.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I think it comes down to philosophy and I do think it sounds pretentious, but I don't care. It comes down to constraining your life in a certain way. I think constraints are good in creativity, in life and stuff. And it makes you focus on the really important things in life for you personally. It must be different for everybody, you know. For me, that's like, you know, girlfriend, friends, health, food, you know, happiness, all that stuff kind of, and creative work, meaningful work, very important. Like I need to be able to, I need to have something to do in my day. I need to feel like I'm contributing something like Sam said.

So what do you own?

So I have a backpack. I have a rolling suitcase though, like a small one. I have clothes, I have an iPhone, MacBook, I pro, uh, what the fuck? I have a toothbrush.

Um, so minimal.

You can name all the things you own.

I'm moving around, right? I, I have two Stadia controllers, like gamepads. You can use Stadia here. It's kind of cool. Um, yeah, that's about it, I think. I mean, I mean, I have like backup phones and stuff because, you know, two-factor authentication stuff, but it's not— Do you think you're gonna do this?

You mentioned you, you could talk about your family or not if you want, but do you think you're gonna do this when you have kids?

So what does doing it mean? 'Cause I'm, I'm mostly settled down. I'm mostly in one place. I'm just like trying to not buy stuff from Amazon.

Doing it as in, uh, not owning stuff. I mean, like, I, I think your life is cool, but you have to acknowledge that it's alternative in the sense of like, you know, 1% of the population.

No, it's not normal at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure. I think it's interesting that like the stuff I do may or may not become a thing because a lot of things I did 8 years ago now are normal, right? So it might be that the things I do now become—

I mean, if you're happy, who cares if it becomes a thing?

Oh no, it's not about me. It's more like, yeah, it's more like it might become mainstream. I think even if you have kids, you can do it in an alternative way. You can, you know, you can go to thrift store, get like secondhand toys or something, secondhand clothes, that kind of stuff. It all doesn't have to be so consumerist and buying and, you know what I mean? It can, we can do it in a different way. And, um, I'm just trying to figure out like how, how I, yeah, want to do that.

And we've tried to keep the focus on, yeah, a nomad list style red pill before briefly, which was, um, my, I forgot what it's called. Sam, do you remember the name of like the zero waste project or the zero, the zero project or something like that? So basically my wife told me about this. She's like, yeah, you know, there's like, uh, like in the city, in the little town we live in, there's, uh, like this Facebook group. And what they do is it's just like, it's like a barter. It's like, oh, it's not even a barter economy. It's like a giving economy. So it's like, if you have stuff, you just give it into the giving circle and other people can take it out and then they can give stuff in. And it's basically like, oh, your kid, it's, I think it's a lot around kids' stuff. Like my kid's grown out of this.

Uh, it doesn't make sense to buy it new, right?

It's not like Craigslist randos. It's like, Yeah, amongst this trusted group of people who buy nothing, believe the same thing, but the Buy Nothing project. Yeah. Um, and I think I might have butchered exactly how it works. Sam, do you know a little bit how it works?

Well, it's just the idea of like, um, instead of like reduce, reuse, recycle, like for like consumer or for like plastic and shit, they're like, no, no, no, let's just like, uh, reuse. We're going to reuse everything. So instead of buying a new toy, we're going to go get one for free and then we're going to give it away when we're done. It's just a mindset. And then there's, there's a bunch of companies in the space, but the big one is like this Buy Nothing series of Facebook groups where it's just like, I'm going to give away, I'm giving away these children's clothes. Come get them.

Yeah, I think, I mean, it's, that's nice. I think it doesn't make any sense. You have a baby and it grows out of its clothes every month or something or every 2 months. So why would you buy everything new if you can ask your family for clothes they already wore or whatever? Right. It makes more sense to me personally. Um, yeah.

Who do you want to be like? Who do you, who do you admire and who do you want to be like? Because like the reason why people buy shit for their kids is because they want to have, they want their kids to have Jordans so they look cool for other people because they want to impress other people. Who do you want to impress and who do you want to be like? You think like, who do you look up to?

Um, I like Derek Sivers. I don't know if you know Derek Sivers.

Yeah. He's a— Tell me about him. Who is he?

He started a company called CD Baby in the '90s, I think, or in early 2000s, and which was like one of the first indie kind of music distributors where you could send your music as an indie musician and they would press the CDs for you and they would send it to your customers and stuff. And they also now have Spotify and stuff, and he sold us for $30 million. I interviewed him for my bachelor's thesis, actually. He's a really nice guy, like the most nice guy in startups, I think. And he's very, he writes a lot, he writes a lot of books now and he's very philosophical, also kind of nomadic. He's been in like living in Singapore, he lived in New Zealand, lived in US and stuff. And he's very, if you go to his website like dereksivers.org, I think, he writes very much kind of same concepts that I talk about, like about simple life and Yeah, it's hard to describe him, but I think that's a very inspirational guy to me. And I don't really need to impress— I think I want to impress my parents just, but they're already happy with me, so it doesn't really matter. I want to, um, I want to try and stay, have like a stable, you know, happiness because I've been depressed a lot. I've been anxious. I had like, especially when traveling, you go crazy in these, you know, in hotel rooms alone, like, um Traveling can— it brings you very deep into your own self and stuff. And I think the most important for me is to impress myself by just, you know, being stable and having a stable, happy life with people around me. And, uh, yeah, like kind of wholesome life, you know. And that's my—

what part of your life are you not impressed by? For your— either yourself or Derek Sivers, or if any of those people, right, you just mentioned, like the lifestyle, you mean? Yeah, what part of your life is not at that point where they— you feel like it's not impressive in that way that—

that—

well, I'm like, I want to have a family too, like you guys, uh, and that's what I'm working on. Um, and yeah, that's like, that's more of a focus now, you know, like, pretty easy, by the way.

You just got to do one thing.

I'll tell you, find the right girlfriend, you know, and then you need to like see if they're not crazy. You need to like connect and all this stuff. And I think, yeah, that's it, Don.

Dude, Sean, you have a— go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. I want to hear what this answer is.

No, I mean, like a little bit like you say, like, I think about Elon Musk. Every time Elon Musk presents something, you're like, oh, fuck, like, that's so cool. Like, why am I building shitty internet websites? This is my only life I have. I'm going to die. I should do something bigger. But then I have to like bring myself back to like, no, it's cool. You're doing okay. Like, it doesn't really matter. Need to be bigger. But I mean, everybody wants to make like space rockets, I guess, but it's just so hard to do that.

Sean, you have a dog, right? A little dog. Yep. I've got a big dog. How do I love—

I love dog.

Yeah. So you like animals. I love owning animals, like big aggressive looking dogs. That's my thing. It's like I'm a weirdo. But how do you live this? I want to live a little bit more like you. And I can do it, uh, A, now because I have a little bit of money, so I can just like pay for fancier Airbnbs that are pet friendly. And B, I can only do it basically in America. Doing this lifestyle with abroad with an animal, even in America, I drive. You either have to fly private or you have to drive most places. Um, I drive most places. How do you, how do you live this life with an animal?

I don't have animals, but I want them. I had, I had two cats with my ex-girlfriend. And it was actually interesting. We went to, in Bangkok, to this luxury apartment hotel and they were cat-friendly. And it was like this, you know, high society of Bangkok people with cute cats and cute dogs. In Asia, all the dogs are small. They like small dogs. I like big dogs too, like you, Sam. But, and they walk around in the hotel and it's super cute. And they have like cats and dog ice cream and stuff and food. And they have little like little beds for them to sleep in and stuff. And everything is serviced. And that's another big market. I think tech people with pets and stuff, they want to travel as well.

Sean, have you guys looked into flying in America with an animal? So basically, if you're—

why do you think I don't go places, dude?

What am I supposed to do with my dog? Your animal's under 20 pounds, right?

Yeah, she is. But that also means she's not tough enough to do all this stuff. We're like, oh God, how is she going to handle this experience? Of going on a 7-hour flight or whatever.

Yeah, but she, she's— the dog's able to. So like, in terms— I don't, I don't know if she's physically able to, but she's allowed to. You could put it in a carrier and put it on your lap or like in the above, whatever, the suitcase thing. And if you have an animal that's above 20 pounds—

who's putting their dog in the above thing?

You could put your dog down. I don't know, dude. It's like, but it's like putting a blanket over a— it's like putting a blanket over a birdcage. Stage. It's aight. I don't know. That's just what— or you put it underneath, you put it underneath your— whatever you fucking do. I don't know. I don't even— I don't have one of these things. But that's what they say on the directions when you look online. But like, if you have an animal above 20 pounds, you cannot— you basically cannot— this whole emotional support animal thing, that's kind of nonsense. It's kind of getting phased out. You cannot bring an animal, a dog, on a flight. I, I'm always amazed that for popular routes they don't have like a once a month or twice a month animal-friendly route.

Dude, it's gonna happen. It's absolutely gonna happen. It's a huge growing market, I think, because a lot of people are not having kids.

Sorry. Right. I was gonna say, I read something that one airline is like being like, yeah, we'll fly pets. Like I think they do a lot of pets in the cargo or whatever. 'Cause most airlines have been phasing that out. And one, I think it's Southwest. I forgot which airline. Some airline is making bank 'cause they take all the pets. And it was like a differentiator. It's like, you know, bags fly free, but it's like, yeah, we let you fly your pet and everybody else is saying no nowadays.

Man, I think you can do it. You can. I think it's all about slow matting. So if you do, if you move like every, let's say every 6 months, it's not that bad for the dog or the cat. And you give them a stable life in where you arrive and not too much chaos and stuff. I think it's okay. I think it's not okay if you keep moving like every week or every month. That might be a little stressful for the dog and the cat, right? But 6 months, like, yeah, it's okay.

And especially if you get the— You had a great tweet.

It was—

What? You had a great tweet. It was, if you don't have a dog in your profile picture on Twitter, are you even trying?

That's a growth hack. It's the biggest growth hack, right?

Sam has one, right? You have a Facebook picture, I think.

Yeah, dude, because guys use this on Tinder, right? This was a Tinder dating trick. Like, you, you, because they swipe right for the dog, not for you, but they still swipe right.

So yeah, I've noticed there's like 2 hacks. When I was single, if like, if I ever walk around with like a niece or nephew or like a kid, uh, that's like an automatic door opener to meet women. And then the other one was having a, uh, uh, uh, an aggressive but nice looking dog. It's like, oh, doors, I'm on, they're disarmed. We're good. You know?

And why does that have to be aggressive but aggressive looking but nice? Is that one of those things where it's like dog owners look like their pets? And so if your dog looks a certain way, they'll think bad about you?

They want to heal you. Women want to heal you sometimes. It's like seeing a guy with sleeve tattoos who smokes cigarettes and a tattoo under his eye who just wants to spend time and cuddle. You're eclectic. I don't know. It just works. Don't ask me. That just works.

Yeah, dude, I love Samoyed dogs, by the way. The big white polar bear dog, right? I think it kind of reminds me a little bit like it's, it's so fluffy.

It's like, uh, that's a very Asian move of you. That's, they're very popular in Asia, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think so.

What, uh, I've seen them here too. Yeah.

But yeah.

What are some, is there anything that people assume about your life and your lifestyle and your businesses, uh, that you, like, for example, with The Hustle as well as Sean's Milk Road, a lot of people are like, oh, that's it. It's just a fucking newsletter. You just write these these words and you just hit send, that's so easy, anyone could do it. And it's like, well, no, it's actually like a user acquisition play. Like you gotta know how to do that. And then it's also like, you're just not good at writing. Like you have to be good and that's just talent. You either have it or you don't. And so that, that's like some misconceptions about our businesses. What, what about yours? Is there anything that people always assume and you're like, no, because like people can, anyone can copy you?

Yeah, I think generally people think that every website or app or company they're a customer of that it's more simple than it actually is because you can't see behind the hood and it's actually way more complicated than you think because there's so many edge cases in every business that you need to code like if statements for or build like little scripts for special features. It's much more complicated and I think people realize that when they start because people always clone you, right? Like they make a copycat of your website and somehow it doesn't take off because they've been able to copy the outside of it, the aesthetic kind of. But they don't know what's happening under the hood. So it's much more complicated. Like, dude, a job board is much more complicated than you think. Like, fuck, how do you explain this? There's so many little parts that, you know, especially companies want. They want, you know, invoices for every little thing they add. The price is dynamic, that kind of stuff. I changed job post pricing based on how many people post jobs on my site, for example. There's so much stuff happening behind. The curtains that you don't see. Um, yeah, it's much more complicated. I also think the misconception about— yeah, sorry.

And a lot of your stuff is automated to where like you don't have to be involved. It kind of runs itself. You said everything's automated.

I think 99%.

And to post on your job board, it ranges from $100 to $1,000, I think, whatever the huge range.

For sure.

Yeah. Yeah. How would you, for the, like, I'm, I'm tinkering with something that costs many, many thousands of dollars a year. Is there, how would you figure out how to do that? Like, and so in my head I'm like, fuck, I gotta hire a bunch of salespeople. That sucks. Do you think that you could automate most things even that are high-ticketed items?

And how many people do that?

No shit. So someone's using a debit card or whatever for $50K.

Yeah, dude, these company cards, this is what, this is lagging information. People don't know the company cards have been upgraded, I think, because they're using it for much more these days. Really, like, it's a lot of money. And I have no idea, like, I never thought, like, I don't, I'm not hiring people. I don't know how this works. I just tried, like, okay, maybe I think companies ask me, like, can we buy a few job posts for in the future? I'm like, okay, I'll make this thing. And a lot of companies use this. So you figure out the features that people want based on talking to them, of course.

Dude, I'm looking at this sales page, it says buy bundle. So buy 25 jobs, it's $22,000. You do something interesting on your sales pages is you just pack it with information and that's totally the right move, but you pack it with text. Like you use icons to kind of break it up.

Emojis, yeah, I use emojis a lot. Yeah, no, it looks like a circus, right? But it kind of works.

I don't know.

It's not like well designed, right? It's not like minimalist design, it's just like, I just add stuff every day and it just keeps growing, but it works kind of.

What's the biggest purchase someone has made? I can scroll all the way up to a hundred.

I gotta jump, sorry. I, I got another call. I gotta, I gotta run too. Peter, this has been amazing. I gotta go.

Yeah.

Nice to meet you, Sean.

See ya.

What's, uh, what, what's been the biggest per, uh, purchase that you've had? This scrolls all the way up to $150,000.

I think, uh, $50K or something around $50K, maybe $49K.

But that happens, that happens a lot of times. Yeah, you strike. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, dude, this is crazy. Yeah, I'm working on this thing and like it's like $10K a year and I'm like, oh man, I'm gonna have to like get on the phone all the time.

Yeah, yeah, seeing you is quite inspiring, but I get annoyed if I, if I need to use like, I want to use these, uh, location service APIs to figure out where are people traveling to, for example, and it's always like you need to do a sales call, you need to like contact us and stuff, and I get so annoyed with it. And I know people on Twitter get annoyed with it, that they can't get a price directly and sign up, you know? Yeah, I think it's much easier to do it like this, like a sales flow.

I think it's easier. I would argue maybe—

It's easier for me.

Yeah. It's easier for you, but I would actually argue there's a world where it's not as effective though, because I'm in the same boat as you is I don't want to have to do all this crap and I'm not naturally a salesperson. But when I hired a sales team and, uh, they, they shockingly were shockingly good at drumming up demand. And I remember a cool podcast with the founder of Squarespace, I think it was. And he was like you, he's an engineer. He's like, I don't want to leave my room. I don't like talking to people. I like freedom, this and that. And he goes the, and he goes the biggest one, a huge mistake I made was I looked down on salespeople and I looked down on this like type of pricing where I think I got to get them on the phone. But he was like, I looked down on it and I was wrong. It was effective. They created demand for a product and that surprised me most. So like, yeah, I don't know.

I think— I think you're right. I think my problem is that it's been— it's very hard to meet good salespeople or to find them. And it's unclear for me how I can hire them. And, you know, how can I rate a person to hire them as a good salesperson. I don't know what's a good salesperson. And I've never done outbound, almost never done outreach and stuff. And I'm scared that if I hire salespeople, I need to manage them. And then, you know, they might fuck up, they might start spamming everybody on LinkedIn and then it becomes like a screenshot thing on Twitter, like, look, Peter Levels is spamming with his website and stuff. So it might turn bad. And I think you're right, if you get the right salespeople, it can work. I just, I'd never been able to, you know, find those people.

It just matters what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for happiness and a, and a well, if you're optimizing for happiness and like a good life, do it your way. Your way is working really well. If you wanna like grow at a certain rate per year and you wanna really push it, I, I do think a salesperson is, is, you do need a sales team, but that's not what you're optimizing for. You're optimizing for freedom. So, and happiness.

Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about?

No, I think we— maybe transparency, like the reason I'm so transparent is I think it's very, like I said before, I think it's very important to be honest and to show other people that you can build a nice indie company like this by sharing every like ups and downs of it. And instead of, because everybody else is only sharing like the good things and the, we're growing so fast and we're hiring and we're funded and blah, blah, blah. And I think it would be cool if we did business in a, maybe in a more wholesome way where we, you know, share everything and share the ups and downs and yeah, maybe not grow super, super, super big, but more in a wholesome manner.

I like that, but I have a few critiques. The first is, I think that if you're high, so you remember Buffer? So Buffer, they did the whole shtick. Joel, yeah. They did it even more, well, equally as extreme as you, I would say, but they revealed—

One of my inspirations for sure, yeah.

But they revealed everyone's salary and they did that. I think they did it as a marketing shtick. They did it because they're like, well, like, you know, like our product's okay. It's good enough, but like, let's come up with a cool shtick. So we stick out and it aligns with our philosophies. Great. And it worked really well for them. But I actually think that it probably hurts them after a while. It's really hard to do that after 100 or 150. I don't know what the number is, some amount of employees, because they're like, dude, I don't want my shit all out there. And when I, if I was you, like there, I don't like, Like when we sold our company, I didn't exactly reveal how much I made because I'm like, man, I don't want to be a target. I don't want people to take advantage of me. I don't want to be judged in a particular way. Um, I don't want that type of attention. So I'd rather just say like round whole numbers instead of like exactly.

There's a real security risk for sure.

Yeah.

Like you don't want to talk about where you are right now. And part of it is because yeah, for sure.

100%. Yeah.

100%. Yeah, I think it's accurate. So like that's part of the downside, but at the same time, it's a marketing, it's maybe it agrees with your life philosophy and also it's a pretty sick marketing shtick.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah.

I think it's hard to stop it 'cause I've been doing it for so long, it's become part of my identity. It would be hard to like hide all this stuff now. And they're like, where did this open page go? Like, why are you not sharing anymore? I'm like, ah, I'm just done with it now. You know, yeah. And I do think it's this recurring marketing machine that I think is a big part of why my businesses work, became successful, and why I got a lot of audience on Twitter is because of this. I cannot deny that. So it's very hard to quit that, right? Once you've been doing this for so long.

Yeah, that's why I'm nervous about even doing it in the first place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, it's kind of like a, I haven't, gone hard on YouTube or any other social platform because I'm like, oh, I don't want a commitment. Uh, like you gotta keep up.

I wanted to do YouTube as well and I have the same problem. Yeah, I'm like, this is going to be a new recurring like activity I need to do every week. I need to upload a video, make a video.

Yeah, I think there's a world where you could do seasons, you know, like a TV show has a season. I think there's a world where you could do seasons and do quite well, but, uh, the majority of people do it regularly, and I'm like, oh man, I don't want to get on that treadmill. That's scary.

No, I think it burns you out. Look at all the YouTubers burning out.

They all bail.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's extreme schedule. Yeah. I think it might be interesting if I just sit in front of the laptop like this and I just tell the stuff I know and I think, and instead of writing it down and just making little videos. Derek Sivers also did that. He makes little videos about small topics, 5 minutes, explains something, and then the next video.

And Alex Hormozi is doing it. Uh, the guy on our pod, he came on our podcast, Alex Ramosi. He's been doing it lately and he loves it. And he, and it seems, it seems like a lot of, kind of a lot of work, but not that much work. No more work than this podcast. And I don't consider this podcast to be too much work. Um, but it works well. But, uh, dude, thanks for coming on. This has been fun. I, uh, I hope you, you will come on more often and we'll do a little more brainstorming this time.

Yeah, dude, it was super fun. Thanks for having me.

Super cool. Yeah, hopefully we didn't— you said you were nervous because we were going to ask you. No, but no, I don't think we asked anything. We didn't ask anything crazy.

Yeah, cool.

There's not much to ask when you tell everyone on the internet about everything you do.

Yeah. This is always when the good part of the podcast starts, right? Because you end it and then like the real shit.

Hopefully not. The real stuff I hope was going on the whole time.

Yeah, no, it was great. Yeah.

Dude, thanks. This is awesome. Uh, pimp out your stuff. So it's @levels?

Yeah, it's, uh, twitter.com/levelsio. So L-E-V-E-L-S-I-O. Um, and there's all the links on for my websites there, so you can click from there.

Thanks, dude. Thanks for coming.