Cheeky Pint: Pieter Levels on Building in Public

Podcast: Cheeky Pint
Host: John Collison (Stripe co-founder)
Guest: Pieter Levels — serial entrepreneur, digital nomad, founder of Nomad List, Remote OK, and PhotoAI
Duration: ~22 minutes
Listen: Apple Podcasts | Transcript | YouTube

Pieter Levels is the most prominent indie hacker working today. He has built multiple million-dollar businesses entirely by himself — Nomad List ($700k ARR), Remote OK ($3.4M revenue), PhotoAI ($600k ARR) — and has never raised venture capital. This conversation covers his philosophy, his lifestyle, and what he thinks most founders get wrong.

The Indie Hacker vs. VC Model

Levels is blunt about what he dislikes in venture capital: companies with no users raising $50 million or $100 million based on hype. He argues that once you take VC money, you have to go big or bust. You cannot build a $10 million per year business and call it a win. The pressure to become a unicorn creates perverse incentives.

His alternative is simple: validate first, scale later, keep ownership. He has had VC interest but never taken it.

Life as a Digital Nomad

Levels has lived in over 40 countries and 150 cities. He recommends travel for expanding horizons but is honest about the cost: it can be lonely. When you move constantly, you lose touch with your foundational culture.

“It’s amazing. And then you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture, your home country. And everything’s fine, people are nice, but you’re like… it fundamentally removes your foundational culture at some point.”

Personal Branding as a Moat

Levels has tweeted 125,000 times over ten years — roughly 40 tweets per day. That consistency built his reputation to the point where he can sell $50,000 worth of preorders for a book before writing it. His advice is not complicated: put in the time.

ChatGPT as a Traffic Source

Levels notes that ChatGPT has grown from 4% to 20% of his traffic in a single month. It is rapidly becoming a meaningful discovery channel alongside Google.

Automation and AI in Business

Levels runs a 40,000-person community and uses GPT to handle moderation. The AI resolves conflicts impartially, which is often better than a human moderator would do.

Investment Philosophy

Keep it simple. Index funds. Avoid home country bias. Most people do not learn personal finance in school and end up watching their cash depreciate. Levels recommends Vanguard and the S&P 500.

EU Accelerationism

Levels launched the EU/acc movement to address the regulatory burden on European entrepreneurs. He believes the current situation in Europe is bad enough that people are finally motivated to change it. The movement crowdsources ideas, upvotes the best ones, and advocates for regulatory reform.

On Stripe

Levels has used Stripe since 2014 and credits it with enabling him to make money online. His advice to Collison: keep the original soul of the company. Most developers do not want to spend time inside Stripe’s dashboard. They want to check their balance and go back to coding.

Final Thoughts

Levels is happy with his current path: building businesses, traveling with his girlfriend, staying flexible. He has started investing in other startups (including Cursor, the AI coding tool) but remains an indie hacker at heart.

Crepi il lupo! 🐺