Nomad List Founder

I am Pieter Levels, Nomad List founder and indie maker.

Nomad List is a site dedicated to the rising trend of traveling remote workers, also called digital nomads: it lets people find the best places to go based on their preferences like internet speed, cost of living, weather and safety (and thousands more data points).

It's also a paid membership site where people can meet other nomads in the places they go, through the site.

I started Nomad List in 2014 as part of my goal to launch 12 startups in 12 months:

I’m Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months

I liked the idea of Jennifer Dewalt’s 180 websites in 180 days[http://jenniferdewalt.com/]. However, unlike Jennifer who learned webdevelopment from scratch, I can already build stuff. My challenge is to actuallyfinish and launch my projects. So for the next 12 months, I’ve set the goal tolaunch…

levels.iolevels

It was the ~7th startup I tried and the most successful one. I launched it on Product Hunt and it took off like nothing I made in my life before:

How I got my startup to #1 on both Product Hunt and Hacker News by accident

It’s been a crazy two weeks. I just launched my 4th startup called Nomad List[http://nomadlist.io] as part of my goal to launch 12 startups in 12 months[https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months]. They’re all minimum viable products,built to test a hypothesis and see if they can get a market fit in…

levels.iolevels

Like all of my products I built it very minimally. Nomad List specifically grew out of a crowdsourced spreadsheet with data about cities around the world (like cost of living, internet speed and safety) that I turned into a website:

How I build my minimum viable products

Since I’ve launched my 12 startups in 12 months [/12-startups-12-months/] challenge, the #1 question I get asked is about my work flow and how I can shipso fast. I don’t work particularly longer hours than most people (I think). I dowork fast and rough. In this post, I’d like to show you the basi…

levels.iolevels

To monetize Nomad List, I built a paid community around it, that first started on Slack:

How to successfully build a community around your startup

You can sign up [http://hashtagnomads.com] to the #nomads community here[http://hashtagnomads.com] The hardest part of startups these days is not building the product or app. It’sgetting people to actually use what you built. One of the goals of me launching 12 startups in 12 months [/12-startup…

levels.iolevels

That first year of launching something that became successful fast was amazing and also stressful, I wrote about it here:

Love, Anxiety and Startups: My Year in 50 Tweets

This year, 2014, a year in review seems appropriate with everything that hashappened. It might seem that this year was 100% awesome for me. But it wasactually not. It’s better described as one crazy roller coaster that brought meto extreme highs and the lowest lows. I know posts like this don’t f…

levels.iolevels

After 5 years, I launched the 5th iteration of Nomad List, aptly called 5.0. It's now used by millions of people every month and its revenue ranges from $20k-$40k/month or ~$300k/year with a thousands of paying members.

Slack is just a small part of the paying membership now as there's lots of other members features on the site now like logging your trips, finding the right place to go in the future based on climate data and even finding someone to date who's also a nomad!

Nomad List 5.0

💫Today, exactly 5 years ago[https://levels.io/product-hunt-hacker-news-number-one/], I launched the firstversion of Nomad List on Product Hunt. Now, 5 years later, I present you with 🌴Nomad List 5[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/nomad-list-5-0…

levels.iolevels

Nomad List is built around my vision for the future of remote work, where I think billions of people in some form will work remotely from multiple countries/cities in the world while moving around to find their perfect place to live with the community of people they fit in:

“There will be 1 billion digital nomads by 2035”

I did a presentation on the future of digital nomads (and remote workers) in thenext 20 years. I used public data to show actual social and demographic trendsand extrapolated them to make a guesstimate how the rise of remote workers willaffect the world in 2035. It’s impossible to predict the fut…

levels.iolevels

P.S. I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below: