It was almost New Year's Eve and I wanted to do something special on Twitter. I had 69,800 followers and because I admittedly am an imperfect and superficial human addicted to vanity metrics, I wanted to get to 70,000 followers before midnight and it becoming 2020.

I knew Gumroad had done giveaways before. I had thought about it. Half of my friends said it was sleazy and attracted the wrong audience, the other half of my friends said "just do it and see what happens", and then there was Cam who said it was "both sleazy and attracted the wrong audience and I should just do it" 😂

I'm not a big fan of ads

I'm not a big fan of ads, nor consuming ads: I have multiple levels of ad blockers like uBlock and HOSTS files blocking any ad and tracker, nor paying for ads: I have tried buying Facebook and Twitter ads and they never really compare to the conversion/clicks/sales I get from writing viral tweets/blogs. Now doing a giveaway is somewhat of an artificial way of getting traction for a tweet. But so are ads.

So I wanted to try it and I wrote this tweet. Pressing the TWEET button on this I got nerves all over thinking this might go complete wrong, but let's try:

As you probably expected to happen, I've never had a tweet take off so fast:

🎁 How I did a Twitter giveaway, got 10K+ new followers and discovered you can hack most giveaways to win them https://t.co/KauZL6KszP (includes the winner) pic.twitter.com/QO2OQWY6kb

— ؜ (@levelsio) January 11, 2020

When it came down to actually picking a winner I started Googling. How do you pick a random person from the people you RT? Luckily there was already lots of sites specializing in that:

My friend Marc was quick to point out that it would be impossible to pick a random person from the RTs due to Twitter's API limits:

Of course me being me, I didn't believe that at first. But the API that lets you list RTs has disabled pagination. So you can get the last 100 RTs, then if you paginate, you get the same last 100 RTs. It must be possible to get a list of all RTs? How about without the API but just through Twitter's web interface?

Nope, it doesn't scroll further than 100 last RTs. So that didn't work. Of course because Twitter's web interface also uses the Twitter API. So who can help me get that RT list?

Nobody except Twitter employees can.

So now how was I going to randomly pick a winner then?

My friend Marc again to the rescue. He suggested that since there was 10,000+ people RT'ing and following, I could just pick a random follower from my current total follower list (78,000 at this point), then go to their profile to check if they RT'd it and see. If they didn't, get another random follower and repeat, until you find someone. With 78,000 followers this should take about ~8 tries.

Where would I get my followers though? I could use the API but that'd takes ages with pagination I think. So I exported my data.

When you extract the archive ZIP file, you get this folder with all your data:

One file called follower.js has a list of all your followers. Beware it's more followers than you actually have. I had about 92,000, of which 14,000 were suspended accounts.

I then made a PHP script (I put it on Github here) to pick a list of random followers, so I could open their profile in my browser and see if they had RT'd the giveaway tweet:

And then I did it, and screencapped it for verification:

Here's a screen cap of the random picking (2x speed) and the source code: https://t.co/Kno6cKomZX pic.twitter.com/VKAgOj26ai

— ؜ (@levelsio) January 11, 2020

The vulnerability of this 100 RT limit

If I'm right (and I think I am, but let me know on Twitter if I'm not), and:

1) we know we can only get the last 100 RTs from Twitter

2) and every random RT picker service I've seen online uses the Twitter API to pick through

3) it means that it's relatively easy to hack giveaways to win them by being one of the, or all of the, last 100 retweeters

Not saying you should by the way, because it's very not nice.

But I don't think most people who do giveaways are technical and will go through the trouble I went of exporting their data, writing their own random follower script and opening people's profiles until finding the person who actually RT'd them.

If there's a service that downloads all your followers, goes to their profile to find the RT (which takes getting sometimes hundreds of tweets to get back to the date of the original giveaway RT), then yes they'll give an accurately random result. But I checked lots of these RT pickers and I don't think most do this.

That means if you can get 100 fake Twitter accounts, which again I don't recommend, and you have all of RT just at the end of the giveaway (after everyone else, and before they pick a winner). You can have a 100% guarantee you win it.

And that's a big vulnerability of Twitter giveaways.

Was it good for business?

Is this a suitable marketing strategy if you don't want to spend ads? Yes, kinda, maybe.

The tweet got 1,459,193 views, 80,368 engagements, 54,061 profile clicks and 11,723 retweets. If you'd use ad metrics for that that means:

CPM (cost per thousand impressions): $3,000/(1,459,193/1000) = $2.05

I could only find Q3 2018 data when Twitter's CPM for ads was $5.93:

So it's almost 3x cheaper than buying ads. But Twitter ads you can actually target, with a giveaway it's quite random who will RT it.

I added about ~10,000 followers, at a cost per follower: $3,000/10,000=$0.30 per follower.

I checked a buy fake Twitter followers site and it $269 for 10,000 followers, so $0.02 per follower.

So a giveaway is about 10x as expensive as buying fake followers. But then again, the fake followers are robot accounts, the giveaway followers are real people.

Even then, the followers you add from a giveaway probably aren't the people who actually want to read what you have to say, or use your products/business. They want a free thing. And I expect a share of the 10k+ followers I added to drop off once the winner is announced.

(Update: At the peak I had 78,700 followers, after announcing the winner it's dropped to 78,200 followers, so that's a loss of 500 followers.)

All that is nice for your vanity metrics but doesn't do much for your business. In fact, both sales and volume on my main project Nomad List (which I link to from my Twitter profile) were lower on Dec 31 - Jan 1 than the same weekdays a week before. That could be NYE of course. I didn't see much effect on revenue. That's logical though since again people just want a free MacBook 16". I'd not click through either, haha.

However, let's say I sell 30x Nomad List memberships for $99/year because of the exposure this giveaway gave me. That's ~$3,000 and would make me break even. It's hard to measure this because I don't know which of the new followers or people who saw the tweet will stick and sign up now or tomorrow or in a few months. It could very well be >30 people. Not sure.

And finally...the winner

For everyone scrolling down to find the winner: The random winner of the giveaway is: https://twitter.com/JSXRDX.

See the video above for verification of the randomness.

Houston, we have contact 👾 pic.twitter.com/653xkva1vJ

— ؜ (@levelsio) January 11, 2020

And here I ordered the high spec one for him:

🎁 Ordered the 🍏MacBook Pro 16" for the giveaway winner, final cost $3,518.90:

Specs:
- 2.3GHz 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9
- AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory
- 32GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory
- 1TB SSD storage
- 16-inch Retina display with True Tone

Video below pic.twitter.com/mrA22bUKH7

— ؜ (@levelsio) January 14, 2020

Conclusion

This was a fun experiment.

Would I do it again? Not sure: there'd be a risk in my Twitter becoming a superficial giveaway account when I like it more as a place where I tweet about what I do and make every day.

Still a giveaway helps if you'd like to quickly build up the vanity metric of followers, which I think Gumroad is trying to do with their Twitter account, and having more followers might help your business to get actual real involved followers who may become customers later!

Using revenue to support other people

It does feel really good to give away if you can afford it. And in the giveaway tweet I wrote "👩‍🎨 Make something cool with it" and I do hope the person who won will do that.

Last year I already started supporting makers on Patreon:

Admittedly, that's relatively small amounts though like $10/mo per maker. The bigger goal (if I make enough revenue) is to make it into a fund which can bankroll indie makers and creatives for a certain amount of time. Like 6 to 12 months at $2,000/mo to focus on building projects. That means $12,000 to $24,000 for one maker. Which is a lot to give away, but would be the plan if I can afford it with revenue.

The giveaway was exciting though, and humble bragging here but we/I hardly checked the RT/follower counter because we were too busy drinking IPAs and chatting with friends during NYE:

Happy new year everyone! <3

I was listening Lorn's new album and the track The Slow Blade immediately gave me visuals of slow motion future city dystopia. Of course we have one in 2019, and it's Hong Kong during its current protests.

So I searched the web for slow motion footage of Hong Kong's protests and put it together with lots of vapor glitch color grading.

Footage from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RErdSr0iAcs

Music from: https://lorn.bandcamp.com/album/drown-the-traitor-within

Coffee is one of my addictions. It's not that I drink it because I'm tired, it's that I drink it because it gives me motivation to go do or make stuff.

My brain is pretty wired naturally and caffeine gives me the stimulus I need to focus on one thing. Like a drug.

Coffee and capitalism

I can't find a link now but someone argued that every historical time had its own preferred mainstream drug and our current one is coffee because it works so well in a capitalist society. I drink a cup of coffee and I want to work. If I don't, my production goes down and long-term there's less work being produced. Capitalim doesn't like that.

That means if we want to escape our addiction to work, we may have to cut down on coffee. Or at least the most neuro-active compound in it: caffeine.

My coffee intake

I usually wake up around noon, then I drink my first cup of coffee. I then will drink another 2 cups. Totaling 3 per day. Sometimes 4 cups. A big cup of filter coffee  is ~100mg of caffeine. so that's 300-400mg of caffeine per day. That's quite a lot since it's already near the recommended healthy limit.

Like lots of people, I'll even drink it late at night after dinner.

Now, the half-life of caffeine average is about 5 hours. But it can stay in your body for 8 to 14 hours. That means if your last coffee at 4pm in the afternoon, it can still be in your body at 6am in the morning.

Sleeplessness

Combine that with everyone being on computer and smartphone screens late into the night and it's no wonder we have a worldwide sleeplessness epidemic:

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has pointed to a 'global epidemic of sleeplessness'

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article-abstract/142/6/e30/5425265

Decaf coffee

If you can't fall asleep because your mind is racing, it might not just be your mind, it might also be the coffee. And it was for me.

My friend Marc said I should try switch to decaf as he did. So I bought decaf coffee.

It tasted worse, but not that much worse. It was okay.

I started switching to a mix of decaf and normal coffee. I'd have a single cup of regular caffeinated coffee. And then 2 decaf the rest of the day.

In the first week I didn't feel much but after a few weeks I started falling asleep considerably easier.

It worked!

But have you heard of paint stripper?

Do you know the stuff they use to remove paint from walls? And the stuff we clean industrial factory floors with? It's an industrial solvent called methylene chloride. Stores have stopped selling it because it's so dangerous:

Public health organizations, including NRDC, had pushed for the ban of methylene chloride–based paint strippers, as the chemical has been linked to multiple deaths. Its fumes can cause liver toxicity, cancer, and harm to the nervous system—they can even trigger fatal heart attacks. More than 200,000 consumers petitioned for the ban, and advocates in 12 states also gathered outside Lowe’s stores to pressure the company to remove them from their shelves.

https://www.nrdc.org/experts/nrdc/lowes-stop-selling-deadly-paint-strippers

Why am I telling you this?

Well, the majority of decaf coffee is produced like this:

(..) coffee beans are soaked in hot water to extract much of the caffeine from the beans. The beans are then removed from the water and the methylene chloride solvent is added to bond with the caffeine. After the methylene chloride/caffeine compound is skimmed from the surface of the mixture, the beans are returned to reabsorb the liquid.

https://www.interamericancoffee.com/decaf-methylene-chloride-mc/

We're using paint stripper to make most decaf coffee

Yes.

Now to be valid, there's no real evidence methylene chloride has a harmful effects to humans in decaf coffee. The amounts left in the coffee are very tiny:

FDA regulation allows for up to 10 parts per million (ppm) of residual methylene chloride, but actual coffee-industry practice results in levels that are 100 times lower than this amount. During this decaffeination process, the coffee beans are soaked in hot water to extract much of the caffeine from the beans.

https://www.interamericancoffee.com/decaf-methylene-chloride-mc/

Then again, I don't like the idea that I'm drinking paint stripper.

I especially don't like that something I consume every day has this stuff in it. We know that most negative effects of compounds don't come from incidental use, but from repeated use as part of a lifestyle. I don't want chemical solvent to be part of my lifestyle.

And I'm not completely stupid to think that: before we used to make decaf coffee with benzene for decades, and many cups of decaf coffee consumed later we discovered it was harmful:

Since its inception, methods of decaffeination similar to those first developed by Roselius have continued to dominate. While Roselius used benzene, many different solvents have since been tried after the potential harmful effects of benzene were discovered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination

Humans invent lots of stuff that decades later turns out to be a disaster, think asbestos or plastic.

So personally, I'd rather not take the risk and be drinking this.

I don't want to sound like a paranoid anti-scientific crazy person, but I think taking steps personally to minimize risks we might not know yet seems sane.

Better safe than sorry.

In search of decaf without chemical solvents

It didn't take me much Googling to find non-chemical alternatives. The most famous one is a process called Swiss Water:

Swiss Water is an innovative, 100% chemical free decaffeination process removing caffeine for coffee roasters around the world.

In this process, the coffee beans are soaked in caffeine-free green coffee extract, allowing the caffeine to be extracted from the bean and into the solution while the flavor components are retained in the beans.  The now caffeine-saturated green coffee extract is then processed through activated charcoal to remove the caffeine, thus becoming caffeine-free again and ready to extract caffeine from a new batch of coffee. The coffee beans are then dried to their originating moisture level and re-bagged. The Swiss Water Process results in coffee that is 99.9% caffeine free.[3]

Nice! I found solvent-free decaf coffee.

Yesterday I ordered my first bag of ground Swiss Water coffee. And today I made a cup:

The taste is much much much better than the methylene chlorinated decaf. It's a little weaker, so you have to use more ground powder to make a coffee. But still pretty good.

Ignore the text on the bag, it's imported and repackaged by a Korean importer.

There's one other decaf method that's not chemical: treating coffee with pressurized carbon dioxide. It's the least used method and reviews about the taste aren't that positive.

So why are most coffee producers like Illy and chains like Starbucks using the chemical solvent process? Because it's cheap. A decaf coffee at Starbucks is about the same price as a regular coffee.

The Swiss Water process is a lot more expensive. But I'm happy to pay for it knowing I'm not drinking paint stripper.

And best of all, now I can fall asleep a little better.

A very common thing I hear is how hard it is to get a remote job. People seem to apply to many job posts, but very few actually get the jobs.

I wanted to figure out how hard it really is.

The data set

For the last 6 months, I've been tracking job 7,797,838 reads and 392,527 applications to 8,394 job posts on my remote jobs platform Remote OK.

A job read is counted as someone clicking a job post on the site to open it. A job applications is counted as someone clicking the [ Apply to Job ] button on the site.

This has some limitations though: some jobs are posted on multiple boards which we can't track, and some people don't complete an application. We'll get to that later.

The odds to get a remote job

Importantly is to make the distinction between the average remote job and the top remote jobs. Let's start with the average in the last 6 months:

Average reads per job: 322
Average applicants per job: 47

The odds to get the top 5% of remote jobs

To define a top remote job, I picked the 5% of most read job posts in the last 6 months:

Average reads per job: 2858
Average applicants per job: 263

A big caveat...

The numbers here look about the same as regular jobs. But this is only data from a single job board. If we assume jobs are posted on multiple job boards and websites, which they usually are, the amount of applicants can be a multiple of that.

Also, not every person clicking Apply completes the applicant process for a job.

I don't have data on this, so I have to guesstimate here: assuming that jobs are posted on 3 job boards, and that 50% doesn't complete a job application, that's:

263 applicants for a top 5% remote job * 3 job boards * 50% applicant completion
= 394 applicants = 0.25% odds

47 applicants for an average remote job * 3 job boards * 50% applicant completion
= 70 applicants = 1.42% odds

Very roughly speaking that means if you want to get a top remote job, you'll have to apply ~400 times. If you want to get an average remote job, you'll have to apply ~70 times. Obviously that number will be much lower if you're higher skilled.

Compared to regular jobs

There's no data on the top 5% of regular jobs to compare to. But we do know that high skilled corporate jobs on average get ~250 applications. So comparing we may conclude:

A top remote job gets about 57% more applicants than a regular corporate job.

And comparing the average remote job with the average regular job which gets  ~52 applications:

The average remote job gets 34% more applicants than a regular job.

Both these numbers rely on some assumptions and guesstimates though, I'll see if I can find better data to make these assumptions more precise.

Let me know on Twitter what you think, I'd love to do more queries on my dataset based on your feedback.

In the future writing actual code will be like using a pro DSLR camera, and no code will be like using a smartphone camera. Some pros will keep doing work with DSLRs (and need them), but most basic apps will be built with no code. Just like most photos now are shot on a phone.

"No code" means building applications without writing code, but instead using a visual platform to connect data and build interfaces. Kinda like Excel, but more visual like this, and it has an actual app/site as output instead of a spreadsheet:

And I think this means we'll see The Great Democratization of Software Creation, where most people can just glue some APIs together to build a functioning app/site/thing in hours/days. Kinda like website builders now, but with added API plugging in (like Zapier) and scheduled cron jobs.

That's why the complexity of current code frameworks is so interesting, it's essentially people buying expensive DSLRs with shitloads of lenses, light sensors, etc. which they may not really need. Especially not if their simple apps can be put together with no code.

Just like modern smartphone cameras are good enough (and are used) to make 99% of people's photos.

Towards 95% no code, 5% custom premium code

I think we'll see coding go in two directions:
1) towards simplicity with no code, for 95-99% of apps
2) towards complexity with custom high-level engineered code, for the 1-5% of apps
The engineers working on (2) will be high paid, in the millions/year, because custom code

A recent example is Netflix, who said they want to have LESS employees, paid higher. They'll pay $1M/y+ for 1 engineer instead of $300k/y for 3 engineers.

Current no code platforms

The major no code platforms currently are Bubble and Webflow. Website builders that could be used for no code (when combined with an API platform like Zapier) are Carrd, Squarespace and Wix. I'm not affiliated with any of these, except that Carrd's AJ is my Twitter friend!

What to build for this trend

1) build paid APIs that people in the future can use to build stuff
2) build no code platforms (many already exist though, but why not)
3) build no code tools (not sure what thought)  But note it might take 5-10 years for this to get going

I wouldn't stop at just building one API either, build a big set of APIs people making apps can use. For example, I use lots of APIs on Nomad List to get daily data, like Dark Sky for weather: http://darksky.net/dev

Collecting lots of dispersed data (for example from government) and merging it together and normalizing it into one format and then selling it for $$$ is a nice example.

Example from this week: there's no API to get neighborhood boundaries for cities worldwide, the data if even available is dispersed on national and city government sites. I'm collecting/drawing neighborhood boundaries in GeoJSON polygons for Hoodmaps that if I wanted I could put in an API later and maybe sell for $$$.

Conclusion

It's impossible to predict the future, but we can try. And the trend of no code while in its infancy now, will only continue I think. It's now at the state of interactive templates and connecting some basic logic. But it will advance more and means a serious overhaul of the software industry for majority of use cases.

Most software engineers will deny this trend though, but as my friend John from Ghost says:

Everyone can identify disruption until it’s about them

People have repeatedly asked me for years why now that I can afford it, I don't hire people, build a team and stop coding myself. Instead every day I still work on all my products by myself. I code the back end, front end, I design the layout, the logos, I do the marketing and press for it.

It's hard to explain why but John Carmack explained it better than I could have:

The majority of technical people at some point decide to make the pivot into some kind of management level, whether it's being a startup CEO or just taking a VP position somewhere and managing other people. And there's good reasons for that.

An argument that I would have with myself about how I'd seen the transition from these very low level programming tools writing in Assembly to writing in higher level languages to using application frameworks. And at some level you say "well the next level of productivity enhancing programming development is to work with people". Instead of writing the code yourself, you find the team, and you tell them what to work on. And that's the way most of the world runs. That type of groups, and teams, and hierarchies, that makes the world go round.

But it's not what I want to do. I don't want to be the one doing that. And in many ways that's selfish. Where, at some point, if I said "I'm all about the project", I want to change the world in this way by bringing this product into existence, I should just suck it up and learn how to manage people. And make that happen.

But it is selfishness that keeps me saying, no, I dearly love building the things myself. I don't want to step away from that. Even if it would be more effective. And I know that even if you go do that, I could maybe be super effective for a couple of years at that but then my skills atrophy, and the world moves on and I am no longer at the cutting edge of those different things. And eventually I am giving bad advice to the people I am managing. Or at least not current and optimal advice.

— John Carmack on JRE 1342 @ 01:23:40

It's exactly how I feel. Apart from that I don't trust most people and I think you need a hell of a lot of money to hire people that would actually do the job better than me (arrogant yes), it also would stop me from improving my skills every day. Every day I work on my projects, I get a little bit better. It keeps my brain active which helps neuroplasticity.

I studied business and a big part of that is management, so I know what it entails. But my core desire is creating new things. It's what makes me most happy. I don't care if it's programming, design, music, or something IRL. Whatever it is, creating is the most pure activity I can do.

Doing this has negatives. I'll probably never be able to scale up to a billion dollar company (but do I want that really? and who really does? isn't a million enough?). Automation helps in some respects as I can program the robots to do what I don't want to repeatedly do myself, and they can run for years, maybe decades, without reprogramming them.

Most importantly, I'll be able to keep creating things myself for a long time.

Anne-Laure wrote about having time anxiety:

Quarter life crisis

Many people around age 26-30 get a quarter life crisis. It usually happens after you've graduated university, have been working for a few years and start getting the itching feeling "is this it?". You then might feel lack of meaning in your life, start getting panic attacks, feeling tense all day, get derealization as if you're living in the Matrix or some simulated reality, depression and insomnia from thinking too much. Also an obsession with your age and goals you need to hit before a certain age is common. Many people also call it Saturn Return, it's like a late 20s rite of passage:

In horoscopic astrology, a Saturn return is an astrological transit that occurs when the planet Saturn returns to the same place in the sky that it occupied at the moment of a person's birth. While the planet may not reach the exact spot until the person is 29 or 30 years old, the influence of the Saturn return is considered to start in the person's late twenties, notably the age of 27.

I got this too. And relatedly, I used to have severe anxiety about this stuff before my quarter life crisis.

Like most late 20s people of this generation having a quarter life crisis, I was terrified of death, my time remaining and what to do with it.

Meaning

If we die anyway, why does anything matter anyway? I tried to avoid answering this question by becoming extremely ambitious, working really hard and trying to get successful. I though if I just did that, I'd optimize my time in the most useful way and somehow that'd matter.

But of course, it doesn't work that way. It just made things worse.

Nihilism

It took years for my anxiety to mostly go away and ironically what caused me most of my crisis was also what solved it: the realization that nothing matters.

You can approach the nihilism of that in a positive or negative way. Negatively that means whatever you do, it doesn't matter, so you can just as well do nothing. Positively it means whatever you do, it doesn't matter, so you can now just enjoy the thing you do intrinsically. Not for the end purpose. So that's what I do now, I'm here just to enjoy the ride.

The heat death of the universe will destroy everything anyway back to entropy or even more, pure nothingness:

Legacy

A lot of people from my generation are obsessed with legacy. Like "leaving their mark on the world" or "changing the world". Especially in tech. Since tech is everyone now, essentially everyone from my generation.

I think this is highly related to this search for meaning. Before atheism we had religion and before religion we had superstition. Religion and superstition gave us meaning to do things. Religion would get you to heaven after death and we'd use superstition as a "belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event". If you have none of those, legacy is one of the last remaining obvious reasons to do things. You'll be remembered for your actions!

But will you, really?

People will probably have forgotten you and your achievements within a generation or two.  

Even if you start a successful company, the average life span of a S&P 500 company is less than 20 years. It'll either fail, be bought up, merged and renamed.

And if you get super famous, you'll probably be forgotten too within 100 years. How many famous people from 100 years ago do you know now? Not a lot.

105 billion people were born before us, and how many historic figures are there? Maybe hundreds, maybe thousands? So your odds of being remembered is something like 1,000 famous historic people divided by (105,000,000,000 people ever lived + 7 billion people currently living) = 0.000000892857% percent or a 1 in 112,000,000 chance.

Even then, we're only counting the human people who lived until now. That's incredibly microscopic odds.

And even then, you'll be dead. How can you enjoy your legacy, when you're dead?

So what's left if:

• you're not superstitious
• you're not religious
• we just debunked the odds that you'll be remembered for your legacy

Well yes, intrinsic motivation and meaning. Enjoying the ride and whatever you do for the thing itself.

Just enjoy your tea and a cookie. And be nice to the people around you. That's all there is. Everything else is just filling time.

— My dad

I still see people think "talking to customers" works when validating an idea, but people don't always know what they want.  I think real validation of an idea happens with executing it and then people getting their credit card out and paying you for it.

I think talking to people and asking them what to build USED to work because there wasn't as much stuff built as now.  But there's hundreds of websites/apps launched every day now, so even if you build what they want, the odds of them paying for it are less due to competition.

That's why building more things, not less, and seeing what  exactly people will get their credit card out for and paying you money is, I think, how to get to validation these days.

There's a certain excessive self-confidence in working on a project for months/years without any paying customers and thinking it will just work out if only people realize how great your product is. But if people visit every day and not pay for it, that's daily rejection.

That daily rejection should be a data point too. That's people EVERY day NOT paying for your product. That means something is severely wrong with your idea/execution. But instead entrepreneurs like to ignore this with "one day people will get it".

And yes, sometimes it does work out, people iterate a product for a long time until ppl start paying for it. But this is way more seldom than ppl think. That's why funding is so risky, it removes the biggest incentive to build a product people actually want: making money.

Being broke may be the best incentive to build something people want because you're struggling to pay rent and survive. There's no Plan B, there's no savings, there's no extra income. You'll build anything to make money, and that'll get you closer to market fit than most people.

This ties into entrepreneurship research: poorer countries generally have higher amounts of entrepreneurship than rich countries, out of necessity:

"people are far more entrepreneurial in the developing countries than in the developed countries. According to an OECD study, in most developing countries, 30-50 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce is self-employed (the ratio tends to be even higher in agriculture).

(..)  In some countries, the ratio does not even reach one in ten: 6.7 per cent in Norway, 7.5 per cent in the USA, and 8.6 per cent in France.

So, even excluding the farmers (which would make the ratio even higher), the chance of an average developing country person being an entrepreneur is more than twice that for a developed country person (30 per cent versus 12.8 per cent). The difference is 10 times, if we compare Bangladesh with the USA (7.5 per cent versus 75.4 per cent).

And in the most extreme case, the chance of someone from Benin being an entrepreneur is 13 times higher than the equivalent chance for a Norwegian (88.7 per cent versus 6.7 per cent)."

— Ha-Joon Chang on United Nations University

Starting from a place of comfort (savings, residual income) can ironically be a negative factor for entrepreneurial success because the difference between the result of you failing and succeeding is smaller: in both cases you'll still be able to pay your rent. Less incentive.

Bali gets internet through a number of sea cables. The most important one is called the Indonesia Global Gateway (IGG). Indonesia consists of lots of islands, and it connects the biggest ones on one giant fiber line to Singapore. It's significantly improved the internet in Bali.

But sometimes it's down, under maintenance or just doesn't work for whatever reason. The problem is you never instantly know if it's just your laptop, the place you're in, the router, the neighborhood, city or entire island.

That's why I made BaliSeaCable.com, it figures that out by constantly measuring the performance of the undersea internet cable. I made it in the last 8 hours.

It runs a simple Speedtest (with speedtest-cli in a shell cron) from a server in Singapore to a Telkomsel server in Denpasar, Bali every single minute. The results are then grep'd from speedtest-cli's output and securely POST'ed with shell curl to the site (which is hosted on my main server in US). The site saves the data and displays it!

The mock up of this idea started like this, a simple map with a line to Singapore showing the cable and overlays with the speed data.

I had to draw the actual cable properly though in HTML. Here's a map of the cable:

I had to figure out how to draw SVG paths myself. I used a website called editor.method.ac to draw it over the cable map:

I first made an image of the map as background:

I then threw the SVG above it.

I learnt to animate the SVG with this tutorial: https://css-tricks.com/svg-line-animation-works/.

It's simply CSS:

svg.transfer path {
	animation: dash 50s linear reverse infinite;
}
@keyframes dash {
	to {
		stroke-dashoffset: 0;
	}
}

The SVG has three copies of it. One is the cable itself in light opacity (gray), then there's one line to the island (green) and one line back to Singapore green. They're dashed to act like data packets.

I also added a text overlay explaining the site and the current speed in top right:

And made it work on mobile:

Then tweaked the colors a bit more, because red is generally negative, so I made it blue:

And I made the map draggable with JS:

The entire site is one HTML file, so you can check the source if you want to figure out. It's pretty hacky.

I hope this helps people in Bali figure out if the internet in the whole island is down or not, so that if it is, they can take a nice break and go jump in the pool instead of work in the hot sun 😊

💫Today, exactly 5 years ago, I launched the first version of Nomad List on Product Hunt.

Now, 5 years later, I present you with 🌴Nomad List 5, which lets you find the best places to work remotely in the 🌎 and a lot more.

🧠 Nomad List now has over 1,000,000 data points for almost every major town and city in the world with a significant population. That's data that ranges from climate throughout the year, to gender equality, to the average income of people living in different cities.

🌎 Cities now stretch across 5 continents, I even have the only two places in Antarctica with inhabitants (hint, it's mostly scientists :D): https://nomadlist.com/antarctica

👩‍🌾 @ajlkn asked to focus on the rural remote work revolution that's happening, especially in the U.S.. With fast internet, people can now move out of big cities into more rural areas. That's why I've added hundreds of smaller towns in North America for you to explore!

💬 After visiting cities people are now asked to review them. Reviews are fully anonymous, so this give you an honest perspective on the city. Pure data gives you only a limited idea of how a city can be, whereas someone writing about a city can give you a better picture

🖼 All photos of cities now come from the amazing @unsplash, and I built a crowdsourced engine at https://nomadlist.com/photos, so that people can vote what's the best pic. Also each city now has a photos tab. (requested by @marckohlbrugge) https://nomadlist.com/photos/amsterdam

☕️ There's now 300,000 places to work (like cafes and coworkings) indexed in the site in partnership with Foursquare, http://Coworker.com and http://Workfrom.co. I use language matching to figure out if a cafe is suitable for working (like power outlets, fast wifi etc.)

📈 Data science is really interesting to me, so I've built a mini data studio into Nomad List. If you click CHART, you can combine two data points and see the data for all cities in an X/Y graph: https://nomadlist.com/chart

🗺New map view with 3d view, which went viral recently on 9gag: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1025300135553597440

❤️ You can now add cities to your wishlist, by clicking the heart when hovering over a city. This was requested years ago by @andreyazimov! Kinda useful if you want to make a selection of cities to go. You can also hide cities from results with the X.

🙂Travel profiles are re-designed and now show a world map with the countries you visited colored. Just like that big scratch off world map IRL! This was requested by @jelmerdeboer and @marckohlbrugge

🔍A new useful search that you can find cities, countries, continents and people with, and like or follow them.

🛬Nomad List Chat now shows when people arrive in the city.

🥰A big challenge for nomads is loneliness. For that reason I've built a matchmaking app into the site. You can set what you're looking for on your profile (like travel buddies, friends, relationships) and your interests, and the site will match you up with other people

✨ I hope you like it, and please try it! I'd love to hear what to improve. I'm always improving my site, it's my 👶baby, and I'll take your feedback and use it! Tweet me!

🎹 Music in the video by the amazing Simple Technique, used with permission. The song is called Mean Regression. Buy it here.

💖 Thanks everyone for always supporting throughout the last 5 years! It's been incredible and insane to experience all of this and I'm still shocked every day that I can wake up and work on my site which people actually use and pays my bills. THANK YOU!!! 🙃🙃🙃

It took 4 years to get here, but we did it:

$83,333+/mo revenue ($83k is ✨special because * 12 is $1M annual run rate)

💳 11,996 customers
💸 740 payments/mo
🤖 208 cron jobs
🧧 $115 avg payment
💎 2 apps: Nomad List + Remote OK
📦 1 VPS
🎫 0 ad budget
💰 $0 funding

Some details:

- The big drop in December 2018 is when I enabled free trials on Nomad List, didn't really work out so well because revenue didn't even recover the month after:

- Spike in March 2018 was launch of MAKE book

- This month's spike is text ad deals for Nomad List:

- Jan 2017 spike is growth of Remote OK, I think in sync with the entire remote jobs market finally taking off

- This is total cash flow, so not recurring, because most of my business is not recurring (and I'm OK with that). So you can't just * 12mo a monthly revenue. But I can dream ^_^

- Also includes MAKE book revenue but that's usually only 5% - 10% max of total

+ Last thanks to @patrickc's Stripe for making this even possible. I wouldn't be able to get money from customers to my bank account without them.

+ Thanks to Daniel Lockyer for keeping the server that hosts my sites up and fast. He keeps the PHP + NGINX + SQLite on Linode fast, secure and up.

I’ve passed $50k in monthly revenue! Which is a ginormous number and a record for me and my sites.

This post is a draft. I’ll keep writing this post today while the tweet spreads! Keep coming back for more info 😀

Many of these income reports are sleazy af, so I’ll try to keep it clean and real in an FAQ style.

📈 $52,843/mo revenue in last 30 days (PR🏅)

🎒 Nomad List: $30,416/mo
👩‍💻 Remote OK: $20,467/mo
📖 MAKE: $1,960/mo
🗺 Hoodmaps: $0/mo

📊 Extrapolated ARR $634,116/year

How does it feel

…

Money and happiness

Completely unrelated after you can pay your bills. Revenue just becomes digits on a screen that you want to increase kinda like a game. Which is nice but also might be an interesting critique on capitalism if you want to go there 😛
…

Validation of nomad/remote work space

This validates there’s a lot of attention and real business to be made targeting the nomad and remote work space. Even if nomads have previously had an image of low-income. There’s money here.

Validation of building a company remotely while traveling

I’ve built these sites while traveling every few months to a new place for the last 3 years.

Validation of indie makers

I’m an indie maker that built these sites and this business. I didn’t raise ANY venture capital.

Validation of solo makers

And I’m solo. I mostly DIY’d and used off-the-shelf tools to build it.

You can make lots of money with morally positive stuff

The internet is full of stories of people making money with sleazy internet marketing scammy stuff, but I guess my story shows you can make fun websites that help people in their lives positively and even charge money for it!

Passive income is bullshit but automation is NOT bullshit

…

The more revenue, the more incentive I get to talk less honest

The more revenue, the more I feel like talking politically correct and less honest in these kinda posts. Simply because there’s more at stake. But that’s stupid too. I’ll continue talking about how this progress in my sites, business and personal life affects me. Because it’s an interesting case study to observe.

Send me questions

If you have more questions, please tweet them to me. I’m still editing this post so will add.

When you have to carry all your possessions with you in a backpack, you don’t really have much choice to become a minimalist. It just happens.

Minimalism is fashionable now, it’s a virtue statement. Yet regardless if it’s hip or not, it’s a functional way to live.

Every posssesion needs a purpose. You can’t just buy new things, because you know you’ll literally have to carry it with you.

Your wardrobe is of primary concern. It’s most of what’s in people’s backpacks. It’s also the most problematic one: fashion with its seasons and trends is inherently consumerist. If you buy into the rabbit hole of fashion, you’ll have to keep buying perpetually to stay relevant and that’s a wasteful addiction to have.

I fucking hate that. I don’t want to keep buying clothes from this new season while trashing the old and spending my time to try and match clothes every day. It’s bullshit.

How about having 2 or 3 outfits that fit you well? 6x t-shirts, 6x collared shirts, 1 long pants, 1 shorts and some underwear etc. That covers ~12 days. I heard they call this a “capsule wardrobe”: you buy essentials that fit you well and “augment” them with seasonal trends.

T-shirts are $3 from the Indonesian supermarket @indomaret (via @andrey_azimov), shirts $25 @hm L.O.G.G., socks $0.50 per pair on the street #bangkok, pants $50, shorts $25 and underwear $5 @zara.🤙

Because, fuck no to buying more stuff. Buy a few right things instead.

(via Instagram)

I’ve won 2x Product Hunt Awards this year:

🏆 Maker of the Year

🏆 Side Project of the Year

💖 Thank you Product Hunt and everyone for supporting throughout the years! The Product Hunt Golden Kitty Awards are one of the most renowned startup awards in the world, and it’s a giant honor to receive them.

I want to dedicate these awards to all the indie makers around the 🌎 world.

In 2014, Product Hunt kickstarted an indie startup revolution that’s still on-going. Where before startups were built with giant teams and lots of capital, the open and fun nature of Product Hunt made it suddenly okay to DIY and launch your own mini apps.

By the nature of the game, most of these apps went nowhere. But in absolute numbers, many of these grew out to be real million-dollar startups. Some raised money later (which is fine at that stage). Others bootstrapped to profitability. Like Nomad List, which is now valued as a multi-million dollar bootstrapped startup.

The implications of this are big.

It means that right this second, anyone, anywhere in the world, from 🌎 San Francisco to 🌍 Nairobi to 🌏 Tokyo, with just an internet connection, a laptop, can DIY an app, launch it, get ppl to use it and build an income. And maybe grow it into a real startup.

Building startups has never been so globally democratized as now.

There’s never been a better time for makers to build indie startups than today.

Be grateful for the time you live in. And if I can ask you for a favor. Please go and…

🛠 Build something today!

Ever since I visited my first one in Korea with my Dutch friends Sam and Hasse, I’ve been in love with bath houses. In 🇰🇷Korea, they’re called jim jil bang (literally: heating room, as the baths are only part of it, they're called sauna) and in 🇯🇵Japan they’re called onsen (hot spring).

Usually they make up 2 or 3 different temperature 🍵baths, and there’s a specific order you take to go through them.

There’s few things that are better to destress than being in scorching hot water for a few hours and then chilling out in a robe with 🍣food and 🍹fresh drinks. Especially Korean spas have gigantic common areas with heated floors where you just lie down, relax, or maybe nap. You can even stay overnight.

There’s Korean and Japanese spas all over the world. I’ve been to ones from 🇺🇸Los Angeles to 🇹🇼Taiwan. And they’re completely unlike the American or 🇪🇺European spas we’re used to. The closest is maybe 🇹🇷Turkish bath houses.

This week I went to one of the few in 🇹🇭Bangkok: the Japanese-owned Yunomori Onsen. It’s extremely well architected with a building made completely out of wood, dark stone and glass.

(via Instagram)

Later I was told by lots of people (like [@ytspar][https://twitter.com/ytspar]) there was apparently an even better Japanese spa called [Let's Relax Spa][https://letsrelaxspa.com/] in Bangkok's Thonglor neighborhood:

I headed over and yes, this is possibly the best spa I've ever visited in my life. The interior is next level minimalistic, there's literally no object that doesn't have to be there. It's super fresh and clean. One of the scorching hot baths looks milky and has steam coming from it so hot that it's like smoke from a fire.

(via Instagram