A few years ago I sold all my stuff to explore the world, creating 12 startups in 12 months and building $1M+/y companies as an indie maker such as Nomad List and Remote OK. I'm also a big pusher of remote work and async and analyze the effects it has on society. Follow me on Twitter or see my list of posts. My first book MAKE is out now. Contact me
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Turning side projects into profitable startups

Presentation, Tech
Jan 24, 2018

I just did a presentation at Dojo, a coworking space in Canggu, Bali about how to build a side project and turn it into a profitable startup. Thanks to @marcantoinefon for recording it! Over a year ago, I did a similar presentation. But since then I learnt a lot of new stuff that I’d like to talk about. A lot of this is covered more in-depth in my upcoming book.

Here’s the transcript of the presentation with accompanying slides:

I’ve built a lot of startups and side projects in the last four years. They’re mostly bootstrapped, and bootstrapped means that you build a business without any funding.

That means, you don’t go to San Francisco and get venture capital from big, old, fat, rich white guys, no offense. Instead you just do it yourself with your own skills, and that’s very fascinating for me ’cause it’s like a new way to build startups. It’s finally made possible because technology’s kinda cheap now. It’s almost free to build things on the internet. And it’s also exciting, because a lot of you guys here, and girl, and whatever, you guys wanna build things. You might have a job now, a remote job, but you might wanna have your own little side project. Make some money, or that maybe becomes a real startup later, and so maybe that’s relevant for your guys. So thanks for coming, thanks for listening.

I would like to start with my own story. Four years ago, I was in Holland, and I just graduated from University. I studied business, and I was really bored, ’cause all my friends got corporate jobs, and I had a YouTube channel for electronic music, and I was making like $2,000 a month, $3,000 a month, so a lot of money for a student for just a graduate, so I was really happy, but I was sitting at home at my desk making these YouTube videos, and I loved the music and stuff, and I loved doing it, but it was really boring being at home all the time. So my friend said, “Why don’t you buy a laptop “and just try and do this on a laptop, “and then you can maybe travel a little bit.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll do that.” So, I sold all my stuff, similar story, maybe, to you guys. You sold all your stuff, stuff you were renting, and you just flew to Asia or South America, whatever, and you went traveling for a little bit with your laptop. I did this. I was all over Asia, and the problem was, my YouTube, meanwhile, was going bankrupt.

It was $3,000, $2,000, but then suddenly, it was $900 and then $700, and then $500. I was like, fuck, I need to make some money, or I’m not gonna be able to pay this travel, and just my rent and stuff, and also, I was getting fucking depressed. I’d been nomading and then I came back home to my parents’ house. I was sitting there in this cold, Dutch winter, and I just wanted to die, and I got really big anxiety and depression and panic attacks for the first time ever in my life, ’cause my life was going fucking bad, so I needed to figure out something to do.

[SAND]

So I knew, like my dad always says, “If you’re depressed, “you need to order one cubic meter of sand, “and get a shovel, and just start shoveling, “one to the other.” And you do something, and you get less depressed. And so I was like, okay, I’ll do it digitally.

I’ll just do 12 projects in 12 months, and I called it 12 startups in 12 months, you know? It wasn’t really startups, but I’ll just do it. And I started building these little projects. I took one month for each, and I had something to do. I had focus. Still wasn’t making money, but whatever.

The first one was, my friends and me, we would always send each other music over e-mail, so I made this little app that would playlist it, and you could list all the music we sent to each other back when we didn’t really have chat apps yet, so, now, nobody uses e-mail anymore. Anyway, this didn’t make any money, but it was really fun, and I launched it.

I made animated GIF books, so I got a supplier in Malaysia. He could print flip books, and then I would send the animated .gifs to him, the frames, and we would order it. Everybody loved it, but the margin was literally like two or 3%, so it was hardly making any money. I think I was losing money after tax. It was total bullshit, but it was really fun.

Then, this was the first one that went really viral. It’s Go Fucking Do It, so you could enter a goal. You could add a deadline. Like, I wanna quit smoking. I want January 2018. You set a price, and you enter your credit card details with Stripe, and on the day, on the deadline, your friend gets an E-mail, and it asks, “Hey, did Pieter really quit smoking on January or not?” and if the friend said no, your credit card would get charged with $50, $100, and the money would go to me, (laughing) and this was the first one that was starting to make money. So, I was going from my YouTube crashing to $200 a month. Suddenly I was making $500 a month again with this, so now I was up at about $700 a month, so I could live again, so this was kinda nice. Still wasn’t a lot of money, but okay.

And then the press started getting involved. So, my friend made this kinda funny picture of me, really pretentious, but whatever. It worked, ’cause the press started biting on this project of 12 Startups in 12 Months, and everybody started writing about it like The Next Web, Tech in Asia, and suddenly, like thousands of people started E-mailing me and following me on Twitter and stuff, and something was started to happen, so I cracked this little marketing thing accidentally with this 12 Startups thing.

Meanwhile, I had to keep continuing building more products, so one product I built was a spreadsheet of cities. So I was in Chiang Mai, and Bangkok, and Singapore, and Hong Kong, and Tokyo, whatever, but I wanted to find places where the internet was good, where it was kinda warm, like 26 degrees Celsius, and it wasn’t super expensive to live, ’cause, you know, I had $700 a month. So I was like, okay, let’s make a spreadsheet, and I published it on Twitter, but I forgot to, well, actually, the first time, it leaked, and I forgot to remove the edits thing, so actually, people were starting to edit it, and I was like, just share it on Twitter, and it went viral, and hundreds of people, maybe I think a thousand people started adding data to it, and then we had 75 cities with all the costs of living and fast internet and stuff, and all these nomad hotspots, so then I made it into a website, and I launched the website to Hacker News and it went number one. I launched the product, went number one, and just started going viral. And it was 2014, August or something at the time.

The second nomad wave of 2014, I think, after the first one in 2007 started with the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, kind of started with Nomad List, if you look at the data.

And I grew Nomad List into this big website with loads of data. It’s 1,250 cities, now 250,000 data points. It’s all crowd-sourced, and it makes money. It makes $15,000 to $25,000 a month in membership fees and stuff, so that’s a far reach from the $700 I was living on, but this took, obviously, years to build, but at least this one actually stuck.

One of those projects stuck, which is kinda the philosophy I do now. It’s like shotgun. You shoot a lot of projects and see which sticks. I bootstrapped Remote OK from Nomad List success. It’s like a remote job website, which is now, also, since December, the number one remote job website in the world with almost a million monthly visits, so that’s really cool, and it makes about $10,000 a month now.

I also made Hoodmaps recently. This is Canggu, so it’s a map where everybody can cross-source tech, kinda like Wikipedia tech, things they think about a place. They can color it based on if it’s hipster or rich, so you kinda know where to go in a city. So this is Canggu. So where? It’s a nomad mecca. Deus’ hipster mecca, and the ocean is full of hot surfer boys and girls.

While building all these projects, there was one framework and pattern that kept happening, which was like, you have an idea, or I would have a problem and make it into an idea. I would build it, I would launch it, I would grow it, and then I would monetize it to make money from it, and then, if I got really annoyed with working on it, I would automate it with robots, so today, I wanna tell you about all these processes.

And importantly, there’s no VCs involved. No venture capital, just self-funded.

So let’s start with idea. A lot of you have already startup or app ideas and a lot of them are good. A lot of them are really bad, and I think the bad ones are pretty much bad because they’re not focused on a problem. I hear constantly, let’s make another food delivery app or another fashion clothes delivery app or whatever, but they’re not really problems that you wanna solve, so my thing is like, I try to look at my own life, and what am I really annoyed with?

What is in my daily life, something I can work on, information that’s missing or whatever. With Nomad List, I wanted to know new cities, where I could go. With Hoodmaps, I was lost in these tourist centers of big cities, and I was like, “Fuck, I wanna see the real city.” So I built Hoodmaps, for example. So I was always trying to find problems and then to solve, and I think that’s the way to do.

And the reason that’s cool, because when you have a problem you solve, you’re actually, you’re the expert at your own problems, so, this is an expert, and it’s a competitive advantage, because let’s say you’re a gardener. You know very well about the problems that gardeners have about flowers and plants and stuff, and nobody else knows that, or only other gardeners, so you have a little niche there that’s competitive, that’s good.

The problem is, we’re all very similar. Look at us. A lot of guys here beards and short hair and trimmed on the sides like me, so it’s bullshit. That means that we all start getting the same ideas ’cause we all have the same problems. So you wanna become less homogenous, right? So how do you do that? Well, you have to start doing crazy shit.

So you have to, I don’t know, go sky diving…

…or you go trek to the jungle for six months alone without any phone, or just do some original stuff.

Go do orgies or whatever. Find new subcultures to go into. Fringe subcultures are really good, because when it’s taboo, nobody else is doing it yet, so it’s competitive advantage again, and you might find some business or app idea or service idea, whatever, in there, but you have to become original, ’cause otherwise, you’re making the same shit everybody else is making, and that’s not gonna make you money.

What I see a lot is a big fault, too. People think really big with ideas, so they start with, I wanna build a space company, but that’s bullshit because you’re nobody, so it doesn’t go as fast as that. You have to start with something very small. So, if you look at Elon Musk, he started with PayPal which was a payment app for Palm Pilots, old smartphones. That became big, and he sold it with a lot of other people, and then, in the end, after 20 years, he’s finally building a space company. So start slowly. Build something small, fix a small niche problem first. Make some money and keep growing the niche, and keep growing bigger. With Nomad List now, it was focused on nomads, but now I’m going bigger. I wanna go into the whole travel market, which is about 10 or 100 times as big as Nomads, so grow a niche instead of starting big, you know?

Start small, it’s better.

And a niche is really cool, because if you have, let’s say, $100 products, you only need 10,000 people for one million dollars. I was shocked. Is that accurate? Yeah, it is accurate, it’s one million dollars. So you don’t need a lot of, and you can take a picture if you want. You don’t need a lot of customers to make one million dollars. You just need a small niche of people. Everybody took the picture? Yeah? Nice, flash isn’t gonna help, haha.

Okay, so you can also make an idea list. That’s what I did too. Every time I have an idea, I write it in a concepts list. This is all bullshit ideas, but whatever. And I’d see which ones are promising and which keep coming back to me, and then I might start building them. And it’s good to just track this. Do it in WorkFlowy or Trello or whatever, to-do post-its or whatever. Write it down because you might need the idea later. I think a lot of the remote work ideas I had, they came months before I actually did them, so it takes a long time to boil in your head.

Also, I would definitely, definitely super advise, and this is very contradictory advice from what most people say. Do it yourself. Don’t work with other people. You don’t need a technical co-founder if you’re a business person. Just learn to code. Just do it yourself and learn to design or whatever. Do the basics yourself, because it will save you so much time. And Groupthink. Groupthink is very dangerous. If you have two or three people in a group, you’re building a startup, I’ve seen it myself. People sort of hyping each other, like, “Wow, this dog food delivery idea is really gonna change the whole fucking ecosystem of the world.” It’s just not true. It’s just you’re hyping each other. And if you’re alone, you cover your hype up, ’cause you’re mostly insecure, right? And being alone is kinda good, because, yeah, it will help you ship faster and better.

A lot of people are like, “Okay, I’m working on a startup, “but I can’t really tell you because we’re “in stealth mode, and I won’t share “that idea ’cause otherwise, somebody steals it,” which is more bullshit. Nobody’s gonna steal your idea. It’s all about execution. Everybody has the same ideas anyway. The execution makes it original and unique, so, actually, sharing your idea is good ’cause you can talk to people, you can talk to maybe potential customers already before you actually build something, so be happy with sharing your idea.

So, if you have an idea, you finally got it, you wanna build it, so how do you start building it?

Well, a lot of people, they need to learn to code and they need to go to coding bootcamps or code academies or whatever, and I would definitely not recommend that, ’cause it’s gonna take months or years, and I don’t really think that works. I think it’s a little bit of a scam.

I think you should learn to code yourself.

I think you should just open Google and write how to make a website. And that’s how I learned it. That’s how most successful people around me learned it, and the thing is, the biggest thing in coding and in business you can learn, is learning how to learn and learning how to figure things out for yourself. That’s very practical knowledge, and that’s super, super important in entrepreneurship, just practically knowing how to do things, and not calling somebody, like, “Hey, how do I do this?” or not finding a book or something about it. Just do it yourself. Why not? All the information is now on the internet.

It’s on YouTube, it’s on Stack Overflow, it’s on Google, so you can easily find for yourself. And that’s, again, it’s the most important skill you can have. Learn to learn.

If you really are stubborn and you’re just like, no, Pieter, I’m not gonna learn to code, use Typeform. Typeform.com is a site where you can make a form, and you can even accept payments, and you don’t need to do any coding, and you can actually build a little mini-startup just with a form.

Like here, you can enter your credit card, and then you can actually pay. You can accept payments with Stripe and stuff.

Another cool app is called Carrd. It’s C-A-R-R-D.co. It’s built by my friend AJ, and it’s super amazing. It lets people without code build really advanced websites. I built this yesterday.

It’s a luggage pickup service, and I just build a whole landing page out of nothing, and then if people schedule a pickup, it gets sent to Zapier. It’s API website, and the luggage gets picked up. Not really, but I could do it if I want.

Me too, I started with a spreadsheet. Normally, this was a spreadsheet. I wasn’t a good coder. I could make WordPress themes for a little bit, but I wasn’t really good at it, so I learned just in time with Google. I learned something when I needed to learn it. When the problem happened, I would go on Google and just find it and figure it out, and because the only other option of not learning it was my entire startup failing, it’s a very nice constraint to, you really need to learn how to make the button align with the logo because everybody thinks it’s ugly. And that’s a good reason to go learn.

Also, I see a lot of people, they build startups for years or months. Like, “Yeah, I’ve been working on this thing for six months. “We have no customers, “and the design is perfect and beautiful.” That just doesn’t work. I would say, max one month for a prototype. It has to be a good prototype, though, but don’t spend too much time working on something because you need to validate with launching. That’s very important.

Okay, launching, very important. So you built some things, and now you wanna actually get users, and I think this is the most important step in any startup because it validates if the product is actually useful or not, and can be monetized and stuff.

Platforms for launching startups. Product Hunt, of course, one of the biggest. It’ll get you about 10,000 users, 10,000 visits. I think about 10% maybe convert or something or less. Tips for Product Hunt, make sure just the whole item looks really good. Add some animated .gif. Make a really good slogan. Ask your friends and stuff about the slogan for your startup. A lot of the startup slogans are just super obtruse, and I don’t know what they actually mean. So, make it very simple. Very important for Product Hunt. Product Hunt works in San Francisco time, so the time’s on Pacific Standard Time, which means that you might have to stay up until midnight San Francisco time, and then you need to submit your product. Because otherwise, if you submit at like, I don’t know, Bali time 4 p.m., it might be 1 p.m. San Francisco or something, anyway, a little bit too late to compete with other startups on Product Hunt for that day, and you wanna be high on the ranking. It’s very important. Also, jump on the comments when you’re on Product Hunt. You know, talk with people. Don’t be marketing, just be honest and say, if this bugs or whatever, fix them immediately and be friendly. Be a human. It’s very important.

Hacker News is another one. Hacker News is very critical. They can destroy your whole startup with their comments. Here it’s even more important. Don’t do marketing stuff. Be as frank and honest and personal as you can. If you build a food delivery app, whatever, say, show HN, “I built a food delivery app.” And then say something unique or whatever. Make it original, but make it friendly. No spamming. Don’t use voting rings and stuff. No bolts, all that bullshit. It’s only gonna go down, you know? They’ll see it.

Reddit is very, very gigantic. It’s about 100 times big than the sites before, Hacker News and Product Hunt. Reddit is the mainstream launching platform right now, I think it’s becoming very quickly. Reddit, again, also, they don’t like spam. They don’t like marketing. They will remove your listing very quickly. Important think about Reddit is you wanna submit to subreddits, so if you doing an app for horse management, you might wanna go in /r/horse, and you wanna be very friendly. You wanna say, “Hey guys, I made this app about horses. “How to manage them. “Would you give feedback on it?” And then if it gets upvoted, people will like it, it will actually, that’s a very good chance to go to the front page. I did it twice. I did it with Nomad List. I did it with Hoodmaps. The problem is, when you go to the front page, when you get about page two or three, your server will die because it can’t handle traffic. It’s like literally thousands of people in the same second, so you wanna make sure that your site stays up so, technical term, but make it static. Make it in XHTML instead of PHP or JS. Just make it static so it actually runs. Load test it before, ’cause a lot of people just don’t get onto the front page when they might have if their server stayed up. And this, again, hundreds of thousands of users you’ll get from this, 400,000, maybe, half a million, it’s crazy.

Then the “Horse Forum”, it’s very important. (laughing)

You’re like, “What the fuck is this slide doing here?” No, it’s very important.

So, if you make for example a horse management app, you wanna also go in your niche. So you wanna find websites specifically for your niche. In this case, horses, and you submit it there. Same story, make it personal. This is actually users that might convert the highest, because it’s very relevant to them. They have horse stables or whatever, and they need your app, so publish here.

Bodybuilding, another one, if you do a bodybuilding app.

And yeah, this is the subreddit for motorcycles if you make a motorcycle app, you get the point.

Questions about launching?

Audience: “I was just gonna ask, do you have any procedure that you go through when you do a new startup, or you just jump right into it? Like, are you doing a competitor analysis or?”

Yeah, good question. I sometimes do competitive analysis. Like I check if the app already exists, but the thing is, the fact that an app already exists doesn’t mean you can’t add to the market, right? So many times, when an app doesn’t exist, is you wanna build, it means there is no market for it. So usually, there is an app that already exists, but it’s shit, and it doesn’t have a lot of users, and it’s just broken and ugly, whatever, so you can just make a better one. That’s what I did a lot of times. There’s a lot of competitors of mine who were just, their site was just unusable, but they were big sites before, but yeah, so it’s easy to, not even take them over, but just like, yeah you’ll get more traffic, but yeah, I will usually dive right into it, and I’m a little bit arrogant and naive, so I’m like, oh, I can do this better. Fuck this, I’ll just do it, and sometimes, usually it doesn’t work out. (laughing)

But mostly, one out of 10 times it does, and then you made something that’s better. So being a little bit arrogant about it works, I think.

Audience: “I mean like, do you have a checklist, I guess, of a lot of things that you would go through?”

Yeah, so I’ll try and launch, so he asked, do I have checklist? Things I go through during launch? I will try and do Product Hunt, Reddit, Hacker News, all those websites on the same day, ’cause you kinda want a constant traffic, ’cause then it’s like, oh my God, this whole day’s about your startup and everybody’s talking about it, and it has this giant effect, like exponential, but the checklist is pretty much, yeah, it’s kinda Tweet about it, share it on Facebook, then submit it. Yeah. Just, it’s pretty obvious, I think, yeah. Sure.

So, when you’ve launched, of course you need to check your analytics, like if it actually worked. Usually you see a drop off in traffic. You see a spike of traffic when it launches, then it goes down and down and down, which is very normal. That doesn’t mean your site is not validated, but if and when, in a week, or month, literally everybody’s gone, then you might have to conclude this wasn’t a successful product. If it does still have traction, you wanna try and grow that traction.

Now, what I really hate these days (laughing) and it’s also of events in Dojo, is there’s a lot of talk about non-organic growth, and I think that just doesn’t work. There’s a lot of talk about Instagram bots. I tried them too, last week. Didn’t work. There’s a Twitter follow/unfollow bots, spamming and buying and selling e-mail lists, all this fucking dodgy, shady gray, or black hat stuff, and I hate it so much that every time I’ll be in some heavy discussion at some coffee shop with somebody. What you’re doing is not good. Don’t do it. But, I don’t wanna be a moral knight.

My point is this is how non-organic growth looks. It’s a very ugly cow. It’s not good.

And look how beautiful the next cow looks. Look, aww. 🙂

This is organic growth, which means people actually really like your website. They’re not there because of bots, or ads as well. Ads are ethical, but I don’t like ads. Like who of us has ad-blockers? See? So why do we have ad-blockers but we’re still buying ads at Facebook and Google? It’s kinda morally ridiculous. I don’t believe that ads will be the future.

Ads, they give you, let’s say they give you a spike of 10,000 users and signups, but when you stop buying these ads, usually it slowly just fades out. And I see it a lot with venture capital-based startups, and I think venture capital-based startups are a lot like this, ’cause it’s all fake growth. It’s all fake growth and paid traffic, and I don’t really think it works.

It stops working when the money stops, right?

Then it usually just fall offs.

And then you didn’t really actually build something useful.

Organic growth is much cooler, because it’s much more hard to get, but when you get it, it means you validated the product you built, so you actually have people using it, and actually people loving it. And if you don’t get traffic, it means your product’s just not good enough.

So organic growth is the ultimate test of, is my product good or not? Should I tweak it, should I build another product, a new thing, whatever, to have organic. And if you have all this paid traffic in there, okay, it’s kinda hard to see if people actually really like your product, or if it’s just paid traffic.

Very important, what I do, to kinda get this growing. I wanna build with my users. So every site or every app I have has this little feedback box, and it just sounds like, “Hey do you have feedback? “Tell me. “Be nice.” Cause people can be really angry in this feedback box, so I had to ask, be nice, and now they’re really nice to me, so it actually worked. (laughing) If this box, like this, the images are not loading, you can write, “Hey your images are broken.” But also, there’s a lot of feature requests. Every week, I’ll add a feature, or I’ll change a feature somebody just says is wrong. This week, I think I moved the search box on Nomad List to the right because somebody said it looked ugly, so, yeah, and then they’re happy and they’re involved in the process, so building. I think it’s called co-creating. Building with users is amazing, because they become, what is it called? Ambassadors. Wow, you’re British. Ambassadors of your products, so they will tell, “Hey, I sent Pieter this message “about the search box, and he actually changed it. “I love it. “You should use Nomad List, too.” So, it’s very positive effect you have, and users are really smart. You shouldn’t always listen to everything they say, but you should definitely consider it, what they’re saying.

A more beautiful feedback box, of course, Intercom, used by most startups. This works as well. It works very well. It’s paid, though, so a little annoying.

Very important to add on your website or app is some kinda thing so you can re-engage users later. So you launch with 10,000 users on Hacker News or Product Hunt, but then after that day, those 10,000 people are gone. So how do you contact them again? So you wanna re-engage. So, capture their email with, I don’t know, somewhere like this, send me a message when you have special food discounts in my area, or whatever. What I did with Remote OK was, the remote jobs website, I would have daily job alerts that people can subscribe to. Nomad List has a newsletter, so that kinda stuff. So you can email people later. Don’t spam people, you know? Again, just be sparing using these email addresses, ’cause you guys know how annoying it is to have annoying emails flooding your inbox.

Very important and very trendy, and if you do this, you will be so far ahead of everybody else. Build your startup in public. So this guy is a friend of mine, kinda friend, acquaintance, not really acquaintance. Okay okay, we hardly know each other. We once tweeted .(laughing)

It’s Drew Wilson, he’s really cool, and he built Plasso, this payment startup, but he build a lot of it in public, and he just live streams. So he’s just sitting there. It’s a little boring, but also kinda fun, because he plays music and stuff, and you can see his code, so you can see the product being built right there in front of you, and that’s super cool. And the cool thing is, nobody else is doing that. I did it with Hoodmaps. I hardly know anybody who’s doing it, and it gives you so much attention and press, so definitely try this. Yeah, takes guts, but also streaming, it makes you very productive. 100 people were watching me, and I never coded as fast, ’cause I was just so nervous and stuff, so it works.

Another one to keep growing is to keep launching, so don’t launch your startup once. Launch a feature as well, and launch to the press again, and just keep doing it every two or three months. You wanna keep getting into the press and keep getting into these websites. I don’t think you can launch it in Product Hunt every two months, but you can launch every year. Every big version number you have, or every change you do, you can launch again, and that’s very important, ’cause you wanna stay in people’s minds.

You aren’t running a charity, you’re running a business. If people won’t give you money for your product, you have an existential crisis on your hands, and that’s very important. And I see so many startups just don’t make money, and it’s like, how do you pay your rent? Just, I don’t know. And (laughing) and that’s just not the way to do it. It’s very important to make money, because you need to pay your bills, and I would say within three months, I would say within two months, maybe, get the first dollar in. Maybe even during launch day, get the dollars running, ’cause otherwise, again, you didn’t validate. You made a nice startup, but it’s not making money, so it’s not really validated as a product, and that’s a big problem. Focus on money, and focusing money is very difficult for us. I’m Dutch, so especially for Dutch people, they’re traders historically, but they’re very weird about money. You’re not really allowed to make money.

This is a typical, I wrote it myself, but this typical example email of the stuff I would get when I started charging money.

But really, this is a typical email I get. It’s absolutely ridiculous. They think you’re a big company, but you’re just you and your laptop and you’re trying to just pay your bills and buy a coffee, and this is so, this happens so much, especially in Reddit. Like people really hate when you charge money for something, but you should charge money for something, and just ignore these people. And there’s always a free alternative of your app that’s worse, but yeah, you’re not competing with them. You’re competing in the premium with actually charging money.

A very good example of how to charge and validate at the same time is Buffer, and they pioneered this whole thing. They didn’t even launch a product yet, but they just put up a landing page with a plans and pricing button, and if you clicked it, this is social media scheduling as well, you would get an email box, and you could sign to get updated if the app actually launched. And this was amazing, ’cause this is literally just validating how many people will click on this? How many people add their email? Okay, so now we have a list of 10,000 people that might actually wanna pay for it, because they clicked pricing, so they actually wanna maybe pay for it. I did this idea even worse, or even bigger. I made a whole payment button with a fake Stripe box where you enter your credit cards for a feature you wanna use, and then after paying, they wouldn’t be actually be paying. I said, you didn’t actually pay. This was a fake Stripe payment box, but now I know that you would pay if I built the actual feature. But I didn’t actually build the feature yet. So, that’s again, validating a feature before you build it, if actually people pay for it.

Put buy buttons on everything. This is the most important slide of my presentation. You wanna check what people pay for in your product, so every feature, put a pay wall on it to see what happens, and then start, if nobody pays for it, make it free, but yeah, limit your app as well. See what people pay for again. Super important.

A few business models here that you can apply. A lot of websites you know and startups, they don’t actually make money off their main product. They make money off their by-line product, kind of, their main product.

So this is Nomad List. This website doesn’t make any money. This is all free data. You can filter cities in the whole world. Nobody pays money for this.

But there’s also like a social network for travelers, which is also Nomad List, which 7,000 people pay money for.

Dribble. You guys, a lot of designers here know Dribble? A design website. It’s free to post your designs on Dribble, and nobody pays money for this, but there’s a job site that business people business pay for to post jobs, and they pay a lot for it. I think $299 for 30 days, yeah.

So you can have your main site to be free, like freemium, and then have side things that you charge money for.

Also, sponsorships are good. When I launched Nomad List, I got an email within the first day by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic and WordPress.com, who had liked the website, and he said, “Can we sponsor it?” And I was like, “Sure, I’ll add a little banner,” and then automatic, WordPress are hiring, and he paid me a few thousand dollars a month for it, and it still pays, which is very very helpful and nice.

It’s just, it’s very hard to get sponsorships. Going outbound, like emailing companies for it is very hard. You wanna be so cool as a product, maybe, and be lucky to, a cool company wants to help you and provide you, so you can keep developing on the website.

And this money from Automattic helped a lot, because in the beginning, I wasn’t making a lot of money, so it has helped me continue developing the website.

A more cool modern model that you might now is Patreon where you just simply ask your users to pay money, not even for a specific feature, but just for supporting you as a maker, and I just saw this week on Twitter, a guy called Sindre Sorhus, who does a lot of open source development, he just asked like, “Hey, do you wanna give me money “for my open source work the last few years? “I’ve been working for free.” And I think he got a few thousand dollars.

This is my friend Abroad in Japan, a Japanese YouTuber, a British guy in Japan, and he makes $3,000 a month from 800 people paying him a few dollars a month, and it’s actually a sustainable model to make money these days, and why not?

Overcast, a podcast app for iOS, does the same thing. They don’t have premium features anymore. They just have a patron part where you can literally just say, “Okay, I’ll pay $12 ’cause I love the app.” And you don’t even get anything. You just, you’re a supporter, and I think 400 people a day, or something, they’re patrons, so it’s a lot of money.

Very important about monetization. You know, I see a lot of people, I did the same thing. I see a lot of people charge $50 once to unlock a feature or use your product, but it’s not recurring revenue, and recurring revenue is quite important, because, as you can see in this chart, if you have a single payment of $75 and the company, you can’t see it, but it says sales growth by 25% a year, which is kinda okay growth, you know, year one, you make $75,000 on both. In year five, when you have a single payment by a user, you make $183,000, and with a subscription, you make almost $2,000,000 a year, because subscriptions keep going, and they keep growing with more and more subscriptions, so it’s exponential kinda growth, and it’s just a lot of money. And of course, you’ll have churn, too. You’ll have people canceling your subscriptions, but still, in the end, it’s kinda positive. Only thing is, subscriptions are annoying for users. I hate getting another bill of some service I signed up a few years ago, like “fuck, I was still paying for that. I don’t even use it!” That might be annoying.

So if you have this whole business running now, you make money, and you kinda, you kinda get sick of the business. Like, I get sick of startups after one or two years or whatever. I like doing new stuff. I hate doing the same shit all over, over and over again. So you can get robots to work for you. You can hire people, but humans are difficult. Robots are much easier and more efficient, I think. So automating.

So this is my server right now. I made a screenshot a few hours ago. In the top, you can see, it’s blocked, but it’s 187 robots are running now. That’s parallel processes, and they’re doing something for my site. They’re getting the weather for the cities on Nomad List. They’re getting job posts for Remote OK. They’re processing refunds for users. Both sites are 100% automated, and these robots keep everything running.

This is my scheduled cron jobs, which means, it’s tech lingo for scheduled programs, these robots. All these things are things that I need to do hourly or daily or weekly. This is my whole business, is all these lines. This is all the robots running everything, and for me, it’s really cool. It just looks really cool that I have this server somewhere in San Francisco, and it just does all this stuff. And I have anywhere from 180 to 700 robots running, working for me 24/7, and they can scale up and scale down whenever they want. When they need more people, they just hire more people. Within seconds, more robots. It’s just, the magnitude of this is like, it’s hard to explain, but it’s, it means that you can run entire businesses now with robots, with scripts doing stuff for you, and this means that you can hire people, but then you can’t really fire them, ’cause it’s hard with labor laws. Humans get sick, all this stuff. And I know it sucks, but this is the reality. Robots are, to be honest, just more efficient at a lot of stuff.

This, for example, is an app that monitors robots. So it’s a robot monitoring a robot!

So what’s the role for the human then, left in his little black box of a business you built? Well, I think it’s very important to have one human hired full time to manage all these robots when you’ve automated everything, so they can check if your server’s down or not. Otherwise, you’re still 24/7 working on this business. I’ve woken up so many times, it’s 4 a.m., just check my website, and it’s down, and then I have to do all this stuff, and then I’m awake for three hours ’cause the server crashed. You wanna have a guy or girl or whatever on there, on standby. Get alerts when a server’s down and when the robots are not doing their work.

Yeah, exit is very important. I’ve never done it: selling your business. I’ve got proposals to sell my business, but I’m not happy yet with the price. Very important to just finally get on with it and start living I guess.

The price of an exit is usually something like this. So, let’s say you have 25% growth. You have $100,000. Usually you can ask $500,000. If you have higher growth, you can ask even a million dollars for $100,000 a year business. Yeah, this is very important. So that’s why you see all these startups. They think about their growth rates so much, ’cause they want the growth rate for the selling price. It’s very important.

Also, there’s a lot of psychological things with selling, like if you wanna sell your company, maybe. You know, your company’s your baby. Like, Nomad List is my baby. If I sell, maybe I get depressed, so think about that stuff.

See, that’s the whole loop. So you have an idea. You solve your own problem. You build it. Then you launch it. You grow it organically, very important. That’s my opinion. Monetize it, automate it, exit. And then you do it again. And this is like a little ecosystem and pattern I found after a few years.

Thanks for listening! ^_^

There’s a 25-minute Q&A available on YouTube from here on.

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:

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2022
18 Sep
This House Does Not Exist
2022
14 Jul
Sam Parr + Shaan Puri asked me about bootstrapping, open startups and lifestyle inflation (My First Million Podcast)
2022
16 May
Thinking and doing for yourself (Life Done Differently Podcast)
2022
10 May
Relocation of remote workers (Building Remotely Podcast)
2022
26 Jan
Money, happiness and productivity as a solo founder (Indiehackers Podcast)
2022
20 Jan
Bootstrapping, moving to Portugal and setting up Rebase (Wannabe Entrepreneur Podcast)
2021
25 Mar
Why I'm unreachable and maybe you should be too
2021
25 Mar
The next frontier after remote work is async
2021
19 Mar
List of all my projects ever
2021
08 Mar
Why coliving economics still don't make sense
2021
14 Feb
Inflation Chart: the stock market adjusted for the US-dollar money supply
2021
10 Jan
I did a live 4+ hour AMA on Twitch w/ @roxkstar74
2020
20 Dec
No one should ever work
2020
10 Dec
Normalization of non-deviance
2020
05 Dec
Copywriting for entrepreneurs: explain your product how you'd explain it to a friend
2020
30 Nov
Entrepreneurs are the heroes, not the villains
2020
12 Nov
The future of remote work: how the greatest human migration in history will happen in the next ten years
2020
05 Nov
Will millions of remote workers become location independent in 2021?
2020
11 Apr
5 years in startups with Abadesi
2020
11 Jan
Twitter giveaways can be hacked to win every time
2019
16 Oct
Lorn - The Slow Blade ✕ Hong Kong
2019
28 Sep
Most decaf coffee is made from paint stripper
2019
12 Sep
The odds of getting a remote job are less than 1% (because everyone wants one)
2019
08 Sep
In the future writing actual code will be like using a pro DSLR camera, and no code will be like using a smartphone camera
2019
29 Aug
Instead of hiring people, do things yourself to stay relevant
2019
28 Aug
Nobody cares about you after you're dead and the universe destroys itself
2019
28 Aug
The only real validation is people paying for your product
2019
05 Aug
Monitoring Bali's undersea internet cable
2019
29 Jul
Nomad List turns 5
2018
29 Jan
I'm Product Hunt's Maker of the Year again!
2018
28 Jan
Why Korean Jimjilbangs and Japanese Onsens are great
2018
24 Jan
Turning side projects into profitable startups
2018
03 Jan
What I learnt from 100 days of shipping
2017
28 Dec
As decentralized as cryptocurrency is: so will be the people working on it
2017
22 Oct
How to 3d scan any object with just your phone's camera
2017
09 Aug
In a world of outrage, mute words
2017
03 Aug
How to pack for world travel with just a carry-on bag
2017
26 Jul
Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit
2017
24 Jul
Facebook and Google are building their own cities: the inevitable future of private tech worker towns
2017
21 Jul
The TL;DR MBA
2017
12 Jul
We did it! Namecheap has introduced 2FA
2017
08 Jun
It's about time for a digital work permit for remote workers
2017
23 May
Using Uptime Robot to build unit tests for the web
2017
08 May
Namecheap still doesn't support 2FA in 2017 (update: they do now!)
2017
03 May
Taipei is boring, and maybe that's not such a bad thing
2017
16 Apr
What we can learn from Stormzy about transparency
2017
17 Feb
The ICANN mafia has taken my site hostage for 2 days now
2017
10 Feb
Most coworking spaces don't make money; here's how they can adapt to survive the future
2017
11 Jan
A society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play
2017
07 Jan
Nomad List Founder
2016
12 Dec
Make your own Olark feedback form without Olark
2016
29 Oct
How to fix flying
2016
19 Oct
Robots make mistakes too: How to log your server with push notifications straight to your phone
2016
17 Oct
Hong Kong Express - 上海 (Shanghai)
2016
17 Oct
Choosing entrepreneurship over a corporate career
2016
13 Oct
"I can't buy happiness anymore. I've bought everything that I ever wanted. There's not really anything I want anymore."
2016
11 Oct
From web dev to VR: How to get started with VR development
2016
05 Oct
What I would do if I was 18 now
2016
22 Sep
Bootstrapping Side Projects into Profitable Startups
2016
27 Aug
Kids
2016
13 Aug
How I cured my anxiety (mostly)
2016
26 Jul
We have an epidemic of bad posture
2016
17 Jul
Fixing "Inf and NaN cannot be JSON encoded" in PHP the easy way
2016
26 Jun
My third time in a float tank and practicing visualizing the future
2016
15 Jun
How to add shareable pictures to your website with some PhantomJS magic
2016
29 May
My chatbot gets catcalled
2016
19 May
From web dev to 3d: Learning 3d modeling in a month
2016
09 Mar
My second time in a sensory deprivation chamber
2016
04 Mar
Day 30 of Learning 3d 🎮 Cloning objects 👾👾👾
2016
02 Mar
Day 29 of Learning 3d 🎮 Glass, reflectives, HD, coloring and more details
2016
29 Feb
Day 27 of Learning 3d 🎮 Details, details, DETAILS!
2016
25 Feb
Day 23 of Learning 3d 🎮 Filling up the street and adding shadows
2016
24 Feb
Day 22 of Learning 3d 🎮 Added rain, blinking lights, sound, textured menu sign and a VR web app
2016
23 Feb
Day 21 of Learning 3d 🎮 High res textures, physical rendering and ambient occlusion
2016
22 Feb
Day 20 of Learning 3d 🎮 Objects and camera perspectives 🙆
2016
19 Feb
My first time floating in a sensory deprivation tank ☺️
2016
12 Feb
Day 10 of Learning 3d 🎮 Making complex objects by combining shapes 🙆
2016
06 Feb
Day 4 of Learning 3d: @shoinwolfe visits the actual street I'm modeling 🏮😎🏮
2016
03 Feb
Day 1 of Learning 3d 🎮 I learnt how to make shapes, move, rotate and scale them + how to texturize, and add colored lights 💆
2016
02 Feb
I'm Learning 3d 🎮
2016
27 Jan
The things I have to do to read an email sent to me by my government
2016
12 Jan
How to use your iPhone as a better Apple TV alternative (with VPN)
2015
23 Dec
Here's a crazy idea: automatically pause recurring subscription of users when you detect they aren't actually using your app
2015
17 Dec
Stop calling night owls lazy, we're not
2015
16 Dec
We are the heroes of our own stories
2015
25 Oct
There will be 1 billion digital nomads by 2035
2015
21 Oct
Tobias van Schneider interviewed me about everything
2015
18 Oct
Why doesn't Twitter just asks its users to pay?
2015
17 Oct
Punk died the moment we learnt that the world WAS in fact getting better, not worse
2015
15 Oct
Stop being everyone's friend
2015
14 Oct
Vaporwave is the only music that fits the feeling futuristic Asian mega cities give me
2015
09 Sep
We live in a world built by dead people
2015
01 Sep
Why global roaming data solutions don't make any sense
2015
26 Aug
How to export your Slack's entire archive as HTML message logs
2015
24 Aug
How to play GTA V on your MacBook (and any other PC game)
2015
14 May
I uploaded 4 terabyte over Korea's 4G, and paid $48
2015
08 May
How I sped up Nomad List by 31% with SPDY, CloudFront and PageSpeed
2015
04 May
My weird code commenting style based on HTML tags
2015
01 May
Now is probably the time to make HTTPS the default on all your sites and apps
2015
17 Apr
Do the economics of remote work retreats make any sense?
2015
17 Apr
Don't grow up
2015
06 Apr
Calling people "expat" or "nomad" is just as irrelevant as calling internet users "netizens"
2015
02 Apr
How I built Remote | OK and launched it to #1 on Product Hunt
2015
29 Mar
Our society is not in line with our natural reward systems, and alcohol and drug abuse proves it
2015
28 Mar
Makers have become the invisible hand
2015
07 Mar
How technology is shaping our future: billions of self-employed makers and a few mega corporations
2015
22 Jan
We are the orcas at Sea World
2014
31 Dec
Love, Anxiety and Startups: My Year in 50 Tweets
2014
15 Dec
How to backup your Linode or Digital Ocean VPS to Amazon S3
2014
01 Dec
The total chaos that the dawn of the 21st century has become
2014
23 Nov
How I hacked Slack into a community platform with Typeform
2014
05 Nov
How to successfully build a community around your startup
2014
27 Oct
The ideal place to start a startup is not necessarily in Silicon Valley
2014
23 Oct
"If I had this, I would be happy"
2014
14 Oct
This is what happens when FlightFox copies your entire site without attribution
2014
02 Oct
GIFbook, the first animated GIF flipbook
2014
01 Oct
On Thailand's immigration police targeting digital nomads
2014
13 Sep
Why traveling makes you feel lost
2014
02 Sep
How I build my minimum viable products
2014
31 Aug
How I built Nomad Jobs, a remote job board for 100% distributed startups
2014
27 Aug
Danism & Rae - Sirens
2014
16 Aug
How I got my startup to #1 on both Product Hunt and Hacker News by accident
2014
15 Aug
Why does Generation Y feel so lost? And what's the cure?
2014
23 Jul
Bali is the magical voodoo spirit island of Asia
2014
05 Jul
Ideals, fears and the script of life
2014
22 Jun
How to access anyone's Telegram messages without unlocking their phone
2014
14 Jun
The achiever in crisis
2014
12 Jun
How I did not sell my startup today
2014
07 Jun
The free fall that is coming home after traveling the world
2014
02 Jun
Never dismiss your ideals as post-adolescent fantasy
2014
31 May
My 3rd startup: Tubelytics, the real-time dashboard for YouTube publishers
2014
29 May
How Go Fucking Do It raised $30,000+ in pledges in less than a month
2014
24 May
We have an ideologically broken and personally unfulfilling society
2014
24 May
On self-funding startups
2014
22 May
Run through ideas quickly
2014
11 May
If you can't express yourself by email, you're not worthy of anyone's time
2014
19 Apr
My 2nd startup: Go Fucking Do It, set a goal + deadline and if you fail, you pay
2014
18 Apr
Over 2,000 people played their inbox with Play My Inbox
2014
13 Apr
Celebrating my birthday North Korean style
2014
02 Apr
How Automation Left Us Feeling Empty
2014
09 Mar
Play My Inbox, collect music from your inbox and playlist them
2014
01 Mar
I'm Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months
2014
14 Feb
How to protect your backups from solar flares with a faraday cage
2014
06 Feb
Linkoban - Oh Oh
2014
05 Feb
Nationality is an accident of birth
2014
18 Jan
How I Went From 100 To 0 Things (Or How I Was Robbed of All My Stuff)
2014
04 Jan
All Watched Over by Machines of Living Grace
2013
31 Dec
Celebrating NYE 2014 in Hong Kong
2013
30 Dec
How I ended up in Hong Kong (or my adventures in the New York of the East)
2013
28 Nov
It's practically impossible for regular people to buy Bitcoin
2013
27 Nov
2014 is the year techstep drum and bass makes its comeback
2013
25 Nov
Rinse FM, here's your podcast feed we've always wanted
2013
23 Nov
How I travel the world with just a carry-on bag
2013
23 Nov
How I spent the night with Singapore's migrant workers
2013
22 Nov
Why I want to live in Singapore
2013
21 Nov
How I predict Bitcoin's price by tracking Twitter mentions
2013
04 Nov
James Blake & Chance The Rapper - Life Round Here
2013
03 Nov
Sasha Keable - Careless Over You
2013
30 Oct
My not so great time in Vietnam
2013
27 Oct
Wiley - And Again
2013
27 Oct
The myth of a globalized world
2013
19 Oct
Remote working is the future
2013
19 Oct
What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
2013
14 Oct
Steve Summers - New Surroundings
2013
12 Oct
What I learnt from bootstrapping my startup from Thailand in six months
2013
11 Oct
Palms Trax - Equation
2013
11 Oct
Cash means controlling your own destiny
2013
24 Sep
You're just a piece of a heartless shitty machine that makes money
2013
16 Sep
Automation Will Free Us From the Endless Consumption/Production Cycle We're In
2013
16 Sep
National Borders Have Become Irrelevant
2013
04 Sep
A Culture of Distraction is Not The Problem
2013
20 Aug
Governments are always ready to grab the greatest degree of power that the people will give them
2013
17 Aug
You constantly need to be painting or it looks like total crap
2013
09 Aug
Oversight: Thank You For Volunteering, Citizen
2013
07 Aug
Stripe launches beta in the Netherlands
2013
22 Jul
Google+ spamming people every 2 weeks to put up a profile photo
2013
20 Jul
The 100 Thing Challenge – From 200 to 20 things in 3 months
2013
17 Jul
Living in a Hotel
2013
16 Jul
The Story of my Visa Run to Tachileik in Myanmar
2013
16 Jul
This is what "acting professionally" results in
2013
08 Jul
Lockah - Sly Winking Usury
2013
30 Jun
Stand-up comedians on creativity
2013
24 Jun
With jobs gone, will robot owners pay people's income?
2013
24 Jun
Money as an enslavement method
2013
19 Jun
Make money where prices are high, spend it where prices are low. Does income arbitrage work?
2013
16 Jun
Finding an apartment in Chiang Mai
2013
13 Jun
Add HTTPS to NGINX for free and help make the world more secure
2013
11 Jun
Co-Working Spaces in Chiang Mai: PunSpace
2013
10 Jun
Moving to Chiang Mai
2013
04 Jun
My Bad Day At The Co-Working Space
2013
03 Jun
If it's in the news, don't worry about it
2013
29 May
The 24-Hour Coffee Place in Bangkok: Too Fast To Sleep
2013
28 May
Nosaj Thing x Chance the Rapper - Paranoia
2013
23 May
"There simply are no other fields in which I can spend $100 tomorrow and set up a new business..."
2013
21 May
"Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing..."
2013
17 May
Visiting Koh Samui, the island of paradise
2013
05 May
From dive bar to roof-top bar to roof-top pool in Bangkok
2013
02 May
"To awaken quite alone in a strange town..."
2013
01 May
Co-working spaces in Bangkok: Launchpad
2013
24 Apr
The 100 Thing Challenge
2013
24 Apr
"Do whatever you're drawn to"
2013
23 Apr
Co-working spaces in Bangkok: Hubba
2013
22 Apr
Reset your life
2013
09 Mar
OSX Terminal Tricks
2013
09 Mar
OSX for Windows users
2013
09 Mar
How I switched from PC to Mac in less than 7 days
2013
21 Feb
Black Mirror is the best TV series I have seen in years
2013
20 Feb
Why overnight success is a myth
2013
20 Feb
Constraints make people more creative
2013
13 Feb
Kitty Pryde & Riff Raff - Orion's Belt
2013
13 Feb
Dedicating our lives to what is essentially an organization to make money
2013
11 Feb
Watch The Pirate Bay: Away From the Keyboard
2013
16 Jan
My new music video for rap duo RASA
2013
14 Jan
What if money was no object in your life?
2013
03 Jan
Why attention to detail matters, even if no one notices the details
2013
03 Jan
In the 21st century, Maria Montessori shows to be more relevant than ever
2012
30 Dec
Unless the job itself is your dream, stay the fuck away from salaried jobs
2012
30 Nov
Success is One Big Hoax
2012
18 Oct
The death of the corporate drone
2012
13 Oct
The West's unemployment problem is permanent
2012
04 Oct
New Panda Mix Show branding and website
2012
29 Aug
Headhunterz - Power of Music
2012
21 Aug
Essendle interview on my music and my YouTube show
2012
07 Aug
The XX - Angels
2012
02 Aug
Spenzo - Ova
2012
02 Aug
Anna Lunoe & Diamond Lights - Stronger (Willy Joy Remix)
2012
10 Jul
Herve feat. Ronika - How Can I Live Without You (Make it Right) (Death Rose Cult Remix)
2012
09 Jul
Pheo - Nyquil
2012
05 Jul
I love minimalist living
2012
05 Jul
Why buying YouTube views is bad
2012
05 Jul
Citizen - Deep End
2012
03 Jul
D!RTY AUD!O intro
2012
01 Jul
Anybody can monetize their passion (now)
2012
28 Jun
Diplo - No Problem
2012
27 Jun
Skream - Thoughts of You
2012
21 Jun
TEED - Blood Pressure
2012
19 Jun
Today is the first day of the rest of your life
2012
17 Jun
Happiness maximization vs. profit maximization
2012
16 Jun
Music genres are dead
2012
15 Jun
Make a great product
2012
15 Jan
Rasa - Noem 't Wat Je Wilt
2011
23 Dec
Rasa - Hard & Soul
2011
15 Nov
Earth