Rabbit Hole #1: The Godfather of Indie Hacking
AKA That Guy Who Carries His Laptop in A Grocery Bag
That Name You Always Hear
You'd be hard-pressed to listen to a discussion about indie hacking and not hear the name "Pieter Levels" come up one way or another.
He's a one-man show raking in over $2 million per year with his portfolio of small bets and shares all the details about how he does it on Twitter.
With over 250,000 followers, a typical person would assume he could sell a to-do list app and make easy money.
Pieter himself however has dispelled such myths and shared that only 4 out of 70+ products have made a meaningful amount of money meaning he has about a 5% success rate.
The Journey
What makes Pieter so appealing is that he is not afraid to show you the behind-the-scenes of anything he's working on and shares his genuine opinion.
His Tweets are like a live feed of what he's up to and thinking about and there's not a day that goes by that he's not doing something interesting.
Pieter is most known for his blog post I'm Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months, a popular series in which he overcomes the problem of being unable to finish projects he starts and the fear of failure.
In about his 7th attempt he creates Nomad List, a site that facilitates digital nomads in choosing their next destination based on their preferences, which took off to being #1 on both Hacker News and Product Hunt.
The success of Nomad List is strongly tied to the inflection point of the rise of traveling remote workers due to the evolution of technology.
It currently brings in about $47,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) which has come down slightly from its peak popularity and from when he shifted his focus towards his AI products.
Minimalism
Pieter embodies minimalism in a lot of things that he does from carrying his laptop in a grocery bag to pushing straight to production with no commit message using a shortcut.
Most notably, you can recognise the minimalism in what he ships as he finds unique ways to ship the most minimally viable products.
For example, Nomad List started out as a Google spreadsheet which crowdfunded all the data points as he realised it would be too difficult to do manually.
Not only did the virality confirm there would be an interest for a product in this area, it led to useful columns being added to the sheet that he did not ask for.
He does not get caught up with learning the hottest frameworks or over-engineering a solution and in fact to this day he still uses PHP to create all of his products where possible.
Pieter has gone through many phases throughout his time creating on the internet - music writing/producing -> blogging -> working on 12 startups in 12 months -> writing a book -> selling AI products - but the one thing that has stayed the same and which makes him great is his consistency.
Extraordinary accomplishments come from doing ordinary things for extraordinary periods of time. - Alex Hormozi
What We Can Learn
Ship frequently and ship fast - be open to the serendipity of the internet
Consistency will take you far in anything you do
Minimalism is one of your advantages as an indie hacker over larger companies so be relentless in staying lean