Sam Parr + Shaan Puri asked me about bootstrapping, open startups and lifestyle inflation (My First Million Podcast)

Sam Parr has been trying to get me to come on his podcast for a year:

I was honored but reluctant because it's a video podcast so I wanted to get a good setup first, so it doesn't look like shit.

When I came back to Portugal, I got a Rode table mic arm and used my iPhone with Camo as a camera so I could finally go on.

It was really fun and different type of podcast to go on. Sam and Shaan are fast-paced and it's not just asking easy questions. Sam challenges you on your viewpoints which is good. Their reach is also very big, I call them the Joe Rogan of business podcasts. It's much more mainstream than Indie Hackers, and thus gets more viewers. The topics are less technical and more business/money-focused.

I like that they can appreciate my different style of doing business (and life), while not necessarily agreeing with it at the same time.

I hope you enjoy listening/watching/reading it!

Here's the video:

Spotify:

Here's a few clips:

Sam Parr (00:00:08):
Are you intimidated? He said he took a run before this because he was nervous.

Pieter Levels (00:00:13):
No, because I've been on a lot of podcasts, but they're usually small. It's like I see you guys as Joe Rogan for business, so it's like this one step above is Joe Rogan and then it's you guys. Yeah, I don't want to diss all the podcasts I've been on. They're amazing, but this is a level. It's good. I'm [inaudible 00:00:31]

Shaan Puri (00:00:31):
Big Pieter Levels. And you also don't know what Sam might ask you because Sam might just come out of left field and be like ...

Pieter Levels (00:00:37):
No, but that's the thing. I was thinking Sam is this not a regular interviewer. He asks some crazy shit.

Sam Parr (00:00:43):
Wait, me?

Shaan Puri (00:00:45):
Yeah, you.

Sam Parr (00:00:45):
First of all, I don't know if that's true. First of all, it's not just me. It's you, too, Shaan, that asks weird stuff, but also I don't think we ask that weird of questions. I think we ask the questions that everyone's thinking.

Pieter Levels (00:00:57):
No, that's true. I mean you're not yes men. There's yes men podcast where it's like fan thing. Obviously that's not you guys. You have real shit, real questions and I think it's more interesting as well.

Shaan Puri (00:01:09):
Sam, can we share the thing you were just telling us in Slack? Can I share that on here on the pod?

Sam Parr (00:01:13):
Yeah. Wait, which one?

Shaan Puri (00:01:15):
The Sam Parr strategy for networking. You can go to Harvard, you can go to Stanford, you're not going to learn this one. Sam has this habit where ... It's a very small little tweak, but it's just so Sam that it just is awesome. So if Sam wants to hang out with you, he'll text you just like a normal person would. And he doesn't need to even know you. He's just interested in you. Maybe it's a cold DM, maybe it's a text message, maybe he got your number from somebody else. He'll be like, "Hey, it's Sam. I'm in San Francisco." But instead of saying want to hang, Sam will just go, "I'm in San Francisco. Let's (beep)."

Pieter Levels (00:01:56):
He sent me some shit that I won't say out loud, but I think it works.

Shaan Puri (00:02:02):
So, Sam, what is this and why does it work so well?

Sam Parr (00:02:06):
It's like a phrase. People will be like I fuck with that guy. I fuck with Drake. I like Drake. It extends from that and I just say it and people, they reply. I don't know. This particular one night, it was a CEO of a multibillion dollar company who I'm friendly with. I just said, "What's up? I'm in your hood. Let's (beep)." And he goes, "Down. When?" So it worked out.

Shaan Puri (00:02:33):
It's amazing. So normally we try to play it cool, but we've actually been chasing you, Pieter. We've been talking about your projects. We've been being like, "Hey, we got to get this guy in the pod." Sam is a fan of you, for sure. I would say I am less of a fan than Sam, but that doesn't mean I like you, It's I'm more in the closet about it where Sam is very open. Sam's like this guy's amazing, this guy's an artist.

Pieter Levels (00:02:56):
Thanks, man.

Shaan Puri (00:02:56):
This guy's got great hair. And you do have great hair, so it's all true and we finally got you here. And it was hard, I think, because you don't schedule or something like that?

Pieter Levels (00:03:07):
I mean, it looks like being an ass if you do that, but, like you guys, I would get so many DMs. I mean, generally they're very low quality DMs. I want to collaborate, but I don't want to invest. People want something from you. I think it's being a hot girl in the club. People want something from you, but they don't want invest the time to actually get to know you or you feel like an object. And I don't like to feel like that and I want to spend more time with my friends in real life, with my girlfriend or something. I want to spend time in the gym, on my health and cooking food and that kind of stuff, go for walks. And I think because I've been doing this for 10 years, startups eight years, and now the money's going well, so I don't really need to do any calls anymore, any DMs.

Pieter Levels (00:03:56):
So I'm just trying to create a more chill life. And I'm not an asshole. It just means I don't have time to reply to everybody. So I close my DMs and then people got really angry on tweets. They're like, "You closed your DMs. Are you arrogant and stuff?" So I wrote a blog post explaining my day and my routine and what I do in a day. And that I don't really have time, if I do all the things I do now, to also DM everybody and reply to everybody and do calls and stuff. And that's pretty much the argument for it.

Shaan Puri (00:04:24):
So let's give the context, so let's explain who the heck you are. So your name is Pieter Levels. You're known on Twitter as levelsio, right?

Pieter Levels (00:04:33):
Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:04:34):
That's the right way to say it?

Pieter Levels (00:04:35):
Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:04:36):
I saw you a while back. I'm just going to say some interesting things about you. Now, you can correct me if I have any of these wrong. I believe you publish how much you make every year. And, in fact, it's in your Twitter bio in your location. There's a meter that's your road to $3 million a year and it says $2.7 million. So your meter is almost all the way filled up. You build a bunch of random, small projects usually around some things you like, or believe, or your lifestyle, which is a nomadic lifestyle. So I think you hop around or you don't have a home base.

Shaan Puri (00:05:11):
So you could be in Bali and then you could be in the Netherlands or you could be in a different place all the time. And you make these small websites or apps and it says in your bio that you have 13 million monthly active users. And I remember seeing you because you did a Nomad community, a Slack community really early on. Slack had just come out and I was like, "This guy's charging, I think it was, 10 bucks a month or something to get into this thing." I was like, "He's got 1,000 people here. Wow, this guy's making good money doing this, just by making a Slack group." And you just do a bunch of small experiments like that. That's what I know. Sam, what did I miss that's interesting?

Sam Parr (00:05:53):
Pieter, let me give the outsider's perspective that's a little more holistic. So basically there's two things that are interesting to you. The first one is your businesses, which actually are the lesser of the two interesting things. Yeah, you have seven different businesses ranging from Nomad List, which makes $2.1 million in the last 12 months. That's a job board. You have another job board called Remote OK that's making $115,000 a month. You have readMAKE, which looks like it's an ebook, something like that.

Pieter Levels (00:06:23):
Yeah, it's like and ebook. Yeah.

Sam Parr (00:06:25):
Yeah, 60K a month. Then you have got a bunch of really small ...

Shaan Puri (00:06:28):
Sam, you're seeing these numbers because he publishes them. Where do you publish these?

Sam Parr (00:06:31):
He publishes all of them on the URL. Go to his Twitter profile. And we'll let you talk, Pieter, in a second, but go to his Twitter profile and then click off and it's open revenue at the very bottom, but I'm reading off of our notes. And then you have a QR menu creator, then you have an inflation chart, which doesn't seem like it makes money, but tracks inflation. And then you have Rebase, which is a platform to help people become a citizen of Portugal, help him relocate to Portugal. So the first part is those businesses, like I said. You have those that are interesting. I would narrow it down to say you have a series of job boards for nomadic or remote work that are pretty profitable, but the second thing that's even more interesting is the way that you do these things.

Sam Parr (00:07:13):
So you do a few things that are interesting. The first thing is I think you're the only full-time employee and you use a team of contractors. And second of all, you have this weird personality that's very embedded in everything you do. So that's my big intro of what you do. Is that accurate?

Shaan Puri (00:07:30):
Yeah, I could see a website and I could know you built it without you having an about page, which is the ultimate compliment.

Pieter Levels (00:07:35):
Because it looks clunky, right? It looks a little ...

Shaan Puri (00:07:37):
No, it's got an attitude.

Pieter Levels (00:07:37):
No, but this is in a nice way. Yeah, because I'm not a designer. Yeah. No, I think it's an accurate description. I'm not very nomadic anymore. I'm slowly settling down, but I started very nomadically. I was moving around every month. I started in 2014. I started nomading and I went to all these places and I started building these apps, these little websites, little products to validate. I mean, I told the story so many times, but I was following Patrick McKenzie, patio11, on Hacker News. Famous Hacker News guy and now he works for Stripe. And he would share his revenue on his blog about all his little products he made. And it was a poignant reminder for barbershops so you got SMS just before your appointment so you don't forget it, that kind of stuff. And I was really inspired. Okay, this is not some big VC funded guy. This is just an indie guy who was just on his laptop building stuff.

Pieter Levels (00:08:32):
And I mixed that with the nomad thing, where building from your laptop, from your backpack, moving around. I think also getting inspired from different places because, if you move around, you ... I mean, I know Sam moves around a little bit as well. Your life becomes very unique because you meet different kinds of people. You're in different kinds of places. You see different kinds of products in shops. If you're in Asia, you see some futuristic shit you don't see in Europe and America. And all that stuff, it helps for inspiration for creating products in some indirect ways as well. So that's pretty much what I've been doing. I've been trying to be radically honest. I know this American guy who pushes the radical honesty movement, so I'm trying to do that in my personal life. I'm trying to do it on the internet.

Pieter Levels (00:09:15):
I'm not perfect, but I'm trying to be as honest and open as possible because I don't like this fake corporate stuff. And it's because I started business administration and I have a master's degree in it, so I know all the management consultancy bullshit. I've been there, done that. That's where my friends work. I know investment bankers and I hate that a lot of that world, where it's fake and not real. And I want to be very open and honest. And I think it's also a little bit of a European thing, not to slack off Americans. I love America, but in Europe people are a little more direct and a little bit more straightforward. And I think that comes across in the stuff I do a little bit.

Sam Parr (00:09:56):
So what's the total size of all your projects in terms of top line and bottom line revenue? And isn't it true that you're the only full-time person? And how many contractors are you using?

Pieter Levels (00:10:07):
Yeah, so I have one customer support contractor part-time, Isabelle, and she works for all my projects. And I have moderator for the Slack group because there's some drama in there. I've had some crazy drama in these Slack groups and communities. So you need to have a moderator, you need to have rules and you cannot just automate this moderation away. I tried that, but you need a real person there to check on messages and stuff. And then I have a dev ops guy. He's my best friend, Daniel, and he works a SLA, a service level agreement, where if the server goes down he gets a message. If I'm sleeping or something, he brings it back up, but the problem is it never goes down anymore. We haven't really had that for years. So he does security updates and stuff because I have a VPS. I don't use Amazon, I use a VPS on DigitalOcean and Linode and it keeps that stuff safe. So that's good.

Sam Parr (00:11:03):
And big's the business top line and bottom line?

Pieter Levels (00:11:06):
Sorry, how big's the business? So Remote OK is the job board. It's the biggest business, makes the most money. Normally this is starting to grow, though. It's past I think $100K a month, so almost a million dollar business. Remote OK is $1.6 million a year I think and Rebase's new business is immigration agency. So I want to help remote workers immigrate to countries that want to attract remote workers with beneficial tech stuff. Portugal is one of the first ones to do that. So those are the three businesses that really make money and the rest doesn't really make money a lot. The book makes I think $4K a month.

Shaan Puri (00:11:44):
But everything you do is part of one flywheel. So I've looked at your system and I've looked at a bunch of people because I got into a little pickle where I was like, "God, I'm doing so many things and I want to do all these things." I'm interested in all these things, but am I going to be able to juggle five different things? I got a podcast, I have a VC fund, I have my eCommerce business, I have a newsletter business. I don't even know what else. A course business, I got another shit. So it's like am I going to be able to do this? And what I saw that you did, I have this mental model of a solopreneur. And a solopreneur, nobody's actually solo. Everybody's got a little support team around them that's helpful. Some in a big way, some in a small way, but basically it's somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a successful business and lifestyle around that.

Shaan Puri (00:12:36):
And what I noticed was that you had this formula, which is I don't know if it's intentional or unintentional, but I'll say it out loud because here's my read of your business. It's basically it starts with the red pill. So a red pill is that scene in the matrix where Morpheus is holding out a blue pill, red pill. He's like, "Do you want the truth or do you want to take the blue pill?" You could just go back to your normal life just as everything was, you could forget this ever happened. And Neo's like, "No, I need to know the truth. What's the truth?" He takes the red pill and basically it's every great solopreneur I think starts with one truth.

Shaan Puri (00:13:08):
So Tim Ferris' truth was basically that the 9:00 to 5:00 work in a cubicle for 40 years model is effing broken and you don't need to do it that way. You could work four hours a week and live like a millionaire. And so that was Tim Ferris's red pill and yours was basically this idea of being a digital nomad, which was like you don't have to subscribe to the normal way of living. You pick a place, that's where you are from, that's where you live and you just stay where you grew up. And go to an office every day and you have to wear shoes and whatever. You're like, "No, I wear flip flops, I walk around on beaches." I just go wherever I feel like whenever I feel like and I carry a little backpack and that's my life.

Shaan Puri (00:13:54):
So you start with the red pill, then you create content around that red pill. So it's you talking about that lifestyle and sharing everything from people always ask what I keep in my backpack for the day. Here's what it is. It's just every bit of content you can come up with that's poppy, that fits that red pill. So then that gives you authority on that subject, so you become authority. And so Pomp became an authority around bitcoin and Tim Ferris became an authority around life hacking and you've become an authority around nomadism. And then you take that and then you basically spin off one of many businesses that can come up with it, but every one of those businesses, either it's a big money maker or it's just another funnel, more content, more new audience that's going to get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that you are talking about.

Shaan Puri (00:14:43):
And so even though you're doing six things, they're all actually part of one flywheel. And everyone that you do, is it going to feed it either because it's going to give you a bunch of cash that lets you fund this lifestyle in a bigger and better way or it's going to give you new content, new stories, new things to be known about that fit that lifestyle as well? That's how I see it. I'm curious, is that true or is that not?

Pieter Levels (00:15:05):
Yeah, I think it's really accurate. And my thing started when I was blogging, just like you said. I was blogging about nomading, but I was blogging for my mom because back then you had travel bloggers, like 2014. And I was going to travel and nomad. And every place I went I wrote a little. How was this city to live in and stuff, and what happened, all the crazy shit that happened to me. And my mom was reading that, but I wrote it in English because my mom was obviously Dutch, but I was like she can read English, so it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff, more audience. It wasn't super a big idea. It just happened and then those blogs started showing up on Hacker News. And I started writing more about bootstrapping startups as a nomad in Thailand or something or in Asia.

Pieter Levels (00:15:46):
And those started going on Hacker News really high. And I think that was the time, it was like 2013, 2014. There was the time when I noticed that the developers in San Francisco working for all the startups, they also were realizing maybe I can start doing this remotely because remote work was not cool back then and nomading was not cool back then because you had the Tim Ferris wave in 2008. It was the first nomad wave. I love Tim Ferris, but there was something about the followers there and the business that were created. They were shady. There was a lot of shady shit I came across in Asia, in Thailand, Americans and Europeans.

Shaan Puri (00:16:22):
A lot of brain supplements and shit like that.

Pieter Levels (00:16:24):
Dude, yes. Yeah, drug dealers, online drug dealers and spam decking. And there's still shady shit, but less. And I was like, "I really hate this shady shit. I don't feel like part of this scene." I think it would be cool to make it more mainstream, reputable businesses, reputable jobs that do it. So I kept blogging about it and it kept taking off on Hacker News. And you're right. And then I went on Twitter and I think organically people started following me. And then a lot of people went nomad. A lot of my friends went nomad because I was blogging and they became my friends now. Yeah, and then I started all those businesses, but it sounds very like a constructed ...

Shaan Puri (00:17:05):
It's not a master plan.

Pieter Levels (00:17:06):
No, it's not a master plan. It's very organic. I'm like user zero. I try to build stuff for myself and I always have new ideas. There's, just like you said, red pill. There's a discongruence in society and what I'm thinking. And most people then think there must be something wrong with me, but I think arrogance. I think there must be something wrong with society. Maybe this is a new thing, so I'll try and make a little website about it. Inflation three years ago or two years ago, I was tweeting about inflation. This shit's going to go crazy with all the fed printing money. And everyone's like, "Nah, inflation is fine. Stop whining about it." I'm like, "No, I'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are higher." So I made this inflationchart.com website that shows the inflation numbers are really high. Turned out to be true now.

Shaan Puri (00:17:54):
Yeah, that's great.

Sam Parr (00:17:56):
What technology are you using to build those sites? Because they all do look alike and you seem like you can spin them up really quickly.

Pieter Levels (00:18:04):
Well, that's really funny because I get a lot of criticism for the technology I use. I use PHP because that's the language I knew because I was making a blog, like WordPress. So I knew PHP a little bit. So I was like I just need to write with the language I know because I don't know other languages. And I did that. And then I used JavaScript and I use jQuery. So everybody starts laughing now cause jQuery is way passe, but I still use it because it's so easy to make a button, bind an event to it, age exterior to the server, to the PHP script, does something with a database, sends it back and it works for me really well. And I think it doesn't matter what you use, but as long as you use something that's really fast feedback loop and iterative loop where you can really quickly develop. I can make a new button in 20 seconds and deploy it to the server and it's really fast.

Pieter Levels (00:18:50):
And I know other developer friends of mine use a very big stack, Kubernetes and all this stuff, all these keywords I don't really know. And for them it takes sometimes an hour or maybe even days to deploy new feature. And I think what we learned from startup and lead startup is that the customer feedback loop has to be very fast, iterative so you can really quickly change stuff. And it also makes your customers really happy because they see something, they have a problem or a feature idea. You can really quickly build it and then they see it. I mean, if you want happy customers, that's how you get it. You make something for them, they're like, "Oh, my god, I influenced this product." So that works for me. So very, very simple stack.

Shaan Puri (00:19:32):
And we won't laugh at you not because we're nice. I don't know what jQuery is, neither does Sam. So we're not going to make fun of you. You're safe here. We're too dumb to call you out on any of your technical [inaudible 00:19:49]

Pieter Levels (00:19:49):
Nice. This is a good podcast.

Sam Parr (00:19:51):
What do you think your whole thing's worth?

Pieter Levels (00:19:53):
So if you do 5X ... Sorry.

Sam Parr (00:19:58):
Shaan, go to his sites and you could see it's something slash open. It's usually the website slash open. And then it says so many stats, most of which honestly are useless, but it's cool.

Shaan Puri (00:20:09):
Yeah, 70% of them are the equivalent of a step counter. It's like how many DMs did I get today?

Pieter Levels (00:20:20):
No, I don't have that.

Shaan Puri (00:20:22):
No, you do.

Pieter Levels (00:20:24):
But it's collective. It's like DMs sent. It's collective events.

Shaan Puri (00:20:27):
Okay, for example, I'm on nomadlist.com, which you said is I think your biggest one, slash open. And on it you see the revenue chart, you see CO2 removed from the atmosphere, you see the full P&L, you see a bunch of other things. And one of them that you see is 73% profit margin. Your team says .78, so that's part-time?

Pieter Levels (00:20:48):
Yeah, full-time equivalent, like FTE. Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:20:50):
And then plus 492 bots. What is that, servers?

Pieter Levels (00:20:55):
Yeah. So on the server you can do ...

Sam Parr (00:20:57):
Also, he has valuation, too. If you scroll down it says if we sold for whatever the multiple is.

Shaan Puri (00:21:04):
If it was 30X profit, this would be $17 million.

Pieter Levels (00:21:07):
So I tried to take the PE. I mean, it's not super accurate. I did business, but it's the PE ratio of public companies that are similar in the industry. And I try to sync it to that sometimes, but it completely depends on the multiple if somebody's going to pay for it.

Shaan Puri (00:21:19):
Have you sold any of these?

Pieter Levels (00:21:21):
[inaudible 00:21:21] multiples are extremely low. No, I've sold nothing.

Shaan Puri (00:21:23):
Do you want to sell any of these?

Pieter Levels (00:21:25):
I've been in the selling processes with previous guests on your podcast, but it bounced off.

Sam Parr (00:21:33):
I'm just going to guess it was Andrew Wilkinson because he loves ...

Pieter Levels (00:21:36):
Yeah, Schmandrew Schwilkinson.

Sam Parr (00:21:37):
Yeah, because he loves job boards. That's just a guess.

Pieter Levels (00:21:40):
I can't say anything. I signed NDA. 80% of the acquisitions, they bounce off. So right now, I don't really care. I like that I have cash flow and my life is nice, but until a few years ago I was obsessed by the selling because you build a startup in the movie Social ... Well, not the movie Social Network, but in big movies about startups, they're like, "Oh, my god, grow big and then sell and you're millionaire." But then if you become a millionaire yourself with your cash flow, you're like, "Okay, why does it matter actually?"

Sam Parr (00:22:10):
Well, let's actually talk about that because what's interesting about you is you have a few that you could sell. So Remote OK and Nomad List are both pretty cool. Have you calculated how much money you want and how long it's going to take you to get there via cash flow? Well, why don't I just sell one and I can get an $8 or $10 million lump sum? But then I still own this other one that's making $3 million a year. I mean, have you thought done that math and what have you ...

Pieter Levels (00:22:35):
Yeah, so the thing is most of my revenue is profit. The margins are really high, especially Remote OK. It's like 94% margin pre-tax, so it's very high. So I'd say 10X. After 10X it gets interesting. I think the problem is with bootstrap companies you usually get 3, 4, 5X profit or revenue share, which is too low for me. I might as well wait three years or four years and sit in this chair and the sites will probably keep running because they're fully automated and I barely need to work on them. They just keep going. It's heavily automated, really heavy, heavy. It's just that I won't build new features anymore then and the site will start looking a little bit old because design trends change, but generally it will keep running. So it doesn't make sense for me to sell for 5X or 4X if I might as well wait.

Pieter Levels (00:23:22):
And also Nomad, this is my baby. So if I sell it, they're going to fuck it up. I already know because they always do. Let's say a big remote startup buys it. I know VC fund remote startups are cool, but they're also going to be bought by big, boring companies later, corporate companies. And they're going to shut this down and they're like, "This is my contribution. This is my life's work." It's like legacy. So Remote OK I care less because it's a job board. Job board's not very interesting, but normally this is this whole movement and culture and there's tens of thousands of people on there and my friends are on there. And it's like this work of love. Yeah, it would be hard to sell that because people are going to fuck it up.

Sam Parr (00:24:06):
Are you the largest ... Go ahead, Shaan.

Shaan Puri (00:24:09):
Well, one thing I was going to say, you tweeted out something that said a 10 year overnight success, which I think is a common idea that most people don't realize, which is by the time you hear about something you don't know the 10 years of toiling and tweaking and iterating that it took before the big breakthroughs happened. My life was the same way. I started my first startup when I was 20, 21 and I made my first million by the time I was 30 or 31. It took 10 years.

Pieter Levels (00:24:37):
That's early, man. Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:24:40):
And then every year since then, a bunch of great stuff has happened, but it took a long time to get that breakthrough. And I was looking at your chart. Sam, I don't know if you saw this tweet that he has, but the chart basically shows, I think you start ...

Pieter Levels (00:24:50):
I think the sum of all my revenue together in one chart. Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:24:53):
Yeah, it's all your revenue from all your projects all together in one chart. And it's looking like it's 2012 or 2013 start. And basically, if I go all the way up until, let's call it 2019, you're at maybe $600K, $700K per year in revenue. And only in the last pandemic boom, let's say 2020, from 2020 you went from under a million dollars to $2.5 million a year. So you two and a half X'd because it sounds amazing. Wow, this dude's making almost $3 million a year. Yeah, but he's also been building that momentum and stacking these assets and it just really took off, which I'm guessing is pandemic fueled a lot of people wanting to be nomads and you were there to catch that wave. You were the guy ready to catch the wave at that time.

Pieter Levels (00:25:41):
Yeah, but no idea this was coming. I did this presentation in 2015 where I predicted there would be one billion remote workers in 2030 and everybody laughed at me and even in the YouTube comments were like, "This is ridiculous. Where are your sources? This is bullshit." And then COVID happened and it suddenly seems very reasonable, but nobody could have seen this coming and I had no idea. I was actually thinking ...

Shaan Puri (00:26:05):
Did you cause COVID or what?

Pieter Levels (00:26:06):
Exactly, with Fauci. If you look at the chart, it doesn't really go anywhere. And I was thinking this is bullshit. I tried everything to make it grow and sometimes it grew and sometimes it didn't, but generally it wasn't a VC star, where ...

Shaan Puri (00:26:25):
Well, it looks like there's these run ups and then a plateau and run up and a plateau. Which is, by the way, that's how all progress actually looks if you zoom out far enough.

Pieter Levels (00:26:35):
Exactly.

Shaan Puri (00:26:35):
And I remember that during 2014, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, there was a small group of people like you, this is I think when you created that first Slack community, that was like, "No, being a nomad is the way to go."

Sam Parr (00:26:46):
Yeah, but those people were freaks.

Pieter Levels (00:26:51):
100%, yes.

Shaan Puri (00:26:54):
But there were some people who took the red pill at that time. I think Steph Smith who also worked [inaudible 00:27:00] she met you in Indonesia or Bali or something like that because she had, I think, probably during more that time period, 2014, '15, '16, something like that, she was one of those people that defected then. Whereas now there's another wave. And if you look at any lifestyle movement, it happens this way. Take crypto, it starts with the cypherpunks.

Pieter Levels (00:27:23):
Exactly same. You're right. Yes, exactly.

Shaan Puri (00:27:24):
They hang out in cryptography forums and they took the pill first. And then came the next, the developers, then came the finance bros. And then came the next wave.

Pieter Levels (00:27:32):
It's the same with music genres, like hiphop, early hiphop. And I come from electronic music, so [inaudible 00:27:39] bass music was my previous career. Music producer, it was the same thing. EDM taking off in the US in 2009, 2010 with dubstep, that's what broke EDM in the US, that kind of stuff. These scenes are almost dead and then suddenly something happens and it's so unpredictable. You have no clue what's going on. You can only surf it. So I think the metaphor of surfing is very accurate. It's better to surf these waves in general, I think life. Just surf waves, stop trying to control it. Just surf it and pivoting startups into, that's pretty much just surfing, steering the surfboard over the waves, because you cannot control the market at all. You cannot control society at all.

Sam Parr (00:28:20):
One of the things that bothers me about this indie hacker movement is ... Well, I really like it. I like it, but in general what I don't like about it is people think pretty small. So it's related to the fire movement, which is I just want to save a little bit of money so I can make $40,000 a year in passive income. And I'm like, "That's cool." Getting your first step is cool, but that can't be it with life. You're going to want more. You want to do more things and you can contribute to society. And with a lot of these indiehackers, they come up with silly stuff, where it's a small widget that they sell for $4 a month and they hope that they can get to $1,000 a month. And I'm like, "Man, that's neat if you're just starting out, but I think that this could be bigger." And you're actually one of the few people that I've seen go harder. You're going harder on this. Are there any others like you?

Pieter Levels (00:29:15):
How do you think I'm going harder on it?

Sam Parr (00:29:15):
Well, your numbers are bigger. It's substantial. Your numbers are nice already and it's very clear that ...

Pieter Levels (00:29:21):
But it could be survivorship bias, right?

Sam Parr (00:29:25):
Well, yeah. Definitely, but I still think that there's a mindset of ...

Shaan Puri (00:29:30):
For example, your Twitter bio thing says your meter is going to $3 million. I would say most people who are indiehackers and makers and the tinkerer community, they don't even have their meter to there. Their meter initially is going to start much lower, $60,000 or $70,000 a year. And maybe yours did, too, but then you're like, "I filled up that meter, I leveled it up." So what was your initial goal? Was it make enough to not need a job or where did you start and when did you get more ambitious?

Pieter Levels (00:30:01):
I mean, back when I started, I had a YouTube channel for this electronic music I was making and stuff. And I was making a few thousand dollars from YouTube AdSense, so I had some cash flow to live off, travel off and work on mini startups, but it was very fast. It was shrinking because of the copyright claims on YouTube in 2012 and stuff. So it was pretty much becoming below $1,000 a month. So I had that cashflow, but to go to your question, I think it's a power law. You always have a few people in a scene who will make more money or get more successful and stuff. Also, there's a delay effect. I started in 2013 or 2014. This any scene, it wasn't cool until maybe I think 2018 or something or 2017.

Pieter Levels (00:30:49):
So these people that are going into it now, they're just starting. And I think the widget thing is interesting because you said it's only a widget. If you make one feature really well that solves one problem, you can get some customers and you get some cash flow and then you can build a second feature. And you can slowly scale up to a real product toolkit. And then I think another thing is you don't see a lot of people with multimillion revenue because they will quickly raise VC. Once you pass a million dollars a year, they'll switch to let's go big. Let's go become a billion dollar company. And I think I'm the exception. I'm like I don't want to be a billion dollar company, I'm fine like this, chill. And that's why you don't see those people a lot because I do know them and they quickly disappear. This app we're using now, Riverside, I think has raised VC now.

Pieter Levels (00:31:38):
Started bootstrapped and then I think Oprah Winfrey used it because it's my friend, Adav. He makes it. He's like, "Dude, Oprah Winfrey used it." I'm like, "Oh, my god, this is crazy." He's like, "Yeah, I think I'm going to raise VC." I'm like, "Okay. Yeah, you should do that," because they think this could be bigger than just a few million, right?

Shaan Puri (00:31:56):
So you tweeted something out the other day that's related to this. You go, "Not sure if people realize it, but if your app does $20,000 a month on revenue, you're probably already a millionaire." $20,000 per month times 12 months, assume you could sell for, let's call it, 4X or 5X multiple, that's a million dollar selling price. You're sitting on a million dollar asset. And when you put it that way, I think that sounds, and it is, way more achievable than this idea of like I got to build a million dollar business. Do I have the big idea, whatever? But getting something to $20,000 to $30,000 a month in revenue [inaudible 00:32:30]

Pieter Levels (00:32:30):
That seems approachable, right?

Shaan Puri (00:32:31):
It's approachable and that's awesome. All you did is you said something that was true out loud. And I think if more people heard that, that's why I'm bringing it up here, I think if more people heard that, that is a pathway to a millionaire status that does not require winning the startup lottery of inventing the next big thing or working and saving and paying your crazy W2 taxes for 15, 20 years to get the same outcome.

Pieter Levels (00:33:03):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's reachable, especially if you think about high automation, very high margins. So software business, you're not going to hire a big team of 10 people immediately. You work with part-time contracts, like I do, and you keep your margins very, very high because then you can sell for 5X. Then your revenue's almost your profit, so it's the same. Yeah, I think $20K is approachable. Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:33:29):
Let's brainstorm a business together that could get to $20K. So what's an idea that you're not currently building, but you thought of, because I'm sure you're an idea guy and you think you can make a website that does X, or you could make Nomad List for this other niche, or you could make the immigration one for this other thing. So what's a business? Let's brainstorm a business together. What's a business that you think could get somebody to this millionaire status?

Pieter Levels (00:33:54):
Man, again, this is so personal. So I used to live in hostel dorms in 2014, but didn't have money. Shared with six people, crazy. Then I started private rooms in hotels. Then the rooms got a little bit more luxurious because I had more money. And then I started discovering apartment hotels and it sounds like bullshit, but it works so well with remote work. So I'm in an apartment hotel right now in Europe on the beach and there's a kitchen.

Shaan Puri (00:34:21):
So what's an apartment hotel? What does that mean?

Pieter Levels (00:34:22):
Sorry. Apartment hotel is essentially a hotel, so full serviced, furnished, nice interior hotel room, but you also have a kitchen, you have a bedroom, you have a living room. It's very big. It's pretty much like an Airbnb, but it's ...

Shaan Puri (00:34:36):
And you pay for month or per night or what?

Pieter Levels (00:34:37):
Well, you can pay per night, you can pay per month. It's just like a hotel.

Sam Parr (00:34:42):
Shaan, it's like that guy who ...

Shaan Puri (00:34:42):
Sander or whatever?

Sam Parr (00:34:43):
Yeah, it's like Sander and I forget the other one. The guy was supposed to come in the pod, but he canceled last minute. What was his name?

Shaan Puri (00:34:49):
Sam, you did one of these in Nashville or something, where you're like, "This is awesome." There's a [inaudible 00:34:52] where everyone's working.

Sam Parr (00:34:54):
Yeah, it's basically just an apartment that you can rent for five days and they're pretty cool. I do them all the time. The problem that I've experienced in New York, it's 10 grand a month and it's 600 square feet. So that's why I tend to go Airbnb, but I'm in smaller, less expensive cities, you can get a 1,000 square foot place for $6,000 a month. And it's basically an apartment building that has one floor or all floors dedicated to Airbnbs.

Pieter Levels (00:35:22):
Yeah, the problem with Airbnb is that I've noticed is the quality is very, very high. There's a big range of quality and there's problems. There's no daily cleaning. It feels too much like you don't know what's going to happen. Stuff might break. If things break here, you just get a new apartment. And I've done this in Europe and I've done this in Asia, too, in Thailand. And I spend about usually $2K to $3K, three and a half K. So it's a lot of money. It's more than normal rent, but the cool thing is that it solves a lot of problems you have in your daily life because it's surface and stuff. And it's a huge thing in Asia. It's a huge thing in Southeast Asia, even in Korea, Taiwan and stuff. So I think that's going to be bigger because of remote work, because you have remote workers, even with families, with kids.

Pieter Levels (00:36:11):
And you don't want to live in a hotel room. Hotel room is very depressing. I go insane in hotel rooms. It's just a bed and you can barely walk around the bed. There's no space. I need to cook food, I need to buy steak from the local butcher. I need to cook it with broccoli and spinach and with my friends and stuff. And you can do it in an apartment hotel. And I think if you target, it's a high end market, I think, of remote workers who make a lot of money, like $200K or $100K, something. If you target them, you can make a lot of money because it's serviced, furnished.

Shaan Puri (00:36:42):
So what would you build? You'd actually build an apartment hotel or you'd build a digital product for ...

Pieter Levels (00:36:46):
That's a big question because I'm a software guy. I don't want to own stuff. I don't want to have all this. I don't even want to buy land. I don't even want to buy a house. I want to be able to be consumer, a customer of these kind of things, but I want it long term. I want to be able to rent for six months or 12 months even. I want to be guaranteed to stay.

Sam Parr (00:37:05):
So my wife and I, we're at the point where we're going to start having kids soon. And I live not like you entirely, but a little bit, where we spend half the year at one place, half the year at the other place. And what we're going to do next year is just rent, do a 12 month lease in New York, and just not be there all the time. But I'm looking to rent all of my furniture and I've been looking at a place where I was like I just want to book this one place and I want to pay someone three grand a month, but they have to show up before I arrive. They've got to completely set it up and it has to be 100% furnished for me. And I've been looking at these and there's a few startups in the space that are doing furniture rental. And furniture rental is not popular right now. And I tell people all the time, I'm like I just want to rent all my furniture.

Sam Parr (00:37:49):
I don't want to own any of it. And they think it's nonsense and they think it's crazy, but if you run the math it's about the same in terms of price, but in terms of headache I think it's 1,000 times better.

Pieter Levels (00:38:07):
100%, yeah. Yeah, so it's all about the headaches. So if you can afford it, you can reduce the headaches of ownership. And ownership, it sounds so privileged, though, but whatever. Ownership is a big hassle. Shit breaks all the time. And if I spend my time on my laptop building on these apps, it's probably better use of my time than managing all this stuff. And if a company can specialize in managing this stuff and renting it to you, it's much better. I think you're on point. That's a real business. And imagine you can go to a website, you can choose different sets of furniture, different interior and stuff, paintings on the wall or whatever. And you can just click and you arrive and it's already done for you, like you said. I think that would be really interesting. Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:38:51):
What are some other things that you're interested in, either niche categories or things in your lifestyle that you're like, "I do this lifestyle thing differently than people." You could build a business around this?

Pieter Levels (00:39:05):
I think that the biggest problem with the digital nomad thing is that maybe it's a good big podcast to say that there's a perception that people travel really fast. And half the day that they don't travel fast, they travel every few months or even I think the average is seven months now. It's very slow. So the word digital nomad is a horrible word. Of course it has so many connotations, but it's mostly remote working people who want a little bit of a different life, who want to see different places a little bit. They have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, they have kids even. There's families doing this as well. Moving around every week doesn't really work. Being very slow is big. And if people are more aware of that, they can find a lot of products built for this long term slowmad market, which most of us are. We're mostly slowmads.

Shaan Puri (00:39:50):
Slowmad. I like that. Nice.

Pieter Levels (00:39:54):
Slowmads, yeah. Think about education, think about homeschooling is taking off also because of remote work. If I have kids, I don't know if I want to put them in a regular school. Maybe Elon Musk builds his own school that's cool, but you can do things in a different way. And now it's still very niche. This remote work thing is still niche. It's going to get only bigger. There's only going to be more and more people doing this once physical jobs get automated. So if you make products, I don't know a specific product, but if you build products for those people, that's a high end market of tech workers that are remote.

Sam Parr (00:40:26):
So you said that you don't own stuff or you said you don't like owning stuff. You said that you don't want to own real estate. So if you're making two and a half million dollars a year in profit, this is a question that Shaan always asks that I'm stealing it, which is what do you do with your money then?

Pieter Levels (00:40:45):
Yeah, so I'm heavy in ETFs. I read a blog post by the guy from Google that does SEO. And he's like I just put everything in ETFs, so Vanguard ETFs, S&P 500, but also I'm heavily invested in Asia because I believe in Asia. I believe in the future. There's a lot of things about Asia that are good, but there's still things very futuristic. And I also invest in crypto. I hold Bitcoin and Ethereum. I'm always scared to say those things on the podcast, but it's all very secure and stuff.

Sam Parr (00:41:17):
It's not exactly the most shocking thing to assume that you own some crypto.

Pieter Levels (00:41:23):
True. Every tech bro has crypto. Yeah, exactly.

Shaan Puri (00:41:26):
You're actually not allowed to have that haircut if you don't own three [inaudible 00:41:29] you can't have a high face with long top hair if you don't own three.

Pieter Levels (00:41:36):
I spend about $4K or $5K a month or something. That's it. I do need to pay tax, but after that most of it goes to ETFs and stuff. It's scary to invest now because it's a scary time, but generally I want to do this for 20, 30 years in ETF invested and stuff. And sometimes stocks, but I did a benchmark, my S&P 500 ETF outperformed all my stock decisions over the last two years. So I'm stupid just like most people.

Sam Parr (00:42:01):
Shaan, you want to tell him what you did recently?

Shaan Puri (00:42:05):
What? Selling?

Sam Parr (00:42:06):
With your stocks.

Shaan Puri (00:42:07):
Yeah, I sold not everything, but pretty much everything sold maybe 70%, 80% of the stocks that I hold.

Pieter Levels (00:42:15):
I get that. I mean, yeah, but I'm scared. They always say don't try and time the market. So I'm like I'll just sit and just crash with it, let the whole thing go back up.

Sam Parr (00:42:25):
Shaan, why did you do that? Why don't you just chill?

Shaan Puri (00:42:29):
Two reasons. One, I didn't want a risk of margin call because I borrowed a little bit against my stock portfolio and to what I felt was extremely safe and it's still safe. But I was like if this drops another 20%, then all of a sudden I'm having a headache that I don't want to deal with. I don't want to have to deal with freeing up a bunch of cash just to buffer this. So I was like, I noticed that every morning I was waking up and I was checking it and I was like, "Okay, logically I know I'm in pretty good shape here," but the stress of having to think about this is taking away from my day to day quality of life. It's like that's the opposite of what I want money to do. I don't want money to give me stress. My money's supposed to take away my stress.

Sam Parr (00:43:10):
So what did you do with the money?

Shaan Puri (00:43:12):
[inaudible 00:43:12] opposite?

Sam Parr (00:43:13):
What'd you do with it? Where is it?

Shaan Puri (00:43:14):
It's in cash right now. I might do some short term fixed income type stuff, but for now, again, I don't care. I don't need the 2%, I needed the peace of mind. And so that was the first thing. The second thing was I thought what will I regret more? What do I believe more? Do I believe that this is the bottom or do I believe that this is actually thinking that this is the bottom six months in and that it's all going to get better soon? Basically, there's three paths. Either it gets better now, this is about the bottom, but we stay here for an extended period of time, one, two, three, four years, or it has further down to go. And I basically thought that things going up soon seemed like the least likely thing. I would actually be betting against that heavily.

Shaan Puri (00:44:04):
And so I thought, "Okay, I have nothing to lose here in terms of upside," because I just fundamentally don't think that stocks and everything's just going to go rip back up again and we're all going to pretend that was it. We just had a few months of pain and then it all went right back up and remember things are all green again. And so I thought either it's going to be flat, boring and sideways for a period of time or it's going to go down more. And I thought in either case that I won't regret being in cash because, A, I don't have to sweat it every day. I don't have to think about it every day and, B, I'm not losing anything doing this. And so that was my thought process. And I figured there's going to be these little bear market rallies, so just sell at the top of the next, so that's what I did.

Shaan Puri (00:44:47):
Everything rallied 5% and I just sold and I kept 20% still in the market and I just left the other 80% in not thinking about it cash. But I held my crypto. I didn't sell my crypto.

Pieter Levels (00:45:00):
That's good. Yeah. Are you guys mostly invested in the American stock market or worldwide?

Shaan Puri (00:45:06):
Yeah, like you said, I believe in Asia. I'm like I believe in Asia, too, but I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. How do I go invest in Asia and where would I invest? I don't even know. What does that mean? Are you buying the equivalent of an ETF for Japan or something? What are you doing?

Pieter Levels (00:45:17):
Dude, I had a Vanguard ETF China and then suddenly it disappeared from my broker app. And I'm like, "What the fuck's happening?" And I get this message, they're like Vanguard left China in March or something because they were like this is too crazy. So I had to buy a different ETF.

Shaan Puri (00:45:33):
[inaudible 00:45:33] privatize. They made private companies public or something.

Pieter Levels (00:45:36):
Yeah. No, they fucked Jack Ma, for sure. There's a lot of weird shit happening, but I still think I should be invested in those markets.

Shaan Puri (00:45:45):
Sam, have I told you about the Jack Ma thing?

Sam Parr (00:45:48):
How it's crazy that the third richest man in the world [inaudible 00:45:52] was like, "Hey, Jack, shut up." And he was like, "Yes, sir."

Shaan Puri (00:45:57):
They just took Jack offline. Yeah, my brother-in-law calls me. So we had one moment where a month in when people started noticing Jack Ma is missing. And my brother-in-law in the car one day was just like, "Where's Jack Ma?" He was in the car, but he's like, "Bro, why aren't we talking about this?" He's like, "Where's Jack Ma?" And we just started laughing. How crazy is that, that Jack Ma is just not ... What if you just couldn't find Elon Musk because he said something that Biden didn't like? That idea is crazy.

Sam Parr (00:46:24):
They did it with the tennis player, too.

Pieter Levels (00:46:27):
Yeah, I saw that. Dude, it's fucked up.

Shaan Puri (00:46:27):
And my brother-in-law still calls me. He'll just call me out of the blue. It's been like a year now and he'll be like, "Yo, where's Jack Ma?" And he'll hang up and that's the whole call.

Pieter Levels (00:46:36):
That's so good.

Shaan Puri (00:46:37):
He'd just be yelling where is Jack Ma?

Pieter Levels (00:46:41):
But, dude, that's the thing of Asia and China, all this stuff is accurate. There's some crazy, but the other thing is also accurate, that there's lots happening in Asia. And I think in the West, in Europe and America, we have a blind spot because we get so much information that's negative about Asia, especially about China. And I'm not a China spy or something. My friends call me a China spy because of that, but I think it's a blind spot a little bit in the west, that we're going to miss out on ... I mean, China's going to be the biggest economy in 2030. I think by GDP it's already the biggest economy by purchasing power or something. Ignoring that, just because there's a lot of arguments why we should ignore China, but it sounds like a blind spot in the west a little bit to me.

Sam Parr (00:47:29):
We'll do an easy one. You tweeted out your calendar and it was free for a week or something like that. And I know Shaan does that, too. And I like that. Sometimes I don't like that because I'll do that for three days and I'm like, "Oh, my god, I'm so bored." Is it real that you just don't plan anything?

Pieter Levels (00:47:47):
Yeah, so this is the only planned thing and it gives me stress because I'm like, "Shit, something's coming up." I live with my friends, so my friends are my neighbors now. So I brought all these nomads friends to Portugal and Europe and we live together. A lot of our lot them are in the city near here, whatever. Everybody's near, so we just have dinners outside and we cook food and the sunsets on the beach and just this nice, chill life that I never had because I was always alone in hotel rooms. I had friends, but they were always around the world. And now they're all here, so I mostly do that. So I don't want to do calls because what am I going to call about? I like having calls with you guys. What am I going to call with other people about? New business [inaudible 00:48:28]

Sam Parr (00:48:27):
Don't you get bored?

Pieter Levels (00:48:29):
No, because I work on my websites. I make coffee, I make open my laptop, me and my friend, we code a little bit together, make a new feature. Then you go to the gym, we go to sauna, we go swim, but that's very recent, this kind of chill life. And I don't get bored as long as I ship a little bit on my websites. I don't really get bored.

Sam Parr (00:48:55):
So basically it's almost always the truth that no matter how hard you try, the more income that you make, your lifestyle gets inflated. Maybe sometimes not as much, but then other times a ton. And I was like I'm going to fight it. I can't imagine spending more than $10,000 out a car or whatever. And then you make more income, you're like whatever. Who cares? You said you spend $4,000 or $5,000 a month. You're one of the few people that has acknowledged that your lifestyle actually doesn't seem like it's been ... It's not lavish at all.

Pieter Levels (00:49:27):
No, but it's on purpose. It's 100% on purpose. Incidentally, sometimes you spend more. Last month hotels were really booked, so we had to pay a lot of money, but now it's chill. I think it's on purpose.

Sam Parr (00:49:40):
How much?

Pieter Levels (00:49:41):
Last month was like $10K or something for hotels because we're in Lisbon.

Sam Parr (00:49:45):
That's still nothing, though. You're making $3 million a year.

Pieter Levels (00:49:47):
But paying $10K for hotel is ridiculous. It doesn't make any sense. It should be the max $2K or $3K for me personally, but I've seen a lot of people do that lifestyle inflation because I know from corporate, again, from studying business, I know the management people and stuff they get paid more and they get golden handcuffs and they can't leave. A lot of my friends are like that and I don't want that to happen to me. I mean, it can't happen it to me, but you get what I mean. And I know that material goods don't really make me happy. So I buy a new shirt or something or I buy a new iPhone, within two weeks I'm used to it. And there's studies on this. There's research about this stuff. If you buy a new car, even you get married, after six months you're at the same happiness. If you buy a house, after six months same happiness. So if you know that stuff, you don't really need to spend money so much. You don't need to buy stuff, essentially. And generally it will probably make you happier.

Shaan Puri (00:50:35):
What do you think you would want to spend more on? Let's say that ...

Pieter Levels (00:50:39):
Food. Good food, organic, free roaming. I mean, it's cliché, like Joe Roman, but free roaming, grass fed cow, beef that are happy animals, organic vegetables, that kind of stuff. Not goods, experiences. It's on purpose I do this.

Shaan Puri (00:50:58):
What are some experiences that you think are worth the money?

Pieter Levels (00:51:01):
What is what? Sorry?

Shaan Puri (00:51:02):
What are some experiences that are worth the money? When most people [inaudible 00:51:07]

Pieter Levels (00:51:06):
Most experiences that are good don't even cost money, right?

Sam Parr (00:51:10):
[inaudible 00:51:10] coach?

Pieter Levels (00:51:11):
Life coach? What?

Sam Parr (00:51:12):
No, do you fly ...

Pieter Levels (00:51:13):
Fly coach. Sorry. Yeah, you're right. Man, you got me. You're trying to find stuff, right? Yes, I fly business class. No, exactly. I only do it long haul and I flew only once in the last 16 months and I flew business. Qatar, really nice and you can lie down and sleep and stuff, but that's about it I think. And one thing I notice, I was in Bangkok in this luxury apartment hotel stuff, but it was a little bit too luxury for me. And I was there for a month and you start noticing that you don't meet as much interesting people. I met one interesting person who had this giant wheat farm, the biggest wheat farm in Thailand, because they just legalized it. It was cool, but generally it's more like a socialite, Paris Hilton audience. But in the hostels you would meet crazy people. You would meet backpackers, but also researchers, and entrepreneurs, and fledgling entrepreneurs. You met generally more interesting people because you were more in those areas. Yeah.

Sam Parr (00:52:15):
Sorry. Listen to this. Did I tell you about Sam Corcos from Levels? Other Levels. What's the URL?

Shaan Puri (00:52:27):
Levels Health.

Sam Parr (00:52:28):
Levels Health, the thing that goes in your arm. So this guy, so he raised ... Yeah, that's right. So he has a startup that makes eight figures in revenue. It's worth, I think, it was $400 million. So let's just say that he's worth $150 million on paper. Not real, but on paper. He came over to my house and he was with his girlfriend and she made a comment, joking he always gives me a hard time because it takes me forever to pack, but that's ridiculous. I only had this one carryon. And I was like, "Well, how long does it take you to pack, Sam?" He goes, "I don't pack." I was like, "What do you mean?" He had a draw string bag. You know what a draw string bag? It's like a bag where you put [inaudible 00:53:02]

Shaan Puri (00:53:02):
You get these at conferences.

Sam Parr (00:53:04):
Yes. That's all he had, was that bag. And he goes, "Well, you see, I only own the clothes that I'm wearing right now, which is a white T-shirt, a pair of pants, socks, underwear and shoes." I only own that plus another pair of underwear, a jacket and this bag and my laptop, which I have right here on me. That's literally the only thing that I own. I was like, "Wait, what?" He goes, "Yeah, I've been doing this for eight years now or something like that and I only live and I do what you do." He's like he does what you do, Pieter. He lives in these Airbnbs and hotel style setups and he's been doing it for years. And that's all he owned. And I thought that was the craziest shit I've hear in a long time.

Shaan Puri (00:53:42):
He does laundry every day? I don't understand. How's he living off two underwear?

Sam Parr (00:53:44):
Well, I was like, "Well, what if you got to go to a funeral?" What if you have to do this? He goes, "Well, I just go to a thrift store when I need to go and I buy stuff and then I just bring it back." This is my guess, he does it partly out of convenience of not wanting to worry about stuff. I also think that there's a very philosophical thing going on here because it's extreme, but have you ever heard of anyone, Pieter, being that crazy?

Pieter Levels (00:54:12):
Dude, yes. Actually, in 2015 I was in Chiang Mai and there was an Australian guy who would fly from Australia to Thailand to Chiang Mai with only his MacBook Air and the clothes he wore and not even a bag. And he would buy everything he needed on the spot and he would be there for two or three months and he would donate the clothes he wore to charity. And then he would fly back to Australia with his MacBook Air in his hand and I was so impressed.

Speaker 4 (00:54:39):
This data is wrong every freaking time.

Speaker 6 (00:54:42):
Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Speaker 4 (00:54:47):
Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support, tickets, emails, and here's a task from three days ago I totally missed.

Speaker 6 (00:54:57):
HubSpot, grow better.

Shaan Puri (00:54:59):
See, that's cool. I would do that because I think that actually adds to the experience of traveling. Traveling fully light and then when you get there buying what you need and then giving it away when you leave. I'd actually get down with that, but I rotate two underwear and I put my underwear in my bag with my Macbook. I don't know about that. Yeah.

Pieter Levels (00:55:19):
Yeah. No, but I think it comes down to philosophy. And I do think it sounds pretentious, but I don't care. It comes down to constraining your life in a certain way. I think constraints are good in creativity and life and stuff. And it makes you focus on the really important things in life for you personally. It must be different for everybody. For me, that's girlfriend, friends, health, food, happiness, all that stuff. And creative work, meaningful work, very important. I need to have something to do in my day. I need to feel like I'm contributing something, like Sam said.

Sam Parr (00:55:56):
So what do you own?

Pieter Levels (00:55:58):
So I have a backpack. I have a rolling suitcase, though, a small one. I have clothes, I have a iPhone, MacBook Pro. I have a toothbrush, I have [inaudible 00:56:14]

Sam Parr (00:56:14):
So minimal.

Pieter Levels (00:56:14):
Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:56:14):
If you can name all the things you own, that's amazing.

Pieter Levels (00:56:16):
I'm looking around, I have two Stadia controllers, like game pads. You can use Stadia here. It's cool. Yeah, that's about it, I think. I mean, I have backup phones and stuff because two-factor authentication stuff, but it's not a lot of stuff.

Sam Parr (00:56:33):
You could talk about your family or not, if you want, but do you think you're going to do this when you have kids?

Pieter Levels (00:56:38):
So what does doing it mean? Because I'm mostly settled down. I'm mostly in one place. I'm just trying to not buy stuff from Amazon.

Sam Parr (00:56:45):
Doing it as in not owning stuff. I mean, I think your life is cool, but you have to acknowledge that it's alternative in the sense of 1% of the population does what you do.

Pieter Levels (00:56:57):
Yeah, for sure. I think it's interesting that the stuff I do may or may not become a thing because a lot of things I did eight years ago now are normal. So it might be that the things that [inaudible 00:57:08]

Sam Parr (00:57:08):
Who cares? I mean, if you're happy, who cares if it becomes big?

Pieter Levels (00:57:11):
It's not about me, It's more like it might become major. I think even if you have kids, you can do it in an alternative way. You can go to the thrift store or get secondhand toys or something, secondhand clothes, that kind of stuff, but it all doesn't have to be so consumerist and buying. We can do it in a different way and I'm just trying to figure out how I want to do that and trying to keep the focus on ... Yeah.

Shaan Puri (00:57:40):
Well, we've talked about a Nomad List style red pill before briefly, which was my ... I forgot what it's called. Sam, do you remember the name of the Zero Waste Project or the Zero Project or something like that?

Sam Parr (00:57:51):
Yeah, I think I heard about that.

Shaan Puri (00:57:52):
So basically my wife told me about this. She was like, "Yeah, in the city, in the little town we live in, there's this Facebook group." And what they do is it's not even a barter economy. It's a giving economy. So it's like if you have stuff, you just give it into the giving circle and other people can take it out and then they can give stuff in. I think it's a lot around kid stuff. My kid's grown out of this.

Pieter Levels (00:58:16):
But it doesn't make [inaudible 00:58:19]

Shaan Puri (00:58:19):
It's not like Craigslist randos. It's amongst this trusted group of people who believe the same thing. The Buy Nothing Project. And I think I might have butchered exactly how it works. Sam, do you know a little bit how it works?

Sam Parr (00:58:31):
Well, it's just the idea of instead of reduce, reuse, recycle for plastic and shit, they're like, "No, let's just reuse." We're going to reuse everything. So instead of buying a new toy, we're going to go get one for free and then we're going to give away when we're done. It's just a mindset. And then there's a bunch of companies in the space, but the big one is this buy nothing series of Facebook groups where it's just like I'm giving away these children's clothes, come get them.

Pieter Levels (00:58:59):
Yeah. I mean, that's nice. It doesn't make any sense. You have a baby and it grows out of its clothes every month or something or every two months. So why would you buy everything new if you can ask your family for clothes they already wore or whatever? It makes more sense to me personally. Yeah.

Sam Parr (00:59:18):
Who do you want to be like? Who do you admire and who do you want to be like? Because the reason why people buy for their kids is because they want their kids to have Jordans. So they look cool for other people because they want to impress other people. Who do you want to impress and who do you want to be like, you think? Who do you look up to?

Pieter Levels (00:59:38):
I like Derek Sivers. I don't know if you know Derek Sivers.

Sam Parr (00:59:40):
Yeah. Tell me about him. Who is he?

Pieter Levels (00:59:44):
He started a company called CD Baby in the '90s, I think, or in early 2000s, which was one of the first indie music distributors, where you could send your music as a indie musician. And they would press the CDs for you and they would send it to your customers and stuff. And they're also now on Spotify and stuff and he sold this for $30 million. I interviewed him for my [inaudible 01:00:06] actually. He's really nice guy, the most nice guy in startups, I think. And he writes a lot, writes a lot of books now. And he's very philosophical, also nomadic. He's been in living in Singapore, he lives in New Zealand, lives in US and stuff. If you go through his website, sivers.org, I think he writes very much same concepts that I talk about, about simple life. Yeah, it's hard to describe him, but I think that's a very inspirational guy to me.

Pieter Levels (01:00:40):
I think I want to impress my parents, but they're already happy with me, so it doesn't really matter. I want to try and have a stable happiness because I've been depressed a lot. I've been anxious, especially when traveling. You go crazy in hotel rooms alone. Traveling, it brings you very deep into your own self and stuff. And I think the most important thing for me is to impress myself by just being stable and having a stable happy life with people around me and a wholesome life.

Shaan Puri (01:01:18):
What part of your life are you not impressed by for either yourself or Derek Sivers or any of those people? You just mentioned [inaudible 01:01:27]

Sam Parr (01:01:26):
Like the lifestyle, you mean?

Shaan Puri (01:01:28):
Yeah. What part of your life is not at that point where you feel like it's not impressive in that way?

Pieter Levels (01:01:33):
Well, I want to have a family, too, like you guys. And that's what I'm working on. Yeah, that's more of a focus now.

Shaan Puri (01:01:46):
Pretty easy, by the way. You just got to do one thing. I'll tell you about that later.

Pieter Levels (01:01:49):
You got to find the right girlfriend and then you need to see if they're not crazy. You need to connect and all this stuff. And I think that's it.

Sam Parr (01:01:58):
Shaan, you have a ... Go ahead. I want to hear this answer.

Pieter Levels (01:02:01):
No, the thing about Elon Musk, every time Elon Musk presents something, you're like, "Fuck, that's so cool." Why am I building internet websites? This is my only life I have or I'm going to die. I should do something bigger, but then I have to bring myself back to like, "No, it's cool. You're doing okay." Doesn't really need to be bigger, but everybody wants to make space rockets, but it's just so hard to do that.

Sam Parr (01:02:26):
Shaan, you have a dog. A little dog. I've got a big dog.

Pieter Levels (01:02:32):
I love dogs. Yeah.

Sam Parr (01:02:34):
Yeah, so you like animals. I love owning animals, big, aggressive looking dogs. That's my thing. I'm a weirdo. How do you live this? I want to live a little bit more like you. And I can do it, A, now because I have a little bit of money so I can just pay for fancier Airbnbs that are pet friendly and, B, I can only do it basically in America. Doing this lifestyle abroad with an animal, even in America you either have to fly private or you have to drive most places. I drive most places. How do you live this life with an animal?

Pieter Levels (01:03:07):
I don't have animals, but I want them. I had two cats with my ex-girlfriend and it was actually interesting. We went in Bangkok to this luxury apartment hotel and they were cat friendly. And it was this high society of Bangkok people with cute cats and cute dogs. In Asia, all the dogs are small. They like small dogs. I like big dogs, too, like you, Sam. And they walk around in the hotel and it's super cute. And they have cats and dog ice cream and stuff and food. And they have little beds for them to sleep in and stuff and everything is service. And that's another big market, I think, tech people with pets and stuff. They want to travel as well.

Sam Parr (01:03:44):
Shaan, have you guys looked into flying in America with an animal?

Shaan Puri (01:03:49):
Why do you think I don't go places, dude? What am I supposed to do with my dog?

Sam Parr (01:03:53):
Well, your animal's under 20 pounds, right?

Shaan Puri (01:03:55):
Yeah, she is, but that also means she's not tough enough to do all this stuff. We're like how's she going to handle this experience of going on a seven hour flight or whatever?

Sam Parr (01:04:07):
Yeah, but the dog's able to. I don't know if she's physically able to, but she's allowed to. You could put it in a carrier and put it on your lap or in the above whatever, the suitcase thing. And if you have an animal that's above 20 pounds ...

Shaan Puri (01:04:22):
Who's putting their dog in the above thing? You can put your dog down [inaudible 01:04:25]

Sam Parr (01:04:26):
It's not that fucked up. I don't know, dude. It's like putting a blanket over a bird cage. It's all right. I don't know. Or you put it underneath there, whatever you fucking do. I don't have one of these things, but that's what they say on the directions when you look online. If you have an animal above 20 pounds, you basically cannot. This whole emotional support animal thing, that's nonsense or that's getting phased out.

Pieter Levels (01:04:52):
Yeah, I heard about that.

Sam Parr (01:04:53):
You cannot bring an animal, a dog, on a flight. I'm always amazed that for popular routes they don't have a once a month or twice a month animal friendly route.

Pieter Levels (01:05:03):
Dude, it's absolutely going to happen. It's a huge growing market, I think, because lot of rich tech people are not having kids. Sorry.

Shaan Puri (01:05:10):
Right. I was going to say I read something that one airline is being like we'll fly pets. I think they do a lot of pets in the cargo or whatever because most airlines have been facing that out. And I think it's Southwest. I forgot which airline. Some airline is making bank because they take all the pets and it was a differentiator. It's like bags fly free, but it's like we let you fly your pet and everybody else is saying no nowadays.

Pieter Levels (01:05:32):
Man, I think you can do it. I think it's all about slowmading. So if you move, let's say, every six months, it's not that bad for the dog or the cat. And you give them a stable life in where you arrive and not too much chaos and stuff. I think it's okay. I think it's not okay if you keep moving every week or every month. That might be a little stressful for the dog and the cat, but six months, it's okay. And especially you get the ... What?

Shaan Puri (01:05:58):
You had a great tweet. It was if you don't have a dog in your profile picture on Twitter, are you even trying?

Pieter Levels (01:06:04):
That's a grow fact. It's the biggest grow fact, right?

Shaan Puri (01:06:06):
Sam has one, right? You have a Facebook picture, I think.

Pieter Levels (01:06:09):
Yeah, dude. This guy used this on Tinder, right? This was a Tinder dating trick because they swipe right for the dog, not for you, but they still swipe right.

Sam Parr (01:06:18):
I've noticed there's two hacks. When I was single, if I ever walk around with a niece or nephew or a kid, that's an automatic door opener to meet women. And then the other one was having an aggressive, but nice looking dog. It's like they're disarmed, we're good.

Shaan Puri (01:06:37):
And why does it have to be aggressive looking, but nice? Is that one of those things where it's like dog owners look like their pets? And so if your dog looks a certain way, they also think that about you?

Sam Parr (01:06:47):
They want to heal you. Women want to heal you sometimes. It's seeing a guy with sleeve tattoos who smoke cigarettes and a tattoo under his eye who just wants to spend time and cuddle. You're eclectic. I don't know, it just works. Don't ask me, but that just works.

Pieter Levels (01:07:11):
Dude, I love [inaudible 01:07:12] dogs, by the way. They're the big white polar bear dog. And I think it looks like me, but it's so fluffy.

Sam Parr (01:07:19):
That's a very Asian move of you. They're very popular in Asia, right?

Pieter Levels (01:07:23):
Yeah. I've seen them here, too, but yeah.

Sam Parr (01:07:28):
Is there anything that people assume about your life and your lifestyle and your businesses that you ... For example, with the hustle as well as Shaan's Milk Road, a lot of people are like, "That's it? It's just a fucking newsletter? You just write these words and you just hit send? That's so easy. Anyone can do it." And it's like, no, it's actually a user acquisition play. You know how to do that. And then it's also you're just not good at writing. You have to be good and that's just a talent. You either have it or you don't. And so that's some misconceptions about our businesses. What about yours? Is there anything that people always assume and you're like no? Because anyone can copy you.

Pieter Levels (01:08:04):
Yeah, I think generally people think that every website or app or company they're a customer of, that it's more simple than it actually is because you can't see behind the hood. And it's actually way more complicated than you think because there's so many edge cases in every business that you need to code if statements for or build little scripts for special features. It's much more complicated. And I think people realize that when they start because people always clone you. They make a copycat of your website and it somehow doesn't take off because they've been able to copy the outside of it, the aesthetic, but they don't know what's happening under the hood. So it's much more complicated. Dude, a job board is much more complicated than you think. Fuck, how do you explain this? There's so many little parts that especially companies want. They want invoices for every little thing they add.

Pieter Levels (01:08:54):
The price is dynamic, that kind of stuff. I changed job post pricing based on how many people post jobs on my site, for example. There's so much stuff happening behind the curtains that you don't see. Yeah, it's much more complicated. I also think the misconception about ... Yeah, sorry.

Sam Parr (01:09:09):
And a lot of your stuff is automated to where you don't have to be involved. It runs itself. You said everything's automated.

Pieter Levels (01:09:16):
Almost 99.9%.

Sam Parr (01:09:17):
And to post on your job board, it ranges from a $100 to $1,000, I think, whatever the huge range.

Pieter Levels (01:09:22):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Sam Parr (01:09:25):
I'm tinkering with something that costs many, many thousands of dollars a year. How would you figure out how to do that? And so in my head I'm like, "Fuck, I got to hire a bunch of sales people. That sucks." Do you think that you could automate most things even that are high ticketed items?

Pieter Levels (01:09:42):
For sure. Dude, I sell job post bundles for $50K via Stripe, which is amazing to me.

Sam Parr (01:09:51):
How do you do that?

Pieter Levels (01:09:52):
So you make a page, it's called buy a bundle, and you can go to remoteok.com/buy-bundle and you'll see a slider where you can make your own bundle and get a discount based on it. And it's all automated and you add your credit card and then you pay $50K or $40K, whatever.

Sam Parr (01:10:12):
And how many people do that?

Pieter Levels (01:10:17):
It's 30% of the revenue, I think, bundles.

Sam Parr (01:10:18):
No shit. So someone's using a debit card or whatever for $50K.

Pieter Levels (01:10:22):
Yeah, dude, these company cards. This is lagging information. People don't know the company cards have been upgraded, I think, because they're using it for much more these days. Really, it's a lot of money. And I have no idea. I never thought it. I'm not hiring people, I don't know how this works. I just tried. I think companies ask me, like, "Can we buy a few job posts for in the future?" I'm like, "Okay, I'll make this thing." And a lot of companies use this. So you figure out the features that people want based on talking to them, of course.

Sam Parr (01:10:51):
Dude, I'm looking at this sales page to buy bundles. So buy 25 jobs is $22,000. You do something interesting on your sales pages, is you just pack it with information. That's totally the right move, but you pack it with text. You use icons to break it up.

Pieter Levels (01:11:07):
The emojis. Yeah, I use emojis a lot. Yeah. No, it looks like a circus, but it works. It's not well designed. It's not like minimalist design. It's just I just add stuff every day and it just keeps growing, but it works.

Sam Parr (01:11:24):
What's the biggest purchase someone has made? I can scroll all the way up to ...

Shaan Puri (01:11:28):
I got another call I got to run to. Pieter, this has been amazing. I got to go.

Pieter Levels (01:11:32):
Yeah, nice to meet you, Shaan.

Shaan Puri (01:11:32):
See you.

Sam Parr (01:11:35):
What's been the biggest purchase that you've had? This scrolls all the way up to $150,000.

Pieter Levels (01:11:40):
I think $50K or something. Around $50K. Maybe $49K.

Sam Parr (01:11:43):
But that happens a lot of times?

Pieter Levels (01:11:44):
Yeah, via Stripe. Yeah.

Sam Parr (01:11:47):
Dude, this is crazy. Yeah, I'm working on this thing and it's like $10K a year and I'm like, "Man, I'm going to have to get on the phone all the time," but seeing you is quite inspiring.

Pieter Levels (01:12:01):
I want to use these location service APIs to figure out where are people traveling to, for example. And it's always like you need to do a sales call, you need to contact us and stuff. And I get so annoyed with it. And I know people on Twitter get annoyed with it. They can't get a price directly and sign up. Yeah, I think it's much easier to do like this, like a sales flow.

Sam Parr (01:12:23):
I think it's easier. I would argue maybe [inaudible 01:12:26]

Pieter Levels (01:12:25):
It's easier for now. Yeah.

Sam Parr (01:12:27):
It's easier for you, but I would actually argue there's a world where it's not as effective, though, because I'm in the same boat as you. I don't want to have to do all this crap and I'm not naturally a salesperson, but when I hired a sales team they were shockingly good at drumming up demand. And I remember a cool podcast with the founder of Squarespace, I think it was, and he was like you. He's an engineer. He's like I don't want to leave my room. I don't like talking to people. I like freedom, this and that. And he goes a huge mistake I made was I looked down on sales people and I looked down on this type of pricing where you get them on the phone,

Pieter Levels (01:13:04):
I think I got that,

Sam Parr (01:13:04):
Get them on the phone. But he was like I looked down on it and I was wrong. It was effective. They created demand for a product and that surprised me most. So I don't know. I think [inaudible 01:13:16]

Pieter Levels (01:13:16):
No, I think you're right. I think my problem is that it's very hard to meet good salespeople or to find them. And it's unclear for me how I can hire them. And how can I rate a person to hire them as a good salesperson? I don't know what's a good salesperson. And I've never done outbounds, almost never done outreach and stuff. And I'm scared that if I hire salespeople, I need to manage them. And then they might fuck up, they might start spamming everybody in LinkedIn. And then it becomes a screenshot thing on Twitter, like Pieter Levels is spamming with his website and stuff. So it might turn bad. And I think you're right. If you get to the right salespeople, it can work. I'd never been able to find those people.

Sam Parr (01:14:00):
It just matters what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for happiness and a good life, do it your way. Your way is working really well. If you want to grow at a certain rate per year and you want to really push it, I do think you do need a sales team, but that's not what you're optimizing for. You're optimizing for freedom and happiness.

Pieter Levels (01:14:23):
Yeah. And I also think there's different types of companies. For example, there's companies that ask for a lot of forms. They want a W8 form, the old US IRS forms and stuff. They want you to sign everything. They want you to sign an NDA and there's some companies that just enter their credit card on Stripe and it's done. And it's different customers. And the customers that ask for a lot of questions on email, they generally convert less for me to pay less money and they are more of a hassle to do customer support for and stuff. So you also get different types of customers. If you do it all automatic, you get more modern customers that are easier to deal with, I think.

Sam Parr (01:14:59):
Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about?

Pieter Levels (01:15:06):
No, I think maybe transparency. The reason I'm so transparent is, like I said, I think it's very important to be honest and to show other people that you can build a nice indie company like this by sharing every ups and downs of it. Everybody else is only sharing the good things and we're growing so fast and we're hiring and we're funded and blah, blah, blah. And I think it would be cool if we did business maybe in a more wholesome way, where we share everything and share the ups and downs. And maybe not grow super, super, super big, but more in a wholesome manner.

Sam Parr (01:15:50):
I like that, but I have a few critiques. So you remember Buffer? So Buffer, they did the whole shtick. They did it even more, equally as extreme as you, I would say, but they revealed [inaudible 01:16:04]

Pieter Levels (01:16:04):
They're one of my inspirations, for sure.

Sam Parr (01:16:06):
But they revealed everyone's salary. And I think they did it as a marketing shtick. They did it because they're like, "Our products okay, it's good enough, but let's come up with a cool schtick so we stick out and it aligns with our philosophy." It's great and it worked really well for them, but I actually think that it probably hurts them after a while. It's really hard to do that after 100 or 150. I don't know what the number is. Some amount of employees because you're like, "Dude, I don't want my all out there." And if I was you, when we sold our company, I didn't exactly reveal how much I made because I'm like, "Man, I don't want to be a target." I don't want people to take advantage of me. I don't want to be judged in a particular way. I don't want that type of attention, so I'd rather just say round whole numbers instead of exactly what I do.

Pieter Levels (01:16:50):
No, there's a real security risk, for sure. Yeah.

Sam Parr (01:16:53):
You don't want to talk about where you are right now and part of it is because you're [inaudible 01:17:00]

Pieter Levels (01:16:59):
Yeah, for sure. 100%. Yeah, 100%.

Sam Parr (01:17:01):
So that's part of the downside, but at the same time maybe it agrees with your life philosophy and also it's a pretty sick marketing schtick.

Pieter Levels (01:17:13):
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's hard to stop it because I've been doing it for so long. It's become part of my identity. It would be hard to hide all this stuff now. And they're like, "Where did this open page go?" Why are you not sharing anymore? I'm like I'm just done with it now. And I do think it's this recurring marketing machine that I think is a big part of why my businesses work, became successful and why I got a lot of audience on Twitter, is because of this. I cannot deny that. So it's very hard to quit that once you've been doing this for so long.

Sam Parr (01:17:45):
Yeah, that's why I'm nervous about even doing it in the first place.

Pieter Levels (01:17:48):
Yeah.

Sam Parr (01:17:51):
I haven't gone hard on YouTube or any other social platform because I'm like I don't want a commitment. You got to keep with it.

Pieter Levels (01:17:58):
Yeah. Dude, I wanted to do YouTube, as well, and I have the same problem. Yeah. I'm like this is going to be a new recurring activity I need to do every week. I need to upload a video, make a video. Yeah.

Sam Parr (01:18:07):
I think there's a world where you could do seasons, like a TV show has a season. I think there's a world where you could do seasons and do quite well, but the majority of people do it regularly. And I'm like, man, I don't want to get on that treadmill. That's scary.

Pieter Levels (01:18:21):
No, I think it burns you out. Look at all the YouTubers burning out.

Sam Parr (01:18:24):
They all bail.

Pieter Levels (01:18:25):
Yeah, it's extreme schedule. Yeah, I think it might be interesting if I just sit in front on the laptop like this and I just tell the stuff I know and I think instead of writing it down and just making little videos. Derek Sivers also did that. He makes little videos about small topics, five minutes, explain something and the next video.

Sam Parr (01:18:42):
Yeah, Alex Hormozi was doing it. He came on our podcast, Alex Hormozi. He's been doing it lately and he loves it. And it seems like a lot work, but not that much work. No more work in this podcast and I don't consider this podcast to be too much work, but it works well. Dude, thanks for coming on. This has been fun. I hope you will come on more often and we'll do a little more brainstorming next time.

Pieter Levels (01:19:08):
Yeah. Dude, it was super fun. Thanks for having me. Super cool.

Sam Parr (01:19:12):
You said you were nervous because we were going to ask [inaudible 01:19:14] I don't think we asked anything. We didn't ask anything crazy.

Pieter Levels (01:19:19):
Yeah, cool.

Sam Parr (01:19:19):
There's not much to ask when you tell everyone on the internet about everything you do.

Pieter Levels (01:19:23):
Yeah. This is always when the good part of the podcast starts, right? Because you end it and then the real shit.

Sam Parr (01:19:30):
Hopefully not. The real stuff I hope was going on the whole time.

Pieter Levels (01:19:35):
Yeah. No, it was great. Yeah.

Sam Parr (01:19:36):
Dude, thanks. This is awesome. Pimp out your stuff. So it's @levels?

Pieter Levels (01:19:40):
Yeah, it's twitter.com/levelsio, so L-E-V-E-L-S-I-O. And there's all the links for my websites there, so you can click from there.

Sam Parr (01:19:50):
Thanks, dude. Thanks for coming.

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: