This Is What Real Freedom Looks Like - Pieter Levels
How a solo operator built $3M/year in profit-heavy, fully automated businesses around one contrarian truth, and why the operating system underneath is simpler and stranger than it looks.
"I'm the exception. I'm like, I don't want to be building another company. I'm fine like this, kind of chill." — Pieter Levels
Pieter Levels, on the episode
Shaan Puri and Sam Parr sit down with Pieter Levels, the Dutch solopreneur behind Nomad List, Remote OK, and half a dozen other bootstrapped projects that together generate close to $3M a year, almost entirely in profit, with no full-time employees. The pop framing of Levels is a lucky nomad who built a few directories and got rich during the pandemic. The actual operating system is more deliberate: a single contrarian thesis about how people should live and work, a radical transparency loop that doubles as a recurring marketing engine, and a relentless bias toward automation and simplicity over growth. Every business he builds either generates cash or generates audience that feeds back into the same thesis, and the whole stack runs on a PHP and jQuery codebase he can ship a feature to in twenty seconds. This protocol pulls the operational plays from across the full conversation, from how he structured his team and his sales flow to how he thinks about money, possessions, and where the next wave of slow-travel products will come from.
Tactic 01
Pieter Levels, My First Million
Publish Your Revenue On A Slash Open Page
The play
Publish a public page showing your revenue, profit margin, and team size.
Pieter Levels says
I keep a public page, like nomadlist.com slash open, showing my revenue chart, profit margin, and team size as a full time equivalent. It is not well designed, I just keep adding stuff to it. This recurring page has become a big part of why my businesses got successful and why I built an audience on Twitter. It is hard to stop now because it has become part of my identity.
Try this
Create a plain public /open page showing your real revenue, profit margin, and team size, and link it from your bio.
