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Intro
Pieter Levels (levelsio) is the digital nomad who took a leap of faith and became a multi-millionaire by building a portfolio of successful startups. From his humble beginnings as a teenager dabbling in programming to launching 7 mediocre startups, Pieter finally hit the jackpot with Nomad List and RemoteOK.
With his philosophy of "learn by doing" and a focus on speed and simplicity, Pieter Levels has built a thriving empire that generates $3 million a year with high margins. Watch this inspiring story of how Pieter took control of his fate and achieved his entrepreneurial dreams.
Projects
Nomadlist is a site dedicated to the rising trend of traveling remote workers, also called digital nomads: it lets people find the best places to go based on their preferences like internet speed, cost of living, weather, and safety (and thousands more data points). Pieter started Nomad List in 2014 as part of his goal to launch 12 startups in 12 months, It was the ~7th startup he tried and the most successful one. It's now used by millions of people every month and its revenue ranges from $20k-$40k/month or ~$300k/year with thousands of paying members:
RemoteOK is the second startup launched in 2015. The main idea of Remote ok is to make remote jobs accessible instead of “commuting to work every day and then sitting from 9 am to 7 pm in a dark office with annoying people you secretly hate who play office politics, make stupid jokes, have useless meetings and talk about football games.” On its launch, It reached #1 on Product Hunt and became the #15 highest-voted product of all time with 1,000 upvotes. Now the metrics look like this:
Pieter was always ahead of everybody with his fresh ideas. And AI sparked his interest before the hype unwrapped. Now let's look at how AI helped him make two successful projects.
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AI Projects
PhotoAI is an AI photographer. Recently video feature was also added to the app. PhotoAI launched on Feb 10 and on Feb 12 Pieter announced that the startup is almost profitable!
With only 2 months spent on building, it’s an impressive result! PhotoAI is an extension of a previously popular app by Pieter.
Initially, he discovered the concept of finetuning and decided to experiment with it on his interior design model. While playing around with it, he uploaded some of his pictures and was amazed to see that the model could generate images in various styles. He shared his experience on Twitter, which quickly went viral.
The following day, he launched a website called http://AvatarAI.me, which generated over $100,000 in the first ten days. This also sparked a trend of creating avatars with big VC apps, with Lensa following suit later. However, AI avatars were considered a bit kitschy and gimmicky because they weren't photorealistic. Instead, they looked more like art, and that was because it was much harder to make a person look realistic with AI. It was much easier to hide the problems by making it "arty".
He felt there was an opportunity to create something useful, so he spent the next two months building http://PhotoAI.com. It was technically the most challenging product he had ever built. Now, after six months, it looks good and has a monthly recurring revenue of approximately $50,000. Pivoting to photo AI was a smart move because AI avatars turned out to be a fad, and their revenue crashed for everyone.
PhotoAI recently launched in the AppStore, which was a big step for Pieter. Now he's working on iteration and improvement of the app.
InteriorAI redesigns the interior using AI. Pieter says that it’s a mutual clone of PhotoAI.
The current MRR of this project is $38K and it’s been noticed by the New York Times and TechCrunch.
A similar project that was the baseline for InteriorAI is ThisHouseDoesNotExist. An idea done before by other AI creators with humans, but with interior design.
Pieter says that both projects were inspired by Stable Diffusion and /r/houseporn:
I started playing with Stable Diffusion in September 2022:
So almost 11 months ago
I tried generating anything for days and what turned out to be quite good was /r/houseporn type stuff: beautiful architecture homes
I made
http://thishousedoesnotexist.org
which generates random homes automatically (still does)
A lot of the pics it’d generate were interior photos, so I tried to upload my own interior (with img2img) and mix it with the prompt, and that worked incredibly well
So I made
http://interiorai.com
where ppl can upload their own interior and it gives them new design ideas, this went instantly viral and is now ~$50,000 MRR
A recent interior feature is creating design sketches, and visa versa turning sketches into designs.
The next steps for interiorAI are marketing, mostly on TikTok, and maybe new cool features!
It's amazing how Pieter keeps track of every possible trend and finds new features to put into apps. He's truly a master of multitasking. With only 3 people working part time on his team, that's an impressive result!
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