Skip to content
minibusinessideas

Case study · Nomad List and Photo AI (Pieter Levels)

How Pieter Levels built Nomad List, Remote OK, and Photo AI as a solo maker

TL;DR

Pieter Levels is an independent maker who started a public challenge in 2014 to launch 12 startups in 12 months. One of them, Nomad List, began as a crowdsourced spreadsheet and became a paid membership site, and by May 2019 Nomad List and Remote OK together reached $83,333 a month in revenue with no funding. In 2023 he launched Photo AI, which he said reached $105,000 a month in revenue by March 2026. The lesson: ship small products quickly and let the winners show you where to focus.

How it started

Levels announced in 2014 that he would launch 12 startups in 12 months. He wrote that his challenge was to actually finish and launch projects, and that every project was a minimum viable product built to test a hypothesis. Nomad List was the fourth project.

Nomad List grew out of a crowdsourced spreadsheet with data about cities around the world, such as cost of living, internet speed, and safety. He turned it into a site for digital nomads to compare places to live and work. He has also said it was around the seventh startup he tried and the most successful one.

Levels launched Nomad List on Product Hunt, where he says it took off in a way nothing he had made before had. In his own write-up he reports that it reached number one on both Product Hunt and Hacker News.

How they got the first customers

The first audience came from launch communities. Levels wrote that Nomad List got to number one on Product Hunt and Hacker News, driving a large wave of visitors. To make money, he built a paid community around the site that started on Slack. Early monetization ideas also included city guide books and kits for nomads.

Levels later wrote that Nomad List grew into a paid membership site with thousands of paying members, supported by features such as trip logging, a climate finder, and dating for nomads.

What drove growth

On May 30, 2019, Levels published that after four years, Nomad List and Remote OK together made more than $83,333 a month, which annualizes to $1 million. He listed 11,996 customers, an average payment of $115, no ad budget, and no funding.

In February 2023 he launched Photo AI, which he described as an evolution of his earlier project AvatarAI.me. In March 2026 he posted that Photo AI was making $105,000 a month in revenue and $80,000 a month in profit, and noted that the product ran on a single PHP file of 40,870 lines. Those figures are self-reported.

Lessons you can copy

  1. 1Set a shipping quotaLevels’ 12-in-12 challenge forced him to finish things. Shipping many small products raises your odds of finding one people want.
  2. 2Start with data you can collect cheaplyNomad List began as a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet or directory can validate demand before you spend months building software.
  3. 3Launch where early adopters gatherProduct Hunt and Hacker News gave Nomad List its first major audience. Pick the one or two communities your first users already read.
  4. 4Monetize with a membership when the community is the valueLevels built paid access around the people using the site, not just the data. Recurring membership revenue is easier to plan around than one-time sales.
  5. 5Keep the stack simpleHe describes Photo AI as one large index.php file. Simple tooling means one person can still maintain and change a profitable product quickly.

Frequently asked questions

Are Pieter Levels’ revenue numbers verified?

They are self-reported on his own site. We cite his posts directly and label them as self-reported rather than independently audited.

How did Nomad List start?

As a crowdsourced spreadsheet of city data for remote workers, which Levels turned into a website as part of his 12 startups in 12 months challenge in 2014.

Can I copy the 12 startups approach?

Yes, the method is simple: set a launch cadence, keep each product minimal, and put more time into the ones that attract users. Expect most projects to fail, as Levels did.

Start something similar

More case studies