PhotoAI / Nomad List / Remote OK
Pieter Levels
Solo, no employees, no investors: a portfolio estimated at ~$3M a year.
Photo AI
Nomad List
Remote OK
Self-reported figure
~$3M/yr
Solo, 40+ products
Audience
~600K followers on X
Launched
2014
Age at launch
26-27
01Started from
Where it started
Techno music producer turned self-taught developer, who learned to code in his late twenties.
- Tech level
- Self-taught developer
- Starting money
- Minimal ("a laptop and a backpack")
- How it was built
- 100% solo with vanilla PHP, jQuery and SQLite, building in public and shipping before things are ready.
- Funding
- None: 100% bootstrapped, never any VC.
- Tools
- vanilla PHPjQuerySQLite
02Journey
The journey
2014
12 startups in 12 months
He challenges himself to launch 12 startups in 12 months. Nomad List comes out of it, when he is 26-27.
Next
A portfolio
Remote OK, then PhotoAI (an AI photo generator), all on the same minimalist stack, with no employees.
10+ years
Compound growth
No viral spike: steady growth over a decade, while traveling to 40+ countries. Around 600K followers on X.
Nov. 2025
~$3M a year (estimated)
PhotoAI makes ~$132-138K a month; the whole portfolio is estimated at ~$3M a year.
03Lessons
What you can take from it
- 01
Launch many small products fast: one of the 12 became Nomad List.
- 02
Use the tools you already know: simple tech is enough to ship and get paid.
- 03
Ship before it's ready, then improve in public with your users.
“That's the thing I knew — I knew PHP, HTML, CSS.”
Figures come from public sources (press, the founders’ own posts) and are sometimes self-reported.
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