The Digital Owner

For people building real businesses online

Founder Stories

Pieter Levels and the Case for Shipping Small

A Dutch developer set out to launch 12 projects in 12 months. A few of them became real businesses, and he still runs them himself.

By The Digital Owner staff · 6 min

Most people who want an online business spend a long time choosing the right idea. Pieter Levels took the opposite route. He decided the problem was not ideas. It was finishing.

His story is useful because it is public. He wrote about it as it happened, on his own blog, and he has since talked through the numbers in long-form interviews. That makes it one of the better documented solo business stories on the internet.

The problem he named

On 1 March 2014, Levels published a post called "I'm Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months." He said he had been inspired by Jennifer Dewalt's project of building 180 websites in 180 days. But his issue was different. He could already build things. His challenge, in his words, was "to actually finish and launch my projects."

So he set a rule. One project a month. Pick the idea, build it, launch it to press.

That framing matters. He was not promising that each project would succeed. He was promising that each one would ship. For an owner, that is a more honest goal. You control whether something launches. You do not control whether the market wants it.

Nomad List, mostly by accident

Nomad List was the fourth project in that run. Levels described its launch in an August 2014 post on his blog. It began as a spreadsheet of cities for remote workers, which he posted to Twitter on June 24 that year.

The site itself went live in a way he did not plan. He wrote that about a month later, on July 29, he rebooted his server. Because he had accidentally uploaded a local configuration file, the site was suddenly public. He only found out when tweets started coming in. Someone else submitted it to Product Hunt, and it went to number one there. It then also reached the top of Hacker News.

"My challenge is to actually finish and launch my projects."

There is a lesson in the accident, and it is not "get lucky." The spreadsheet had already been shared. People already wanted the information. The launch only exposed demand that existed.

What the portfolio became

In 2025, Levels sat down with Stripe co-founder John Collison on the Cheeky Pint podcast. Collison opened by listing the results: Nomad List had reached $700,000 in annual recurring revenue, Remote OK had reached $3.4 million in revenue, and PhotoAI had reached $600,000 in ARR. "These are all just you," Collison said.

Levels did not dispute it. He described his last decade as mostly working on a laptop while traveling, "making little creative projects that I needed to solve my problems." Then he added the part most success stories leave out: "most of the time, nobody else needed that problem solved. But a few times, it worked."

That is the real shape of a solo portfolio. A long list of attempts. A short list of winners. The winners pay for everything else.

Payments were the turning point

In the same interview, Levels said he started making money in 2014, the year Stripe became available to him in the Netherlands. He also told a story about trying to accept payments as a 12-year-old, when his father had to sign a merchant contract that made him liable for very large damages. He never sold anything through it.

The point is practical. A business is not real until someone can pay you without friction. Before that, it is a project. A lot of first-time owners build for months before they set up checkout. Levels' history suggests doing it early.

He had made money online before

Levels also explained on the podcast that he earned money from YouTube while still at university, uploading drum and bass music he made. He said that income grew from around $1,000 a month to as much as $8,000 a month.

This is worth noting for one reason. His later businesses did not come from nowhere. He already understood audiences, distribution and the idea that the internet could pay him directly. Founder stories often skip the years of skill that came first.

What an owner can take from this

You do not need to copy his lifestyle or his tech stack. Three habits carry over to almost any online business.

Ship on a deadline. A monthly launch rule forces decisions. It also gives you more chances to find something people pay for.

Build from a problem you have. Nomad List came from his own need as a remote worker. That gave him an edge in knowing what the product should be.

Let the market decide. He did not guess which project would win. He launched, watched, and kept the ones that worked.

The trade-off nobody should ignore

A portfolio of small bets is not free. It costs time, and most bets lose. Levels said so directly. If you need one predictable income stream next month, this approach will feel slow and uncertain.

But if you are building for the long run, and you can afford to treat early projects as tests, the record is clear. One person, shipping steadily, built several businesses that most funded teams would be happy with.

The idea he started with in 2014 still holds. Finishing is a skill. And it can be practised.

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