Pieter Levels

Pieter Levels is a Dutch self-taught developer and arguably the best-known solo founder on the internet. He rose to prominence in 2014 with his challenge to launch 12 startups in 12 months, out of which came Nomad List (now Nomads.com), a crowdsourced database of cities for remote workers that grew out of a single public spreadsheet. A year later he started Remote OK, which became one of the largest remote job boards.

When generative AI arrived he reinvented his portfolio almost overnight, launching Interior AI, Avatar AI and Photo AI, an AI photo generator that became his biggest earner. He keeps adding experiments, including a browser flight simulator built largely with AI prompting and Vibe Jam, a game jam for AI-assisted games, and he invests in other startups through levels.vc.

Levels is famous for running multi-million-dollar businesses with no employees and no investors, on a deliberately boring stack of plain PHP, jQuery and SQLite on a single server. He shares revenue numbers openly on X, wrote the indie startup handbook MAKE, and his 2024 appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast introduced the indie maker approach to a mainstream audience. His public project list doubles as a reminder that most of what he ships fails.