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drug dealers online, directories and like spam daxing. And like, they're still Shady ship.
Unless I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all into it. Like all Days on the
Road, Less Traveled. Never are you intimidated? Why are you what you? He said he took.
A run before this because he was nervous. Now he's dead because I've been on a lot of podcasts, but like they usually kind of small, you know, it's like I see you guys just like Joe Rogan for business. So it's like this one step below above is like Joe Rogan and as you guys and then below is like yeah, I don't want to diss all the pot because I've been on their amazing but you know like this is like a level so but it's good to know I'm here to
figure levels so and you also don't know what Sam might ask you because Sam might just come out of left field and be alone. But that's the thing I was thinking like Sam is like is
not a regular interview.
No, he asked some crazy shit. So wait. Hey first of all I don't know if that's true. I don't know. We first of all, it's not just me. It's you too Shawn, the ask weird stuff but also I don't think we ask that weird questions. I think we ask the questions that everyone's thinking. Now this true my I mean you're not yes man. Like you notice yes-men podcast where like they just this kind of like a fan thing obviously does not. You got you have real shit real questions and it's I think it's more interesting as well.
Can we say I'm can we share the thing? You were just telling us in slack can I share that on here on the Pod? Yeah, this area which one's the sampar strategy for networking. This is, you know, you can go to Harvard, you can go to Stanford, you're not going to learn this 17 where if like, you know, it's the first small little tweak but it's just so Sam that it just is awesome. So if you're if Stan wants to hang out with you he'll text you just like a normal person would but and he
Need even know you. He's just like interested in you. Maybe maybe it's a cold, DM, maybe it's a text message, maybe he got your number from somebody else. But hey, it's Sam, you know, I'm in San Francisco but instead of saying want to hang same, we'll just go. I'm in San Francisco. Let's
he sent me some shit that I won't
say out loud. But yeah, I think it works. Yeah. So Sam what, what is this and why does it work so well?
It's like a phrase. Like, you know, like
People will be like, you know, I fuck with that guy. Like I fuck with Drake. I like Drake it extends from that and I just say it and people they reply I don't know, I just yeah this particular one I it was a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company who I'm friendly with I just said, what's up? I'm in your hood. Let's and he goes down when like it worked
out it's amazing and now so normally we try to play it. Cool but we've actually been chasing you. Peter, we've been we've been talking about your
Jack's we've been being like, hey, we got to get this guy. The Pod Sam is a fan of you, for sure. I would say, I am less of a fan than Sam, but I am a, that is, I mean, I like you. It's just, I'm more in the closet about it. Whereas Sam was very open Sam's. Like this guy's amazing. This guy's like an artist. Thanks man, this guy's got great hair and you do have great hair, so it's all true you and I think we finally got you here and it was hard, I think, right? Because you like don't do you don't schedule or something like that. Like
I mean it
Like he's it looks like being an ass, right? Anything if you do that but I
like you guys, I would get so many VMS
and they're all like I mean generally very low quality. I'm sorry like I want to collaborate but I don't want to invest. I don't want to like people want something from you. I think it's like, being a hot girl in the club like people want something from you, but they don't want to invest the time to actually get to know you or, you know, you feel like object and I don't like to feel like that. And I want to spend more time with, you know, like with my friends in real life with
Go
for know, something I want to spend time on in the gym, you know, my health and cooking food and that kind of stuff go for walks. And I think, because I, because I've been doing this for 10 years, like, startups, like eight years and now, I get the money is going well, so I don't really need to do any calls anymore and idioms. So I'm just trying to create a more chill life, and I'm not an asshole. It just means, like, I don't have time to met to reply to everybody. So, I close my DMs and then people got really angry on Twitter like,
Why don't you why don't you close your dams? Are you are going to stuff. So I wrote a blog post like kind of explaining my day, a, my routine. And what I do in a day and that that don't really have time. If I do all the things I do now to also, DM, everybody in reply, everybody and do calls and stuff, and that's pretty much the arguing or even
true. Let's give the context. So let's explain who the heck you are. So your name is Peter levels. Your known on Twitter as levels. I oh right? Yeah that's the that's the real estate I saw you a while back I'm just going to say some interesting.
Things about you. I believe you can correct me if I have any of these wrong, I believe you publish how much you make every year and in fact, it's in your Twitter, bio in your location. There's like a meter that's like your road to 3 million a year. Yeah. And it says 2.7 million so your meter is almost all the way full filled up. You build a bunch of random small projects usually around some things you like or believe or your lifestyle which is kind of a nomadic lifestyle. So I believe
I think you you hop around or you don't have like a home base. So you live, you know, you could be like in Bali and then you could be in the Netherlands, you can be a different place all the time and you make these small websites or apps. And it says, in your bio that you have 13 million monthly active users. And I remember seeing you because you did a community like I'm like a nomad Community. A slot Community really early on like slack, had just come on. And I was like, you guys guys, like charging 10 bucks of, I think it's 10 bucks a month.
Something to get into this thing. I was like, he's got like a thousand people here. Wow, this is actually, it's guys, making good money doing this like just by making a slight group if you just do a bunch of exfol experiments like that. That's what I know Sam. What did I
say? I'll give Peter Peter. Let me give like the outsider's perspective. That's a little more holistic. So basically there's two things that are interesting to you. The first one is your businesses, which actually are the least, the lesser of the two interesting things so you have roughly five or yeah, you have seven different businesses.
Ranging from Nomad list, which makes 2.1 million dollars in the last 12 months. That's a, that's a job board. You have another job board called remote, okay? That's making a hundred fifteen thousand dollars a month. You have read May read make, which looks like it's like an e-book something like that. Yeah, okay. We'll get ya 60k month. And you have got like a bunch of
really are seeing these numbers because he publishes them. Where do you publish these?
He publishes all of them on, like, the, the URL, go to his Twitter profile and we'll let you talk, sorry Peter in a second, but go to this. Another profile.
Let's go to his Twitter profile, men like click off, and it's like open Revenue at the very bottom, but I'm reading off of our notes and then you have like, a few, our menu Creator. Then you have like an inflation chart, which doesn't seem like it makes money, but tracks inflation. And then you have rebase, which is a platform to help people become a citizen of Portugal. Help them relocate Portugal. So, what's the first part is those businesses? Like I said, you have those that are interesting, I would narrow it down to say, you have a series of job boards for nomadic or remote work.
That are pretty profitable. But the second thing that's even more interesting is the way that you do these things. So you do a few things that are interesting. The first thing is, I think you're the only full-time employee, right? And use a team of contractors. And second of all, you have this weird personality, that's very embedded in everything you do. So that's kind of like, my big intro of what you do it
is that I could see a website and I could know you built it without you having an about page which is kind of the ultimate funky, right? It looks a little it's like nobody.
Yeah.
Yeah. No. I think it's accurate description. It's like, like, I'm not very nomadic anymore. Like, I'm slowly settling down, right? But I started very nomadically. I was like moving around every month. I started liking 2014, I started no matting. And I went all these places and I started building these apps, these little website little products to validate. And I remember, I mean, I told the story so many times but I was following Patrick Mackenzie bet your 11 on Hacker News.
Famous second is a guy and now he works for stripe and he would do. He would share his revenue on his blog about all those little products he made. And it was like a appointment reminder for barber shop. So you got a SMS just before your appointment so you don't forget it that kind of stuff and I was really inspired like, okay. This is not like some big VC fund that guy. This just like an indie guy was just on his laptop kind of building stuff. And I kind of mix that with the Nomad thing where like building from your laptop from your backpack moving around.
Think also getting inspired from different places because if you move around you, I mean, I know Sam moves around a little bit as well. You, your life becomes very unique because you meet different kinds of people. You're in different kinds of places. You see different kinds of products like in shops. Like, if you're in Asia, you see some futuristic shit. You don't see in Europe and America and all that stuff. Kind of it helps for inspiration for creating products in some indirect ways as well. So that's pretty much what I've been doing. And I think it's, I've been trying to be like, radically honest like, I know,
This is American guy who wishes to radical honesty movement. So, I'm trying to do that in my personal life. I'm trying to do it on the internet. I'm not perfect but I'm trying to be as honest and open as possible because I don't like this fake corporate stuff and it's because I started business administration and a master's degree in it. So I know all the management consultancy bullshit. You know, I've been there done that. I know this were my friends work, I know investment bankers. And I hate that, that a lot of that world where it's like, fake and are real and I
Want to be very open and honest and I think it's also a little bit of a European thing not to slack off America's, I love America, but like in Europe, people are very little more direct and they would more straightforward. And I think that comes across in my, in stuff, I do a little bit. So what's the total size of all your of all your projects in terms of Top Line. And bottom line revenue, isn't it true that you're the only full-time person? And how many contractors are you using? Yes, I have one customer.
Sport contractor part. I'm Isabelle and she works for all my projects and I have a moderator for the select group because to select groups, take there's some drama in there. Like I've had some tasty trauma in this slide groups in communities. So you need to have a moderator, you need have rules, you need to have a. You cannot just automate this moderation away. Like I tried that. We need a real person there to check on messages and stuff. And then I have a devops guys, my best friend Daniel and he
Works kind of like a SL SL a-- like a service level agreement. Where if the server goes down, he gets the message. You know, if I'm sleeping with something, he brings it back up but the problem is never was down any more. Like, it doesn't, we haven't really had that for years. So he does security updates and stuff, you know? Like because I have a VPS, I don't use Amazon, I use a VPS on digital ocean and line out and he kind of keeps that stuff safe, you know, so that's good. And how big is the business Top Line and sorrow makes a business. So, remote a case.
Job or it is the biggest business makes the most money. Normally this is starting to grow those like it's best. I think 100k this month 100K month. So almost like a million dollar business remoter case 1.6 million a year. I think Andre basis the new business is immigration agency so I want to help remote workers immigrated to countries that want to attract remote workers with like you know beneficial text stuff. Portugal is one of the first ones to do that so those are the three business really make.
Money in the rest doesn't really make money a lot like the book makes like a thing like 4K month.
So but everything you do is part of one flywheel. So I've looked at your kind of like system and I've looked at a bunch of people because I got into a little pickle where I was like, God I'm doing so many things and I want to do all these things. I'm interested in all these things but shit, you know, am I going to be able to juggle five different things? I got a podcast, I have a VC fund. I have my e-commerce business, I have
Newsletter business. I have, you know, I don't even know what else to course business. I got other shit, right? So it's like, am I gonna be able to do this? And what I saw that you did like I have this kind of like, mental model of a solopreneur and a solopreneur. Nobody's actually solo. Everybody's got like a little support team around them. That's like helpful, some in a big way, someone small way. But basically, it's like somebody who builds a personal brand and then builds a bit. Build a successful business, and lifestyle around that. And what I noticed was that you had this formula
Which is I don't know if it's intentional or unintentional but I'll say it out loud because here's my read of your business. It's basically you have you starts with the red pill. So the red pill is like, you know, that scene in The Matrix where Morpheus is holding out a blue pill read books like you know, do you want do you want the truth or do you want to you take the blue pill? You could just go back to your normal life just as everything was. You can forget this ever happened and he's like no I need to know the truth. What's the truth? He takes the red pill and basically it's like every great solopreneur I think starts with one truth.
So like Tim Ferriss is truth was basically that like the 925 work in a cubicle for 40 years model is like effing broken and you don't need to do it that way like you could work for hours a week and live like a millionaire and I was like, Tim Ferriss. Is red pill? And yours is basically, like this is idea of being a nomad, a digital Nomad, which was like, hey, yeah, you don't have to prescribe to the subscribe, to the normal way of living, you pick a place. That's where you are from. That's where you live.
Live and you pay, you know, you just kind of stay where you grew up and like and you go to an office every day and like you have to wear shoes and whatever you like, no, I wear flip-flops, I walk around on beaches. I just kind of go wherever I feel like whenever I feel like and I carry a little like backpack and that's my life. Yeah. So you start with the red pill, then you, then you create content around that. Red pill says you talking about that lifestyle and sharing everything from like, hey, people always ask what I put keep in my backpack for the day. Here's what it is. It's like just every bit of content, you can come up.
That's like Papi, that's like fits that red pill. So then you become that big gives you Authority on that subject. So you become religious Authority and so, you know, pomp became an authority around Bitcoin and Tim Ferriss became a Authority around life hacking and you've become an authority around nomadism and then you take that and then you basically spin off one of many businesses that can come up with it. But every one of those business, either it's a big money maker or it's just another funnel, add more content, more new
That's going to like get sucked into that same red pill lifestyle that you are like talking about. And so it even though you're doing six things, they're all actually part of one flywheel and everyone that you do is he going to feed it either? Because it's going to give you a bunch of cash that lets you fund this lifestyle and a better bigger and better way, or it's going to give you new content, new stories, new things to be known about that, fit that lifestyle as well. That's how I see it as curious. Is that a good is that traffic is very accurate. And all right, let's take
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my thing started. When I was, I was blogging. Just like you said, I was blogging about like no matting.
But I was blogging for my mom because back then you had like travel bloggers, like 2014 and I was going to travel kinda and Nomad and I wanted to know every place. I went, I wrote a little I was this city to live in and stuff, and what happened? All the crazy shit happened to me. And my mom was reading that but I wrote it in English because my mom was obviously Dodge was like, okay she can read English so it's maybe easier to get more traffic and stuff more audience, but it wasn't like super like a big idea just kind of happened. And then those blogs started showing up on Hacker News. And I started writing more about
Bootstrapping startups as a nomad and in Thailand or something or in Asia. And those started going on, Hacker News really high and I think that was the time. It was like, 2013-2014, there was a time when I noticed that the developers in San Francisco working for the startups. They also were realizing, okay, maybe I can start doing this remotely because remote work was not cool back then and no man was not cool back then because you had the Tim Ferriss wave in 2008 was a good first nomad wave but there was so I love Tim Ferriss, but it
Something about the the followers there and the business that were created, they were kind of like like shady. There's a lot of shady shit. I met I came across an Asia in Thailand like Americans and Europeans. It was like
a lot of brain supplements and shit. Like do it. Yes. Yes dude. Yeah, drug dealers online
directories and like spam daxing and like they're still shady shit but less and I was like I really hate this shady shit. I don't feel like part of the scene. I think it would be cool to make it more like you know mainstream like reputable business is reputable job.
That do it. So I kept looking about it and it kept taking off in a hacker news and and you're right I think and then I went on Twitter and I think I kind of organically people started following me and then a lot of people when Nomad lot of my friends when no mad because I was blogging and they became my friends now and yeah. And then I started out as businesses and but I think it's not like some it sounds very like a
constructive. Not a master
plan. No not a master plan is very organic like I kind of try. I'm like user 0. I try to
Stuff for myself. And I always have, like, I've like new ideas, like there's just, like you said red-billed. Is there something? This is this congruence in society. And what I'm thinking and most people than think like, okay, they must be wrong something. There must be something wrong with me, but I think like, arrogance, I think the most it's all wrong, stupids Society. Maybe this is like a new thing. So I'll try and make a little website about that inflation, like, three years ago or two years ago. I was tweeting about inflation like this. Shit's gonna go crazy with all the FED printing money and every second I inflation is fine.
Fine. Stop, stop whining about it. I'm like, no. I'll just prove you that the real inflation numbers are higher. So I made this inflation chart.com website, that shows inflation. I was a really high turned out to be true kind of now.
So yeah, that's all right.
What, what technology are you using to build those sites? Because they all do look alike and you seem like, you can spend your spin them up, like, really quickly with this really funny because I get a lot of criticism for the technology I use. I use PHP because that's the language I knew, because I was making a blog like, right, like WordPress. So I knew PHP a little bit.
So I was like, okay, I just need to write with the language. I know, because I don't know on their other languages and I did that and then I use a JavaScript and I use jQuery. So, everybody starts laughing now because jQuery is like way Bessie, but I still use it because it's so easy to, you know, make a button binding event to it, a gesture to the server to the PHP. Script does something with the database sends it back and it works for me really well and I think it doesn't matter what you use but as long as you use something that's really fast feedback loop and iterative.
Where you can really quickly develop like I can make a new button in like 20 seconds and deploy to the server and it's really fast and I know other developer friends of mine, use a very big stack, all those governing ayaats and all the stuff all these keywords. I don't really know and for them, it takes sometimes like, you know, an hour or maybe even days to deploy a new feature. And I think what we learned from startup and Lean Startup, is that the customer feedback loop as to be very difficult? Very, very fast iterative so you can really quickly
In stuff, and also makes your customers really happy because they see something, they have a problem or a feature idea. You can really quickly build it and then they see it. And that's, I mean, if you want to happy customers, that's how you get it. You make something for them, they're like, oh my God, I influence this product. And, yeah, so that works for me. So very, very simple stack. And what do you think? Laugh
at you? Because not, because we're nice. We just we don't know anything about that. And what jQuery is either the
Samsung nobody these days. Do not gonna make fun of me.
You're safe here. We're too dumb to tend to call you out on any of your technical,
nice size. It's a good podcast. What do you what do you think? What do you think this whole your whole thing's worth? Because if you go, okay, so it depends if you 5x, sorry Sean. Go to his like sites and you could see like, it's like something / open. It's usually like the website / opened. And then like it says, like so many stats, most of which honestly are kind of useless but it's just like, it's cool. It's like, you know, like how many, how many
percent of them are like
You know, the equivalent of like a step counter. It's like, it's like oh, how many DM's did I get today? How many? No, I don't have need it. Do you? Do you
have? It's but it's collectivistic DM. Send you notes Collective right Vance?
Yeah, but we're not for example. I'm on Nomad list.com which you said, yeah, I think your biggest one slash open and on it. You can see the revenue chart, you see, you know, CO2 removed from the atmosphere. You see the full PML, you see a bunch of the things and one of them that you see is my okay. So, 73 percent profit margin your
Jim says, point seven eight. So I guess that's like hard time.
Yeah. Like full-time equivalent like FTE
and then plus four hundred ninety two Bots.
What is that survey? Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to also do like he has a valuation to. It's very says yes we sold for like X, whatever the
motor TX profit if it was 30 x problems to be six Seventeen million.
So I try to take the pee. I mean, it's not super accurate, I did business, but it's the PE ratio of public companies that are similar in industry. And I
Hi like sync it to that sometimes but the dude it completely depends on the multiple. Someone's going to pay for it right. Like have you so much. These are extremely low. No, absolute nothing but a felony in. I've been in selling process with previous guest on your podcast you know. So but I kind of bounced off. I'm just a lot of I think I'm just gonna guess it was Andrew Wilkinson because he
loves manager, smoke Ensign.
Yeah cuz he loves em Force. That's just gas concentration but 80% I signed any a
Percent of the Acquisitions they bounce off, right? So right now I'm like I don't really care. I like that. I have cash flow and my life is nice and but I until recently I was really like until like a few years ago I was like obsessed by this selling because you bills start up like in the movie like social or not, the movie social network. But in a big movies about stars, they're like, oh my god, grow big. And I sell your millionaire. But then, if you become millionaire yourself with your cash flow, you like, okay, why does it matter actually? Well, let's actually talk about that because what's interesting about
You is you have a few that you could sell so, like remote, okay? And no med list are both pretty cool. Have you calculated like how much money you want and how long it's going to take you to get there via cash flow? And if it's better to like, well why don't I just sell one? And I can get like an 8 or 10 million dollar lump sum, but then I still on this other one that's making like yeah, three million dollars. I mean, have you thought I'd be done that math? And what have you? The thing is, most of my wrapping, his Prophet. Like, the margins are really high. Especially remote. Okay. Is like it's 94 percent margin.
This is very high so I'd say 10 eggs, after thanks gets interesting, I think the problems of boost your company's you usually get three, four, five x profit Arabian are here which is too low for me. It's like, I can, I might as well. Wait, three years or four years and sit in this chair and the sides will probably keep running because they're fully automated and I barely need to work on them. They kind of just keep going like heavily automated like really heavy heavy. It's just that I won't build new features. Any more than and decide. We'll start looking a little bit old.
As you know, design Trends change, but generally it will keep running so it doesn't make sense for me to sell for, you know, 5 x, 4 x, if I might as well. Wait. And also like no man, this is like my baby, so if I sell it, they're gonna fuck it up. I already know because they always do like, let's say a big, a big remote start up by is it okay? I know if easy find remote starters are cool but they are also going to be bought by big boring companies later like corporate companies, right? And they're going to shut this.
Down there like and this is my contribution. This is my life's work. Is that Legacy? So remote? Okay I care less because the job or job was not very interesting but normally this is like this whole movement and culture and there's like tens of thousands of people on there and my friends are on their hands like this work of love, you know? And so yeah it's hard. It would be hard to sell that because people going to fuck it up. Are you the largest? Go ahead John
well one thing I was going to say you tweeted out something that said a 10-year overnight
S, which I think is a common idea that most people don't don't realize which is by the time you hear about something you don't know the 10 years of kind of toiling and tweaking and iterating, that it took before, the big kind of Breakers happen. I have my life was the same way. You know, I start my first startup when I was 20, 21 and I made my first Million by the time I was 30 or 31, right? Like it wasn't. It took 10 years man? Yeah. And and you know and then and then every year since then bunch of great stuff has happened but like it.
A long time to get that breakthrough and I was looking at your chart Sam. I don't know if you saw this tweet that he has, but the chart basically shows, I think you start the
sum of all my Revenue together in one charge yet.
Yeah, it's all your revenue from all your projects, all together in one chart. And it's looking like it's like at another 2012 or 2013 start and basically if I go all the way up until let's call it 2019. You're at maybe 600. 700 K and per year in revenue and only in the last like that kind of the
Emic boom. Let's say 2020 or 2022 went from under a million dollars to 2.5 million a year, right? So you two and a half X and you like is because it sounds amazing. Wow. This dude is making almost 3 million a year is like, yeah. But he's also been building that momentum and stacking these assets and it just really took off and it which I'm guessing is like, pandemic fueled. A lot of people wanted to be Nomads and like, you were there to catch that wave. You were the guy ready to catch my breath? No, he just was coming like, right. This
was
Like I did this presentation in 2015, where I predicted, there would be 1 billion remote workers in 2030 and everybody laughed at me. And I was like, even in the comments, like, YouTube comments were like, this is ridiculous, where is your sources is bullshit? And in covid happened and it suddenly seems very reasonable and, but nobody could have seen this coming and I had no idea. I was actually kind of
like thinking, like innovate or what? Exactly, we probably it kind of like it. If
you look at the chart, it's kind of like, you know, doesn't really go.
Anywhere. And I was like, thinking, okay, this is bullshit. Like I try I tried everything to make it grow and sometimes just grew and sometimes it didn't. But generally wasn't very, it wasn't like a VC star of. We're like,
well, it looks like there's these Pete. There's these run-ups, and then, a plateau and run up your flat 20, which is, by the way, how that's how all progress actually looks. If you zoom out Florida because you can't, I remember that. Like, during 2014. When I first moved to Silicon Valley, there was a small group of people like you. This is I think when you created that first
Black community that was like, know, being a nomad is the way to go and I have a dozen. People would like
he's reeks, you know, they were very kind of standard hundred percent, yes,
and I. But there were some people who took the red pill at that time. I think Steph Smith who was just as she met you in. I don't know, Indonesia or something like that because she had, I think probably during that more like that time. Period, 2014, 15, 16, something like that. She was one of those people that defected then whereas now there's
Another wave. And like, if you look at kind of like any lifestyle movement, it's happens this way. It starts with like very I could take crypto, it starts with the cypherpunks like a senior, right? Yes. They don't hang on cryptography forums and they took the pill first. Yeah, then came you know the next of the developers then came the finance but grows and then it changes the same with the next
week like music genres. Like hip-hop like early hip hop and I come from electronic music so drum and bass music. It was my previous career like music producer to same thing like EDM
Taking off in the u.s. in 2009 2010 with dubstep. That's what broke EDM in u.s. that kind of stuff. It
you like these movements
these scenes are almost dead and then suddenly something happens like right? And it's so unpredictable you have no clue what's going on, you can only serve it. So I think the metaphor of Surfing is very accurate is better to serve these waves in general. I think life just serve way. Stop trying to control it. Just serve it and kind of like pivoting, like pivoting startups into this pretty much just serve him.
During the surfboard offered ways because you cannot, you cannot control the market at all. You cannot control Society at all, you know, one of the things that bothers me about the, this Indie hacker movement is why I jealous. And I really, I really like it. I like it but in general what I don't like about it is like people think pretty small. So they're like, you know, like there's it's kind of related to like the fire movement which is like oh I just want to say a little bit of money so I can make forty thousand dollars a year in passive income.
And and I'm like oh that's cool like getting your first step is cool but like that can't be it with life. Like you have to like you know, you're going to want more, you want to do more things, can contribute to society. And with a lot of these Indie hackers, they kind of come up with silly stuff or it's like a small widget that they sell for four dollars a month. And they hope that they can get to a thousand dollars a month and I'm like, man that's like knee if you're just starting out. But I think that this could be bigger and you're actually one of the few people that I've seen goal harder, you know, you're going harder on this, are there any others, like you thinking?
Order on it's like and while your numbers are bigger, like it, like, like it's substantial, like your numbers are nice already and be survivorship bias, right?
Well yeah, definitely, but I still think that there's a mindset of like, for example, there's your
Twitter. Bio thing says your m going to 3 million. I would say most people who are in D hackers and makers and kind of like the, the sort of tinkerer community. They don't even have their beater to their, their meter, you know, initially is going to start much lower 60,000 or 70,000 a year and maybe yours did too but they do you like oh cool. I filled up that m. I leveled up. So what was your like, initials
Was it like make enough to not need a job or what? Where did you start and when did you get more?
Ambitious. So I mean, back when I started, I had a YouTube channel for this electronic music. I was making a stuff and there was making like a few thousand dollars from YouTube AdSense. So I had some Runway, some cash flow to live off of travel of and work on many startups, but it was very fast. It was shrinking because of the competitive like the copyright claims on YouTube in 2012 and stuff. So it was pretty much becoming like below a thousand dollars a month.
But so I had that Castro but to go to your question I think it's a power-law like you always have a few people in a scene who will make more money or get more successful and stuff. Also, there's a delay effect. I started in 2013 or 2014. All these in need is in this scene, didn't really, it wasn't cool until maybe I think 2018 or something 2017. So these people that are going into it now, they're just starting kind of and I think the widget thing is interesting because
Says only a weighted, if you make one feature really well that solves that one problem you can get some customers and you get some cash flow and then you can build a second feature and you can slowly skill up to a bigger to real business, to real product, toolkit Ray. And then I think another thing is, you don't see a lot of people with multi-million Revenue because they will quickly race PC. Like, once you pass the million dollars a year, they will switch to. Okay, let's go big. Let's go become do it on a company.
And I think I'm the exception. I'm like, I don't want to be building our company. I'm fine like this kind of chill and that's why you don't see those people lot because I do know them and they quickly disappear like this app we're using now Riverside I think is raised to be see. Now started bootstraps and then I think Oprah Winfrey use it and because it's my friend on the of he makes it he's like dude over way for you is I'm like oh my God, this is crazy. He's like yeah I think I'm gonna race PC. I'm like okay yeah you should do that because they think this is like this could be bigger than just a few million.
Right, so you tweeted something out there today that's related to this, you go, not sure if people realize it, but if your app does 20,000 a month in Revenue, you're probably already a millionaire, 20 thousand dollars per month times 12 months assume you could sell for. Let's call it, 4/5 x multiple. Yeah. That's a million-dollar selling price, right? You you're sitting on a million dollar asset. And when you put it that way, I think that sounds and it is way more achievable than this idea of like I got to build a million-dollar business like I do.
No, I don't. Do I have the big idea, whatever. But getting something to 20 to 30,000 a month and revenues, a proposal. Right? It's approachable. And that's kind of awesome. I think that's an amazing, like, just like you didn't see all you did, is you said something that was true out loud. And I think if more people heard that, that's why I'm kind of bring it up here. I think if more people heard that that is a pathway to a millionaire status, that does not require like winning the startup Lottery of like
inventing the next big
thing.
Or working and saving and yeah paying your crazy W2 taxes for like you know 15 20 years to get the same
outcome. Yeah exactly, I agree. Yeah and I think it's reachable, especially if you think about high automation very high margins, so software business, you're not going to hire a big team of 10 people. Immediately your work for part-time countries like I do and you keep your margins very, very high because then you can sell for 5x, right? Then your revenues almost your profit. So
The same. Yeah, it I think
twenty days or brainstorm our business together, that could get to 20 K. So what's an idea that you, you're not currently building, but you thought of because I'm sure you're an idea guy. And you think you can make a website that does X or you could make Nomad list for this other Niche or you could make, you know, the the immigration one for this other thing. So what's a business? Let's brainstorm a business together. What's a business that you think could get somebody to this millionaire
status? Dude, I think what?
Man. It's like again this is so personal. So I've been living like I used to live in hostels right? Like dorms in 2015 we did have money, shared with six people like crazy. Then I started like private rooms and hotels than the rooms got a little bit more luxurious because I had more money and then I started discovering like apartment hotels, and it sounds like bullshit. But it works. So well remote work. So, I mean apartment hotel right now in Europe on the beach and there's a kitchen apartment Hotel. What does that? Make sure apartamentos essentially Hotel.
So, full service, furnished and nice, interior hotel room, but you also have a kitchen, you have a bedroom, you have a living room, you have it, you know, it's very big. It's pretty much like an Airbnb, but a pay per month or per night or what you pay per month, well, you can pay per night, you can pay per month. It's just, it's like Sean. It's like that guy who whatever. Yeah, it's like sander and it's like, all I forget. The other one, the guy was supposed to come on the pot canceled
last minute. You did one of these in Nashville, right? Or something where you're like. This is. Yeah. Like Nemo. You were
working. Yeah.
Like a, it's basically just an apartment that you can rent for five days and they're pretty cool. I do I do them all the time. The problem that I've experienced is within the New York, it's like 10 grand a month and it's like 600 square feet. So that's why I tend to go Airbnb ball, Diamond smaller less expensive cities. You can get like a thousand square foot plays for like six thousand a month and it's just it's basically an apart apartment building. That has one floor or all floors, dedicated to airbnb's.
Yeah, the front of everybody is that I've noticed is the quality is very very high. There's a big range of quality and there's problems. There's no daily cleaning. It's feels too much like unexpected. You don't know what's going to happen. Is the water stuff, might break. If things break here, you just got a new apartment, right? And I've done this in Europe, and I've done this in Asia, to, in Thailand. And I spend about you see 2 to 3, K 3 and 5 K. So it's a lot of money. It's more than normal.
And but the cool thing is that it, it solves a lot of problems you have in your daily life, because its surface and stuff, and it's a huge thing in Asia, it's use thing in Southeast Asia, even in Korea, Taiwan stuff. So I think that's going to be bigger because of remote work, because you have remote workers, even with families with kids. And you don't want to live in a hotel. Or motel room is very depressing. Like, I go insane in hotel rooms. It's just like a bad and you can barely walk around the bed, there's no space. I need to cook food on
to buy steak from the local butcher. I need to cook it with broccoli and spinach and with my friends and stuff. And you can do it in an apartment hotel. And I think the, if you target, it's a high-end Market. I think of remote workers and make a lot of money like 200k or 800k. So me if you target them, you can make a lot of money because it's serviced furnished.
And what would you build, you actually build an apartment hotel or you'd build a digital
products. A big question because I'm a software guy. I don't want to, I don't want to own stuff. I don't want to have
This, I don't even want to buy land, I don't even want to buy a house. I want to be able to because Schumer a customer of these kind of things, right? But I wanted long-term, I want to be able to rent for like six months in or 12 months. Even I want to be guaranteed to stay. So we my wife and I are like we're at the point where we're going to start having kids soon and I live, not like you entirely but a little bit where we spent, we spend half the year, one place, happy or the other place and what we're going to do next year is just rent. Do a 12 month month lease
It's in New York and just not be there all the time but I'm looking to rent all of my furniture and I've been looking at a place where I was like, all right? I just want to like book this one place and I want to pay someone like 3 Grand a month but they have to show up before I arrived got a completely set it up. Yes. It's Gotta Be. Should 100% furnished for me. And I've been looking at these and there's a few startups in the space that are doing furniture, rental and furniture rental is not popular right now. And I tell people all the time I'm like, I just want to rent all my furniture. I don't want to own any of it and
They, they think it's nonsense and I think it's crazy, but if you run the math it's significantly like it's about the same in terms of price but in terms of headache, I think it's a thousand times better and I think that's another yeah.
Yes, yes, it's all right. It's all about the headaches. So if you can afford it, you can reduce the headaches of ownership and ownership is sounds so privileged do, but, whatever. It ownership is, a big hassle should breaks all the time. And if you are, like, if I spend my time on my laptop building on these apps, it's probably better use of my time than managing all this stuff. And if a company can specialize in, you know, managing your stuff and renting it to you, it's much better. I think there's a real, you're on point. That's a real.
Since and imagine you can go to a website, you can say like okay you can choose different sets of furniture, a different interior stuff paintings on the wall or whatever and you can just click and you arrived and already done for you. Like you said I think that would be really interesting.
Yeah. What else do you think? Yeah, things that you're interested in either kind of Niche categories or things in your lifestyle that you're like I do this lifestyle think differently than people this could be, you could build a business around this. I think the the biggest problem of the deal, no 12.
Uh, is that there's a maybe it's a good big podcast, is to say that there's a perception that people travel really fast and have the data that they don't travel fast. They travel like every few months, or even I think the average is 7 months now is very slow. So the, the word digital Nomad is so horrible word. Of course, we had so many connotations, but it's mostly remote working. People who want a little bit of a different life. We want to see different places a little bit and they have boyfriends, girlfriends wives. Husbands, they have kids even this family's doing this as well move.
Around every week doesn't really work being very slow is big and if people are more aware of that they can find a lot of products Built For This long-term slow Matt Market, which most of us are, were mostly slow mats and little mad also like slow mads. Yes. Think about education. Think about like homeschooling is taking off also cause a remote work. If I have kids I don't know if I want to put him in a regular school maybe, you know, Elon Musk built his own school. That's kind of cool but you can do things in a different way and
Like now, it's still very, we're still Niche, like this remote work thing is still Niche, it's going to get only bigger. There's only going to be more people doing this. Once physical jobs, get automated. So if you make products, I don't know a specific product but if you know if you build products for those people that's a high-end Market of like Tech workers that are remote. So if you don't but you said that you don't own stuff or you kind of said like you don't like owning stuff. You said that you said that you don't want to own real estate.
If you're making two and a half million dollars a year in profit, this is a question that Sean always ask that I'm stealing it. Which is what do you do with your money? Then? Yeah. So I'm having
ETFs, I read a blog post by
what's his name. The guy from Google that does SEO and he's like I just put everything needs yet and ETFs so Vanguard, ETFs S&P 500 but also, I'm heavily invested in Asia, because I believe in Asia. I believe in the future, I know the West. There's a lot of things about Asian are good, but it's very still
Is very futuristic. And I also invest in crypto like, I hold Bitcoin in theory. Mmm. It's always scared to say those things on the pockets, right? But it's all like very secure and stuff. So it's not exactly the most shocking thing to your own guy. Exactly.
But II mostly you're actually not allowed to have that haircut. If you don't like the, yeah, what are you gonna have a high face like long top hair? Yeah, you don't know. Three, I spend about.
45 came on for something that's it. So most of it is just I do need to pay tax. I'm about after that most of it goes to ETFs and stuff. It's scary to invest now because it's scary time. But generally, I'm like, I want to do this for 24 years and in ETF, invested and stuff and sometimes stocks, but my, I did a benchmark, my S&P 500, ETF out performed, all my stock decisions, over the last two years. So, I'm stupid, just like most people do something. You want to tell me what you did recently,
what selling with your stocks.
Yeah. So I'm sold not everything. But pretty much everything sold. Maybe 70, 80 % of the stocks that I hold.
I get that. I mean yeah, but I'm scared that they always say like don't try and time the market so I'm like, okay I'll just sit and just crash with the you know Sean. Why don't you do that? Why don't you just like chill?
Two reasons, one, I didn't want to risk of margin coal but I borrowed a little bit against my stock portfolio but and you know to what I felt was extremely safe and it's still safe but I was like ahh look if this drops another you know 20% then all of a sudden I'm having a headache that I don't want to deal with. I don't want to have to deal with freeing up a bunch of cash just to buffer this. So I was like I noticed that every morning I was waking up and I was checking it and I was like, okay logically I know I'm in pretty good shape.
But the stress of think, having to think about this is taking away from my, like, you know, my day-to-day quality of life. It's like, that's the opposite of what I want money to do. I don't want me to give me stress, by money, supposed to take away my
stress. So what did you do with the money opposite? What you do with it, where is this
is instant cash right now I got might do something like whatever some short-term you know, fixed incomes type stuff. But like for now is like again I don't care like I don't need the 2%, I needed the peace of mind and so that was the first thing. The second thing was
I thought, what will I regret more? What do I believe more? Do I believe that this is the bottom or do I believe that this is kind of like actually thinking that this is the bottom, you know, six months in and that is all going to get better soon. The basically like there's three paths either, it gets better. Now it stays, this is about the bottom but we stay here for an extended period of time. One, two, three, four years or it has further down to go and I basically thought that it getting things going up.
Moon seemed like the least likely thing like I would I would actually be betting against that heavily I thought. Okay I don't I'm nothing to lose here in terms of upside because I just fundamentally don't think that stocks and everything's just going to go rip back up again and we're all going to pretend like you know that was it. We just had a few months of pain and then it all went right back up and remember things go into things are all green again. So I thought either it's going to be Flats boring in sideways for a period of time, or it's going to go down more
And I thought, well in either case that I won't regret being in cash because a I don't have to sweat it every day. Don't have to think about it every day and be. I'm there's no I'm not losing anything during, you know, by doing this. And so that was my thought process. And I figured okay, there's going to be these little bear Market rallies. So just sell at the top of the next bar. So that's what I did. Everything, rallied 5%, I just sold. And I kept like, I don't 20% still in the market, and I just left the other 80% in, and you do not thinking about it cash, but I held my
I didn't sell my crypto,
those goods. Yeah. Are you guys mostly invested in the American Stock Market or
worldwide? Yeah, like you said, I believe in Asia. I'm like yeah, I believe in Asia too but I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. How do I go against it? Asia, and where would I invest? I don't even know. What, what does that mean? Are you buying the equivalent of like an ETF for like Japan or something? What are you doing,
dude? I had a Vanguard ETFs China and then suddenly disappeared for my broker hat and I'm like, what the fuck is happening and I get this message there like Vanguard left China in March or something cause they were like this is too crazy.
Chapel by
the media. I don't know. That's the government. Get some specific. Yeah, private companies public or something.
Yeah. No they fuck Jack. Ma for sure. There's a lot of weird shit happening but I still think I should be invested in those markets and
Sam have I told you about the Jack mom
thing.
How it's crazy. That the third richest, man, in the world that there is pain. I was like, hey dude. Yeah, shut up. And he's like, yes, sir,
mr. Jack. My brother-in-law calls me. Like, so, we had one moment where, like, a month in when people started noticing Jack Ma's missing and my brother-in-law in the car one day, which is where's Jack ma? Like he was in the car but he's like, bro, why are we talking about? This is a, where's Jack by? We just started laughing. Like, how crazy is that? The jackpot.
Just not like, what have you just couldn't find Elon Musk because he said something, you know, that, that Biden didn't like that idea. Daisy, they did it with
tennis player to.
Yeah, I saw that my brother-in-law still calls me. He'll be like, it's called me out of the blue. It's been like a year now. He'll be like, yo, where's Jack - and he'll hang up. I'm like, that's the whole cost so crispy. Like yelling, where is Jack ma?
But dude, that's the theme of Asia and China, like older stuff is accurate. There's some crazy shit, but the other thing is also accurate that
That there's just a lot of stuff happening in Asia and I think in the West in Europe and America we have a blind spot because we get so much information that's negative about Asia especially about China and I'm not a Jonah spy or something, my friends call me Janice by because of that but I think it's a blind spot a little bit in the west. There were we're going to miss out on. You know. I mean China is going to be the biggest economy in 2030. I think by GDP is already the biggest economy people purchasing power parity or something ignoring that just you know because
Lot of arguments why we should ignore China, but it sounds like a blind spot in the west a little bit to me, do you? What what I'll do it will do an easy one. Do you actually like tweeted out your calendar and it was like free for a week or something like that and I know Sean rest are you? And I kind of like that sometimes I don't like that because I'll do that for three days and I'm like oh my God, I'm so bored. It are you is it real that you just don't plan anything?
Yeah. So this is the only plan thing and it gives me stress because I'm like, oh shit, this summer is coming up. But I mostly like I spend my days like I live in my friends, all my friends are my neighbors now. So I brought all these Nomads friends to Portugal in Europe and we kind of live together. A lot of our lot of them are in the city, near whatever, every kind of near. So we just have like dinners outside and we cook food and the sunset on the beach and just this nice chill life that I never had because I was alone in hotel rooms, I had friends, but they were always around the world.
Other will kind of here, so I mostly do that. So, I don't want to do calls about like, because, what am I going to call about? Like, I like having cause of you guys, what am I gonna call with other people about, like, Noob is, no, no! Don't you get bored? Like, no, because I can, because I work on my website is, right? I hope I make coffee. I make over my left of me and my friend and we coat it together. Make a new feature, you know, then you go to the gym, we go to sauna, we go swim the kind of like. But this very reason, right? This kind of chill life and
I don't get boards as long as I ship little bit on my websites. I don't really get bored. You're like the only Rich /. So basically it's almost always the truth that no matter how hard you try, the more income that you make your life, fought your lifestyle gets inflated. Maybe sometimes not as much, but then other times a ton and like I was like oh I'm gonna fight it like I can't imagine spending more than ten thousand dollars on a car or whatever and then you make more incoming like whatever who cares.
You said you spent four or five thousand dollars a month. You're one of the few people that has acknowledged that your lifestyle actually doesn't seem like it's been, it's not know, I have a shot at all. This it's 100% on purpose like it's very well, thank you Miss. Incidentally, sometimes you spend more right? Like last month was hotels were really books. We had to pay a lot of money but now it's chill again. I think it's a was how much I try to follow. Like last one was like 10K or something. For us illness. Very know we're in Lisbon or making three million dollars a year.
Yeah. But pain, 10K for hotels. Ridiculous. Doesn't make any sense like it should be the max like two or three cape for me personally, but I've seen a lot of people do that lifestyle inflation because I know from corporate, from again, from studying business, I know the management managing people stuff, they get paid more and they get golden handcuffs right and they can't leave. A lot of my friends are like that and I don't want that to happen to me. I mean, can't have it to me but you get what I mean and I know that material Goods don't really make me happy. So I buy a new shirt or something or I buy a new iPhone within two weeks. I'm used to it.
And our studies on this, there's like research about this stuff. Like, if you buy a new car, if you get married after six months or the same happiness, if you buy a house after six months, same happiness. So if you know that stuff, you know that, okay, you don't really need to spend money so much. You do need to buy stuff essentially and generally will probably make you
happier. Do you, what do you think you would want to spend more on? Let's say that like, you know,
food like good food, like iPhone ganic, you know free-roaming, I mean it's cliche like Joe Rogan, right? But free-roaming
And grass-fed cow beef, you know, that are happy animals, organic vegetables, you know, that kind of stuff, like not Goods, you know, experiences. It's on purpose. I do
this. What are some experiences that you think are worth the money? What what, sorry, what are some experiences that are like worth the money that, you know,
when most people because it a good? Don't you pass money, right? Like what do you think coach life coach? What no, do you fly coach? Sorry. No. So that's yeah, you're right. So man, you got me that you're trying.
Find like stuff, right? Yes it's like this guy's because know exactly. I'm done with. I can't see it. I only do it Long Haul and I only fly like I flew only once in the last 16 months and after business, Qatar really nice and you can lie down and sleep and stuff, but that's about it, I think. And you notice a one thing I notice like, I was in Bangkok in this luxury kind of apartment Hotel stuff, but it was a little bit too luxury for me, you know, and I was there for a month and you start noticing that you don't need
Eat as much, interesting people, like I met one innocent person who had this giant Wheat Farm. The biggest wheat farm in Thailand because I just Legalize It was kind of cool, but generally, it's a very different. It's more like a socialites kind of Paris Hilton audience, you know, but in the hostiles you would meet crazy people. You would need Backpackers but also like researchers and entrepreneurs and fledgling. Entrepreneurs, you know, you met generally more interesting people because you were more in those areas and I totally did. Yeah, sorry. Did I just tell you
Did I tell you guys listen to this? Shawn, did I tell you about Sam core goes from levels. Love other levels. What's the levels? So the levels Health, the thing that goes in your arm so this one. I so he raised. Yeah, that's right, he raised. So he has a startup that makes eight figures in Revenue. It's worth I think it was four hundred million dollars. So let's just say that he's worth 150 million dollars on paper. Not real Bond paper, he came over to my house and he was with his girlfriend and she made it.
Comment like joking. Like oh you know, he always gives me a hard time with it takes me forever to pack but that's ridiculous. I only have this one carry-on and I was like, well, how long does it take you to pack? Sammy goes. Well, I don't pack as like, what do you mean? He's like well he had a drawstring bag you know a drawstring bag. It's like a bag that like where you put like Spanish
princess. Yes
he had that's all he had. Was that bag and he goes well you see I only own the clothes that I'm wearing right now which is a white T-shirt, a pair of pants socks, underwear and shoes. I only own that plus another pair of underwear.
But jacket, and this bag and my laptop, which I have right here on me. That's literally the only thing that I homesick wait, what he goes. Yeah, I've been do it. I've been doing this for like eight years now or something like that and I only live in like, I do what you do. He's like, he does what you do Peter. He lives in like these airbnb's and hotel-style setups and he's been doing it for years and that's all he owned. And I thought that was the
craziest shit laundry day. I don't understand. How is he?
Well, I was like, I was like, so I was like, well, what if you go to a funeral? What if you have
To do this, he goes well I just go to a thrift store when I need to go and I buy stuff and then I just bring it back and he does it partly out of I think this is my guess he does it partly out of like convenience of not wanting to worry about stuff. I also think that there's like a philosophy like a very philosophical thing going on here because it's like extreme but have you ever heard of anyone? Peter being that crazy dude? Yes. Except actually like in 2014 I was in Chiang Mai and it was an Australian guy.
Who would fly from Australia to Thailand to Chiang Mai with only as MacBook Air and the clothes he wore and not even a bag and he would buy everything he needed on the spot and you would be there for like two or three months and he would donate the clothes. He wore to charity and then he would fly back to his trailer with his MacBook Air in his hand. That's why I was so impressed,
that's it, that's cool. I would do that because I think that actually adds to the experience of traveling, like traveling fully light and then when you get there. So, yeah, I also
What you need and then giving it away when you leave. Like, I might actually get down with that. But like I rotate to underwear and I put my underwear in my bag. Exactly that. Yeah, no. But I
think it comes down to philosophy and I do think it sounds pretentious but I don't care. It comes down to constraining your life in a certain way. I think constraints are good in creativity and life and stuff and it makes you focus on the really important things in life for you personally.
Different everybody. You know, for me, that's like, you know, girlfriend friends, Health Foods, you know, happiness, all that stuff, kind of and and creative word meaningful work, very important. Like I need to be able to, I need to have something to do in my day. I need to feel like I'm contributing something like Sam set. And so what do you own?
So, I have a backpack. I have a rolling suitcase, so, like a small one I've closed. I have a iPhone Mac Book. Pro have a toothbrush. So, minimal State. Yeah. You don't
have one like, you can name all the things you own.
Your controller controllers are gamepads. You can use stadia here. It's kind of cool. Yeah that's about it. I think I mean I mean I have like backup phones and stuff because
Two-factor authentication stuff, but it's not. You think you're going to do this? You mentioned you can talk about your family or not, if you want. But do you think you're going to do this when you have kids?
So, what does doing it mean? Because I'm mostly settled down. I mostly want plays. I'm just like trying to not by stealing it, as in not owning stuff. I mean, like, I think your life is cool but you have to acknowledge of this alternative in the sense of like, you know, one percent of the time the models but yeah, sure, for sure. I think it's interesting that like the stuff I do may or may not become a thing because a lot of things I did eight years ago. Now are normal, right? So it might be that the things that who
Become. I mean, if you're happy, who cares, if it because he's more like, yeah, it's more like it might become major. I think, I think, even if you have kids, you can do it in an alternative way you can, you know, you can go to Trip store, get like secondhand toys or something, second-hand clothes, that kind of stuff, but it all doesn't have to be list. So consumerist and, and buying and you know, I mean it can we can do it in a different way and I'm just trying to figure out like how I want to do that and we
And keep the focus on. Yeah. Nomad list style red pill before briefly, which was my, I forgot what it's called Sam. Do you remember the name of like the zero waste project or the zero? The zero project is really like that. So basically my wife told me about this, she's like yeah you know there's like like in the city than the little town, we live in. There's like this Facebook group, and what they do is, it's just like, it's like a barter. It's like, oh, it's not even a barter economy, it's like a giving economy. So it's like, if you have stuff, you just give it into the
Circle and other people can take it out and then they can give stuff in is basically like, oh, your kid grits. I think it's a lot around kids stuff like my kids grown out of this. That's it. It doesn't make sense
to me, right? Yeah like
Craigslist randos it's like yeah amongst this trusted group of people who buy nothing if the same thing by the by nothing project. Yeah. And I think I might have butchered exactly how it works and do you know a little bit
how? Well, it's just the idea of like, instead of like reduce reuse recycle like for like consumer or for like
Asik and shit. They're like, no, no, let's just like reuse. We're going to reuse everything. So instead of buying a new toy, we're gonna go get one for free, and then we're going to give away. When we're done, it's just a mindset. And then there's there's a bunch of companies in the space. But the big one is like this by nothing series of Facebook group. So we're just like, I'm going to give away. I'm giving away these children's clothes come get them. Yeah, I think I mean it's that's nice. I think it doesn't make any sense. You have a baby and it grows out of its close every month or something or every two months. So why would you buy everything? New
If you can ask your family for closed. Already wore, whatever, right? It makes more sense to me personally. Yeah. Who do you want to be like you? Who do you, who do you admire? And who do you want to be like? Because like the reason why people buy shit for their kids is because they want to have they want their kids to have Jordan. So they look cool for other people because they want to impress other people who do you want to impress? And who do you want to be like, you think like, who do you look up to
I like Derek severs, I know if you know darksaber, yeah, he's tell me about who is he? He's a, he started a company called CD Baby in the 90s, I think, or in early 2000s, and it, which was like one of the first in the kind of music Distributors, where you could send your music as any musician and they would press the CDs for you and they would send it to your customers and stuff. And they also now Spotify and stuff and he sold for thirty million dollars. I interviewed him for my best first. He's actually is really nice guy like the most nice.
In startups, I think and he's very he writes a lot of rice. Lot of books on is very philosophical. Also kind of nomadic he's been in like living in Singapore, lived in New Zealand live in us and stuff. And he's very if you go to a website, like, Derek severs, dot or service, or the Orca, think he writes very much kind of same Concepts that I took about, like, about simple life. And, and
Yeah, it's hard to describe him but I think that's a very inspirational guy to me, and I don't really need to impress. I think I want to impress my parents just but they're already happy with me so it doesn't really matter. I want to I want to try and stay have like a stable, you know, happiness. Because I've been depressed. A lot of I've been anxious. I had like especially when traveling you go crazy in these you know in hotel rooms alone like traveling can it brings you very deep into your
Own self and stuff. And I
think the most important for me is to
impress myself by just you know being stable and and having a stable happy life with with people around me and yeah like kind of wholesome life, you know? And that's my
what a part of your life are you not impressed by your yours, either yourself or Derek severs or if any if any of those people right? You just
mentioned, like the lifestyle, you mean. Yeah. What part of your
life is not at that point where they're you feel like it's not impressive. In that way that
Well, I'd like I wanna have a family to like, you guys and that's what I'm working on. And yeah, that's like this more of a focus now, you know,
like it Easy by the way, you just gotta do one thing. I'll tell you if I find the right girl friend, you know, and
then you can like see if they're not crazy, you need to like connect and all this stuff and I think. Yeah that's that's it done.
Dude Sean you have a go ahead. Go ahead, go ahead. I want to hear what this answer. No. I mean like a little bit. Like you said, like I think about Elon Musk every time Elon Musk present something you're like a fuck. Like that's so cool. Like why am I building shitty internet websites. This is my only life I have. I'm gonna die. I should do something bigger but then I have to like bring myself back to like no, it's cool. You're doing okay. Like doesn't really need to be bigger but I mean, everybody wants to make like space Rockets, I guess, but it's just so hard to do that, you know Sean. You you have it, you have it.
Right. A little dog. Yep, I've got a big dog. How do I love talk? Yeah, yeah. So you like animals? I love owning animals like big aggressive looking dogs. That's what I'm that's my thing. It's like, I'm a weirdo. How do you live this? The I want to live a little bit more like you. It's and I can do it a now because I have a little bit of money so I can just like pay for fancier airbnb's that are pet friendly and be I can only do it. Basically, in America doing this lifestyle with abroad, with an animal,
Well, even in America I drive you either had to fly private or you have to drive most places? I drive most places, how do you how do you live this life with an animal? I don't have animals but I want them, I had two cats with my ex-girlfriend and it was actually saying, we went to in Bangkok to this this luxury apartment hotel and they work at Friendly. And it was like this, you know, High Society of Bangkok people with cute cats and cute, dogs and Asia. All the dogs are small. They like small dogs. I like big dogs to like, use them but and
They walk around in the hotel and it's super cute. And I have like cats and dog ice cream and stuff and food and they have little like a little best for them to sleep in and stuff and everything is service and that's another big Market. I think, you know, that people with pets and stuff they want to travel. So did John have you looked into? Have you guys looked at the Flying in America with an animal? So
basically, if you're why do you think I don't go places. Do
that with your animals under 20 pounds, right?
Yeah, she is but like that also means like,
She's not like tough enough to do all this stuff like we're like, oh God, how is she gonna handle this experience? You know of going on a 7-hour flight or whatever.
Yeah, but she is, she's the dogs able to so like intern. I don't know if she's physically able to but she's allowed to you could put it in a carrier and put it on your lap or like in the above, whatever the suitcase thing. And if you have an animal that's above 20
pounds, putting their dog in the above that, you can put your
dog. I don't know. Dude. It's like
Put the blanket over a it's like putting a blanket
over a Birdcage. It site, I don't know. That's what are you? Put it underneath, you put it underneath through whatever you fuckin do. I don't know, I don't know. I don't have anything, but that's what they say on the directions when you look online. But, uh, like if you have an animal above 20 pounds, you cannot bait. You basically cannot this whole emotional support animal thing. That's kind of nonsense. That oh, that's kind of get phased out. Yeah, I heard you cannot bring an animal, a dog on a flight. I'm always amazed.
At for popular routes. They don't have like a once a month or twice a month animal-friendly round is gonna happen, is absolutely gonna happen. It's a huge growing Market. I think because a lot something Ranch think people are not having
kids, sorry? Right. I'll just say, I read something that one Airline is like being like, yeah, we'll fly pets. Like I think they do a lot of pets in the cargo or whatever, because most Airlines have been facing that out. And what I think is Southwest, I forgot which airline some Airline is making bank because they take all the pets and it was like a differentiator it's like, you know, bags fly free.
It's like yeah, we let you fly your pet and everybody else is saying, no nowadays man, I think you can do it. You can
I think it's all about slow matting. So if you do if you move like every every six months, it's not that bad for the dog or the cat and you give them a stable life and where you arrive and not too much chaos and stuff. I think it's okay. I think it's not. Okay, if you keep moving like every week or every month that's might be a little stressful for the dog and the cat, right? But six months like yeah it's okay and especially to get
agree. It was a lot.
You had a great week ago. It was, if you don't have a dog in your profile picture on Twitter, you even trying to grow fact, is the biggest girlfriend right Sam has one right, you have it? Facebook picture? I think, yeah, you can use this on Tinder, right. This was a dinner dating
trick like you because they swipe right for the dog, not for you, but they're still swipe, right? So yeah, I've noticed there's like two hacks when I was single if I ever walk around with, like, a niece or nephew or like a kid that's like an automatic door opener to meet women. And then the other one was
Having a aggressive, but nice looking dog. It's like, no doors. I'm on they're disarmed, we're good, you know,
and why does that be aggressive? But aggressive looking. But nice, is that one of those things where it's like dog owners look like their pets? And so if you're done, it's like way. They'll think that about you,
they want to heal you, you know, like women want to heal you sometimes it's like seeing a guys would like sleeve tattoos, who smoke cigarettes in a tattoo on her is I who like you,
No, just want to like, spend time and cuddle, you know, like it's like really good. It's you know, you're so careless your eclectic, I don't know. It just works, don't ask me, that's just work. Yeah, so did I love summer? Yeah, dogs. By the way, the big white polar bear-dog, right? And I think it's very Asian, it would like it's, it's so fluffy. It's like that's a very Asian move of you. That's the best way to learn Asia, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what I've seen him here through yet? But yeah.
What are some is there anything that people assume about your life and your lifestyle and your businesses that you like, for example, with the hustle, as well as Shawn's milk Road? A lot of people are like, oh that's it just a fucking newsletter. You just write these these words and you just hit send that's so easy. Anyone can do it and it's like well no it's actually like a user acquisition play like you have to know how to do that and then it's also like you're just not good at writing. Like you have to be good and not just Talent you either have it or you don't. And so that's like some misconceptions about our businesses, what?
Yours. Is there anything that people always assume you're like, no, because like, people can anyone can copy you? Yeah, I think generally people think that every website or app, or company their customer off. That is more simple than actually is because you can't see behind the hoods as actually way more, complicated than you think. Because there's so many edge cases in every business that you need to code. Like if statements for or build like little scripts for special features, it's much more complicated. And I think people
Realize that when they start because people always clone you right like they make a copycat of your website and somehow it doesn't take off because they've been able to copy the outside of it aesthetic. I know but they don't know what's happening under the hood. So it's much more complicated like dude. A job board is much more complicated than you think. Like fuck out. Explain is there's so many little parts that you know, especially companies want, they want invoices for every little thing. They add the price is dynamic. The kind of stuff I bet.
He's jobless pricing based on how many people post jobs on my side. For example, there's so much stuff happening behind the curtains that you don't see as much more complicated. I was having any other misconception but yeah, sorry and a lot of your stuff is automated to wear. Like you don't have to be involved. It kind of runs itself, you said everything is automated. I think nine a nine percent and to post on your job or it ranges from 100 to 1000 dollars. I think I'm whatever the huge range for sure. Yeah. How would you for the like I'm tinkering with something?
That cost many many thousands of dollars a year, is there? How would you figure out how to do that? Like, and so in my head I'm like, fuck I gotta hire a bunch of sales people that sucks, do you think that you could automate most things even that are high ticketed items? Oh, for sure. Dude I still have a job post bundles for like 50 k. If your stripe.
Which is amazing for me to me like that. I'm like, how do you do that works? She make a page called by bundle and you have the, this, you can go to remote ok.com. / bi Dash bundle, and you'll see like a slider where you can make your own bundle and get a discount based on it and it's all automated and you add your credit cards, when you pay, you know, 50k or 40K whatever. And how many people do that? Oh yeah. It's like a lot of is like 40 percent of the revenue.
Think bundle? No shame. So someone just using a debit card or whatever. 450k. Yeah dude these company cards this is what this is lacking information. People don't know. The company cars have been upgraded, I think because they're using it for much more these days really like it's a lot of money and I have no idea like I never fought like I don't I'm not hiring people. I don't know how this works. I just tried like okay maybe I think companies ask me like can we buy a few job posts for in the future? I'm like, okay. I'll make this thing and a lot of companies use this. So you figure out
Out, the features that people want based on token to them, of course, dude. I'm looking at the sales page for us by bundles of 52525 jobs is 22,000 dollars. You do something interesting in your sales pages is you just pack it with information? That's totally the right move, but you pack it with Tex like you. Use icons to kind of break it up through the Emojis. Yeah, I use emojis a lot. Yeah, no. It looks like a circus, right, but it kind of works out. It's not like well-designed, right? It's not like minimalist.
line is just like I just add stuff every day and it just keeps growing, but it works kind of
What's the biggest purchase someone has made? I can scroll, I gotta jump.
I got another call. I got it. I got to run to Peter. This has been amazing. I got to go guys, Sean. See ya,
what's a, what's been the biggest purchase that you've had? This Scrolls all the way up to 150,000. I think a 50k or something around 50 k, maybe for tonight but that happens that happens a lot these, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is crazy. Yeah, I'm working on this thing and like it's like 10K year and I'm like, man, I'm gonna have to like, get on the phone.
All the time. Yeah, yeah. Being used, quite an inspiration, inspiring. But I get annoyed. If I need to use, like I want to use these location service, apis to figure out where our people traveling to, for example, and as always, like, you need to do a sales call, you need to like, contact us and stuff, and I get so annoyed with it. And I know people on Twitter, get annoyed with it that they can't get a price directly assign up, you know? Yeah, it I think it's much easier to do like this, like a sales flow.
I think it's easier. I would argue major from the yeah, it's easier for you but I would actually argue. There's there's a world where it's not affect as effective though, because I would, I'm in the same boat as use. I don't want to have to do all this crap, and I'm not naturally A salesperson. But when I hired a sales team and they shockingly were shockingly. Good at drumming up demand. And I remember a cool podcast with the founder of Squarespace, I think it was, and he was like, you, he's an engineer. He's like,
I want to leave my room, I don't like talking to people, I like Freedom this and that and he goes the and he goes, the biggest one, a huge mistake I made. Was I look down and salespeople and I look down on this like this type of pricing where I think I got them on the phone, but he was like, I look down on it and I was wrong. It was effective, they dry. They created demand for a product and that surprised me most so like, yeah, I don't know. I think, I think you're right. I think my problem is that it's been, it's very hard to meet Goods.
Salespeople or to find them. And it's unclear for me how I can hire them. And, you know, I how can I raid a person to hire them as a good salesperson? I don't know what's a good salesperson and I've never done outbound almost, never done Outreach and stuff. And I'm scared that if I hire salespeople, I need to manage them and then, you know, they might fuck up there. My start spamming everybody LinkedIn and then it becomes like a screenshot thing on Twitter, like Luke Peter levels is spamming with his website and stuff, so it might turn
Add and my finger, right? If you get the right sales people it can work. I just I'd never been able to, you know, find those people. It just matters what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing their happiness and a well, if you're happening for happiness and like a good life, do it your way? Your way is working really. Well, if you want to like grow at a certain rate per year and you want to really push it. I do think a salesperson is you do need a sales team but that's not what you're optimizing for. You're optimizing for freedom.
Um, so and happiness. Yeah, and I also think it's this. There's different types of companies. For example, this companies that ask for a lot of forms, like they want like a W8 form, like all these u.s. IRS forms and stuff, they want you to sign a ring, you want you to sign an NDA and there's some companies that just, you know, enter the credit card, a stripe and it's done and it's different customers. And the customers that ask for a lot of questions on email, they generally convert less for me to pay less money and they are more of an asshole to, you know, do some customer support for and stuff. So you also you get
In touch with customers. If you do, it'll automatically get more kind of modern customers that are easier to deal with. I think, is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about know? I think, I think we may be transparency. Like, the reason I'm so transparent is
I think it's very like I said before, I think it's very important to be honest. And to show other people that you can build a nice Indie company like this, by sharing every like ups and downs of it. And instead of because everybody else is only sharing the good things and we're growing so fast and we're hiring and we're funded and blah blah. And I think it would be cool if we did business in a, maybe in a more wholesome way where we, you know,
Share everything is shared a ups and downs and yeah maybe not grow super super super big but more in a you know wholesome manner. I have a I like that. But I have a few critiques. The first is. Yeah I think that if you're high so you remember buffer to buffer, they did the whole Stitch. Oh yeah. They did it even more extreme. Well equally as Extreme as you I would say but they revealed in one of my Inspirations for sure. Yeah. But they revealed everyone's salary and they did that. I think they did it as a marketing strategy.
Kick. They did it because they're like, well like, you know, like our products okay, it's good enough but like let's come up with a cool stick. So we stick out and it aligns with our philosophy is great and it worked really well for them but I actually think that it probably hurts them after a while. It's really hard to do that after 100 or 150. I don't know what the number is. Some amount of employees because you're like, dude, I don't want my shit all out there. And when I if I was you like there, I don't like like when we sold our company, I didn't exactly reveal how much I made because I'm like man, I don't want to be a Target. I don't want people to take advantage of
The I don't want to be judged in a particular way. I don't want that type of attention. So I'd rather just say, like, round whole numbers. Instead of like, exactly what is real is a real security risk for sure. Yeah. Like you don't want to talk about where you are right now and part of it is because, yeah, for sure, on a percent. Yeah, I'm son. Yeah. So like is accurate heart of the downside, but at the same time, it's a marketing. It's maybe it's a great it agrees with your, with your life philosophy. And also it's
A pretty sick marketing stick like yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think it's well, it's hard to stop it because I've been doing it for so long. It's become part of my identity. It would be hard to, like, hide all this stuff now. They're like, where did this open page go, like, why you not sharing any more? I'm like I'm just done with it now, you know? Yeah. And I don't think it's this recurring marketing machine that I think is a big part of why my businesses work become successful. Why I got a lot of audience on Twitter is because of this, I cannot deny that. So,
Very hard to quit that, right once you've been doing it for so long.
Yeah, that's why I'm nervous about even doing in the first place. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, it's kind of like a, I haven't gone hard on YouTube or any other social platform because I'm like, oh, I don't want a commitment. Like you got to keep up your wanted to do you ship as well. And I have to same problem. Yeah I'm like this is going to be a new recurring like activity. I need to do every week I need to upload a video. Make a video. Yeah I think there's a world where you could do seasons you know like a TV show has a season. I think there's a world where you could do seasons and do quite well but
The majority of people do it like regularly and I'm like, oh man, I don't want to get on that treadmill. That's scary. No. I figured Burns you out like, look at all the YouTubers burning out. It's a real Baal extreme. Yeah. It's extreme schedule. Yeah, I think she's my but I think it might be interesting if I just sit in front of the laptop like this. And I just tell the stuff I've, I know and I think and instead of writing it down and just making little videos, Derek severs also did that it makes little videos about small topics, five minutes, explain something, and the next video. And so I'm Alex from 0 Z is doing it.
The guy on our pot, he came on our pockets Alex from Jose. He's been doing it lately, and he loves it and he and it seems, it seems like a lot of kind of a lot of work, but that that much work, no more working in this podcast. And I don't consider this podcast to be too much work, but it works. Well, but dude, thanks for coming on. This has been fun. I hope you. You will come on more often and when you're coming this time. Yeah. Do super fun. Thanks for having me super. Yeah, hopefully we didn't. You said you were nervous because we're going to ask, nobody knows.
Anything crazy. Yeah. Cool. There's not much to ask when you tell everyone on the internet about everything you do. Yeah. This is always when the good part of the podcast starts, right? Because you ended. And then like the real shit, hopefully not the real stuff. I hope what was going on the whole time was quite a. Yeah dude, thanks. This is awesome pimp out your stuff. So it's at levels.
Yeah, it's a
twitter.com session levels. I also level-2 sio.
That's all the links on for my website there so you can click from there. Thanks to thanks for coming. Yeah,
I feel like I could rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to travel. Never looking back.
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