Pieter Levels
speaker
696 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Aug 2024
Pieter Levels’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I was like, I'm collecting cities where we can live as digital nomads with the internet speed. the cost of living, you know, other stuff. And I tweeted it and I would, and back then I didn't have a lot of followers. I had like a few thousand followers or something. And it went like viral for my skill viral back then, you know, which was like five retweets.
And a lot of people started editing it and there was like hundreds of cities in this list, like from all over the world with all the data. It was very crowdsourced. And then I made that into a website. So figuring out like what technology you can use that you already know. So if you cannot code, you can use a spreadsheet.
If you cannot use a spreadsheet, like whatever, you can always use, for example, a website generator like Wix or something or Squarespace, right? Like you don't need to code to build a startup. All you need is a... idea for a product, build something like a landing page or something, put a stripe button on there, and then make it.
And if you can code, use the language that you already know and start coding with that and see how far you can get. You can always rewrite the code later. The tech stack, it's not the most important of a business when you're starting out a business. The important thing is that you validate that there's a market, that there's a product that people want to pay for. So use whatever you can use.
And if you can't code, use... spreadsheets, landing page generators, whatever.
Yeah, I remember this, man.
So I was traveling and I was still trying to find problems, right? And I would go, I would discover that everybody's experience of a city is different because they stay in different areas. So I'm from Amsterdam and when I grew up in Amsterdam, or didn't grow up, but I lived there, university, I knew that center is like, in Europe, the centers are always tourist areas. So they're super busy areas
They're not very authentic. They're not really Dutch culture. It's Amsterdam tourist culture, you know? So when people would travel to Amsterdam, I would say, don't go to the center. Go to, you know, southeast of the center, the Jordaan or the Pijp or something, more hipster areas, like a little more authentic culture of Amsterdam. That's where I would live, you know, and where I would go.
And I thought this could be like an app where you can have like a Google Maps, you And then you put colors over it. You have like areas that are like color coded, like red is tourist, green is rich, you know, green money, yellow is hipster. And you can figure out where you need to go in a city when you travel. Cause I was traveling a lot. I wanted to go to the cool spots.
Color. Yeah. Yeah. And I would use a canvas. So I thought, okay, what do I need? I need to. Did you know that you would be using a canvas? No, I didn't know it was possible because I didn't know... This is the cool thing.
Yeah, draw images. Just draw pixels, essentially. Yeah. And that was special back then because before you could only have elements, right? So you want to draw a pixel, use a convulse. And I knew I needed to draw pixels because I need to draw these colors. And I thought like, okay, I'll get like a Google Maps, iframe embeds, and then I'll put a div on top of it.
with the colors and I'll do like opacity 50, you know, so it kind of shows. So I did that with convos and then I started drawing and then I felt like obviously other people need to edit this because I cannot draw all these things myself. So I crowdsourced it again and you would draw on the map and then it would send the pixel data to the server, it would put it in a database.
And then I would have a robot running like a cron job, which every week would calculate or every day would calculate like, okay, so Amsterdam center, there's like six people say it's tourist, this part of the center, but two people say it's like hipster. Okay, so the tourist part wins, right? It's just an array. So find the most common value in a little pixel area on a map.
So most people say it's tourist, it's tourist and it becomes red. And I would do that for all the GPS corners in the world.
No, people just type in cities and go berserk and start drawing everywhere.
Man, they drew that crazy stuff. Like offensive symbols, I can't mention, they would draw penises.
Man, I did it in the snow, you know? But the penises did not become a problem. Because I knew that not everybody would draw a penis and not in the same place. So most people would use it fairly. So just if I had enough crowdsourced data, so you have all these pixels on top of it. It's like a layer of pixels. And then you choose the most common pixel.
So yeah, it's just like a poll, but in visual format. And it works. And within a week, I had enough data and... And there was like cities that did really well, like Los Angeles. A lot of people started using it, like most data's in Los Angeles.
The colors, yeah. As colors? So it's just like, I think you can see there, there's like hipster, tourist, rich, So there's always a business area, right? And then there's a residential. The residential's gray. So I thought those were the most common things in the city, kind of.
Yeah, I mean, obviously it's simplified, but you need to simplify this stuff, you know? You don't want to have too many categories. And it's essentially just like using a paintbrush where you select a color in the bottom, you select the category, and you start drawing. There's no instruction, there's no manual.
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