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
It's like GPTs, you know?
Like these chat GPTs, they're going to charge money for it now. You get a rev share, I think, for an opening eye. I made a lot of them also.
I think the hard part is like figuring out what you shouldn't add, right? What you shouldn't build because you don't have time. So you need to build a landing page. Well, you need to make, you know, you need to build the product actually because it needs to be something they pay for. Do you need to build a login system? Like maybe no, you know, like maybe you can build some scrappy login system.
Like for Photoi, you sign up, you pay with a Stripe checkout and you get a login link. And when I started, there was only a login link with a hash and that's just a static link. So it's very easy to log in. It's not so safe, you know, what if you leak the link? And now I have real Google login, but that took like a year. So keeping it very scrappy is very important to...
Because you don't have time, you know? You need to focus on what you can build fast. So money, Stripe, build a product, build a landing page. You need to think about how are people going to find this. So are you going to put it on Reddit or something? How are you going to put it on Reddit without being looked at as a spammer, right? Like if you say, hey, this is my new startup, you should use it.
No, nobody gets deleted, you know? Maybe if you find a problem that a lot of people on Reddit already have on subreddits, you know? And you solve that problem and say... Some people, I made this thing that might solve your problem and maybe it's free for now. That could work. But you need to be very, narrow it down what you're building.
Okay. So I think it's normal if you're young, that you feel like a loser.
Yeah. I think this is the peak. And so I would not kill yourselves. It's very important. Just, get through it, you know? But because you have nothing, you have probably no money, you have no business, you have no job. Like Jeremy Peterson said this, I saw it somewhere. Like the reason people are depressed because they have nothing.
They don't have a girlfriend, they don't have a boyfriend, they don't have... You need stuff, you need like a family, you need things around you, you need to build a life for yourself. If you don't build a life for yourself, you'll be depressed.
So if you're alone in Asia, in a hostel, looking at the ceiling and you don't have any money coming in, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't... Of course you're depressed. It's logic. But back then, if you're in the moment, you think there's not logic, there's something wrong with me, you know?
And also, I think I started going... I started getting like anxiety and I think I started going a little bit crazy where... I think travel can make you insane. And I know this because I know that there's like digital nomads that they kill themselves. And I haven't checked like the comparison with like baseline people.
But I have a hunch, especially in the beginning when it was a very new thing, like 10 years ago, that it can be very psychologically taxing. Yeah. You're alone a lot. Back then when you travel alone, there was no other digital nomads back then a lot. So you're in a strange culture. You look different than everybody. Like you're in, I was in Asia.
Like everybody's really nice in Thailand, but you're not part of the culture. You're traveling around. You're hopping from city to city. You don't have a home anymore. you feel disrooted.
Yes, exactly. But people treat you like Thailand. People are so nice, but you still feel like outcast. And, and then I think that the digital nomads I met then were all kind of like, it was like shady business, you know, but they were like vigilantes because it was a new thing. And like one guy was selling illegal drugs.
It was an American guy was selling illegal drugs via UPS to Americans, you know, on this website, they were like a lot of drop shippers doing shady stuff. Um, There's a lot of shady things going on there. And they didn't look like very balanced people. They didn't look like people I wanted to hang with, you know? So I also felt outcast from other foreigners in Thailand, other digital nomads.
And I was like, man, I made a big mistake. And then I went back to Holland and then I got even more depressed.
I struck upon it on accident because I was like, I'm going to graduate university and then I'm going to, I need to get out of here. I'll fly to Asia because I've been before in Asia. I studied in Korea in 2009, like study exchange. So I was like, Asia is easy. Thailand's easy. And I'll just go there, figure things out. And it's cheap. It's very cheap.
Chiang Mai, I would live like for $150 per month rent for like a private room. Pretty good. So I struggled on this on accident. I was like, okay, there's other people on laptops working on their startup or working remotely. Back then nobody worked remotely, but they worked on their businesses, right? And they would live in like Colombia or Thailand or Vietnam or Bali.
They would live kind of like in more cheap places. And it looked like a very adventurous life. Like you travel around, you build your business. There's no pressure from like your home society, right? Like you're American. So you get pressure from American society telling you kind of what to do. Like you need to buy a house or you need to do this stuff. I had this in Holland too.
And you can get away from this pressure. You can kind of feel like you're free. You're kind of... There's nobody telling you what to do. But that's also why you start feeling like you go crazy because you are free. You're disattached from anything and anybody. You're disattached from your culture. You're disattached from the culture you're probably in because you're staying very short.
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