Pieter Levels: preference

Transcript context

…The following is a conversation with Pieter Levels, also known on X as levelsio. He is a self-taught developer and entrepreneur who designed, programed shipped and ran over 40 startups, many of which are hugely successful. In most cases, he did it all by himself while living the digital nomad life in over 40 countries and over 150 cities, programming on a laptop while chilling on a couch, using vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP and SQLight. He builds and ships quickly, and improves on the fly, all in the open, documenting his work, both his successes and failures, with a raw honesty of a true indie hacker. Pieter is an inspiration to a huge number of developers and entrepreneurs who love creating cool things in the world that are hopefully useful for people. This was an honor and a pleasure for me. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Pieter Levels. You’ve launched a lot of companies and built a lot of products. As you say, most failed, but some succeeded. What’s your philosophy behind building the startups that you did? I think my philosophy is very different than most people in startups, because most people in startups, they build a company and they raise money and they hire people and then they build a product and they find something that makes money. And I don’t really raise money. I don’t use VC funding, I do everything myself. I’m a designer, I’m the developer, I make everything, I make the logo. So for me, I’m much more scrappy. And because I don’t have funding, I need to go fast. I need to make things fast to see if an idea works. I have an idea in my mind and I build it like a mini startup, and I launch it very quickly, within two weeks or something, of building it. And I check if there’s demand and if people actually sign up and not just sign up, but if people actually pay money. They need to take out their credit cards, pay me money, and then I can see if the idea is validated. And most ideas don’t work, as you say, most fail. So there’s this rapid iterative phase where you just build a prototype that works, launch it, see if people like it, improving it really, really quickly to see if people like it a little bit more enough to pay and all that. That whole rapid process is how you think of-…

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