Indie builder, ships with AI at record speed
Pieter Levels
Profile
Pieter Levels (known online as levelsio) is the patron saint of the one-person internet business. A self-taught Dutch developer, he’s spent the last decade building and running a portfolio of profitable products — Nomad List, RemoteOK, PhotoAI, and dozens of smaller experiments — entirely alone, from a laptop, across 40+ countries. His stack is defiantly boring: vanilla HTML, jQuery, PHP, SQLite, one beefy server. No team, no investors, no dashboards, no meetings. Just shipping.
He made his name in 2014 with “12 Startups in 12 Months,” a public challenge to build and launch one product per month. Most flopped. Two — Nomad List and RemoteOK — became millions in ARR. That public-in-the-open, ship-fast-and-see posture became the template for a generation of indie hackers, and it’s the backbone of his book MAKE, still one of the most-recommended bootstrapping guides going.
What makes Levels matter now, in 2026, is what happened when he picked up AI tools. PhotoAI — a Stable Diffusion wrapper that generates AI photos of you — crossed $100K/month, then $130K+ MRR. In early 2025 he built a multiplayer browser flight simulator, fly.pieter.com, in roughly three hours using Cursor, having never touched game dev. It went viral, hit $75K+ MRR from ad sales and in-game purchases, and dragged the term “vibe coding” (coined by Andrej Karpathy) from a tweet into a real development culture.
The lesson Levels teaches, loudly, is that the moat for a solo builder has collapsed. If you can describe what you want, an AI agent can write most of it; your edge is taste, speed, and distribution. He’s proof that one person with Cursor, a cheap VPS, and a Twitter account can out-ship a ten-person seed-stage startup — and he documents every revenue spike, DDoS attack, and broken deploy in public. For developers coming up in the AI era, he’s less a role model than a working hypothesis.
Books
MAKE: Bootstrapper's Handbook Practical handbook on building and launching indie products without funding — speed, minimalism, and shipping in public.Key Articles & Papers
I'm Launching 12 Startups in 12 Months How I Built Nomad List Bootstrapping Side Projects into Profitable StartupsControversies
Vibe-coding backlash (2025): After Levels shipped fly.pieter.com in three hours using Cursor, senior developers pushed back that AI-generated code can’t match hand-crafted engineering. Levels publicly dismissed the critics as gatekeepers and doubled down by monetizing the game — which promptly crossed $50K+ MRR and drew a 120-million-request DDoS attack across his product line. The episode became a flashpoint in the broader debate over what “real” programming means in the AI era. Hacker News discussion.
Spotify Podcasts
