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Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

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Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#31

Post by umaar »

Sometimes I think it's fascinating the rabbit holes we'll go down, when ultimately, the user just doesn't care.

TypeScript vs. plain JS

Logic-less templates like Mustache vs. Handlebars

Vue vs. React

Using async/await, and adding the relevant infrastructure to support that (transpiler)

Clean code practices in general

Unit tests, end to end tests

CSS BEM vs. tailwind

You can make indirect connections to imply the user does care, e.g. E2E tests catch a bug which meant the user didn't see it, but generally, these things are meaningless to them.

For my first course, I put time into those things - time taken away from making content. The more I think about it for my new course, the more I wonder should I just sell on a platform which already handles all of that, like gumroad.

Where's the line though? When is gumroad or squarespace not the answer?

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#32

Post by DZittersteyn »

Pete-Codes wrote: post #19
sdoering wrote: post #13

> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking…

hey, I posted the article. Good to know! I'm sure I had read it somewhere on their site. Maybe it was just from other developers that I got the impression it wasn't meant from production. Thanks

I also used to have this impression, I think I got this from Rails and Django docs, maybe you read something similar?

> Rails comes with built-in support for SQLite, which is a lightweight serverless database application. While a busy production environment may overload SQLite, it works well for development and testing. Rails defaults to using a SQLite database when creating a new project, but you can always change it later.

> By default, the configuration uses SQLite. If you’re new to databases, or you’re just interested in trying Django, this is the easiest choice. SQLite is included in Python, so you won’t need to install anything else to support your database. When starting your first real project, however, you may want to use a more scalable database like PostgreSQL, to avoid database-switching headaches down the road.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#33

Post by amelius »

gargron wrote: post #6

I don't think it's at all surprising that there is no relation between tech stack and business success. End-users don't care if you use a single PHP file or a Go binary, they never get to see that anyway. So I don't really see "it was all a single PHP file" as a gotcha. The whole thing could've been coded in Assembly, the difference is in the effort required for development, ease of maintenance/scaling up and how wel…

Also, this is not really a "tech" story. Everybody is building websites these days. What counts is what business you build with them.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#34

Post by thesizeofa »

christophilus wrote: post #14
BoorishBears wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't get why the fact a high successful venture is using such a barebones tech stack is not noteworthy, you must be following a different tech industry than I am

I mostly follow HN, a successful tech forum that is written in a single lisp file and runs on a single server. It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack. The opposite is more surprising.

The fact that I keep reading posts on HN about how successful HN is makes me wonder how soon will this forum die off, infested by cultist "contrarians", wanna be philosophers and alt right fantasists, in favour of reddit - where most of the times I read either the exact same comments as here on identical posts, or better quality comments with far more evidence and without the usual non sense downvoting of dissent.

But to the point specifically, " It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack." - you are spot on. The "successful" HN crowd appears to favour overengineering or obscure tools, point which shows 90% are armchair philosophers who daydream of running a business, building a 0 to 1 start-up, and other things office workers imagine when they think building a webapp using GO, or Haskell will result in anything else but a line on a CV for yet another slave away job (potentially an open source project that no one wants too).

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#35

Post by RikNieu »

brainless wrote: post #4

I am a solo founder and I recently saw the post of solo founder persistence, which I am yet to read in full. Pieter is one of those that can consistently deliver. He has been doing that for years now. I admire him and what he does, yet I know I can not. I am plagued by mental, emotional issues that break my routine every few months. I started focusing on perseverance and I am happy with where I am now. There is still…

> I admire him and what he does, yet I know I can not.

Of course you can! I'm like you in that I haven't had a successful project yet, but it'll only happen if we keep trying!

And like Pieter said in his reply to you, pretty much everyone struggles with mental stuff, even him and people like Tim Ferriss. So don't let that hold you back. Acknowledge the hardships and then keep on going.

You can do this!

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#37

Post by Cthulhu_ »

sdoering wrote: post #13

> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking…

As long as SQLite doesn't catastrophically break under load it's fine for production, but only as long as it has a single client; traditional database engines can deal with multiple applications connecting to them.

I'm using sqlite for a production application as well, but its load will be in the range of - at best - thousands per day. The only complexity will be that there has to be a secondary 'fallback' server; the current application just copies the whole .db file over to the secondary server after certain events.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#38

Post by kiza »

sushshshsh wrote: post #24

I would say that for every Pieter on this planet, there are thousands of failed Pieters. The success of his business niche doesn't have much to do with tech stack or even programming, but rather Instagram style lifestyle businesses.

Agreed, almost any developer could build the same products. The real reason for success is by selling the nomad lifestyle via social media.

People buy into the dream.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#39

Post by mytherin »

Pete-Codes wrote: post #19
sdoering wrote: post #13

> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking…

hey, I posted the article. Good to know! I'm sure I had read it somewhere on their site. Maybe it was just from other developers that I got the impression it wasn't meant from production. Thanks

SQLite runs in airplanes [1]. I would say that is all that needs to be said on whether or not SQLite is production-ready :)

In fact, I would argue SQLite is the most well-tested and production ready database system out there.

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#40

Post by sbarre »

sushshshsh wrote: post #24

I would say that for every Pieter on this planet, there are thousands of failed Pieters. The success of his business niche doesn't have much to do with tech stack or even programming, but rather Instagram style lifestyle businesses.

These are fair points, and you are very likely correct about the ratio of success to failure. Survival bias is strong on HN.

I would add though that "shipping it" greatly increases your odds of success, and choosing a simple stack that lets you ship an idea quickly is a good thing.

I feel like his choice of a super basic tech stack likely contributed to Pieter's success in some way.

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