Pieter Levels

Pieter Levels is the internet's most famous solo maker. After challenging himself to launch 12 startups in 12 months back in 2014, he went on to build NomadList, RemoteOK, and PhotoAI into multi-million dollar businesses, all without a single employee, co-founder, or venture capital dollar. His approach to building is radically simple: ship fast, use whatever tools get the job done, and never over-engineer. PhotoAI, his AI-powered photo generation platform, hit $1.2M ARR within months of launching and demonstrated how a solo founder could leverage AI models to build a profitable SaaS. Levels is a vocal advocate for the indie maker movement and regularly shares his revenue numbers, tech stack decisions, and business philosophy on X, where he has a massive following. He codes in vanilla PHP and JavaScript, proving that you don't need fancy frameworks to build successful products.