Pieter Levels: his worst year became the year that changed his life

“Love is celebrating each other’s success. Not hating it.” Pieter Levels, 2014

The quotes on this page are translated back from my Turkish version. His original English words are in the images below.

Why this portrait

Pieter Levels (@levelsio) today makes 219 thousand dollars a month, alone, with a laptop. But the money is not what moved me. What moved me is how a man who woke up gasping for breath every morning in 2014 turned that year into the turning point of his life. I told this story on Threads as a 15-part chain. The original English of every quote here is in the images.

The worst year: 2014

At the end of 2014 he wrote a post called “Love, Anxiety and Startups”. He tells the story there, in his own words.

• He came back from Asia to the Netherlands. In the very first week everything he owned was stolen. For months he slept on friends’ couches.
• Panic attacks. “Everything felt like a movie and I was in the middle of it. Like the Truman Show. It was scary.”
• His girlfriend called everything he made “stupid startups”. She wanted him to settle down, stop traveling and do “something important”.
• “I became ashamed to tell her I was in the New York Times.”

How he got there

For years he made music. His YouTube channel brought in up to 8 thousand dollars a month. Then royalty agencies started taking his income, a little less every month. In 2013 he sold everything and flew to Thailand. The girlfriend he was supposed to go with never came.

There is an older wound too. In 2011 he and a friend prepared an Uber-like taxi idea (SnapSnap) and pitched famous, rich investors. None of them invested. His own word: “Quite humiliating.” That day he decided he would neither chase investors nor become one of those arrogant rich people.

The turning point: one goal, one word

“I set myself a goal so I wouldn’t lose my mind.” He wrote “12 projects in 12 months” on his blog, then for fun deleted the word “projects” and wrote “startups” instead. A few months later WIRED and the New York Times were writing about him.

Then he noticed something: every day he was meeting people who had moved to the other side of the world because of his sites. He gave a section of his post this title: “My startups did matter.”

At the end of the year he went back to his parents’ house. “Nothing had changed here. It was all in my head.”

After: someone who knows how to fall

• 116 projects, 9 lasted. He didn’t delete the ones that failed, he put all of them on his site: “I see this as my CV. It also shows the incredibly high failure rate of everything I do.”
• His idea got copied. In 2022 he was one of the first to launch AI avatars. 35 days later a big company copied the idea and stole all the attention from him. His answer: “Crying with 1 million dollars of profit in a year isn’t that bad.”
• 95% overnight. In November 2022 he was making 140 thousand dollars a month from a job board. It dropped to 10 thousand a month. He wrote “I’ll always remember those good days” and added a smiley.
• Still afraid. In 2023 he kept postponing a new product for weeks. To force himself he made a public promise: if he didn’t ship by Friday, he would pay a friend 10 thousand dollars. He shipped on Friday. It was Photo AI, and today it brings in 86 thousand dollars a month.
• Looking down from the top. In 2025 a game he made hit a 1 million dollar annual run rate in 17 days. The next day he wrote “This is a hype that will die. And it will.” It did. On his own list, next to it, it says “Made money but didn’t last”.
• Enough. In September 2026 he made the community he had charged for over 10 years almost free. The first point of his reasoning: “I’ve made enough money from this.”

What I take from it

In his worst year, to keep from losing his mind, he set himself a goal and told everyone about it. That year became the one that changed his whole life. Maybe the bad year we are living through right now is like that too.

Sources

• Love, Anxiety and Startups: My Year in 50 Tweets (2014): https://levels.io/love-anxiety-and-startups
• 12 startups in 12 months (2014): https://levels.io/12-startups-12-months
• His projects and his own labels: https://levels.io/projects
• Remote OK dropping 95% overnight: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1806443641059074136
• Flight game at 1M dollar run rate in 17 days: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1899596115210891751
• “This is a hype that will die” and Lensa: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1899855777038250232
• Nomads.com made almost free: https://x.com/levelsio/status/2096177854270550097
• Profile and revenue by product: https://x.com/levelsio
• Lex Fridman Podcast #440: https://lexfridman.com/pieter-levels-transcript
• 2013 Thailand photos: https://x.com/LayerUp/status/528414187718864898
• Lisbon Nomad List meetup (2022): https://x.com/levelsio/status/1538554459156058112