🎬 Pieter has been interviewed by Lex Friedman, see the full interview here.
Pieter Levels' "Make - Bootstrapping Projects" is a guide on building and launching successful indie businesses without external funding. Levels provides a roadmap focused on speed, persistence, and minimalism. Below are some of the key themes and insights from the book.
1. Persistence and iteration
Success in bootstrapping is neither instant nor guaranteed. Most indie makers need to launch 10-30 products over 1-3 years before achieving a breakthrough. Thus, you need to rely on continuous experimentation—if an idea doesn’t gain traction early, just pivot and move on.
- Keep shipping: Success is about staying in the game and iterating quickly.
- Luck plays a role: Timing and external factors are unpredictable, but you need to be prepared to catch opportunities when they arise.
2. Build in public and validate early
Seek radical transparency and real-time user engagement:
- Pre-sell before building: For example, he launched his book by announcing it before writing a single word and collecting pre-orders through a Typeform.
- Immediate feedback loop: Early adopters contributed to the book’s content through a shared document.
- Building in public fosters engagement: By exposing 90% of his process, he built an audience-driven product.
This philosophy connects to the lean startup movement —launch early, build with users, and refine based on their input.
3. Solve your own problems
A recurring theme in the book is solving problems that personally resonate. Personal experience provides the best foundation for ensuring you build products that address real needs.
- The Nomad List example: Originally, Levels was keeping a personal spreadsheet to track city data. Once he shared it, the list gradually became a crowdsourced resource with thousands of contributors.
- Expertise matters: The best founders have deep knowledge of the problem they are solving.
- Avoid starting from the solution: Many startups fail by fixating on a technology rather than the problem.
4. Start small, then scale
There's no need to aim for a billion-dollar idea at the outset. Instead, focus on niche markets:
- Micro-niches are lucrative: Serving 1,000 customers at $83/month generates $1M/year.
- Case study: Instead of generic hairdresser booking software, a more strategic approach is targeting hairdressers specializing in African hair.
- Tech giants started small: Facebook was a student directory, Microsoft resold MS-DOS, and Google indexed Stanford's intranet before going global.
5. Speed over perfection
Seek rapid iteration:
- Launch an MVP within one month.
- Avoid perfectionism: Delaying launches for additional "polish" often results in stagnation.
- Users tolerate errors: What matters is an app’s core functionality and a way for users to report issues.
- Minimalism works: Single-purpose apps that do one thing well succeed over bloated products.
6. Indie hacking vs. VC funding
Bootstrapping offers major advantages over traditional venture-backed startups:
- No dilution of equity: Founders retain full ownership.
- No external pressures: VC-backed startups must chase hypergrowth, often at the cost of sustainability.
- Lower costs = greater freedom: A lean approach allows for more creative control.
7. Focus on execution rather than perfect ideas
Ideas are not valuable on their own:
- Sharing ideas is beneficial: Others rarely can execute them better than you.
- Execution defines success: The same idea executed by different people leads to vastly different outcomes.
- Track and iterate: Maintain a categorized list of ideas and update it as you build and test them.
8. Automation and solopreneurship
Instead of hiring early, automate repetitive tasks:
- Monitor workflows: Identify tasks done frequently and automate them.
- Leverage contractors: Hire selectively for tasks that cannot be automated.
- Example: Zapier can filter and assign customer support queries without human intervention.
9. Product distribution and growth
- Leverage press: Platforms like Product Hunt attract tech journalists, who could provide valuable media coverage.
- Make every new feature a launch: Continuous updates drive renewed interest.
- Design for virality: Build products that encourage organic sharing.
10. Tools
- Use familiar tools: Ship with what you know.
- Go web-first, then native: Start with a web app and transition to native only if necessary.
- Keep costs minimal: A laptop and an internet connection are good enough to compete with VC-backed companies.
Quotes
You may need to try shipping 10 to 30 products for 1 to 3 years before you have anything that works. That's how this approach works. You build stuff and see what sticks.
It takes a long time to "get" it and even then it's a lot of luck and timing. If something doesn't seem to take off early on, it probably won't take off later, so make something new and try again.
Always keep shipping. Launch early and build with/for your users.
The most important thing is to find ideas from solving your own problems. You do that by looking at your own life and observing what your daily challenges are. Then you see if you could make those challenges easier using technology.
Get ideas from your life experience. Get outside. Become original. Do crazy stuff that you're scared off. Jump off cliffs (do it safely). Ask people you like out. Walk into random office buildings. Jump fences. Crash hotel pools. Whatever makes you different. Don't be so scared! Live.
Note: ❤️❤️❤️❤️
A lot of companies start not from the problem but from the solution. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make.
Start with a micro niche. [...] Niches are specific market segments that are shallow enough to easily access, with not many players in there.
You need constant feedback from your users in the markets to see what people want and what people use and what not.
No, people won't steal your idea if they like it. And even if they do, they probably can't execute it as well as you. [...] Everything is about how you execute.
Work alone, especially early on. Share your ideas freely to get other people's input on them. Log every idea you have, filter them, and see which ones you can execute upon.
You want to start building as soon as possible. The faster you get it out, the faster you'll see if people want to use it, how they use it and what other features they want to see you build.
Your enemy is perfection.
People are fine with errors, as long as they can use something new and as long as the errors get fixed, and if they have some way to tell you the feedback about the errors.
Remember: you can ALWAYS go native later. If people use your site already, you can bug them to install your native app later.
Don't build on an MVP too long, a good rule of thumb is to spend max. one month on it and launch.
If you have 1,000 people using your product actively, don't expect more than 5% to pay for it.
Here's where I say: "avoid hiring, build robots".