What it had to solve
In 2014 Levels' first income source, a YouTube music channel, had peaked around $8,000 a month and was sliding as copyright claims piled up. His real problem was habit: he started projects, never launched them, and was left with landing pages collecting email addresses.
The idea
Publicly commit to launch one startup every month for a year, treating each launch as practice: finish, ship, fail fast, and let the market pick winners.
How it works
He pledged on his blog to launch one startup per month for twelve months, calling it "a tiny personal hyperfast incubator": pick an idea, build it, ship it, pitch it to press, and count it done. Over the year he shipped all twelve - Play My Inbox, GoFuckingDoIt, Tubelytics, Nomad List, NomadJobs, GifBook, #nomads and Remote OK among them - and posted each result publicly.
What it did
Most of the twelve went nowhere, as expected, but the survivors became the business. Remote OK hit #1 on Product Hunt, the #nomads community passed 2,000 members, and Nomad List grew into a paid product. By 2015 the portfolio earned $202,785 for the year; in May 2019 Levels crossed $1M in annual recurring revenue; by September 2024 his self-reported run rate reached $420,000 a month, solo and self-funded.
Background
In 2014, with the income from his YouTube music channel falling from a peak of about $8,000 a month, Pieter Levels announced "12 Startups in 12 Months": one startup picked, built, launched and pitched to press every month for a year. He named the two habits he was fighting - never finishing projects, and being too scared of failure to launch them - and framed the challenge as "a tiny personal hyperfast incubator."
The method was volume and deadline. Instead of polishing one project until it was perfect, he forced himself to ship monthly, counting a project done when it was live and had been pitched. Of the twelve shipped, most quietly died - he expected that - but Nomad List and Remote OK, both from that year, kept growing. Remote OK hit #1 on Product Hunt and the #nomads chat community passed 2,000 members.
The flops were the point too: each failed launch taught him what to stop building. His rule after Tubelytics, one of the twelve that nobody paid for, was to find customers before writing code. The surviving products carried the economics: $202,785 in revenue for 2015, $1M annual recurring revenue crossed in May 2019, and a self-reported $420,000 a month by September 2024 - one person, no employees, no outside funding.
Why it lands
A public deadline makes the cost of quitting visible, so finishing becomes the only way to save face
Monthly launches turn failure into data: each flop is cheap, finished, and useful for the next decision
Volume replaces market research - a dozen real launches reveal demand faster than planning one perfect product
Shipping in public built an audience that later became his distribution channel for every new product
What you can take
Public commitment turns perfectionism into shipping: a high volume of launches produces data, most flops are cheap tuition, and a couple of survivors can carry the whole portfolio.
Since then
The 2014 experiment became a template: Levels kept building solo, publishing revenue and failures openly, and the "12 in 12" format spread through the indie-hacker community. Of the 113 projects he later catalogued, he tagged 19 as failures and treated the list itself as part of the method. By 2026 he was still running the whole portfolio solo, and his self-reported peak of $420,000 a month had grown from the two survivors of one year of cheap, public experiments.
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