The archive · Small Business & Money · Product decision · 2014–2019
Nomad List: a shared spreadsheet becomes a $15–25K/month city-ranking business
Pieter Levels turned his own search for cheap, fast-internet cities into Nomad List — a crowdsourced leaderboard that hit #1 on Product Hunt and Hacker News.
Nomad List
What it had to solve
In 2014 Pieter Levels was a traveling remote worker who knew a few nomad cities like Chiang Mai but could not compare candidates — cost of living, internet speed, weather. He was also mid-way through a 12-startups-in-12-months experiment.
How it works
In June 2014, Pieter Levels posted a public Google Spreadsheet on Twitter asking remote workers to help him build the definitive list of cities for digital nomads. Instead of building a website first, he used the spreadsheet as the product: if people contributed, demand was proven. They did — adding columns for safety, coffee density and LGBTQ-friendliness until the sheet filled up.
A month later an accidentally uploaded nginx config pushed the real site live without warning. That same day it went to #1 on Product Hunt (ending as the #5 most-voted launch ever at the time) and then #1 on Hacker News. Levels had measured ~3,000 uniques and ~5,000 page views a day with no drop-off, and collected 2,500 email addresses in two weeks.
The product was a scored leaderboard of cities — a 'NomadCost' estimate weighted by cost of living, weather and other indicators — that made a vague lifestyle question answerable in one page. It was profitable from day one on a sponsorship, and later moved to memberships for social features: $5/month at first, eventually up to $99/month. By 2018 it served almost a million monthly users at $15,000–25,000/month.
Why it lands
- The spreadsheet MVP answered the real question — is there demand? — before a single line of site code was written.
- Crowdsourcing made early users co-authors, so the first contributors became the first evangelists.
- A single scored leaderboard turns a scattered question ('where should I go?') into one sortable, shareable answer.
- Charging for community access — instead of ads — kept the product clean and scaled revenue with engagement.
- Public, build-in-public launches gave him free distribution: one Product Hunt submission did the marketing.
What it did
~3,000 daily uniques and 2,500 email signups in two weeks; profitable day one via a sponsorship. By 2018 it had almost a million monthly users and $15,000–25,000/month in memberships; by 2019 over 1,000,000 city data points.
What you can take
Test demand before building: a spreadsheet MVP costs an afternoon, and the people who fill it in are both your data source and your first customers. Price by value delivered, not by cost.
Since then
Nomad List became the reference database for remote-work cities and kept compounding: by its fifth anniversary in July 2019 it held over a million data points across five continents, plus 300,000 indexed places to work and a matching feature for lonely nomads. Levels kept building the portfolio next to it — notably the remote job board Remote OK — and continued publishing revenue and metrics openly, so the city-list model became a template copied by countless niche directories.
Sources
- How I got my startup to #1 on both Product Hunt and Hacker News by accident
- Confronting Your Fears and Taking a Leap with Pieter Levels of Nomad List
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