2014: Pieter Levels commits to 12 startups in 12 months and ships all twelve

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.