Ask HN: How does Levels handle so much negative PR for NomadList? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does Levels handle so much negative PR for NomadList?

10 pointsbuf8 comments

Recently, I've stepped out of the shadow of being a W2 employee into being a one-man entrepreneur like Pieter Levels. He runs super popular remotelist and remoteok.

At first I thought he just made a great product and that was it, but at closer inspection, I'm having doubts.

1. Earlier today, a reddit thread on the digitalnomad subreddit completely bashed nomadlist. Hundreds of upvotes saying nomadlist wasn't worth it, with dozens of comments agreeing. Only one person raised defense for it.

2. When looking at the nomadlist product itself, it's kind of ...rough. Not that I care about that sort of thing, but it's riddled with bugs, design flaws, etc.

3. He publishes his refund rate, which is just above 10%. This seems really high.

Is this a case to where he got lucky and owned the digital nomand / remote work market early enough that the product actually doesn't matter? Or am I missing something?

I used to run a tiny little site that made about $100 a month. Yet it got discussed on reddit and Facebook frequently because it related to a somewhat popular hobby. I found that such discussions brought me traffic and new users no matter whether they were negative or positive, because people saw the discussion, went to the site and made their own judgments.

I'm sure he gets the same thing. Talk == traffic. Or, if you prefer, the standard cliche is: "Any publicity is good publicity"

I love the phrase "Haters gonna hate."

The more successful you or your product becomes the more haters you'll have. That doesn't only apply to software. Pick any 'classic' novel and check out the reviews on Amazon. 5% of them will be haters.

Microsoft and Google haters wouldn't hate them at all if they were still scrappy startups that no one had heard of and that had achieved zero success.

From my own experience, I released an app for creative writers 5 years ago that generated a lot of positive attention, as well as a bunch of haters on one very specific niche forum. The guys on this forum went so far as to dig up info about another Irishman with the same name as me who ended up in court for passing bad checks -- citing it as clear evidence of how I couldn't be trusted, and neither could any software I made.

It bothered me for a whole day, then I decided never to waste my time reading that forum again.

Having haters who hate you is a sign that you're achieving some measure of success.

I bought a lifetime subscription to nomadlist on some sale. I don't even remember how much I spent but I'm sure it was worth it. I love the site!

I wouldn't want to speak for Pieter but I suspect he isn't bothered by those sorts of things.

For some insight into his mindset check out his interview on Indiehackers https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/043-pieter-levels-of-no...

I think it's one of the best episodes.

McDonald’s, Walmart, and Apple get plenty of bad PR and complaining online. They do alright. Pieter got something working early on, when the digital nomad thing took off. He put some useful resources together and built a community. Plenty of people decide to try the nomad lifestyle every month, while some people settle down and leave the group. More experienced DNs probably don’t find NomadList as useful as it was when they started.

Sure, the site is buggy and could be better, but for what it does it works well enough. No one is spending all day in there, depending on everything working perfectly. It’s good enough for what it does, for most users.

Pieter is a nice guy who figured out a way to support his own nomadic lifestyle while offering something people found useful. If you don’t like it he refunds your money.

Disclaimer: Pieter Levels gave me free membership years ago. I used to participate actively on NomadList but haven’t logged in for several years.

Reddit thread mentioned: https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/tq7b93/is_it_...

His refund rate: https://nomadlist.com/open

He makes about $700k a year on nomadlist, $70k in refunds.

In a lot of side projects, the actual hard problem to solve is distribution.

Once people actually get a benefit from the product, they're happy. Quality/programming language/design is rarely a consideration for customers in pain/looking for a solution.

I have personally encountered bugs on it. Not minor ones, but the page is giving a random php error.

He still uses sqlite and proud of it. Nothing wrong with it. But at least invest some money in system design as you grow.

I recall having a twitter discussion with him a few years ago where the thread was about NL being a single PHP file and he was anti-framework with the stance that their added complexity didn't outweigh the benefits they provided. No idea if things have changed since then, but I don't think CS is his background.

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