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Nomad List
p/nomadlistA global community of travelers working remotely.
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levelsio

Nomad List 3.0 - Find the best place to ā¤ļø live, šŸ‘©ā€šŸ’» work, and šŸ’ƒ play

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Nomad List is the biggest crowdsourced database of cities in the world analyzing 250,000+ data points to help you choose where to go next.

It also connects 10,000+ remote workers on a paid online social platform, as well as organizing meetups worldwide to connect digital nomads.

šŸŒ Find your ā¤ļø place

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levelsio
Maker
šŸ‘‹ Hello Product Hunters! :) This is the third iteration of my side-project turned business and life's work called Nomad List. šŸ“– Story Nomad List started out as simple list of 25 cities for digital nomads to go with their internet speed and cost of living. šŸš€ Now Since then it's grown to 1,000+ cities and now features 250,000+ data points from air quality, to female safety, to how busy traffic is. This kind of data is always subjective, but I think I now have a shot at giving people a solid advice on which places to live, work or travel to based on their personality. Because, where you're born is not always where you end up. And that's the motto of Nomad List, to help you: šŸŒ Find your place šŸ’° Revenue Nomad List makes money mostly from paid memberships. Most of the site is freely usable but to use any of the social features of the site like the chat, forum and travel planner, you need to pay. Users pay monthly, annual or once for a lifetime membership. A small part of money is made from on-page ads (like a sponsorship with Automattic). Revenue ranges from $15,000/m to $25,000/m via Stripe and PayPal. See https://www.indiehackers.com/bus.... It was profitable in its first month of launch. The model is offer something for free and then a small percentage % pays. With 900,000 monthly visits, about 200 pay and become a member. That's 0.02%. That seems low, but the site pays my bills and I don't want to bug people to sign up. They can do pay if they want to. Because I think the importance of this site existing is higher than me having high conversion rates. šŸ‘‰ Features āœ… A destination search engine with 100+ filters to pick cities āœ… Live flight prices for 100,000 flight routes from 1,000 cities to 1,000 destinations, directly bookable with one-click āœ… 250,000+ data points on 1,000+ cities from cost of living to power plug type to quality of life for families āœ… 25,000+ places to work (including coffee shops and coworking spaces) mapped in 187 countries āœ… Integrated neighborhood data for every city if you zoom in on the map (from Hoodmaps) āœ… A forum with over 1,000+ questions on destinations to go to and how to work remotely āœ… A chat (on Slack and web) with 1,000+ messages sent daily āœ… A trips planner where you can share your trips and see if other people are in the same place as you āœ… A social network of 10,000+ digital nomads, remote workers and travelers you can connect with āœ… 52+ official meetups per year all around the world and hundreds of informal meetups šŸ›  Making I coded, designed and built Nomad List alone in vanilla HTML, CSS, JS (with jQuery) and PHP. It's a collection of hundreds of PHP, JS, CSS files. I use a lot of old-fashion tech without frameworks like simple JS AJAX to PHP backend to SQLite databases. It's been a lot of work maintaining all diff mini-apps (like the Chat) and pages (like the Gear page) and making sure it's all bug-free. Luckily I get a lot of bug reports on Twitter and try to fix them ASAP. šŸ’– Thanks Thank you everyone for sending me messages of support, bug fixes and feature ideas! This is my šŸ‘¶ baby and I spent most of my time the last 3 years making this, thank you for being part of it šŸ™ƒ
Kevin Lou
@levelsio šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘
Himanshu Vaishnav
@levelsio Congrats šŸ‘
Jonny Miller
@levelsio solid shipping effort as usual šŸš¢
Adam Davies
@levelsio Well done dude. This site is getting unbelievable. Nice video as well by the way šŸ‘
Joshua Voydik
@levelsio Awesome job dude! So great. You definitely inspire the community to make and ship more than we thought we could -- thank you! (The video makes me want to go back to Southeast Asia very soon, too.) āœˆļø
John O'Nolan
Nice work Pietz! It's been fun to watch your psychological trauma unfold as you fought tooth and nail to get this finished. Good job for getting it out the door and accomplishing huge improvements across the board. What do you think will be the main focus of Nomad List 4.0 ?
Adil
@johnonolan I'm pretty sure he's aiming for the moon šŸ¤”
aj
@johnonolan Migrating codebase to React
levelsio
Maker
@johnonolan Haha, thanks šŸ˜ I think this is really, really, the final version for a long time. After this launch I will take some time off in 2018. I might come up with something new but it might just be a new product. I'd love to see how we can augment remote work and location independence with more advanced technologies outside web. So, not just Nomad List as a website necessarily. It's that first principles thinking: if Nomad List's goal is to make fixed location less important and have people move around more. Then how can modern tech help with that. Think AR/VR for example. Although they're hyped, there's still not a solid collaborative app for remote workers in those dimensions. How would it look? @aj_lkn and me discussed this a lot before. I'd love to experiment with that. So in that sense, if there is a Nomad List 4.0 or 5.0, it may not necessarily be a website anymore.
Robin Good

Looking forward to v.4

Pros:

The fact that it keeps growing and adding new locations and data

Cons:

The interface is getting more and more confusing. NomadList 1.0 was the best of all. Much simpler and more intuitive to use.

levelsio
Maker
Thanks Robin! What parts of the interface can I minimize to make it more clean?
Solomons
Exactly. Peiter stop changing the layout everyday. Just keep it simple as it was in the beginning. The website is lagging probably because of too much javascript. Remove the video from home page it is making the page even more slower. keep the filters at the top as before and maybe add a search filters function because there are a lot of filters now(it's good to have a lot filters but they do not need to be always visible). Just few suggestions because I love the nomadlist(paid member).
Luke Flegg
@levelsio my account has been suddenly deleted, without telling me what I did to cause that. That's already crazy, but you haven't even refunded me my lifetime membership fees. Please do this, otherwise I'm going to be very upset.
Jesse āœŒļø
Love Nomadlist and love you šŸ˜™šŸ˜™šŸ˜™ Question: is Nomadlist's core userbase still similar (in characteristics/demographics) to the one when you started years back? If it's changed (evolved), how has that influenced the product design and feature list. Mwah. Xo.
levelsio
Maker
Hi Jesse! I šŸ’– you too! Great question and yes it changed radically over the last 3 years. It started as a site for digital nomads. Which (as you now) back then was a tiny fringe scene of maybe thousands of people, mostly in Asia and South America. It's now hundreds of thousands, with some saying millions, and they're distributed all over the world: (from https://nomadlist.com/#sort=user...) They're now a variation of newbie nomads hopping from place to place every 2 weeks (which they discover gets tiring pretty quickly), to experienced nomads staying in places 3-6 months and coming back to their favorite places repeatedly to meet with their friends. The increase in traffic in the last year (now almost a million monthly visits per month: https://www.similarweb.com/websi...) can be attributed to more mainstream travelers using it now to plan their travels. I think it's the typical example of a startup starting in a small niche, and slowly expanding step-by-step to the mainstream. That's what I'm trying to do with Nomad List 3.0, as there's no other site now combining all this data to "find your place". Instagram has had a big effect too on travel changing, think tags like #travelstoke and #vanlife. They're entire scenes on IG. People want to visit more unique places and avoid the typical destinations. There's a lot of opportunity for Nomad List there as a useful product.
My future vision is most people will be a remote worker and digital nomad in some form and it will be as normal as offices are now. But I think that's still ~17 years away (2035).
Jesse āœŒļø
@levelsio haha sweet answer, here supporting ya all the way buddy šŸ˜
Andrey Azimov
It's very inspiring how you are shipping all these years. It's hard to make one hit but much harder continue to make hits over time! And other cool thins that you are shipping every day by small steps! Compared to version 2 Nomad List become a product with multi-dimensions like from macro to micro like I starting to browsing tickets by nearest country after city price and finishing by checking the specific area of the city with HoodMaps. The video is amazing I feel goose skin after watching! Cheers man!!!!
levelsio
Maker
@andreyazimov Haha "goose skin"! šŸ§ Thank you!
Mo
@levelsio Where did you take the song from? You can use YouTube sound library at least, song quality is bad, it's like 10 years ago :)))
levelsio
Maker
@morajabi It's an unreleased exclusive dubplate from the underground UK techno scene by Alex Virgo, it's fresh šŸ’–
Mo
@levelsio But why the quallity is bad?
levelsio
Maker
@morajabi Buy new speakers :)
Rik Nieu
Hey man, great work as usual! My question is kinda common and generic, but hey, that's how I roll... How do you choose potential projects most likely to be successful and/or profitable? Moreover, how would you suggest those with limited time/budgets do the same?
levelsio
Maker
@riknieu Most of my projects/products are NOT successful. I have about a 1 in 10 score of launching something and getting it to success (which means large reach, e.g. hundreds of thousands monthly users and sustainable revenue of $10,000/m at least). That means I do not know what is successful until it is successful. I have hunches, but they're usually flat out wrong. I thought Nomad List was one of my worst ideas and would be an afterthought. But it turned out to the best project in my life until now. So: launch a lot of products, launch a lot of features, see what sticks.
Sabri Helal
@riknieu @levelsio shotgun technique. Shoot out several projects and see what hits the target.
āš’ļø Alex McKenzie šŸ‡³šŸ‡æšŸ‡³šŸ‡±
@riknieu @levelsio Once you built Nomad List ā€” thinking it was a bad idea ā€” when did you decide it was worth more of your time as opposed to moving onto a new project?
Yusuf Parak
Really like NL Pieter! Your ability to consistently ship amazes me! šŸ”„ My question(s): - How did you grow from 0-100, 100-1000 and 1000-current users? - How did you keep user retention in an age where every app gets spikes of traffic but no retention? - What tips do you have for community building? - What would you do differently knowing what you know now? Feel free to answer as many as you want. Keep up the great work! šŸ¤™
levelsio
Maker
@yusufpq > - How did you grow from 0-100, 100-1000 and 1000-current users? It's hard to answer this question because there's no real objective way to know. All I can say is what I "think" has worked. - Iterating on your product every day and constantly asking users for feedback (I do this through Twitter and feedback boxes on my site) - Trust your users, but trust your own intuition generally more. Users often don't know what they want before they got it. If you're the end user for your app (I am), I feel like I kinda know things best of how it should be. If I like it, many will (probably). - Grow organically, don't inflate your traffic with paid traffic like ads. Just make the product great and functional. > - How did you keep user retention in an age where every app gets spikes of traffic but no retention? I think it helped that the app is useful, keeps improving with better features and it's in a scene that is growing fast (remote work and digital nomads). > - What tips do you have for community building? I made a lot of big mistakes with community building. The biggest was taking on 30 moderators for Nomad List. I thought it'd be a great idea to get active users as moderators but it ended up months of interpersonal drama. To fix it, I hired a single paid moderator (from those 30 people) who I gave full autonomous power to warn and ban users. That worked really, really well. Also I defined the rules of the community very specific. People should be nice primarily. Anyone who isn't is out. > - What would you do differently knowing what you know now? I would hire less, and automate more. Managing people is a huge time suck and not my strength. And I think most stuff I could have automated easier.
Mohammed Rafy
@yusufpq @levelsio Warn and ban users? Even in paid communities, this happens wherein you need to ban users. If so, what's the use case?
levelsio
Maker
@yusufpq @rafyasarmatta Yes, about 5 to 10% of new users every week. People spam channels etc.
Joshua Pinter
Dude, that video is fantastic! Perfectly captures the emotions of nomadic life. Video production in your future I think. Great job with the latest version, too.
levelsio
Maker
@joshuapinter Hah thank you! Footage by @peachananr compiled by me. Music by @alexvirgo_
Pete R.
@joshuapinter @alexvirgo_ @levelsio Beautiful man, beautiful :) Many of my feet in the vid! I like it hahaha
Sarah Ball
Nomadlist changed my life. It's made me dozens of friends, saved me hundreds of dollars, got me work, and facilitated countless adventures. Thanks Pietz ā£ļø
levelsio
Maker
@_satelliteeyes Thanks Sarah! Oh and thanks for the beer last year haha šŸŗ
Where is Dean?

Was one of the first to financially support Pieter Levels with NomadList, helped promote it, and was a contributing member on Slack and in forums.

Got kicked from Slack without any warning or explanation. Customer service is non existent (you chat with a human-robot), and Mr. Levels blocked me from his Twitter when I tried to reach out for help.

I can not recommend a product or company, where the most loyal users are treated like ... or being ignored.

Too bad.

Pros:

It's ok.

Cons:

Poor customer service

Wasin Thonkaew
I just went to toilet, came back. Now you launched 3.0. Sending ā¤ļø.
Harry Dry

Normally a team of 20 create something of this quality.

So for just 1 guy to make this is inspiring.

Pros:

A very useful website.

Cons:

Nope

Adil
Congratulations again @levelsio! You mentioned that NL has grown from 25 to 1000+ cities. Did you add them manually or got it from some kind of list of cities database? Or users added cities themselves?
levelsio
Maker
@cheepo2109 It has been 3 years of day-in-day-out manual research adding cities, that means Googling and reading blog posts, analyzing them, making judgements about things like "female safety in Lima, Peru" to normalizing public data sets on "traffic safety in Chattanooga, TN, USA". It's been a giant effort. I hired @adealyvidal @sadokx @rpish @xiufensilver all for different periods to help me add cities. And researched a lot myself too. It sounds stupid to do it manually, but there simply isn't an extensive data set like Nomad List yet. It's all dispersed. It's a Herculean effort.
Nathan Broadbent
@levelsio That sounds like a pretty good example of "do things that don't scale" (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)
Tamas Torok
Congrats! How did you validate feature ideas from the very beginning?
levelsio
Maker
@torok_tomi I quickly shipped very very basic versions of new features, then checked if they got used. If not, quickly scrapped them again. I've been doing this "throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks"-approach for 3 years now and it worked well!
Tamas Torok
@levelsio awesome! keep throwing spaghettis :)
matt kocaj

I'd like the barrier to entry to be a bit lower, as in maybe a monthly price where I pay **each month**. As someone who's trying desperately to find a way to secure a remote gig so I can begin my Nomad journey, I can't easily drop $60 on a product I have no idea of the return value. I'm assuming that there will be folks "on the inside" ready to help me, answer my questions, etc, etc but I don't know yet. How can Nomad List help me get there without this $60 leap?

Pros:

all the info you might want, awesome networking potntial

Cons:

can't get to the really valuable network unless pay $60

levelsio
Maker
Sure I understand. Iā€™ve designed Nomad List so that anyone can use all feature of the site (read-only) without paying. You donā€™t need to pay for it to be useful. You do need to pay to interact with others (write access). I have no other choice than charge money for these features because itā€™s a for-profit business, not a charity. A valuable ā€œnetworking opportunityā€ will probably be worth more than $60. It could be a $2,000/mo remote job or a $30,000 remote client. YMMV of course. Thanks for the feedback!
Owen Williams
šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘šŸ‘
Kevin Lou

It's absolutely insane that this is all built by one incredible person - Pietz is a demigod

Pros:

An enormous amount of comprehensive info for travelers, remote workers and anyone in between. āœØ

Cons:

None šŸ‘€

Pizza Yap
That side project I followed years back had become a global business! So hype for you @levelsio and congrats! šŸŽ‰
levelsio
Maker
@pizza0502 Thank you Kwang! <3
Kate Harvey

I've recommended Nomad List to so many people -- it's such an awesome resource! I honestly didn't realize it's created by a single person. Now I'm even more impressed :)

Pros:

Great way to find new destinations and uncover more details about the ones already on your "to travel to (or live)" list.

Cons:

Nothing comes to mind.