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Nomad List 3.0 — Find the best place to ❤️ live, 👩💻 work, and 💃 play
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.
🌍 Find your ❤️ place
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@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.) ✈️
@levelsio This looks amazing! Congrats! :)
Be sure to check out our tool , it will be very interesting to you.
https://www.producthunt.com/upco...
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 ?
@johnonolan Haha, thanks 😝 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.
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.
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).
@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.
Hi Jesse! I 💖 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).
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).
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!!!!
@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.
Really like NL Pieter! Your ability to consistently ship amazes me! 🔥
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! 🤙
@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.
@yusufpq @rafyasarmatta Yes, about 5 to 10% of new users every week. People spam channels etc.
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.
@joshuapinter @alexvirgo_ @levelsio Beautiful man, beautiful :) Many of my feet in the vid! I like it hahaha
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 ❣️
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
@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.
@levelsio That sounds like a pretty good example of "do things that don't scale" (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)
@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!
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
Sure I understand. I’ve designed Nomad List so that anyone can use all feature of the site (read-only) without paying. You don’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 it’s a for-profit business, not a charity.
A valuable “networking opportunity” 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!
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.
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