I agree on one point, we're always trying to over-engineer everything. They think about scalability, security before having a product market fit. They have 95% chance the market doesn't care. Reducing the time between ideation and production. That's the key. The market doesn't care what language you use, or what server you have.
I would go with at least dev and production. Maybe you can get away at the begining, but if you work with php at some point you will make a mistake. So if you have your server configured properly best case scenario visitors get a white page ... worst case scenario debugging data gets to hackers ..
I don't think he tests in production. He just deploys straight to production. If you listen to Lex's podcast interview with Peter, he says he doesn't really do testing.
We engineers. More interested in all the fun, and deeply fascinating, tech stuff than in the actual product and its user value. This guy is probably not tweaking his prompt during all of the weekend 🙂
This is so typical. This guy has been working for years on his projects! The nomad one he registered in 2010. Only recently has he found success after many years of failures. Also it is a massive amount of work to create a SaaS project like the ai one. Building it, coming up with the membership and access levels, getting a payment provider, doing SEO and advertising. But yeah keep thinking this guy stumbled upon 3 million a year success LOL He probably worked 70 hour weeks on failure after failure for years before these took off. Good luck to him but don't think for one minute you can copy that without doing the hours.
Yep, business guys won’t care about an engineer and even look down at the engineer’s work until said engineer actually gets their due ounce of financial success through much trial and error. And even when the engineer does something worthy of praise like this, business guys will just assume this shit is easy and reproducible and market it as such.
@@thalissevero7627 The wife and I are both professional QAs. We know all about being looked down on LOL. We have created a testing course platform and it's taken us over a year of hard work. Hundreds of hours and we are yet to turn a profit on this venture!
@@thalissevero7627 and then people start copying how it's done and writing it all down, put everything into a power point on some shotty website where you watch a video for 47 minutes guilt tripping you into clicking a link that promises you all the secretes to recreate this successful business where you buy a $70 E-Book of said power point, inevitably stealing your $70 when you can freely find this information on the internet in a wiki, and making the seller rich as fuck. What a wonderful world we live in
The question is how sustainable this is. I can imagine there will pop up quite a lot of competitors in this space soon enough. When the barrier of entrance is low, there will be more competition. We see this with dropshipping etc. as well. Even though, making 3M profit for a couple of years, is more than enough to live a comfortable life. Timing is everything. Being ahead of this curve is low effort markets is one strategy.
@@PhilippBlum you'll still be set. Unless you are pretty reckless with money, you should be looking at starting other sources of income with 3M a year. You need to invest, get into real estate and stuff so you would be sure that if programming became obsolete tomorrow you will still have a source of good income
@@RackaApps That's what I said. It's not sustainable, but 3 mil for a couple of year will set you up for life. It really depends on what you want to achieve in life. If all you want is some money and no fulfillmet, this might be a good way. Try hundres of trash ideas and see what sticks.
Gives you the notion that there is some sort of fake economy of the unnecessary happening, which I guess is how all economies eventually work. We learn that we need all the newest and the best just to be competitive, but you really mostly have to have good biz development and marketing, which in his case is being very present online. He was a build in public pioneer too.
@@mischavandenburg oh indeed. but to be fair, it may actually be the case that he doesn't need robust infrastructure. its possible he can quickly resolve performance issues at his scale with a simple click of a button. simple cloud architectures can take you very far these days.
@@greekthejimmy4107 yep. remember that video of Whatsapp running millions of messages. "2 million concurrent connections on a "single server" using FreeBSD and ErLang." sometimes you don't need cloud. in fact, it's probably at the point where it's probably cheaper to build locally for most needs.
It depends. In this case, yes. But if you need certifications like SOC2 (in order to get some "serious" customers), you should have redundancy. Also, if he already has a load balancer integrated, then spinning up another VPS once his notified about a downtime might take a couple of minutes (also, it depends).
@@mischavandenburg just spin up new vps .. use ansible to install requirements/ server. git clone site. BAM! should be all automated. Guessing you could also automate this with vps api and have a free vps running to monitor your site. Another thought is to use vps snapshots. snapshot at regular instances.. if site down. revert and spin up.
been using namecheap dedicated hosting, no affiliation. Running 50+ sites, paying under $150 per month, no issues. It's been awesome. Actual, real, fast, expert support. Best move of my life quitting bluehost. Never, ever again.
I've always said this, unless you're working for a company with existing traffic, or a startup that pays you for your time, it's not worth scaling from the start. Start simple and make changes as needed. I run everything on a single VPS with Caddy, some processes configured with systemd user units, a docker container, and some reverse proxies with caddy. Especially with free Cloudflare, you're fairly protected, and if you use a provider like OVH you're even more protected.
@@jordixboy I think its a scam to sell API services. His twitter profile is just disguised sales landing page. You will waste a lot of money and time trying out the APIs, for that elusive 5% success rate. usually if its too good to be true, then its a scam.
@@TheMuserguy yeah poor choice of wording. You ever make a comment and then realize the next day you shouldnt have been making comments? That was one of those comments :) mad respect to the guys work ethic. Neat story -- sorry for the negativity!
I am stealing "Scam cloud" to use next time. I have been calling them expensive cloud. Some CEOs see the value of contabo, hetzner, etc VPSes which get them products making tons of cash without infrastructure cost drowning their businesses.
The only question I have then, is: what are all the other bills? Initially it sounded like the VPS did e everything, but then it became clear that the VPS only does coordination - it is a front-end to a whole lot of other services.
Ive know about this guy for awhile and I always thought he was another one of those tech dudes that speaks loudly but is full of bs, but I saw him on Lex and now I have a lot of respect for him!
I thought exactly the same, when you have a good thing going and making millions its something I would not wish to expose to the world of sharks. I especially would not want to give away its on a VPS etc. Surprised he hasn't been hacked yet.
his greatest asset is his established audience. which is harder to achieve for most folk than any type of software development. when you can accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers, throwing ideas onto the wall to see what sticks is considerably easier.
Whats wild is that this guy is so young he does not realize this is how things run. MOST of the web is like this. Its wild that so many people are so hooked up in top tier corporate environments but just how small that really is.
Cloud is expensive, there's a lot of smaller and medium companies moving back to on-prem or other services like Hetzner, Linode, even DigitalOcean, it's cheaper. Major benefit of microservices is for your organization (team structures) and not the tech. I'd say just use VMs and avoid the big 3 clouds until you have around 50 employees minimum.
Interesting. Shows you how engineering and business are two very different skills. Sometimes the engineering mind will hold you back because you are aware of everything that Could or should go wrong, people / no engineer who don’t know any better have no concept of this so they sort of just go for it and think the opposite, that most things should work. They aren’t aware of the details
The thing is everyone makes fun of Containerization until something fails and it saves your ass, if you just push to production 99% of the time its gonna be fine, the other 1% is gonna cost millions of dollars in operating costs 7:00 so like 99% of the entire "ai economy" just another front end to the same 3 AI model apis
@@Blast-Forwardyou’ll need to learn to manage a vps securely before you can start leaning to create SaaS apps or run a forum.. if you needed to clarify what a vps even was I’m suggesting you might have more luck in some other realm you know more about.
If you do this with kubernetes, you need to hire the person to do the kubernetes, and then another engineer to work in the problems they create with all the complexity, and then a tech lead, a tester and a scrum master and before you know it your 70k per month is gone
Hello from Amsterdam! I think he is a madman =) . he does 1000x more than I do as well but truly inspiring. I have to get out of my comfort zone and materialize my ideas now. Thanks for sharing.
Amazing. I always have ideas like that but then I figure I know absolutely nothing about how to get traffic to it and getting it popular so It feels impossible
I've known about this guy for years. He's pretty famous in certain communities. It's funny to see new people just discovering him for the first time and having the same reaction I did 😂
It's very insightful. I am going to release a product but was Just trying to make it perfect and searching best budget vps options. I guess I will just go with a basic one for now 😊
For $400, you can easily own multiple VPS. Your last statement on backup is important. I learnt a great lesson earlier due to no proper backup plan. Anyhow, i admire him on his efforts to keep trying.
He's a baller. yes it takes a crap ton of time to build all these brands, but this is a great example of someone who invested continually in his biz and it paid off. Mad respect. Similar pattern here in some ways, not as big income but I have over 50 websites on a dedicated host, lots more that started up then killed off as they didnt work, Id say around 5% of them hit. Dont necessarily cull the losing sites - my worst performing one went on to be the biggest winner with some tweaks.... also... just like he did... you can have an idea and the reason it doesnt hit is because the crowd didnt arrive yet...
I wonder if he's running each of his apps as a container in his VPS ? It would be problematic if one of his apps had some issue to affect the whole VPS
There's always something that can fail and affect entire VPS. IMHO, spinning up separate servers for these projects isn't worth it as far as you don't break entire VPS too often. The point is, he's not solving problems he doesn't have yet which is a very healthy approach. There are several ways to separate apps on one server, e.g. reverse proxy (nginx) + apps running as separated processes (you can limit cpu & memory per process if you'd like to).
Looks to me that his VPS is only really serving html to the cloudflare cache and doing some simple database lookups at most. No need for docker I guess. All of the heavy computation happens in third party services. And most of those services are stuck in a race to the bottom pricing war atm so the cost there is low.
idk how legit are the numbers that all these one-man businesses bring I've heard that Levels sold his remoteOK for 1mil during pandemic That I could believe The rest are just cool stories on par with crypto-bro stories to me
@@ExtremelySimpleTH-cam You forget the luck factor. How many people out there could easily make the same thing (or better)? He definitely seems to be making his own luck, and doing many simple projects yourself is not doing nothing, but is he really providing that kind of actual value to society? This seems like a problem of the highly subsidized/loss-leading nature of these AI tools, which will only be temporary. But the only-as-complicated-as-necessary approach is good if you're just in it to make bank until the market actually starts to function properly.
He's the epitome of an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) junkie. I watched that podcast and I was inspired by his whole 2-week philosophy. Basically when he comes up with an idea he gives himself 2-weeks to execute it. As a closet entrepreneur, I hate how easy he makes this all look.
Leuk verhaal Mischa! Ik denk dat wat we kunnen leren van dhr. Levels is dat het winnen vooral het DOEN is. Ik hink ook tegen de launch van een product en ben ook aan het over engineren als een gek. Waardoor het project steeds complexer en vreemdere vormen aanneemt (hoe leuk en leerzaam dan ook). Dank voor het delen van dit verhaal, dit inspireert echt om het gewoon te doen. Fijne avond!
TBH I don't find his technique weird at all, most solo developers are doing same thing, when you are not slave to some company tells you learn this and that to use in 0.01% of your real works.
I mean, it's certainly "laughable" for some, but you can't deny jQuery and PHP is battle-tested in every environment possible, so you'd likely face less issues than, let's say, Node and such. At the end of the day, nobody cares in what language it's written in or how good the language is, as long as it WORKS.
I even don’t understand why anyone needs jQuery… the code is ugly and unreadable. I prefer Vanilla JS over jQuery. Why not write code in plain JS then…
Very proud of your channel progress Mischa. I think I've been here a while. I don't know if you're interested but I think you should start a subscription of some kind for paying members. I think you've really got it.
Quantity not quality is a means to success. Just output a ton of already known good ideas and see if you can stumble into market share with 5% of them.
A 1% developer with a 1% work ethic will absolutely be guaranteed to make at least $1 million/year. With any luck, he'll make much more than that. If you know you're good, you have to do it alone or in a startup. NO EXCUSES BABY.
Its exactly how I have been doing this stuff for 20 years. Granted at work I did AWS autoscale for 10+ years howwever I also have a 100% failure rate. I blame PHP. :P
_"Less is more"_ isn't just a saying. It's true. Think pragmatic and make things work instead of overcomplicating them. It's probably even more safe in some regards for it being less error-prone due to a server setup that is as simplified as it can ever be. Funny video, however. Didn't know either this channel nor the guy you've been talking about. That video was just recommended to me by
I think it’s funny people think since he is making money, that his product is “working”. Sure he is making $3 mil but it a true engineer came and rebuilt it they would be making 10x or 100x that. You don’t realize how much money is being left on the table
Cloud is great to start your project but if they start getting traction an old school vps is great. Funny that I use to manage my own vps before the cloud took over more than a decade ago lol
384 for 16thread 64gb? What bandwidth? Better be 10GB because that man is over paying and exceedingly so...😢 I've got a 24thread 64gb 1000gb-unmetered and I pay $80 month. Not going to post it here because.... That would saturate the network and server availability if I ever wanted to up-scale.
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jquery and php ftw
I agree on one point, we're always trying to over-engineer everything. They think about scalability, security before having a product market fit. They have 95% chance the market doesn't care.
Reducing the time between ideation and production. That's the key. The market doesn't care what language you use, or what server you have.
That’s the main lesson I got from him.. validate the need first and then start improving when you know a product works
ummm...but to keep up with market demands YES internals matter
so the market cares about a whopping 5% of products? Nah, way less
Yes until they got hit with million users and lose them to an unusable products.
@@savire.ergheiz Before you reach 1 000 000 users... I guess you'll have time to fix those issues...
I ran a web hosting company in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a single system... 450mHz, 128MB of RAM.... 30000 websites.
Haha amazing!
My hero
@@mischavandenburg when I was broken, I run multiple WordPress sites on *64MB* with single/shared core, thanks to LET tutorials encourage me to do it.
One thing I learned here:
"real men test in production"
Lmfao 😂
I mean why not. That's what Microsoft does.
I would go with at least dev and production. Maybe you can get away at the begining, but if you work with php at some point you will make a mistake. So if you have your server configured properly best case scenario visitors get a white page ... worst case scenario debugging data gets to hackers ..
I don't think he tests in production. He just deploys straight to production. If you listen to Lex's podcast interview with Peter, he says he doesn't really do testing.
Oh.
That is terrifying.
Fun fact: Earlier he used to have all the code in just one php file.
Why are you looking into my projects?
There goes my cs degree wisdom down the drain 🤣😂😅
TBH, even when I was noob never did that, that a nightmare.
@@arduinoguru7233 you also never made 3 mill a year and probs never will though lol
We engineers. More interested in all the fun, and deeply fascinating, tech stuff than in the actual product and its user value. This guy is probably not tweaking his prompt during all of the weekend 🙂
Yeah right? He’s spending time coming up with good business ideas
A real engineer keeps it simple.
i can spent 5 hours tweaking my console
Then you are just a tech enthusiast, not an engineer.
@@jordixboy yeah yeah yeah, ever heard of German over-engineering? Go there, they will like you 🤪
He said he aims for 90% profit, so the $75k a month -revenue- is pretty good 👍
This is so typical. This guy has been working for years on his projects! The nomad one he registered in 2010.
Only recently has he found success after many years of failures.
Also it is a massive amount of work to create a SaaS project like the ai one. Building it, coming up with the membership and access levels, getting a payment provider, doing SEO and advertising.
But yeah keep thinking this guy stumbled upon 3 million a year success LOL
He probably worked 70 hour weeks on failure after failure for years before these took off.
Good luck to him but don't think for one minute you can copy that without doing the hours.
This is the comment that needs to be pinned.
Yep, business guys won’t care about an engineer and even look down at the engineer’s work until said engineer actually gets their due ounce of financial success through much trial and error. And even when the engineer does something worthy of praise like this, business guys will just assume this shit is easy and reproducible and market it as such.
@@thalissevero7627 The wife and I are both professional QAs. We know all about being looked down on LOL.
We have created a testing course platform and it's taken us over a year of hard work. Hundreds of hours and we are yet to turn a profit on this venture!
@@thalissevero7627 and then people start copying how it's done and writing it all down, put everything into a power point on some shotty website where you watch a video for 47 minutes guilt tripping you into clicking a link that promises you all the secretes to recreate this successful business where you buy a $70 E-Book of said power point, inevitably stealing your $70 when you can freely find this information on the internet in a wiki, and making the seller rich as fuck. What a wonderful world we live in
Keep telling yourself all these excuses so you don't have to go and try
3M Profit using 400 on VPS is wild. man the ratio
The question is how sustainable this is. I can imagine there will pop up quite a lot of competitors in this space soon enough.
When the barrier of entrance is low, there will be more competition. We see this with dropshipping etc. as well.
Even though, making 3M profit for a couple of years, is more than enough to live a comfortable life.
Timing is everything. Being ahead of this curve is low effort markets is one strategy.
@@PhilippBlum yes very easy just become a senior developer and implement 70 projects with good ideas to market and with 5% success your good to go🌠
@@PhilippBlum you'll still be set. Unless you are pretty reckless with money, you should be looking at starting other sources of income with 3M a year. You need to invest, get into real estate and stuff so you would be sure that if programming became obsolete tomorrow you will still have a source of good income
@@RackaApps That's what I said.
It's not sustainable, but 3 mil for a couple of year will set you up for life.
It really depends on what you want to achieve in life. If all you want is some money and no fulfillmet, this might be a good way. Try hundres of trash ideas and see what sticks.
@@PhilippBlum the copium is strong
Gives you the notion that there is some sort of fake economy of the unnecessary happening, which I guess is how all economies eventually work. We learn that we need all the newest and the best just to be competitive, but you really mostly have to have good biz development and marketing, which in his case is being very present online. He was a build in public pioneer too.
@@lewiemarks6418 too bad people are making money 🥲
i guess concerns about single point of failure are overrated
Until it goes down with no failover and you lose clients
@@mischavandenburg oh indeed. but to be fair, it may actually be the case that he doesn't need robust infrastructure. its possible he can quickly resolve performance issues at his scale with a simple click of a button. simple cloud architectures can take you very far these days.
@@greekthejimmy4107 yep.
remember that video of Whatsapp running millions of messages. "2 million concurrent connections on a "single server" using FreeBSD and ErLang."
sometimes you don't need cloud. in fact, it's probably at the point where it's probably cheaper to build locally for most needs.
It depends. In this case, yes. But if you need certifications like SOC2 (in order to get some "serious" customers), you should have redundancy. Also, if he already has a load balancer integrated, then spinning up another VPS once his notified about a downtime might take a couple of minutes (also, it depends).
@@mischavandenburg just spin up new vps .. use ansible to install requirements/ server. git clone site. BAM! should be all automated.
Guessing you could also automate this with vps api and have a free vps running to monitor your site.
Another thought is to use vps snapshots. snapshot at regular instances.. if site down. revert and spin up.
He's old school. Proves that you really don't need to 'over-complicate' things.
Wow, this is totally unbelievable. It actually inspired me to to go and try and reduce our server bill. 😂
been using namecheap dedicated hosting, no affiliation. Running 50+ sites, paying under $150 per month, no issues. It's been awesome. Actual, real, fast, expert support. Best move of my life quitting bluehost. Never, ever again.
I've always said this, unless you're working for a company with existing traffic, or a startup that pays you for your time, it's not worth scaling from the start. Start simple and make changes as needed. I run everything on a single VPS with Caddy, some processes configured with systemd user units, a docker container, and some reverse proxies with caddy. Especially with free Cloudflare, you're fairly protected, and if you use a provider like OVH you're even more protected.
Cloudfail isn't production ready
Most of his products are using some 3rd party paid API. With PHP he is making API calls to 3rd party services.
So what? The money comes in anyway, problem is being solved, how does not matter lol.
@@jordixboy I think its a scam to sell API services. His twitter profile is just disguised sales landing page. You will waste a lot of money and time trying out the APIs, for that elusive 5% success rate. usually if its too good to be true, then its a scam.
@@jordixboy you will spend a lot of money for that elusive 5% success rate. in reality its 000.1% . he sneakily selling those 3rd party API.
@@watchernode6138 i dont think so, he said he is making 90% of clean cash
$400 vps bill $400 000 api bill
Facts. Click bait.
Vps is not capex, it's opex. The very nature of IaaS is that it's zero capex. @@TheMuserguy
@@TheMuserguy yeah poor choice of wording. You ever make a comment and then realize the next day you shouldnt have been making comments? That was one of those comments :) mad respect to the guys work ethic. Neat story -- sorry for the negativity!
Scam cloud is not necessary, old solutions are gold.
Scam Cloud?? I am lost here
@@nezeradeleke2166 It's not necessary everywhere = "scam"
"Yes, the old ways are still best at Los Pollos Hermanos." - Excerpt from the Los Pollos Hermanos TV commercial in Breaking Bad.
I am stealing "Scam cloud" to use next time. I have been calling them expensive cloud. Some CEOs see the value of contabo, hetzner, etc VPSes which get them products making tons of cash without infrastructure cost drowning their businesses.
I think the CloudFlare service that he uses is actually free. Peter talks about it in his interview on the Lex Fridman podcast.
He motivated and demotivated me at the same time as a full stack developer working soo hard to push my saas product to production. 😢
The only question I have then, is: what are all the other bills? Initially it sounded like the VPS did e everything, but then it became clear that the VPS only does coordination - it is a front-end to a whole lot of other services.
Ive know about this guy for awhile and I always thought he was another one of those tech dudes that speaks loudly but is full of bs, but I saw him on Lex and now I have a lot of respect for him!
Story of my life. I just don’t tell everyone. I love digital ocean. Been running everything off it.
Faceless brands for the win.. fame sucks but getting paid rocks! :)
I thought exactly the same, when you have a good thing going and making millions its something I would not wish to expose to the world of sharks. I especially would not want to give away its on a VPS etc. Surprised he hasn't been hacked yet.
I have 4 websites on a 15$ VPS that have been running for years with no issues at all.
cool , what provider do you use
Yeah what provider
I use Digital Ocean
And here is The Thing, you can just start on a 3 dollar vps, and grow the one vps over time.
which provider are you using for 3 dollars/vps?
@@dopetag lmao a seedbox vps
I'm glad I'm not the only one who was absolutely blown away by the guy on Lex Fridman
Except he's not just running on a $400 VPS. He's using API's hosted on large GPU clusters.
his greatest asset is his established audience. which is harder to achieve for most folk than any type of software development. when you can accumulate hundreds of thousands of followers, throwing ideas onto the wall to see what sticks is considerably easier.
Yes
Commits straight to production. Guess this is the new meta guys lets do this!😂
He's damn good at what he does if he just deploys to production and it doesn't crash anything
I have a 96 vcpu and 254 gb for 250 $ I'm starting some osint services wish me luck
$400 per month... plus some mad, mad skillz!
Whats wild is that this guy is so young he does not realize this is how things run. MOST of the web is like this.
Its wild that so many people are so hooked up in top tier corporate environments but just how small that really is.
Cloud is expensive, there's a lot of smaller and medium companies moving back to on-prem or other services like Hetzner, Linode, even DigitalOcean, it's cheaper. Major benefit of microservices is for your organization (team structures) and not the tech. I'd say just use VMs and avoid the big 3 clouds until you have around 50 employees minimum.
wow I didn't think that some of the other services that you mention are using AWS . I knew Vercel were
After at least 100 engineers
What? No, DigitalOcean is not running on AWS
@@ArcRCG you are right, I was mistaken.
@@darrenpierre9903 seems I was mistaken, I edited my comment.
Interesting. Shows you how engineering and business are two very different skills. Sometimes the engineering mind will hold you back because you are aware of everything that Could or should go wrong, people / no engineer who don’t know any better have no concept of this so they sort of just go for it and think the opposite, that most things should work. They aren’t aware of the details
The thing is everyone makes fun of Containerization until something fails and it saves your ass, if you just push to production 99% of the time its gonna be fine, the other 1% is gonna cost millions of dollars in operating costs
7:00 so like 99% of the entire "ai economy" just another front end to the same 3 AI model apis
He just gets to work while the rest of us get caught up with shiny new toys.
Exactly
its just like his lifestyle, levels is a minimalist!
VPS? Virtual Private Server?
yes
1 machine doing everything basically xd
if you are asking that, this isn’t the video for you.
@@Hans-fl2kn So I shouldn't learn?
@@Blast-Forwardyou’ll need to learn to manage a vps securely before you can start leaning to create SaaS apps or run a forum.. if you needed to clarify what a vps even was I’m suggesting you might have more luck in some other realm you know more about.
If you do this with kubernetes, you need to hire the person to do the kubernetes, and then another engineer to work in the problems they create with all the complexity, and then a tech lead, a tester and a scrum master and before you know it your 70k per month is gone
I have 25 website on one server. Cost 80 dollars
The old ways are still best.
Hello from Amsterdam! I think he is a madman =) . he does 1000x more than I do as well but truly inspiring. I have to get out of my comfort zone and materialize my ideas now. Thanks for sharing.
Go for it!
Amazing. I always have ideas like that but then I figure I know absolutely nothing about how to get traffic to it and getting it popular so It feels impossible
How about we partner up and create something together?
@@basitmate5310@LionhartM i am in 😊
@@basitmate5310let’s do it
You need to stop thinking like a SWE to do what he does. You need to think like a business.
Swe is a fancy terms for people that are supposed to be smart but in fact are nothing but slaves putting other people's dreams into reality
I've known about this guy for years. He's pretty famous in certain communities. It's funny to see new people just discovering him for the first time and having the same reaction I did 😂
Human beings are great at overthinking and over-engineering everything😂
Except cars!. They all seemed, well under engineered.
I think we are finally coming back from all these expensive over-powered micro services and cloud platforms.
I don't believe so. This guy builds simple, almost-useless apps with no one willing to fire him when the company payment system goes down.
@@caruccioTruth!
@@caruccio is stripe that bad?
It's very insightful. I am going to release a product but was Just trying to make it perfect and searching best budget vps options. I guess I will just go with a basic one for now 😊
That VPS plan is like the highest AWS Lightsail plan!
Followed him for a few years now, always love his tweets wish i run into him one day in Thailand
For $400, you can easily own multiple VPS. Your last statement on backup is important. I learnt a great lesson earlier due to no proper backup plan. Anyhow, i admire him on his efforts to keep trying.
He's a baller. yes it takes a crap ton of time to build all these brands, but this is a great example of someone who invested continually in his biz and it paid off. Mad respect. Similar pattern here in some ways, not as big income but I have over 50 websites on a dedicated host, lots more that started up then killed off as they didnt work, Id say around 5% of them hit. Dont necessarily cull the losing sites - my worst performing one went on to be the biggest winner with some tweaks.... also... just like he did... you can have an idea and the reason it doesnt hit is because the crowd didnt arrive yet...
Sounds to me like a sysadmin that got into PHP and jQuery and though "damn, it just works"
Also Bethesda. It just works™
I wonder if he's running each of his apps as a container in his VPS ? It would be problematic if one of his apps had some issue to affect the whole VPS
I don’t think so but I can’t know for sure ofc
Prob not.
There's always something that can fail and affect entire VPS. IMHO, spinning up separate servers for these projects isn't worth it as far as you don't break entire VPS too often. The point is, he's not solving problems he doesn't have yet which is a very healthy approach. There are several ways to separate apps on one server, e.g. reverse proxy (nginx) + apps running as separated processes (you can limit cpu & memory per process if you'd like to).
Looks to me that his VPS is only really serving html to the cloudflare cache and doing some simple database lookups at most. No need for docker I guess. All of the heavy computation happens in third party services. And most of those services are stuck in a race to the bottom pricing war atm so the cost there is low.
@@perfredelius yep
fun fact: he only use sqlite
idk how legit are the numbers that all these one-man businesses bring
I've heard that Levels sold his remoteOK for 1mil during pandemic
That I could believe
The rest are just cool stories on par with crypto-bro stories to me
He is just making a fancy looking frontend to some AI service with some prompt for some BS. He couldn't care less how stable that is.
exactly. People way overthinking this.
As with most businesses? They make something other people don't understand simple, pretty and affordable. You could've done the same?
Just?
Does that really matter? Let him make 10mil in a couple of years until this whole breaks down. More than enough to live a nice life.
@@ExtremelySimpleTH-cam You forget the luck factor. How many people out there could easily make the same thing (or better)?
He definitely seems to be making his own luck, and doing many simple projects yourself is not doing nothing, but is he really providing that kind of actual value to society?
This seems like a problem of the highly subsidized/loss-leading nature of these AI tools, which will only be temporary. But the only-as-complicated-as-necessary approach is good if you're just in it to make bank until the market actually starts to function properly.
He's the epitome of an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) junkie. I watched that podcast and I was inspired by his whole 2-week philosophy. Basically when he comes up with an idea he gives himself 2-weeks to execute it. As a closet entrepreneur, I hate how easy he makes this all look.
Really cool, but in terms of disponibility and security i fell like it can be a bit risky
Leuk verhaal Mischa!
Ik denk dat wat we kunnen leren van dhr. Levels is dat het winnen vooral het DOEN is. Ik hink ook tegen de launch van een product en ben ook aan het over engineren als een gek. Waardoor het project steeds complexer en vreemdere vormen aanneemt (hoe leuk en leerzaam dan ook). Dank voor het delen van dit verhaal, dit inspireert echt om het gewoon te doen. Fijne avond!
Ga ervoor! En ik ben nieuwsgierig naar wat je aan het maken bent :)
you only need 1 vps but you also need a god coder
That’s a crazy story, thank you for this video 😂 straight to the point
TBH I don't find his technique weird at all, most solo developers are doing same thing, when you are not slave to some company tells you learn this and that to use in 0.01% of your real works.
PHP and jquery?! That's really funny yet inspirational. He is truly pragmatic.
I mean, it's certainly "laughable" for some, but you can't deny jQuery and PHP is battle-tested in every environment possible, so you'd likely face less issues than, let's say, Node and such. At the end of the day, nobody cares in what language it's written in or how good the language is, as long as it WORKS.
I even don’t understand why anyone needs jQuery… the code is ugly and unreadable. I prefer Vanilla JS over jQuery. Why not write code in plain JS then…
Good for him. I wonder how he drives traffic to his websites.
4:51 *a year
Very proud of your channel progress Mischa. I think I've been here a while. I don't know if you're interested but I think you should start a subscription of some kind for paying members. I think you've really got it.
Thanks man! I launched my private community at skool.com/kubecraft
Maybe I’ll see you there? :)
Dudes a genius!
DHH would be happy to hear this.
Im so jealous 😂. I always believed the cloud was overrated. Time for me to start a buch of projects and host them on my raspberry pi on my closet
Quantity not quality is a means to success. Just output a ton of already known good ideas and see if you can stumble into market share with 5% of them.
This amazing! very inspiring!
meanwhile me being super over engineering by trying to microservice everything on the apps that is not even launched yet
DON’T USE ACRONYMS WITHOUT EXPLAINING WHAT THEY MEAN THE FIRST TIME YOU USE THE ACRONYM!
Yes, I know that was all caps.
Really like your humbleness 🙂
How much money are YOU making after this ?
I wonder what his marketing budget and repeat business/customer retention stats look like.
Very inspiring. Thank you so much bro.!!
A 1% developer with a 1% work ethic will absolutely be guaranteed to make at least $1 million/year. With any luck, he'll make much more than that. If you know you're good, you have to do it alone or in a startup. NO EXCUSES BABY.
What is a VPS?
Virtual private Server. He runs his projects on his server, hosted somewhere at a data Center.
use google Rob.
But how secure are all his websites and code. That is what would be most impressive to me.
man you Jesus?
Come, my child
@@mischavandenburgHahaha, when Jesus starts to teach you DevOps and CI/CD, you know - The End is Near! 😂😂😂
Thanks bro, I’ll just copy his successful startups 😂
That’s if you believe his numbers. I find them unbelievable but good for him if they are real
SQLite FTW!
I'm sure he meant MySQL
@@collinsushi1155 he did not, he uses SQLite.
@@collinsushi1155no
SQLite is excellent. I just wrote software around it.
If you don't need much of writes or distribute to multiple servers, SQLite is excellent.
if he surprised you, you need check Marc Lou, who is following his path ...
Why staging need , most of the cases staging not need but people make it over complex
amazing video!, very interesting guy, thanks for the recomendation.
btw @Mischa, what internet explorer you are using?
Qutebrowser!
why was one of his sites in http and not https
Its exactly how I have been doing this stuff for 20 years. Granted at work I did AWS autoscale for 10+ years howwever I also have a 100% failure rate. I blame PHP. :P
What is the service he uses for photoAI ? Or in what podcast did he mention it?
The one I linked
He said he uses Replicate for his AI apps
JQUERY and PHP in 2024? Tell me you aren’t an engineer without telling me you aren’t a engineer
Tell me you're react dev after bootcamp without telling me you're react bro lol
He says that he is earning 3 mill per month
_"Less is more"_ isn't just a saying. It's true. Think pragmatic and make things work instead of overcomplicating them. It's probably even more safe in some regards for it being less error-prone due to a server setup that is as simplified as it can ever be.
Funny video, however. Didn't know either this channel nor the guy you've been talking about. That video was just recommended to me by
What 3rd party service did he use for PhotoAI?
I think it’s funny people think since he is making money, that his product is “working”. Sure he is making $3 mil but it a true engineer came and rebuilt it they would be making 10x or 100x that. You don’t realize how much money is being left on the table
X for doubt.
I am like him. I did that in college to beautify cli apps with ascii art.
Cloud is great to start your project but if they start getting traction an old school vps is great. Funny that I use to manage my own vps before the cloud took over more than a decade ago lol
You need to account for the devops guy he hires.
384 for 16thread 64gb? What bandwidth? Better be 10GB because that man is over paying and exceedingly so...😢 I've got a 24thread 64gb 1000gb-unmetered and I pay $80 month. Not going to post it here because.... That would saturate the network and server availability if I ever wanted to up-scale.
Guess no one is going to mention what a vps is..
I still don't see how that websites are making money!? It looks like a potential "value".