What Pieter Levels Has Said Publicly About Building Solo With AI

Pieter Levels (@levelsio) has built multiple profitable businesses solo — Nomad List, Remote OK, and PhotoAI among them — and is one of the most-followed indie founders on X. His approach to AI is radically practical and often contrarian, and he is known for running profitable products with no employees.

On His Current AI Stack

From his X posts and podcast appearances, Levels has described the tools he leans on day to day — and the categories where we recommend our own wired picks:

AI coding — Levels uses AI coding assistants for development, and has said they let him ship features in hours that used to take days: the AI writes a large share of the code while he reviews and adjusts. In his framing the skill is no longer writing code so much as directing the AI and catching its mistakes.

AI image generation — his PhotoAI business uses custom image-generation models that turn user selfies into professional headshots, social photos, and other creative content. PhotoAI is one of his most public products, and he shares its revenue figures openly on his sites.

Content and social management — keeping up a large social presence without spending hours composing posts is its own job. For that workflow we recommend a scheduler with AI caption writing such as Vista Social, and for short AI-generated video for product marketing, PixVerse. (These are ToppAgent's wired picks for the task, not tools we attribute to Levels.)

Email and subscriber management — for automated email sequences and subscriber nurture, our wired pick is GetResponse, which handles follow-ups and list management without manual effort.

On Why He Stays Solo Intentionally

In his view, hiring creates coordination overhead that AI removes: every employee adds management, communication, and alignment cost, whereas AI adds capability without adding coordination.

His thesis is deliberately provocative: for the first time, a one-person company reaching enormous scale is at least theoretically possible — not probable, but possible — because AI can handle coding, customer service, marketing copy, data analysis, and operations while the founder handles strategy, taste, and customer relationships.

He acknowledges the tradeoff: being solo means everything depends on him — if he is out for a week, nothing moves — and there is no backup. But for the fast-iteration web apps he builds, he judges the speed advantage of working solo to outweigh the redundancy a team would provide.

On the PhotoAI Business Model

PhotoAI is Levels' most public case study in AI-powered business building. From his public revenue dashboard and podcast appearances:

The premise: upload selfies, get professional AI-generated photos — headshots, dating profiles, social content. By his public account the product found paying customers and scaled quickly after launch.

The playbook he describes: launch a landing page over a weekend, test pricing, get the first customers from an existing audience, and iterate daily on their feedback until the product clicks — a matter of weeks rather than months in his telling.

His key insight is that search drives a large share of the traffic: people look for terms like "AI headshot generator" and "AI photo editor" constantly, so he built content around those keywords from day one — distribution before product perfection.

On What Kills Most Solopreneurs

In podcast appearances he lists the usual killers: overthinking the tech stack, not launching fast enough, building in private, and ignoring distribution. He is emphatic that most founders fail because they build in isolation, spending months on a product before anyone has seen it.

The founders who win in the AI era, he argues, ship far faster than the average startup: ship on day one, ship something embarrassing, ship before it feels ready, and let the market tell you what to fix.

His second killer is ignoring distribution. Roughly half your time, he argues, should go to getting the product in front of people; most founders spend nearly all their time building and almost none on distribution, and flipping that ratio is what speeds up success.

On His Twitter/X Strategy

Levels has built one of the largest indie-founder followings on X through building in public — sharing revenue numbers, product updates, failures, and opinions in real time. He credits that audience with driving a meaningful share of new sign-ups across his products.

Building in public works, in his view, because it creates a relationship with potential customers before they need the product: by the time someone searches for an AI photo generator or a remote job board, they already know and trust him.

His specific tactic is to share real numbers: revenue screenshots, he has found, draw far more engagement than motivational quotes, because people follow founders for transparency rather than inspiration.

On What He's Building Next

From recent X posts and conference appearances, Levels has expressed interest in AI for healthcare, travel, and education — markets where the existing digital products are terrible and customers are stuck with bad options.

He looks for three things: a market where the existing product is awful, customers actively searching for alternatives, and a problem where AI can deliver a step-change improvement. Health records, travel planning, and personalised education, he has said, all meet those criteria.

What This Means for ToppAgent Readers

Levels' framework is actionable: use AI to move fast, stay small, distribute before you build, and choose markets where existing solutions are bad. The tools exist to build a real business solo — the question is whether you have the courage to ship before it's perfect.

Sources: Pieter Levels's X (Twitter) account, the revenue figures he publishes on his own sites, and his public podcast appearances. Paraphrased throughout; no direct quotations.

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