š Hello Product Hunters! :)
This is the third iteration of my side-project turned business and life's work called Nomad List.
š Story
Nomad List started out as simple list of 25 cities for digital nomads to go with their internet speed and cost of living.
š 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: š Find your place
š° 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.
š Features
ā A destination search engine with 100+ filters to pick cities
ā Live flight prices for 100,000 flight routes from 1,000 cities to 1,000 destinations, directly bookable with one-click
ā 250,000+ data points on 1,000+ cities from cost of living to power plug type to quality of life for families
ā 25,000+ places to work (including coffee shops and coworking spaces) mapped in 187 countries
ā Integrated neighborhood data for every city if you zoom in on the map (from Hoodmaps)
ā A forum with over 1,000+ questions on destinations to go to and how to work remotely
ā A chat (on Slack and web) with 1,000+ messages sent daily
ā A trips planner where you can share your trips and see if other people are in the same place as you
ā A social network of 10,000+ digital nomads, remote workers and travelers you can connect with
ā 52+ official meetups per year all around the world and hundreds of informal meetups
š 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.
š Thanks
Thank you everyone for sending me messages of support, bug fixes and feature ideas!
This is my š¶ baby and I spent most of my time the last 3 years making this, thank you for being part of it š
@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.) āļø
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 š 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.
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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).
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@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.
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Love Nomadlist and love you ššš
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.
Hi Jesse! I š 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).
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@levelsio haha sweet answer, here supporting ya all the way buddy š
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!!!!
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?
@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.
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.
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
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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.
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