Episode notes
12 startups in 12 months. Vanilla PHP. SQLite. No co-founder, no investors, no office. The constraint was the strategy.
Pieter Levels makes around $3M a year from one laptop across forty countries — on the simplest possible tech stack, built in public, zero employees. Nomad List hit $5.3M in revenue in 2024. Built on vanilla PHP. This episode is about radical simplicity as a strategy, why complexity is the enemy of shipping, and what "velocity over perfection" actually looks like in practice.
— THE BUILD —
What is the simplest possible version of your product idea that would prove whether anyone wants it? Not the full product. The version you could build this week. A landing page with a payment button. A manual process disguised as software. A PDF that solves the problem before the tool exists. Write one sentence describing that minimum viable version.
If you can't describe it in one sentence — it's not simple enough yet.
Don't skip this. Motivation fades by Tuesday. The BUILD happens today.
Download the free BUILD Workbook — all 52 BUILDs, one page per episode:
https://1personunicorn.com/books-unleashed-workbook
Zero Permission. Always.