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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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@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.
👋 Hello Product Hunters! :)
This is the third iteration of my side-project turned business and life's work called Nomad List.
📖 Story
Nomad List started out as simple list of 25 cities for digital nomads to go with their internet speed and cost of living.
🚀 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: 🌍 Find your place
💰 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.
👉 Features
✅ A destination search engine with 100+ filters to pick cities
✅ Live flight prices for 100,000 flight routes from 1,000 cities to 1,000 destinations, directly bookable with one-click
✅ 250,000+ data points on 1,000+ cities from cost of living to power plug type to quality of life for families
✅ 25,000+ places to work (including coffee shops and coworking spaces) mapped in 187 countries
✅ Integrated neighborhood data for every city if you zoom in on the map (from Hoodmaps)
✅ A forum with over 1,000+ questions on destinations to go to and how to work remotely
✅ A chat (on Slack and web) with 1,000+ messages sent daily
✅ A trips planner where you can share your trips and see if other people are in the same place as you
✅ A social network of 10,000+ digital nomads, remote workers and travelers you can connect with
✅ 52+ official meetups per year all around the world and hundreds of informal meetups
🛠 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.
💖 Thanks
Thank you everyone for sending me messages of support, bug fixes and feature ideas!
This is my 👶 baby and I spent most of my time the last 3 years making this, thank you for being part of it 🙃
✅ Live flight prices for 100,000 flight routes from 1,000 cities to 1,000 destinations, directly bookable with one-click
✅ 250,000+ data points on 1,000+ cities from cost of living to power plug type to quality of life for families
✅ 25,000+ places to work (including coffee shops and coworking spaces) mapped in 187 countries
✅ Integrated neighborhood data for every city if you zoom in on the map (from Hoodmaps)
✅ A forum with over 1,000+ questions on destinations to go to and how to work remotely
✅ A chat (on Slack and web) with 1,000+ messages sent daily
✅ A trips planner where you can share your trips and see if other people are in the same place as you
✅ A social network of 10,000+ digital nomads, remote workers and travelers you can connect with
✅ 52+ official meetups per year all around the world and hundreds of informal meetups
🛠 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.
💖 Thanks
Thank you everyone for sending me messages of support, bug fixes and feature ideas!
This is my 👶 baby and I spent most of my time the last 3 years making this, thank you for being part of it 🙃
@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...
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
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.
Hey Pieter - Congrats on the 3.0 launch and keep up the good work! I've been a fan since v1 and glad to see its evolution. Are you still doing a subscription model? I'm curious to hear how you've handled growth vs monetization with scale. And what you use to measure user engagement with the way you rapidly prototype features?
Even though I know we disagree when it comes to approach on languages, frameworks, architecture, etc what you have built is definitely super impressive especially given a "classic" stack underneath. If you could write it again from scratch would you still choose PHP or another language/framework? It would be cool to see a blog post given that it's contrarian to the startup scene today.
@kicksopenminds
> Are you still doing a subscription model? I'm curious to hear how you've handled growth vs monetization with scale.
Yep! Monthly, annual or lifetime to join the social interactive parts of the site like the chat, forum and travel planner.
> Even though I know we disagree when it comes to approach on languages, frameworks, architecture, etc
I don't disagree with any approach. I think everyone should use what works for *them*. That's it. And we shouldn't tell people what to use if they're doing fine. That's the devsplaining issue on Twitter noawadays.
> If you could write it again from scratch would you still choose PHP or another language/framework
I'd definitely use the same. For me dealing with constantly changing frameworks and libraries keeps me behind. The reason I used PHP and vanilla JS in the beginning was to ship fast. The idea was then to use the "hip" tools when it matured. But now I realized this works fine on scale too. Nomad List and Remote OK serve almost 2 million users per month, and it's doing fine. So I think this *is* in fact technology for scale.
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.
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!!!!
@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)
Pieter inspired me to become a full time digital nomad. 🙌
Pros:Great way to find my next place to stay. Got everything I need.
Cons:Got some serious FOMO for all the places I haven’t visited yet.
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).
yoyo! Congrats, man!
Solid work, Pieter👌
Also nice meeting you at Dojo 🌴
Q: What's your work style like? Stable productivity every single day or inspiration-driven?
Looks great! What happened to Places to Work? I think it was my most used feature beyond (how much should I take out at the ATM).
@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.
Great thing is you don't even have to be a nomad to enjoy the benefits of this site. I love traveling and will use this site for information on my next trip.
Pros:Everything!
Cons:Sometimes too much data can be cumbersome.
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 ❣️
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