List of all my projects ever

An endless AI-generated TV channel. Minimax H3 Max on fal.ai generates 10-second video clips faster than you can watch them, so I hooked it to a live stream where the chat decides what airs next — type anything and it becomes a video on TV. Surreal interdimensional-cable vibes, went viral with hundreds of people meme-bombing it live.

I reverse engineered Windows XP to run it in your browser with classic programs like MSN Messenger, AIM and Winamp (with a lot of help from v86 by copy). Like a little time capsule to go back 20 years. Windows XP was the most legendary memorable OS ever I think, everyone remembers using it, it doesn't matter if you're 25 or 50.

A web-based version of Quake I with a multiplayer server

A web-based version of Quake II with a multiplayer server

A web-based version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein with a multiplayer server

A retro web radio station powered by Nullsoft SHOUTcast

I vibecoded my own blog platform that also auto-pulls my posts on 𝕏 when I write there (because I use that as my blog platform these days), so finally I have all my content in one place. It also lets me do cool stuff like this projects page.

A search engine that lets retro browsers surf the web

My first Chrome extension that is multi-functional and contains functions I used to have separate extensions for, but I made my own because it's safer and I don't trust Chrome extensions.

My entry to the Vibe Jam 2026 (although I can't win because I organize it), an FPV drone war simulator MMO vibe coded by me

DOS text-based user interface (TUI) running on the web called PieterOS

A vibe-coded macOS app that lets you increase your MacBook Pro's screen brightness so you can work in the sun.

A web-based version of Quake III with a multiplayer server powered by Q3JS by @lukathedev

A dial-up ISP for retro computers I created with lots of help from @bai0. We emulated a virtual modem that dials into a phone number that is then routed over a WebSocket onto a PPP tunnel onto the internet and then back! You can use it on pieter.com/win31.

The first vibe coding game jam competition with sponsors like Cursor, Bolt, Lambda, CodeRabbit, Glif and Tripo

I am so sick of booking sites that lie. They rank hotels based on how much money they make from them, and the EU forced them to admit this. If a hotel lowers their commission to the booking sites, they go up in the ranking. Also there are so many fake reviews now you can't trust booking sites or Google Maps. My goal with Hotelist is to fix this. I use AI to analyze hotels, browse the web to see what people say about them (not just on booking sites), and normalize ratings based on the actual range of booking site ratings (which is like everything is a 3.9 to 4.7 instead of 0 to 5!).

Vueling lost my gf's suitcase in June 2024 and it then went on a trip to random spots around the world without coming back to us, while we got gaslit by useless Vueling staff! We called and DM'd customer support, even messaged the CEO on LinkedIn, all without resolve. In the end we got it back because American Airlines found it. Not even Vueling.

Movement to save Europe

My crazy retro computer project to get a 1993 Windows 3.11 PC running in your browser with a dial-up internet connection. Read more about it on my blog: Building pieter.com, my retro PC in the browser

My angel investing in AI startups, plus some big-tech public stocks. Bets include Cursor (exited to SpaceX), Replicate (acquired by Cloudflare), Perplexity, fal, Sync and Blueprint.

This project led to me creating Interior AI.

Rebase, immigration-as-a-service that lets you get legal and tax residency, and work permits in countries that want to attract high-tech remote workers. The first country it launched is Portugal.

The State of Digital Nomads, an always-up-to-date research report on digital nomads and remote workers based on live data from tens of thousands of Nomad List members which makes it the biggest study on real digital nomads ever.

Remote OK in Microsoft Word, Google Docs and VSCode, I made different fake layouts so that people can browse remote jobs in the office without their boss finding out, it went very viral

QR Menu Creator, a site that lets restaurant owners create mobile friendly menus that customer can open by scanning a QR code on the table, to avoid Coronavirus; Product Hunt

IdeasAI, an OpenAI-powered GPT-3 business idea generator which uses artificial intelligence to come up with new businesses; Product Hunt

Airline List, a comparison of airlines, airplane models and airports based on service quality and safety rankings

Nomad List Climate Finder, pick a temperature and time period and find places that match based on your desired climate; Product Hunt

Bali Sea Cable, monitors Bali's undersea internet cable performance; blog post

How Much Is My Side Project Worth?, a calculator to estimate how much your app, startup or side project is worth when you'd sell it; Product Hunt

Maker Rank, an index of Product Hunt makers ranked by upvotes; Product Hunt

No More Google, privacy-friendly alternatives to Google that don't track you; Product Hunt

MAKE Village, an MVP test to see if people would be interested in living together in a place, ~500 people showed interest; Results

Nomad List FIRE Calculator, a calculator to see where and when you can retire based on your current savings and income; Product Hunt

MAKE Book, I wrote and self published a book on building startups without funding in public, it has sold 10,000+ copies; Product Hunt

How to Build a Startup Without Funding, I did a presentation at Dojo coworking space in Bali about bootstrapping startups. I think this is my favorite presentation I ever made as it quite clearly lays out the fundamentals of how I build my projects. It's essentially a summary of my book MAKE; blog post

Nomad Gear, a crowdsourced index of the best gear for digital nomads; Product Hunt

Hoodmaps, a crowdsourced map to navigate cities based on hipsters, tourists, rich, normies, suits and uni areas; Product Hunt, blog post

My attempt at a clone of Slack to use for Nomad List

A coliving platform for people to organize and find coliving and group travel dates for digital nomads

Places to Work, an app to find the best places to work near you

Startup Retreats, find remote work retreats for you and your startup

Taylor Bot, a personal travel assistant bot on Telegram that tells you where to go and who is near you

Remote OK, a daily remote job aggregator which would pull jobs from other non-remote job boards if they were remote, this later merged with Nomad Jobs to become its own job board; Hacker News, Product Hunt, blog post

#nomads, a Slack community for digital nomads, now part of Nomad List; Hacker News, Product Hunt, blog post

GIF Book, make animated GIFs into paper flip books; blog post, Hacker News, Product Hunt

Nomad Jobs, a remote job board for distributed/remote startups, and the precursor to Remote OK

Tubelytics, a real-time analytics dashboard for YouTube creators and multi-channel networks

Go Fucking Do It, set a goal and a deadline and if you don't reach your goal I charge your credit card; Hacker News, Product Hunt, blog post

12 Startups in 12 Months, to fight my depression and decreasing income, I decided to build one project per month for 12 months to see if I could get traction with anything

Play My Inbox, a site that pulls music links from YouTube and SoundCloud from your email inbox (which your friends would send you) and plays them in a nice interface

My 𝕏 account that I have been posting on since 2013. I started it with very few people even seeing my posts for years, and mostly just used it for fun. It was the place my first project went kinda viral (which for me back then was like a few RTs): Nomad List. Then after that was the time of Product Hunt peaking around 2016-2018 and the start of the indie hacker scene, with lots of people starting to build in public like I was doing. Then around 2022 with the AI wave starting it became a very interesting place for me to ship my AI startups in public, as well as me talking more about society like the issues we have in Europe with degrowth and overregulation. And now 𝕏 also pays me, sometimes $16,000/month, so I'd say it's financially successful too.

I sold all my stuff, got a MacBook and a backpack and moved to Asia. I ended up staying for over a decade. The backstory is I was dating a Russian girl in December 2012 and even flew to Russia for her, and our plan was to move to Thailand in 2013. Every month she promised me she would book a flight but she didn't. So I flew in April myself and was expecting her to come too, but she wasn't there. So we kinda broke up and I was alone from then on the other side of the world!

On January 7 2012, I moved to San Francisco for 3 months with my friend Jim. He was writing his Master's Thesis in Cultural Anthropology about San Francisco's tech scene and specifically reciprocity — how investors and founders helped each other without immediately asking stuff back, but instead having some credit of reciprocity to help each other implicitly. I hopped on to write my Master's Thesis (unrelated to SF). We lived in cheap basements with gas leaks and a landlord who had a goose as a pet, and because we were so broke we couch-surfed for free, staying with 2 cool gay guys in Mountain View who worked for Akamai, and then ended up in a girl's house in the center of San Francisco where she worked for Square as a barista. Very crazy time and so many crazy stories! It was interesting to be so close to the SF startup scene which, now that I write this in 2026, seems early (2012), but back then already felt late! SF was a lot safer than it was later, a lot cleaner, and of course very progressive.

FML Dubstep was my try to pivot my Drum & Bass career into Dubstep, which became really big around 2011. We did make lots of cool music but it didn't take off.

A missed connections dating site for university campuses on HotForYa.com, which I made with my friend Jim. The Dutch version was called Vind je leuk :) and this mockup shows it for Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Me and my friend Robin Spiegel wrote a business plan for SnapSnap, a cheap-taxi app like Uber in the Netherlands, in March 2011, less than two years after Uber launched in 2009 as UberCab. We found rich famous entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who wanted to invest and pitched them for their investment fund. It turned out to be a massive time waste and they never invested in anyone and it was quite humiliating. It was a significant moment for me to stop being impressed by both venture capital investors and rich people who acted quite unfriendly and arrogant, and made me never wanna raise money or become that arrogant rich person also.

I wrote my master's thesis here: How technology changed the music industry, on what happened to artists after major record labels lost their century-old monopoly on production and distribution. I interviewed 12 artists, agents, labels and platforms. I started writing it during my 3 months in San Francisco in 2012. Download the PDF

Years later, in 2017, RSM's alumni magazine Outlook wrote about me and Nomad List:

A Drum & Bass and Dubstep t-shirt and merch line I designed and sold through Spreadshirt.net, promoted via my Panda Mix Show channel. It sold pretty well and made $1,876 in total. This was on drumandbasstshirt.com, dubstepshirt.com, moombahtonshirt.com and emojishirt.com.

A network of AdSense blogs where I tried to make money with AdSense and Amazon affiliate links — I think at the peak they made $500/mo. AsusTablet.com was the most serious one, covering Asus's Eee T91 tablet, registered together with AsusT91.com/.net/.org/.info: I drove traffic to it with Google AdWords campaigns, outsourced blog posts via Mechanical Turk, and after a 6-year run sold it at auction on Flippa in 2015. AppleTablet.net was registered with MacBookTablet.com nine months before the iPad was announced, betting Apple's tablet would be called the Apple Tablet so I'd rank #1 on Google for it — Apple called it iPad, so that bet never paid off. And MyCancerDiet.com was a one-year experiment where I tried to publish correlations between cancer and diet, dead by 2010.

An exchange program that changed my life. My first time outside Europe on the other side of the world. A complete cultural shock that changed the fundamentals of my identity forever and responsible for pretty much everything that came after — like my digital nomad journey for a decade and leaving my country forever. I blogged about it on hassepietersam.com.

A business plan me and my brother Jeroen wrote for selling Dutch granny bikes (omafiets) in London. We downloaded a 29-page business plan template and we only ever filled in the cover page and one sentence. That's how far this one got.

I started uploading my music from my album Retake Manhattan below, including mixes. Back then in 2008 almost nobody uploaded music to YouTube — it was a site for videos after all! My videos started getting millions of views and I got invited by Google to join AdSense and was one of the first YouTubers in the Netherlands to make money with YouTube. It ranged from $1K/mo to $8K/mo at peak. I started getting requests by DJs to also upload their DJ mixes of their music, and I did. I always cleared all the music with the labels and it was all legal. After about 3 years the vibe changed when I started getting lots of copyright claims from labels and royalty agencies. The label ones were easy to clear — after all I had permission and would be asked by the labels themselves (!) to upload their music — but many labels would outsource to royalty agencies (like Merlin) and getting those copyright claims cleared was hard. It meant that slowly the labels would take all my money, and it didn't make sense to continue. I saw the end was near even though I was still making $5K/mo. I outsourced the video making to a friend and pretty much quit. In the meantime, while seeing my revenue drop every month, I had to find other income streams which is why I did 12 startups in 12 months in 2014.

My first music album as PandaDNB, I pressed 1000 CDs and sold them online and the music was played on major radio stations like BBC Radio One

I wrote my bachelor thesis here at the Amsterdam Center for Entrepreneurship: Firm Size & Innovation: The Advantages of a Small vs. Large Firm Size for Innovation. Public perception says big firms are slow and bureaucratic and small firms are agile and innovative — so if big firms are so bad at innovating, why do they still exist? I interviewed business leaders at both to find out. Download the PDF

Reaktor was a hard drum & bass night in The Hague that I organized with friends I knew from the Dutch drum & bass forum dnbforum.nl. It was my first real experience in entrepreneurship, with nights that drew 300 people. We booked the artists, organized the venue, sold tickets at the door, and promoted it with flyers we put up at universities and elsewhere.

Found footage from Reaktor IV on 13 June 2006.

Outbound sales calls for Nationale Nederlanden, pitching their products to ING customers.

I started making Drum & Bass music and posting it online. After lots of trying I finally started seeing my songs played by big DJs. Also they started getting playlisted by BBC Radio One (a very important radio station for Drum & Bass and electronic music). Back then I had just dropped out of my previous high school around age 16, lost most of my friends, was isolated, so doing music became my escape. Around 2005 it started taking off a bit, I started DJing in the Netherlands and UK, and started 2 Drum & Bass nights in The Hague in 2005 and my hometown Nijmegen in 2006. I learned a lot about organizing night club events and the economics of it. And that kinda made me really want to continue in entrepreneurship actually.

Luzac is essentially an expensive private school for kids that fucked up their high school, to finish it fast. I could do 2 years in 1, which since I had to re-do 3 years already in the previous high school meant I could make up for some time. It was expensive, about EUR 15,000, which I later paid back to my parents (in 2018).

I joined a Quake II Clan and made the website for them too.

I got pretty good at aggressive inline skating. I could grind frontal on a tube and grind sideways too. Then my oldest brother told me they'd stopped skating, so I quit too. Turned out he just didn't like that I was better than him — so he stopped inviting me along.