The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2015–2026
Remote OK: a solo bootstrapped job board hit Product Hunt #1 and still earns ~$36K/month
Pieter Levels aggregated the world's remote jobs into one board, hit #1 on Product Hunt, never took funding — and Remote OK still earns ~$36K/month.
Remote OK
What the business is
Remote OK is a remote job board that aggregates listings from hundreds of sources, lets companies post jobs directly, and connects remote workers with employers worldwide — built and run solo by Pieter Levels since 2015.
Starting capital：Self-funded: no external capital; Levels built and ran it solo from a laptop while traveling, funding it from earlier indie projects.
How it started
In February 2015 Pieter Levels launched Remote OK as part of his '12 startups in 12 months' challenge: he kept meeting people who wanted remote jobs they couldn't find, so he built an aggregator of every remote job feed he could parse and launched it to Product Hunt and Hacker News.
What happened
It reached #1 on Product Hunt (1,000 upvotes, then #15 all-time), drew ~100,000 visitors in its first month and 3,723 email signups, and was covered by The Next Web, Forbes, Fast Company and Lifehacker. Job boards including WFH.io and AngelList asked to be indexed rather than fighting the scraper. By 2017 it claimed ~1M monthly visits and ~$10K/month; revenue kept compounding — Stripe's 2025 podcast cited $3.4M for Remote OK, and 2026 snapshots put it near $36K/month.
How it ended up
Still live and profitable as of 2026-09: Remote OK remains one of the largest remote job boards, run solo with zero funding, and is the longest-running pillar of Levels' bootstrapped product portfolio.
Background
Remote OK is a remote job board that aggregates listings from hundreds of sources, lets companies post jobs directly, and connects remote workers with employers worldwide. It was built and is still run solo by Dutch indie developer Pieter Levels, who launched it on 2015-02-22 as part of his '12 startups in 12 months' challenge.
The bet was that remote work is a category, not a filter: instead of asking companies to post on yet another board, Remote OK pulled in remote jobs already listed elsewhere via RSS and JSON feeds, normalized them with hand-written parsers, and gave every source prominent credit and backlinks — turning scraped sites into partners. It hit #1 on Product Hunt with 1,000 upvotes, drew ~100,000 visitors in its first month, and was covered by The Next Web, Forbes and Fast Company.
Monetization came after the audience: sponsorships first, then job posts and premium features. By 2017 Remote OK claimed to be the #1 remote job website with nearly a million monthly visits; Stripe's 2025 podcast cited $3.4M in revenue for the product, and 2026 self-reported monthly figures put it at ~$36K/month. It remains live and profitable, with zero funding, as part of Levels' portfolio of solo-built products.
What has to be true
- Aggregation with attribution was the unlock: by crediting and linking back to every source, Remote OK made the job boards it scraped want to be included rather than shut it down.
- Category-first thinking beat feature-thinking: by collecting every remote job in one place, it became the default destination for a movement, not just another job board.
- Audience before monetization: building traffic and an email list first let a solo founder charge later without needing investor money to survive.
- Portfolio economics kept it alive: Remote OK never needed to hit venture scale, so it could stay small, profitable and independent for a decade.
What can be applied
Give value back to the sources you aggregate and you turn potential enemies into partners; build the audience and utility first, monetize later, and you may never need funding at all.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-02 Remote OK is live and profitable, run solo by Pieter Levels with no funding. The site advertises reach of 13,400,000+ remote workers and positions itself as 'the #1 Remote Job Platform'. It sits in Levels' portfolio — Nomad List, Photo AI, Interior AI and others — which Stripe's 2025 podcast put at roughly $3.1M/year across products, with Remote OK's own 2026 monthly snapshots around $36K/month. Levels has said he keeps old products running rather than shutting them down, making Remote OK one of the longest-running solo businesses on the internet.
Sources
- How I built Remote OK and launched it to #1 on Product Hunt
- Turning side projects into profitable startups
- Stripe Podcast: A Cheeky Pint with John Collison — @levelsio
- Pieter Levels (levelsio): A Real Indie Developer Playbook for 2026
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