Creative Chaos
He Sold It Before He Built It
In 2013, a designer named Pieter Levels had a problem.
Not a startup problem.
A personal one.
He wanted to know where he could live around the world while working remotely.
There wasn’t a good answer.
Most founders would have done what founders do.
Open Figma.
Open Cursor.
Start building.
Instead, he opened a spreadsheet.
The first version of Nomad List wasn’t software. It was a public Google Sheet ranking cities based on cost of living, internet speed, weather, and a handful of other factors remote workers cared about.
Nothing fancy.
No login.
No AI.
No dashboard.
Just data.
He posted it online.
People started sharing it.
Some disagreed with the rankings.
Others suggested cities.
Many asked for more.
That reaction was more valuable than any product he could have built.
Because for the first time he had evidence.
Not assumptions.
Evidence.
A surprising number of founders never get that far.
They spend months building solutions for audiences they’ve never spoken to.
Then they call the lack of traction a marketing problem.
But distribution often fails much earlier than that.
It fails when nobody verifies that strangers actually care.
What I find interesting about Nomad List isn’t the spreadsheet.
It’s the order of operations.
Levels didn’t start with a product.
He started with a useful artifact.
Something people could consume immediately.
Something that attracted exactly the type of person who would eventually become a customer.
Today everyone talks about building audiences.
Very few talk about building assets.
A useful calculator.
A database.
A template.
A report.
A benchmark.
A directory.
These things travel further than products.
People share them because they’re useful, not because they’re customers.
That’s an important distinction.
The spreadsheet attracted remote workers long before Nomad List existed.
When the product eventually arrived, the audience was already there waiting.
Most founders try to build a product and then find an audience.
The smarter founders build an audience around a useful asset and then discover what product the audience wants.
Same destination.
Completely different path.
And one is considerably less risky than the other.
— Tom
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