Pieter Levels, nomadlist.com Founder, Says it Doesn't Make Sense for Him to Sell His Companies

Name: Pieter Levels, nomadlist.com Founder, Says it Doesn't Make Sense for Him to Sell His Companies
Uploaded: 2022-09-01T00:30:18+00:00
Duration: 33 s
Channel: Sam Parr
Description: In this clip, Pieter Levels, the founder of Nomad List, Remote OK, and other bootstrapped SaaS sites, explains his valuation philosophy. He argues that…

1 Sept 2022 · 1 min

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In this clip, Pieter Levels, the founder of Nomad List, Remote OK, and other bootstrapped SaaS sites, explains his valuation philosophy. He argues that selling his businesses for 4–5× revenue or profit doesn’t make sense because the companies generate extremely high pre‑tax margins (e.g., Remote OK at ~94%) and are largely automated, requiring minimal ongoing work. Levels believes a 10× multiple is the threshold where a sale becomes attractive, and he is willing to wait several years for that valuation, trusting the sites will continue to run profitably even without new feature development, despite potential design aging.

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It doesn't make sense for me to sell for 5x or 4x. Most of my revenue is profit. Like, the margins are really high, especially Remote OK is like 94% margin, uh, pre-tax. So it's very high. So I'd say 10x, after 10x gets interesting. I think the problem is with bootstrap companies, you usually get 3, 4, 5x profit or revenue, not sure, which is too low for me. It's like, I might as well wait 3 years or 4 years and sit in this chair, and the sites will probably keep running because they're fully automated and I barely need to work on them. They kind of just keep going. It's just that I won't build new features anymore, and the site will start looking a little bit old because, you know, design trends sense change, but generally it will keep running.