On the afternoon of February 22, 2025, Pieter Levels opened an AI coding tool and typed a prompt. He wanted a flight simulator he could open instantly in a browser — the kind of game he’d reach for instead of waiting through Microsoft Flight Simulator’s endless update queue. He had never made a game before. He told the AI what he wanted: a 3D flying game, browser-based, multiplayer. Three hours later, he had one.
He built it live on X, posting updates as it took shape. He started selling advertising slots the same day.
“I’ve never ever made a game before, and just made my own flight simulator 100% with Cursor in I’d say 3 hours,” he wrote on X, “by just telling it what I wanted.”
Seventeen days
fly.pieter.com is a free-to-play browser game: open a tab, pick a plane, and fly over an endless world alongside other players in real time — no download, no account required. The revenue doesn’t come from players. It comes from brands that pay to place logos on planes and billboard-planets that drift through the game’s airspace.
Those ad slots started at $5,000 per month each. Levels sold them direct, no intermediaries, no ad network.
By day three, Elon Musk had shared the game on X. “AI gaming will be massive,” Musk wrote. The audience that statement reached — over 200 million followers — compressed weeks of potential organic growth into a single afternoon. Levels added Mars to the game world shortly after, a nod to the direction of the endorsement.
By day seventeen, the game had crossed $87,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
“fly.pieter.com has now gone from $0 to $1 million ARR in just 17 days!” Levels posted on X. “My first project ever to go up this fast.”
By that point, 320,000 people had flown in it.
The decade before the three hours
What made the seventeen days possible was not the AI tool, though Cursor was essential. It was not the Musk post, though that accelerated things. It was the ten years Levels spent building an audience by shipping products publicly, writing honestly, and never disappearing between launches.
In 2014, running low on money, Levels set himself a challenge: launch 12 startups in 12 months. His seventh was Nomad List — a real-time database of cities ranked by cost, internet speed, and quality of life for the growing number of people working remotely. It caught that wave early enough to help define it. Remote OK, a job board dedicated to remote positions, followed in 2015.
Both were built the way fly.pieter.com would be a decade later: small teams (none), fast launches, no investors. The technical stack was simple by design — PHP, jQuery, SQLite on a rented server. The approach was public by design. Every milestone, every number, every problem was posted on X as it happened, and the posts accumulated into a following.
Photo AI came later, launching in early 2023 as an AI-powered portrait studio that generates professional-quality photos from a set of selfies. It was built the same way. It grew the same way. By September 2024, Levels appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast with a portfolio generating well over $200,000 per month — his most prominent mainstream interview to date.
That same month, he posted a total revenue record: $420,000 per month across all products combined, Photo AI leading at $161,000.
“Photo AI just reached a new record of $150,000/mo,” he had posted earlier on X. “87% profit margin. 100% bootstrapped. $0 funding. Employees: 1 = just me on my laptop.”
What the ad model tells you
fly.pieter.com’s monetization is worth understanding on its own terms. The game is free because the game is a media property — a daily audience that brands want sustained access to. Levels sold a limited number of branded in-game slots at $5,000 per month each as direct prepaid contracts.
“I’m still selling ad slots but I’ll be limiting them now so the game doesn’t get overloaded with ads,” he posted on X as demand filled the inventory. “There’s 6 slots left and then it’s full.”
Early sponsors included Basecamp’s parent company 37signals, which placed a custom UFO bearing their logo into the game’s airspace. The logic for advertisers was concrete: thousands of daily players, and every post Levels published about the game’s growth generated hundreds of thousands of views on its own. The $5,000 monthly fee was not buying impressions from an algorithm — it was buying placement in a product that its audience actively came back to, in a distribution ecosystem that Levels had spent a decade building.
One person, no employees
Levels has run every product he has built without co-founders since 2014 and without full-time employees. The philosophy is documented in his book MAKE, available at readmake.com: launch before you feel ready, keep the stack simple, don’t hire what you don’t need, build in public so the distribution compounds. The decade of public posts on X is both the record of the work and the mechanism of the business — the 600,000+ followers who were there the day fly.pieter.com launched didn’t arrive for the flight simulator. They arrived for all the products that came before it, and stayed for the ongoing dispatch from a founder who treats transparency as strategy.
The simulator he built in an afternoon is now his fastest product to reach $1 million ARR. It also runs on a codebase he couldn’t have written by hand. The distinction between those two facts — speed that compounds over a decade, execution that AI has compressed into an afternoon — is the gap that 2025’s fastest-growing solo founders are learning to occupy.
Related founders
- Six Months, $80 Million: How Maor Shlomo Built Base44 Alone — a solo Israeli founder who built and sold a vibe-coded AI platform for $80 million, bootstrapped, without a co-founder or outside investment.
- The Tweet to $10M: Yasser Elsaid Built Chatbase With No VC and No Sales Team — another solo founder who scaled to $10M ARR entirely on product-led growth with no investors and no sales team.
Revenue figures and direct quotes from Pieter Levels are sourced from his public posts on X (@levelsio), including his February–March 2025 posts documenting fly.pieter.com’s launch and the September 2024 post announcing the $420,000/month total revenue record. The Elon Musk quote is from Musk’s post on X as reported by Decrypt (decrypt.co, March 2025). Lex Fridman podcast appearance: episode #440, August 20, 2024 (lexfridman.com). The MAKE book is at readmake.com.
