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You're listening to how Peeter Levvuls built a flight simulator in just three hours, reaching one million dollars in annual revenue in seventeen days.

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Written by Dee-aygo Ferrahro on Promptway.

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In February twenty twenty five, Peeter Levvuls typed a sentence into Cursor.

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"Make a 3d flying game in browser with skyscrapers." Three hours later he had a working flight simulator.

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He had never made a game in his life.

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I went through his

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last

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couple

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hundred

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posts

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so

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you

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do

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not

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have to, and I

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want

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to

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show you both ends of this.

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The part where it

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printed

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money,

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and

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the

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part

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where

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it

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stopped.

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The

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setup

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Levels is the indie hacker other indie hackers quote.

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Dutch, self-taught, builds everything solo in old PHP and runs it on a Hetzner box.

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His flagship is Photo AI, which trains a model on your

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selfies

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and

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spits out studio-grade portraits.

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He posts his revenue.

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Constantly.

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That is the unusual thing about him.

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Most founders post a cropped Stripe screenshot once and disappear.

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Levels treats his Stripe dashboard like a public weather report.

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The moment something worked, fast The flight sim, fly.pieter.com, was a lark.

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He shipped it, tagged it as built with Cursor in about three hours, and posted the prompt.

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"Today I thought what if I ask Cursor to build a flight simulator So I asked 'make a 3d flying game in browser with skyscrapers' And after many questions and comments from me I now have the official [ Pieter.com Flight Simulator ] in vanilla H T M L and JS" @levelsio on X It went off.

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Elon Musk reposted it.

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The game was free, so the money came from in-game ad slots, branded blimps, and a twenty nine dollars and ninety nine cents F sixteen upgrade.

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Thirteen days in he posted sixty seven thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue.

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Then this.

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"fly.pieter.com has now gone from zero dollars to one million dollars annual recurring revenue in just 17 days!

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Revenue update: eighty seven thousand dollars monthly recurring revenue (which is one million dollars annual recurring revenue) My first project ever to go up this fast" @levelsio on X Read that last line carefully, because he did.

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In the same post he wrote, "Whether the monthly recurring revenue is truly sustainable for a year we can only guess." He flagged the risk himself, in the victory tweet.

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The rest of the internet ignored that sentence and ran "1M annual recurring revenue in 17 days" headlines for weeks.

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The moment something broke, quietly Here is the number the headlines never followed up on.

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As of his live X bio in mid-twenty twenty six, the flight sim line reads "Pieter.com zero dollars per m." Zero.

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The thing that hit one million dollars annual recurring revenue in 17 days makes nothing now.

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That is not a scandal.

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It is the actual nature of the revenue.

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Sponsor slots and one-time jet purchases are not subscriptions that renew.

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Once the viral moment passed and the ad slots lapsed, the money left with the attention.

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Levels basically said as much at the peak.

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The crowd just preferred the clean version.

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The product that actually pays the bills So ignore the game.

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The durable story is Photo AI, and it is more impressive precisely because it is boring.

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In September twenty twenty five he posted a record month.

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"Photo AI just reached a new record of one hundred fifty thousand dollars per mo.

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two thousand five hundred seventy three active subscribers.

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eighty seven percent profit margin.

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one hundred percent bootstrapped + zero dollars funding.

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Employees: 1 = just me on my laptop.

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Tech: PHP + jQuery + SQLite on a Hetzner VPS with Nginx and Ubuntu" @levelsio on X One person.

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An eighty seven percent margin.

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A tech stack that working developers openly mock.

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When he posted that his code was "almost fourteen thousand lines of raw PHP mixed with inline H T M L," the post pulled millions of views and a small civil war in the replies.

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His current X bio lists the portfolio: Photo AI at one hundred thousand dollars/m, RemoteOK at forty four thousand dollars/m, Vibej.am at thirty nine thousand dollars/m, InteriorAI at thirty five thousand dollars/m, and a few smaller lines, which puts him in the neighborhood of two hundred forty five thousand dollars a month across everything as of mid-twenty twenty six.

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Notice Photo AI is at one hundred thousand dollars there, down from that one hundred fifty thousand dollars record.

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These numbers move around.

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He is honest that records are usually one good day, not a new floor.

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The verdict Here is the part the "one person, one hundred fifty thousand dollars a month" posts leave out, and Levels does not.

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He did not build an audience in twenty twenty five.

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He built it for a decade.

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His launches land because hundreds of thousands of people already trust his Stripe screenshots.

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After the Lex Fridman podcast he posted that sign-ups and revenue across almost all his sites doubled overnight, +ninety three percent, and in his four hundred twenty thousand dollars-record post he put Photo AI's bump specifically at 3x.

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That is an input you do not have.

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So the copyable lesson is not the three-hour build.

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AI genuinely compressed that, and that is real.

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The lesson is the boring middle.

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Charge from day one.

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He told PPC Land, "pay me money, pay ten dollars, twenty dollars, forty dollars.

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I would ask more than ten dollars per month." Ship the fix in two minutes, not two weeks.

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And know the difference between revenue that renews and revenue that visited once, took a selfie in an F sixteen, and never came back.

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That's the story.

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You'll find every source linked at the end of the article.

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Thanks for listening, on Promptway.