Levels was a broke, anxious digital nomad living on roughly $700/month, moving between Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and wanted an easy way to compare where the internet was fast, the climate was warm, and the cost of living was low. Rather than build a product, he made a public Google Sheet, one of the twelve monthly releases in his self-imposed '12 startups in 12 months' challenge, to collect exactly that comparison data for himself first.

“I wanted to find places where the internet was good, where it was kinda warm, like 26 degrees Celsius”

Levels tweeted a public link to the crowdsourced Google Sheet on June 24, 2014, to a following already primed by press coverage of his '12 startups in 12 months' challenge. Strangers immediately began filling in data and adding new comparison columns, helped along by the sheet's edit permissions having been accidentally left open to everyone.

“I was slightly stunned by the response. Apart from filling in all the data, people started adding columns for different indicators”

The earliest paying relationship on record was not a membership sale but an inbound sponsorship: within 24 hours of the site accidentally going live and topping Product Hunt and Hacker News (July 29, 2014), Levels got an email from someone at Automattic looking to advertise remote openings, and put up a pay-per-view job listing for them. He describes this as making the project profitable from day one, well before any community paywall existed.

“The sponsorship would pay per view, which was super generous and awesome making this project profitable from the first day.”