Starter Story

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Starter Story is an American media company covering entrepreneurship. The company was founded in 2017 by Pat Walls.

Starter Story got their start by interviewing successful entrepreneurs and sharing the stories behind their businesses. In each interview, they ask how they got started, how they grew, and how much revenue they make per month.

Company History

Pat Walls details how he came up with the idea for Starter Story: (source)

Q: What motivated you to create Starter Story?

Starter Story was the result of a failed business.

I was living in San Francisco, and a couple of friends and I tried to start a business that would help small brands sell to retailers. Here’s our old landing page.

We spent 4 months building the MVP, and then fell flat on our face trying to get customers. We applied to YC and got an interview, but ultimately were turned down.

After that failure, I went heads down for a bit. I continued on with my full-time job but never lost that urge to start another business. I knew I wanted to start something and I knew I had to do it alone. I just didn’t know what yet.

Then I came across this reddit post. It’s since been deleted, but I found it fascinating. This guy found a niche, hired copywriters, and ultimately made a bunch of money through the Amazon affiliate program.

I immediately got started. I wanted my niche to be pets. So I bought the domain, hired some copywriters and got started. A couple weeks in, I started losing interest. I really wanted to build a blog but quickly realized I wasn’t passionate about pets.

What was I actually passionate about…?

Entrepreneurship. Duh! I immediately pivoted to that. At the time I was also a big fan of Indie Hackers. I decided I wanted to create the Indie Hackers for non-technical founders.

Source (source)

Growth

Starter Story has achieved much of their growth their user-generated content model and SEO.

Technology

Starter Story is built on Ruby On Rails and Heroku.

They use Klaviyo for their email. They use Pigeon for their CRM.

They use Canva for their design. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit for their social media.

Company History

Growth

Technology

References