How We Work

If you're joining Starter Story, welcome! Before you join, you should know how we work.

This is a living, breathing document about everything we do at Starter Story. Please submit edits if we should add anything.

Our Vision

At Starter Story, our vision is to create the world's greatest resource for startup founders and business owners.

We build products with the goal of helping regular people build real, life-changing businesses.

Our products help people across the entire founder "stack" (from finding a business idea to selling your business).

Our goal is to help 1 Billion people (even in a small way) by 2025.

Strategy

Our strategy is to grow our reach and traffic through search engines.

Every day, more people search how to start their own business and we want to be the resource they come to trust in their decisions.

We plan to grow our reach and brand through search engines. Creating content and products that people search for.

Business Model

Our business model is a combination of our premium membership, ads (both onsite and newsletter), and affiliate marketing.

Communication

Limit Meetings & Calls

At Starter Story, we try not to have any traditional synchronous meetings as our team is located all around the world in different time zones.

Forum Style Communication

Mainly, we communicate on Starter Story itself. At the bottom of any article, there is a place to leave a comment. In that comment, you can tag anyone on the team.

Weekly 1 on 1's & Telegram Chat

You may communicate directly with someone on Telegram if you are working on an ongoing project and may meet once a week to plan more high level things.

Tasks

Our Work Is Task/Project Based

You will be assigned tasks using our custom backend communication system. These tasks involve anything from content creation, writing, data entry, research, editorial review, and programming new features on the site.

So, you are not designated to work a certain amount of hours per week, but rather, you'll be assigned tasks to get done.

You will receive an email when you are assigned a new task. To see your assigned tasks, visit the team dashboard.

Culture

You Work On Your Own Time

You can get your work done on your own time, whenever works for you. All we ask is that you get your assigned work done within the week.

(Almost) Nothing Is Urgent

Since we all work asynchronously, we must be respectful of each other's time.

You should never expect someone to respond within minutes, even if it feels extremely urgent. And vice versa. You should never feel rushed by anyone, either. We do our best work when we're focused and present :)

The only time something may be urgent is when working directly with customers, or if the website is down.

Good Writing Is Essential

Since we communicate in a written form, it is important that you write well. Please take the time to communicate effectively. Please use images, links, and videos to communicate your point. We love to use Loom.

We Always Want Your Feedback

We want to hear your feedback! If you feel like something could be improved, such as our backend system or a specific task, please let us know.

Backlog

Here is a link to our backlog.

Potential projects: If you have a cool idea, improvement, etc add it here!

If you begin working on a project, create a new internal document and assign yourself the task in the backend. Then, take the project off the backlog document.

Important Resources

Things that are constantly changing & being updated & are essential for knowing.

Content Team

At Starter Story, our core product is the content that we produce. In this section, we lay out much of the processes and way we think about content.

CMS

Starter Story is built on its own CMS (content management system). We don't use something like WordPress.

How to create a new article: Navigate to our team page and click "Create Article". From there, you can "Add Section" to start adding content to the article.
How to add a metaphoto to the introduction: Loom Video

PPS

PPS (Pivot, Persevere, or Scale) is our framework for creating (and iterating) on great content that ranks in search engines.

Finding A New Content Opportunity

Find a 'content type', and identify 'topics' we can rank for.

You can use basic (and free) research tools to help you identify new content types, such as google search, competitor blogs, and our own content!

Here is a list of all the content types we have currently done or are in the experiment mode.
Example: Doing Research To Find A New Content Type Idea Loom Video

Creating A Content Project Plan

When we have identified a new idea for a content type, the next step is to create a project plan that outlines how the content will be executed.

We encourage you to get creative when researching information and presenting the plan in a document. The goal is to create a detailed project plan that lays out:

The opportunity + why this will be a good fit for our audience
Keyword research + competitor research
The Topics/MVC's we will test for the experiment
Article layout: formatting, design, keyword placement, data points, title, etc.

Examples of great project plans:

Create the MVC's

MVC = Minimum Viable Content

Follow the project plan outline, and write out the article(s)!

We will test the content for 30 days, and then set a 'reminder' to assess the content to see if we should Pivot, Perservere, or Scale.