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Updated: April 23rd, 2022

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She grew her blog to $216K/year by mastering Pinterest

"Because I didn't want to work for anyone, I poured a lot of time and effort searching for the best stock investments, side hustles, and passive income ideas so I could increase my earnings and help my family without having to rely on them climbing the corporate ladder.

With absolutely no experience in the online world, I was lost and confused, but to my surprise, I learned a lot about this industry in my last 4 years of blogging! I even published my previous blog income reports on my website for readers to follow my blogging journey."


The $72K/year pop-up to grow your followers

"We built this because we needed traffic from Pinterest, which was (and still is) a very important way we monetize so we needed to find a way to grow our Pinterest followers. When our pop-up worked for us (we currently have 1.7 million Pinterest followers), we realized there was a need for other bloggers and creators to grow their real, best followers as well."


Starting a $104K/year digital product consultancy in Vietnam

"After graduating, I worked in a lot of tech companies like TradekeyAlibaba, then I moved to build my own startup in a marketing agency, eCommerce, logistics, handicraft, etc. I am very interested in technology. I built by myself a startup community in Vietnam with 6000+ members who are startup founders and developers. And through my community, I met Thinh, Boris, and Ben - who is my co-founders in Product Lab now."


Bootstrapping a $720K/year socks brand

"We're constantly running roughly 40 ads at a time, and reallocate our marketing budget to the ones that are performing the best.

Due to the seasonality of socks sales, Hippy Feet spends the majority of our advertising budget in the 4th quarter when socks sales peak. This seasonality however, was a challenge for us during the spring and summer months when socks are a less desirable item. This seasonality was a challenge to overcome because it limited the amount of cash that we had to carry into our busy season."


Building a $500K/year software development business with a $500 investment

"I've put $500 of my savings into the "office", a simple room we rented out. We started as a team with different skills and technologies, mainly providing software development for our clients' needs. It was a bright example of the early company: if any client needed any solution, we answered that we could do it and quickly searched for the necessary specialists. It was inefficient, stressful, but we also learned a lot in the process."


This bike lover built a $12M/year electric cargo bike business

"Yuba started in a storage container about 15 years ago, and in addition to becoming a $12M company, we have also pioneered the field of an entirely new segment in the industry.

Over the past 15 years, Yuba has put over 50,000 cargo bicycles on the road. That is a lot of happy families."


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Thanks for reading.

---Pat Walls (PW), David Bustos (DB), Samantha Walls (SW), & the rest of the Starter Story team :)

meet the author
Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.