Starter Story

How Pat Built Starter Story Into a $1.1 Million Business

Pat Walls
Founder, Starter Story
$250K
revenue/mo
1
Founders
6
Employees
Starter Story
from New York, New York, USA
started September 2017
$250,000
revenue/mo
1
Founders
6
Employees
Discover what tools Pat recommends to grow your business!
Discover what books Pat recommends to grow your business!
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A media business that shares the stories of founders building businesses to millions in revenue. The target audience is bootstrapped founders looking to start or grow their businesses.

Monthly Revenue
$250K
Starting Costs
$100
Built in
60 days
Score
98 🔥
Founders
1
Employees
6 (est.)
Monthly Traffic
1,400,000
Gross Margin
70%
Profitable
Yes
Days To Build
60
Year Started
2017
Growth Rate (CAGR)
187%
Customer
B2B
Revenue Per Visitor
$0.18

Starter Story Revenue

Starter Story Growth Timeline
  1. Pat Walls starts the business
  2. Starter Story hits $92.4K in revenue
  3. Starter Story hits $428K in revenue
  4. Starter Story hits $763K in revenue
  5. Starter Story hits $1.09M in revenue [source]
  6. Starter Story hits $1.1M in revenue
  7. Starter Story hits $3M in revenue [source]

Who is Pat Walls?

Pat Walls is an entrepreneur and developer who founded the website Starter Story in 2017.

The site is dedicated to helping people start businesses by interviewing entrepreneurs worldwide about how they started and grew their businesses.

Starter Story also shares revenue figures for every business it interviews.

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What problem does Starter Story solve?

How did Pat come up with the idea for Starter Story?

Pat came up with the idea for Starter Story after receiving numerous emails and messages about starting the website. Through his personal blog posts and monthly update articles, he chronicled the growth of Starter Story from its humble beginnings to reaching 1.6 million monthly visitors and generating $1,100,000 in annual revenue.

How did Pat build the initial version of Starter Story?

At first, Pat started using WordPress but could not achieve the desired outcome. He switched to create-react-app deployed on Netlify and migrated the website to Ruby on Rails.

After building the website and a robust CMS, he went on to find at least 10 interviews. He first interviewed founders over a phone call and transcribed it into a text.

After accruing 15 interviews, Pat launched his website on Product Hunt, Reddit, and Hacker News.

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Earlier Version of starter Story

What was the growth strategy for Starter Story and how did they scale?

Pat has focused heavily on optimizing website content for search engines using his Lean SEO framework. The outline of his Lean SEO framework has been:

  • Research: Pat always does quick research to identify content opportunities
  • Creating minimum viable content to test if he can rank for the content
  • Testing the content over 30 days, keeping an eye on traffic and rankings for the new content
  • Content iteration based on performance over the past 30 days
  • Scaling the content by spending more time creating fresh content

Starter Story’s first big breaks came when Walls posted content on the r/Entrepreneur forum on Reddit.

Pat also posts content on Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn

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What platform/tools does Starter Story use?

Platform
Email
Customer Service
Accounting
Productivity
Payments
Analytics
Design
Affiliate

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More about Starter Story:

Who is the owner of Starter Story?

Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story.

When did Pat Walls start Starter Story?

2017

What is Pat Walls's net worth?

Pat Walls's business makes an average of $250K/month.

How much money has Pat Walls made from Starter Story?

Pat Walls started the business in 2017, and currently makes an average of $3M/year.