Starter Story Sunday Breakfast #10

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Updated: September 21st, 2022

This is an archive of the Starter Story newsletter, which is read by 222K people every week.

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What is the Sunday Breakfast?

It's 5 bite-sized case studies to get you motivated for the week ahead. You can read it in 2 minutes or less.

1. The orange juice 🍊

This side project hit $2,5K MRR in just 3 months

A founder that made his first dollar online at 16 and that hasn’t stopped building products ever since.

With a portfolio of several online tools already making money for the last couple of years, his experience certainly helped to shorten the path to generating revenue.

The best part of this case study? His Twitter strategy is just great. Searched for high intent tweets and then cold emailed those users. If you’re bootstrapping, you really need to see how he does it.

2. The coffee ☕️

This founder emptied her savings to start her dream business

Due to a health condition, she took adaptogens and other herbs to improve her health and energy levels.

However, she felt like there should be a more convenient way to take them.

After many rejections from manufacturers, some even laughed at her, she decided to hire a couple of experts and start making them in a commercial kitchen.

Today, her products are sold in 150 major retailers across the US.

Why do I love this? Because this case study greatly represents how a motivated founder can overcome every possible obstacle. She even measured different retailers’ shelves to design packaging that would fit anywhere!

3. The eggs 🍳

How this side project sales grew by 469% in the last 6 months

This is one of my favorite products: a reusable notebook designed to reduce waste. Genius.

But as good as the product is, this was still just a side project. Until a few months ago. They decided to invest in a business consultancy agency to better understand her e-commerce business.

This helped her update and optimize the website to be more search friendly; added more automated email flows and understood better how to improve social media ads to optimize conversions.

The results? In the last 6 months, they’ve experienced a sales increase of 469%, and the website conversion rate is also up by 126%.

If you’re in the e-commerce space, make sure you don't miss this one. If you're not, I wouldn't skip it either.

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4. The toast 🥪

This guy left the finance sector to make $72K/year as a career coach

After 50 rejections from startups who wouldn’t even let him work for free. He ended up going from intern to VP.

When a startup he was working at went out of business, he wondered what was he good at. And the answer was pretty clear: Landing great & hard-to-get jobs.

After all, someone who’s landed every dream job without ever filling out an online application certainly has a talent.

And how is he growing 50% QoQ? Well, there’s one very popular website where people like to talk about work: Linkedin. He’s writing a lot of posts there and it’s paying off.

5. The pancakes 🥞

This former alcoholic and drug addict created a $2M/year Gen-Z marketing agency

With a successful past as a concert promoter, he wanted to put all that knowledge about the youth culture into a business.

The problem? Nobody was buying it.

He even got banned from Linkedin 3 times after insisting so much that people started reporting him as spam.

Landing a small contract with Superdry thanks to a friend’s intro was the boost he needed.

Today they have worked with Beats by Dre, Converse, Puma, Timberland, and more.

What you’ll learn from this case study: How to channel all the knowledge and experience from your hobbies into a successful business. These guys even developed their own big data tool to process all their cultural intelligence.

Thanks for reading!

meet the author

David Bustos

Hey there! 👋 I'm David, and if you ever got an email from Starter Story, I probably wrote it. With a background in working with startups and writing, being part of this team is kind of a perfect fit for me.

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