Starter Story Sunday Breakfast #6

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Updated: August 18th, 2022

This is an archive of the Starter Story newsletter, which is read by 226K people every week.

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1. The orange juice 🍊

This designer cat furniture brand does over $3M/year in sales

Might sound silly the first time you read it, but it makes total sense.

People spend lots of time and money decorating their homes, and once they got a pet, the majority of accessories are kinda ugly and there aren’t many styles to choose from. An ugly litter box in the living room can really mess up all your feng-shui.

Having a unique product will make you stand out from the competition (especially in crowded marketplaces like Amazon) and will also make your marketing job easier.

2. The coffee ☕️

This social media agency grew to $1M/year

A great thing about this business? It requires zero initial investment. You could start it with just whatever you’re using to read this email.

Another thing I love is that her first customers were people who previously worked with her. That’s the power of starting a business in a field in which you have previous experience.

Key takeaway: People that you’ve worked with, probably will want to keep working with you if you start your own thing. Leverage those relationships to get your first customers.

3. The eggs 🍳

These co-founders built a $60K/year and never met in person

This is a solution born out of a painful personal experience. And it confirms that if you find a process painful, there’s a high chance other people feel the same way. They just haven’t thought of building a solution yet.

In this case, there were two people working on the same problem. When they met on a forum, decided to join forces instead of doing their own thing separately.

Favourite thing about this story: How, until the business took off, they went on Fiverr/Upwork looking for gigs, and sometimes they even did them for free.

4. The toast 🥪

This Reddit search tool made $60K in 12 months

Just like Youtube was initially a private website that someone used to share a video from the zoo with their friends, this tool was intended to be an internal ‘guerrilla marketing tool’ for Reddit.

After sharing a post about the tool, it was obvious that others were also interested in using it, and that it had the potential to be bigger than the ‘main’ product.

Great learning: He nailed his pricing strategy after speaking to a customer who had just canceled.

5. The pancakes 🥞

These guys convinced 140 people to buy a private island

After having the domain letsbuyanisland.com parked for almost 10 years, one night these friends finally decided they were doing it. They were going to buy an island.

They put together a website and some materials and convinced enough investors to buy a tropical island in Belize.

Plans for the future? Build a hotel, sports activities, having a venue for events,... the sky is the limit once you have your own island!

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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