S
S
Starter Story
Esc
Researched profile.
Starter Story's AI research system compiled this page from
114
public sources — the founder didn't write it.
Automated research can misread or misattribute a source, so treat figures as best-effort.
How this works →
How Starter Story Grew
Media platform showcasing founder success stories.
How did Starter Story grow?
Summary of the sourced claims below
Starter Story grew through multiple channels including Reddit, where reposting interviews in entrepreneurship subreddits helped attract readers and newsletter subscribers. The company also leveraged SEO by repackaging interview insights into search-optimized articles, significantly increasing monthly visitors. Word of mouth played a role, as featured founders shared their stories and recommended other entrepreneurs, creating a growth flywheel. Additionally, Starter Story expanded into video content by traveling to film business owners for its YouTube channel, which accelerated growth.
Channels
23 channels · grouped by how Starter Story grows
-
Organic social media
· 15 mentions · 15 sources“He started posting daily revenue screenshots on Twitter, sharing his own journey building the company with the same transparency he asked of his interview subjects. That build-in-public approach created a flywheel: founders who followed Pat on Twitter wanted to be featured on Starter Story, which...”
highShow 14 more quotes
“because I have this audience like in the hacker audience Twitter audience A lot of people just hear about the app through that and then there they say they're interested. So it ends up being Like agencies or startups people running their own apps and things like that So I get a lot of interest in...”
high“Hastily I wrote a tweet. I cringe each time it's retweeted because it's so quickly written. I also let a few of my wonderful friends/makers groups know about the launch...As the day goes by I'm on twitter, facebook, and writing an email to my lists. To get the word out appropriately is always dif...”
high“I've been able to tweet more, and launch on product hunt. Those two combined have resulted in... as Borat would say... 'Great Success!!'”
high“some of the founders he interviewed started sharing their case studies on their social media accounts. He also had some early posts take off on platforms like Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt.”
medium“I would blog, tweet, and create videos about what I was working on, the results I got after trying different strategies, etc. ... Sharing all this stuff not only helped me build a better business, but it also helped me make tons of friends and connections online and build a small personal brand.”
high“Pat used the Buffer API to queue up his new posts based on a schedule he’s set up for posting on both Instagram and Twitter.”
high“I'll just research successful businesses, write about my findings on a blog, and share them with others who also wanna learn. ... After two months, I've published dozens of stories, and I'm starting to find a routine. The business isn't making any money, but I'm starting to build a tiny audience.”
high“I posted various Facebook posts in those groups... one of the posts where I I had a screenshot of my not yet published app. It was just a design and it kind of blew up. There was more than 100 likes and a lot of comments...”
high“every single day, I just kept shipping, posting content, interviewing, coding, refreshing Stripe over and over and over. It never exploded overnight. It just accumulated, and slowly, people started to notice. Revenue started ticking up.”
high“If you follow me online, you might have seen some stuff that I posted about how I'd never ever sell. I meant it. I really did.”
high“Walls has been unusually open about the ride. On social media, he’s chronicled everything from revenue milestones to burnout and cross-country “think weeks” in almost uncomfortable detail – fitting for someone who’s spent his career getting other people to tell the truth about their journeys, too.”
medium“I would get off work and post these articles online. People liked it. They were reading it. They were subscribing to our newsletter.”
high“Even in the first month of running Starter Story, with only five interviews conducted, Pat promoted his newsletter on his own Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. His numbers? 27 newsletter subscribers and 1,200 sessions.”
medium“He cold-emailed founders, coded the platform, and published content.”
medium -
Reddit
· 7 mentions · 7 sources“Walls managed to find a workaround. “Instead of linking to the article, I would take the full interview and put it into the Reddit post, and then at the very bottom it would say, ‘oh, if you're interested in more stories, come check out our website. ... According to Walls, some of the most succes...”
highShow 6 more quotes
“$50 in Reddit Ads thanks to suggestion by @SeriousGamesKit”
medium“I tried a lot of things and finally found something that worked: posting the case studies on reddit. My first success: This post hit the top of r/entrepreneur, and it validated that our case studies with founders were actually interesting and valuable to Redditors.”
high“Pat was getting really good results from Reddit, but crossposting to the site was becoming a big time-suck. And he was spending a lot of time scrolling Reddit, which added to the time-wasting. So, he automated it.”
high“After four months, I start working on marketing, and I get my first big break. One of my stories goes viral on Reddit, and thousands of people crash my site and join the newsletter.”
high“Starter Story’s early growth came not from search engines but from Reddit. Walls would repost the interviews — sometimes nearly in their entirety — inside entrepreneurship subreddits. At the end of each post, he included a link inviting readers to subscribe to the Starter Story newsletter. “That’...”
high“In the case of Starter Story, the main source of this initial traction was through Reddit. Although Pat had some initial success on Reddit, there were two main takeaways he found that made this month particularly successful, with over 15,000 views on one post alone:”
medium -
Newsletter
· 6 mentions · 6 sources“So it was pretty small, but it was a big benefit in terms of building the brand of Starter Story, and then also finding more entrepreneurs to interview, because they would see that it would go viral on Reddit, and they’d be like, ‘well, I want to share my story too.’ ... That would send maybe a t...”
highShow 5 more quotes
“The next day those at the top of the hunt get in Product Hunt's newsletter. This where the money was made... I think.”
medium“Testing a Different Format for the Newsletter In July 2020, they started running a new format of the newsletter...Open rates went from 17% to 27% and click rates from 3% to 6%.”
medium“I then start a newsletter and get my first 100 subscribers. ... One of my stories goes viral on Reddit, and thousands of people crash my site and join the newsletter. ... I monetize the newsletter with a sponsorship, and I start making some money from affiliate revenue.”
high“...a 275,000-person newsletter, and a total audience of roughly 1.6 million across platforms.”
medium“Today, Starter Story has ... over 250,000 newsletter subscribers ...”
medium -
Email List Growth
· 4 mentions · 4 sources“And writing an email to my lists... Once I got a nice email out to my email lists, things really took off. It was near the end of the 'Product Hunt' day and suddenly I went from #4 to #2.”
highShow 3 more quotes
“Visitors spent 2x more time on the site People were visiting more pages People were more likely to sign up for the email list”
medium“If you can build a landing page or something to try to get the emails of your customers, that's great.”
medium“Hopefully, they will enjoy it enough to give us their email and sign up for our free email newsletter.”
high -
Online Community
· 4 mentions · 4 sources“Before, before building it, I tried to validate it with basically talking to users. I joined various Discord communities of drop shippers. I joined the ecommerce Facebook groups. I posted various Facebook posts in those groups... one of the posts where I I had a screenshot of my not yet published...”
highShow 3 more quotes
“Thankfully, I have a wonderful group of online friends who will take one look at a product hunt page and rip it to shreds, while also giving great critiques, and suggested changes...I also let a few of my wonderful friends/makers groups know about the launch...my own personal community pulled it ...”
high“Pat also built a community layer with a private forum and database tools that gave paying members a reason to stay subscribed beyond just reading stories.”
medium“Over time, the company expanded beyond written founder interviews into video and community.”
medium -
SEO
· 4 mentions · 4 sources“Starter Story began repackaging insights from its interviews into SEO-friendly articles. For example, the site might combine insights from multiple founders into posts like: “Business ideas for developers” ... By reorganizing the information into practical guides, Starter Story unlocked massive s...”
highShow 3 more quotes
“So, we started looking into a new channel: SEO. We started creating content that would do well in search engines ... This strategy resulted in 10x organic traffic growth over the next year, and it’s how we reached over 1 million visitors to our site per month.”
high“Pat started investing heavily into optimizing content for search engines. He now gets 1.6 million people to his site….every month. ... Since that time, he’s seen the light, and now is bringing in over 1.6 million visitors to the website – a majority of which come from SEO.”
medium“Pat had a thesis: if he could build a large enough library of keyword-rich case studies, Google would eventually send him traffic. He was right, but it took patience. By the end of 2017, the site was getting around 30,000 monthly visitors, almost entirely from organic search.”
high -
Video content
· 4 mentions · 4 sources“The next big bet was video. Instead of waiting for creators to come to him, Walls took Starter Story on the road, driving across the US to film raw, on-site stories with businesses for his YouTube channel, which surged past 100,000 subscribers in months. Today, his YouTube channel has roughly 778...”
mediumShow 3 more quotes
“Starter Story, which was founded in 2017 by software engineer Pat Walls, has evolved into a video-first media brand with more than 800,000 YouTube subscribers...”
medium“And if that's actually true, then maybe I'm the one holding it back. If I really want this thing to grow beyond me, then I have to let it go... It became about the team, about the process, about the thousands of founders we interviewed, and the millions of people who watch these stories and get i...”
medium“Over time, the company expanded beyond written founder interviews into video and community. Five years in, Starter Story made a major push into YouTube, traveling the country to film business owners. The channel reached 100,000 subscribers in 6 months and accelerated growth.”
medium -
Email marketing
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“What worked: Don't want to bore you too much in this milestone, but I wrote a bit more about my journey, and also what worked, such as: Building an email list and announcing features constantly”
highShow 2 more quotes
“Then we have all of these monthly emails. So every month we're sending a monthly e-mail in which we show how much revenue this app brought to you. And in that e-mail we also ask for review.”
high“I was writing. I was coding. I was sending emails. I was interviewing founders.”
high -
Affiliate program
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“I monetize the newsletter with a sponsorship, and I start making some money from affiliate revenue.”
highShow 1 more quote
“Throughout the site, there are links to tools that some of the founders being interviewed have used to grow their businesses. Many of these are affiliate links, and Starter Story gets paid a commission when these are used. Affiliate marketing accounts for around 5% of revenue.”
medium -
Lead magnets
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“In January, Pat posted that he was seeing crazy growth in terms of his email list and that it was bringing in almost 1000 people a day. And then in the comments people were asking how he did it, and he said it was a mix of AB tests and other things. A lot of little things, a lot of AB testing, Fu...”
highShow 1 more quote
“Posting content, interviewing, coding, refreshing Stripe over and over and over. It never exploded overnight. It just accumulated. And slowly, people started to notice. Revenue started ticking up.”
high -
Product Hunt
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“One week ago I launched Pigeon on Product Hunt...I made the decision at about 10 am local time...Quickly it got to #4 product of the day, and for most of the day it stayed there...By the end of 48 hours after Launching on Product Hunt I had 200 new users, and a sale. It's now 7 days later and I t...”
highShow 1 more quote
“He also had some early posts take off on platforms like Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt.”
medium -
Word of mouth
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“Our content was unique, fresh, and interesting which helped us stand out. Because we were different, people would share our site with their friends, on social media, etc.”
highShow 1 more quote
“Reminding myself that I’m not doing any paid advertising and the product is growing and customers are finding Pigeon through organic means (more on that later).”
high -
Direct sales
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“you gave me the advice to basically close off the app so no one can sign up for it and then take emails and then get on meetings with people and Just see what they do ... just talk to people see if the app Is useful give them a demo and then try to sell them on the app So that's what I've been do...”
highShow 1 more quote
“What worked: Don't want to bore you too much in this milestone, but I wrote a bit more about my journey, and also what worked, such as: Direct sales”
high -
Contribute on Quora
· 1 mention“What worked: Don't want to bore you too much in this milestone, but I wrote a bit more about my journey, and also what worked, such as: Quora”
high -
Partnerships
· 1 mention“A few months after launching Starter Story, Walls was approached by an email marketing company called Klaviyo, and they soon struck a deal that positioned the company as the exclusive sponsor of Starter Story, a relationship that lasts until this day.”
medium -
Webinars
· 1 mention“$300 to editing a Newsletter Growth Guide (will be free, it's at 12k words now so massive undertaking)”
medium -
Leveraging existing platforms
· 1 mention“Building on top of a marketplace, you don't need a big audience, you don't need to spend money on ads, and there's a built-in customer base just waiting for you to solve their problems.”
medium -
Guest posts
· 1 mention“Starter Story began as a simple idea: interview founders to understand what was working. ... He ... published content.”
medium -
Interview Blog Content
· 1 mention“Starter Story is a content site that primarily has interviews with founders of successful businesses.”
medium -
Building in public
· 1 mention“He’s been doing it since before it was even called Building in Public, but that’s exactly what he’s done. And it’s helped connect him with thought leaders and is almost a flywheel to get more founders for his interviews as well.”
medium -
Hacker News
· 1 mention“Another distribution channel: Hacker News ... What's great about Hacker News is that when you have a popular post, it can result in lots of high-quality traffic. Relevant entrepreneurs, media, etc pay attention to the site.”
high -
Weekly newsletter
· 1 mention“I've been able to tweet more, and launch on product hunt. Those two combined have resulted in... as Borat would say... 'Great Success!!'”
high -
Content marketing
· 1 mention“I was writing, I was coding, I was sending emails, I was interviewing founders. Nobody in there had any idea what I was doing, and honestly, I didn't either. It wasn't impressive at all, but it was consistent. I kept coming back every single day, refreshing Stripe, watching it go from zero to a c...”
high
How 2,739 businesses grow
Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each —
Starter Story’s highlighted.
-
Referral/Word-of-mouth68% ◀
-
Social media60% ◀
-
Search/SEO57% ◀
-
Email48% ◀
-
Community35% ◀
-
Content/Inbound33% ◀
-
Partnerships32% ◀
-
Paid ads24%
-
Events24% ◀
-
Press/PR17%
-
Outbound/Sales17% ◀
-
Marketplaces/App stores10% ◀
-
Product expansion2%
-
Influencer partnerships2%
