How We Research Profiles

Most Starter Story profiles aren't written by the founder. They're compiled by our research system from public sources. Here's exactly what that means — how it works, and where it can get things wrong.

Researched Profiles

A researched profile is a business page that Starter Story's research system assembled automatically. No one from the company filled out a form, and the founder didn't submit it. We point the system at a real business and it gathers what's already been publicly said about it: founder interviews, podcasts, news articles, press releases, public filings, and the company's own site.

The classic Starter Story case study is the opposite — a founder sits down and writes their own story. Those still exist. A researched profile is how we cover the thousands of businesses whose founders never wrote one in, using only what's already public.

How it works

1. Find sources. The system searches the open web for places a business has been written about or quoted — interviews, articles, podcasts, public databases — and collects the credible ones.

2. Extract facts. It reads each source and pulls out specific, checkable facts: revenue figures, founding date, team size, tools used, growth channels — each tied back to the source it came from.

3. Verify against the source. Every extracted fact is checked against the original text. A quote has to actually appear in the source for it to survive. Figures that can't be grounded are dropped.

4. Compile the profile. The verified facts are organized into the page you see — revenue, monetization, growth, founders — with a citation on each one so you can click through to where it came from.

5. Review. Profiles are checked for quality and accuracy before they go live, and re-checked over time as new sources appear.

Where it can go wrong

Automated research isn't perfect, and we'd rather be upfront about it than pretend otherwise. A few things that can happen:

• Mistaken identity. Two businesses can share a name. The system can occasionally pull facts about the wrong one.
• Misread figures. A revenue number stated as a goal, a projection, or a one-time event can get read as recurring revenue.
• Stale data. A figure that was true in an old interview may not be true today. Dates matter, and we anchor figures to when they were stated.
• Source quality. A profile is only as good as what's been published. Thin public coverage means a thinner, less certain profile.

This is why every fact carries a citation — so you can check the source yourself — and why we treat figures as best-effort rather than gospel.

Spotted something wrong?

If you're the founder (or you just noticed an error), we want to fix it. Click any citation to see the source behind a fact, and tell us your story to set the record straight or write your own.