How I Built Starter Story
Hi, I'm Pat. I created this website, Starter Story!
I get lots of emails/messages about starting Starter Story, so I wanted to create a place where I could reference a few articles/blog posts on the topic.
Read these first
- The most comprehensive interview about starting: Founder Interviews: Pat Walls of Starter Story.
- A more personal side of the story: The Best Year Of My Life: In 35 Tweets.
- More recent: How Starter Story grew to 1.4 million monthly visitors and $500,000 in annual revenue
- Latest: 5 years building Starter Story
Want to start a site like Starter Story?
- Lean SEO: This is our framework for growing the site to 1.5M monthly readers
- Guide: How To Grow Your Audience With Interviews
- How I Published 142 Blog Posts in 12 Months (a bit outdated)
Monthly update blog posts:
- November 2017: Intro/my first blog post
- December 2017: My First Month
- January 2018: Cracking Reddit
- February 2018: Product Hunt Launch
- March 2018: 1000 Email Subscribers
- April 2018: First Revenue
- May 2018: Increased Focus
- June 2018: Heads down, shipping hard
- August 2018: Reaching $1K Monthly Revenue
- September 2018: Becoming Internet Famous in 24 Hours
- October 2018: Quitting My Full Time Job
- November & December 2018: First Months As Digital Nomad
- February 2019: Struggles Adjusting To Nomad Life
- March 2019: My New Outlook On Indie Startups
- April 2019: A record month! (YouTube video)
- May 2019: Launched, Quit Social Media + Record Month
- July 2019: Continued Growth And Building A Team
- August 2019: 100K Visitors!
- November 2019: 100K Uniques!
- 2019: Going Full Time As A Founder
- January 2020: Kicking in the new year!
- February 2020: Focused on adding value and monetizing
- March 2020: COVID-19
- April 2020: A record month
- May 2020: Think Week
- June 2020: Reaching $10K/Month
- July 2020: Grow!
- August 2020: Let's do this!
- September 2020: $15K/Month!
- October 2020: $17K/Month
- November 2020: $25K/Month!
- December 2020: $46K/Month!
- 2020: I Am My Own Greatest Obstacle
- January 2021
- March 2021
- April 2021
- May 2021
- June 2021: $500K ARR
- July 2021
Hey! 👋 I'm Pat Walls, the founder of Starter Story.
Get our 5-minute email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.

- Shortform guides are essentially superpowered book summaries.
- Get all the book’s key ideas clearly and simply explained, plus smart commentary and analysis.
- It’s like having your smartest friend dissect a book for you.
Get your free trial + $42 off the annual sub today

Collect and analyze feedback with Delighted, the self-serve experience management platform of choice for thousands of the world’s top brands.
Choose from 8 ready-made survey templates including: Net Promoter Score, Product Market Fit, Smileys, Thumbs Up/Down, 5 Stars, and more.
And 5 survey delivery methods: email, web, link, kiosk, and iOS.
Sign up now and start collecting feedback for free.