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- STARTER STORY: FROM A WEEKEND BLOG TO A $1.4M/YEAR BUSINESS
STARTER STORY: FROM A WEEKEND BLOG TO A $1.4M/YEAR BUSINESS
How Pat Walls took Starter Story from a weekend blog to a growing $1.4M/Year business...
Niall Ratcliffe
June 18, 2023
Morning!
Most people who are able to get millions of eyes on themsevles have one similarity:
→ They excel at one thing.
For Sahil Bloom that’s growing on Twitter, for Jake Paul it’s causing a spectacle, for Daniel Murray it’s dominating LinkedIn.
But it’s really tough to find people who aren’t just specialists at one thing, but instead, they’re someone who makes it work in nearly any format.
They’re the 1% of the 1%.
And the person you are about to meet is one of them.
In just the last 5 years he has:
Grown his business to $1.4M in annual revenue.
Got 1.6M people visiting his website every month.
And he’s just grown his YouTube channel from 0 to 60k subscribers in under 4 months.
He’s the definition of a man who makes it work no matter the vertical and this is how he grew viral:
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Breaking Down The Strategy
Meet Pat Walls.
In 2016, Pat was working the classic corporate life as a software engineer in New York. But like many people he was fed up of being told what to do, dragging himself through the 9-5 life, and not dabbling in entrepreneurship.
So in late 2017 he decided to start a blog called “Starter Story” - not to make money, but instead to help him learn more about other businesses before he created his own.
Every week he would interview an entrepreneur via phone call or Zoom and then break down the interview for the blog.
He’d work on it during the weekend
It only took him a couple of hours
And he never expected to make any money from it
Today, 6 years on from Pat creating that “Blog”, Starter Story is now:
A $1.4M/year business
With 1.6M website visitors every month
That is absolutely blowing up online
Most recently he took the plunge of taking Starter Story to YouTube and has grown to 60,000 subscribes in just 3 months.
Ever since, he has been all everyone is talking about on my Twitter feed - I had to find how he’d done it.
So, this week I spent 7 hours listening to every interview Pat has ever done and it turns out his growth came in 3 key stages:
Stage 1: Getting off the ground - Reddit
As anyone who has started anything knows, getting early traction is always tough.
When Pat began taking Starter Story more seriously he also had the same experience.
But rather than sulking that not enough people were reading his blog, Pat decided to take his blog to where his target audience was.
For him, that was the subreddit r/entrepreneur a 2.3M person hub all about entrepreneurship.
Pat knew that he couldn’t just post his blogs in there because no one would upvote them or read them.
So instead, he repurpose the blogs into a format that was native to Reddit.
1) He removed photos and self-promotion
2) Rewrote them in a markdown format
3) Then made the titles seem like it was from the entrepreneur
Point 3 was particularly genius from Pat as no one was going to click on a post from a guy plugging his own interview.
But when it felt like it was someone posting about their own business - everyone clicked it.
So Pat would literally title these posts with stuff like “$1.1M/month selling beer coolers [profit included]”.
This way it seemed like it was an entrepreneur giving people an inside look at their business, even though it was actually Pat giving people an inside look at their business.
This strategy is how Pat amassed his first 10,000 subscribers for the Starter Story newsletter.
It was also during this phase that Pat discovered 2 key things that were key to his future growth
1) His “Winning formula” for his content
Ridiculous/boring product + Large amount of money made
Pat says whenever he has stories like this they nearly always blow up. This finding is vital for all of his future marketing.
2) His USP
Pat noticed that his Reddit posts that included specific money numbers were always fan favourites.
So, he decided to make it mandatory that anyone who wanted to be interviewed for Starter Story had to be transparent with their numbers.
At the time, no one else was doing this and it made Starter Story stand out amongst the other entrepreneurship blogs. It was ballsy, but Pat new that it was the specific numbers that made people care about his stories.
Stage 2: Blowing up - SEO
Once Starter Story began pulling in large amount of email subscribers through Pat’s Reddit strategy, it was time to take this whole thing up a notch, and Pat’s plan to do that was through SEO.
Now, I’m not going to get into the technical side of his SEO strategy as I’m not an SEO guy (Chenell did a good job of that here). Instead, I wanted to breakdown the macro of his approach.
On a recent podcast Pat broke down his 3 key thoughts when it comes to SEO:
1) Always be audience first
2) Understand that audience on a deep level
3) Write content you know that they want
At this point Pat knew that his target audience was people in 9-5 jobs who wanted to start a business or were interested in entrepreneurship.
So he would ask himself:
A) What are they searching for?
B) What problems are they having?
C) What do they really want?
Then optimise his articles around that.
I’m sure he did some clever technical stuff too, but unfortunately you’ll have to go searching for that.
Just know that as Pat began leaning more and more into SEO Starter Story got significantly bigger.
Today, Starter Story pulls in over 280,000 organic visitors every month.
Stage 3: Rinse & Repeat - YouTube
As I mentioned at the start, how I came across Pat was through everyone shouting about how quickly he’s blown up his YouTube channel.
He started posting long-form videos there in April and has already gained 60,000 subscribers in just the last 3 months.
That’s completely unheard of when it comes to YouTube.
But after breaking down everything Pat has done in the past, it honestly makes total sense to me.
Because Pat isn’t attacking YouTube from scratch. All he is doing is applying the same formula he KNOWS works and applying it in the YouTube format.
The Formula: Remember that winning formula I talked about earlier, it’s exactly what Pat uses for his YouTube titles.
“He makes $125,000/year As A Niche YouTuber”
“Zero to $1.1B from flipping websites”
“How to make $30K/month with cooking”
Everytime the title showcases someone making a lot of money from a service or product that you wouldn’t think made that much money.
The same formula that worked on Reddit, is now working for him on Youtube.
His USP: Remember how I mentioned people were only interested if they got the specifics of how much someone made?
Well Pat moved that to YouTube too.
Each video has:
A) A title that gives the specific amount the business/person makes
B) A breakdown of exactly how they make it
Again, it worked on Reddit and now it’s working for him on YouTube.
He’s rinse and repeating the same things that he knows work.
Granted, his videos are awesome. But it’s honestly no surprise that they are performing so well when you see it like this.
Pat has currently only posted 8 videos on his YouTube channel and has amassed 1.77M views.
Absolutely crazy.
But the scary part is, we certainly haven’t seen the last of Starter Story’s explosive growth and my guess is we’re going to see a lot more of Pat and Starter Story over the next few years.
What do you think? Make sure to review this breakdown below and leave me a comment of your thoughts on where Starter Story will go from here.
Until next time.
I’ll see you next Sunday.
— Niall
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