💼Let’s Get it Started... (Business Feature #7)

🤔What It Is

Starter Story is a platform for prospective entrepreneurs to learn how successful entrepreneurs went from $0 to millions in revenue through building an online business.

💸The Business

We all have that entrepreneur friend. They always have at least one side hustle, maybe two or three. Even if they have a 9-5 job, they are still looking to make more money through personal business ventures. (Editor’s note – I am that friend)

Starter Story helps entrepreneurs like our friend(s) learn how to grow from $0 to potentially millions through building an online business. It’s not a scam like certain online courses, but rather it’s an inventory of case studies from REAL starters who achieved REAL success growing a business online. They get into the weeds with each business owner: learning how they got started, how they grew, and where they are today.

Checkout the Starter Story YouTube channel here to watch interviews with different starters who made millions on the internet. Case Studies/Businesses that have been featured include this guy who made $2.4 million in a year running 6 YouTube channels, and this person who made millions selling mattresses online.

Aside from the YouTube videos, Starter Story also sells an online product, which is essentially an inventory of 4,000+ of these successful business case studies, along with an ideas database, SEO and email marketing courses, a slack channel for you to talk with fellow starters, and exclusive business tools savings (e.g. Slack, Hosting services, etc.)

🧑‍💻The Model

Starter Story leverages the stories of successful founders and businesses, aggregates their data and stories, and sells them in a productized database/inventory of case studies. The company leverages their larger social media and YouTube presence to draw in an audience with featured stories, which are typically interviews with successful founders discussing how they got to where they are today.

💰Revenue Streams (Expected)

• Starter Story Membership Access:

  • Either $995 or $1,095 for a one-time purchase

• Social media and YouTube ad revenue

🔻Potential Expenses (Expected)

• Website costs (Hosting, SEO, Website Builder fees)

• Marketing costs

• Content Creation – Film editing, traveling to meet founders for video features, etc.

• Gathering case studies:

  • Presumably the Starter Story team originally paid founders to write their case studies, provide business metrics, and share their business secrets.

  • This potentially has shifted as Starter Story has grown. Perhaps the exposure a successful founder could get from participating in Starter Story is enough to get them to do it for free.

😎 Customer Appeal

For most prospective entrepreneurs, the hardest thing to do is just getting started. “What should my business be?”; “How do I get started?”; “Once I’ve gotten started, how do I grow?” are all common questions asked by entrepreneurs beginning their journey. Starter Story helps these beginners by giving them case studies of similar businesses that they can copy to get started.

👍The Good Stuff

• Great Niche - Business products can be sold at a higher price point than most other goods.

• Money-Back Guarantee - With such a high-price point, you’ll feel more comfortable purchasing the product if you can get your money back.

👎The Risks

• It’s Expensive - ~$1000 is A LOT for someone to spend, especially if the target audience is someone just starting out with presumably an average income.

• Defining the Value-Add – Starter Story has awesome FREE content, but does the paid product provide that much more value?

🧠 The Op Ed

We absolutely love the content that Starter Story puts out. As we try to grow out our own newsletter, we have found many of the interviews Starter Story put out provide real and actionable insights for growth.

From a business perspective, the high-price point is valuable for the reasons we mentioned previously, as well as the fact that it keeps the community exclusive and engaged. If you commit $1,000 to a product, you sure as heck are going to squeeze every ounce of value out of it.

One critique of Starter Story is not geared towards the business itself, but rather the consumers of their content. It’s the following:

Many prospective entrepreneurs spend too much time looking for the shortcut/easy path, and waste their time-consuming entrepreneurship content. Most should spend more time DOING and EXECUTING instead.

Hand-Up - We find ourselves guilty of that. While it’s important to leverage tools and channels like Starter Story, it’s more important to focus on actually building that business you spend so much time talking about.

📚For the Road

• Starter Story Review: My Unusual Experience in 2024

• Pat Walls on Founding Starter Story

• Why Entrepreneurship Is So Hard - Harvard Business Review