This blog post is an archive of this series of tweets that I wrote, so I apologize for spelling errors and strange formatting :)

Starter Story September Results

• 💵 Revenue: $1,737.84
• 📈 Uniques: 20,205 (Sept)
• ✉️ Email Subscribers: 2,956

For all my new followers (will get to that in a sec) I do a revenue & traffic #openstartup report every month for my main side project  http://starterstory.com

I've been working on this project for nearly a full year.

Biggest thing that happened this month was obviously the 24 hour startup!

I won't talk about it too much in this thread, but after that happened everything just blew up. I'm still trying to catch up on everything and keep my head above water.

https://starterstory.com/blog/how-i-built-a-startup-on-twitch-in-24-hours …

All of this craziness sparked a big decision for me.

I QUIT MY JOB! 😁😅

I know it sounds kind of crazy to quit your job over that, but as I was heading into my 1:1 with my manager it just felt like I had to do it. It felt like the right thing to do.

I had planned to grow SS for 6 more months and then quit, but then the 24 hour startup happened and it felt like it was the right moment to quit.

I'm moving home for a couple months (holidays) and then:

I'M BECOMING A DIGITAL NOMAD 🏖

First stop: Chiang Mai (I think). I'm so fricken excited to do this. It's been my dream for many years.

My last day at my full time job is this Friday. Then I'm leaving New York City :(

This is the first time post-college that I haven't had a "real" full time job. I'm excited but also nervous about how I will handle it. Sometimes I feel like a full time job keeps me productive.

Re: revenue. This is my biggest month, and it's really exciting. Here's a chart of my revenue over time cc: @GregorySchier :)

Hope this graph shows people that you can struggle hard in the beginning. It's ok if you can't monetize right away. Don't take shortcuts keep pushing!

Search traffic is finally starting to pay off!

I don't do anything "for SEO". The only thing we are focused on is putting out good content that people want to read.

Lately I've been seeing ~300 sessions/day from organic search.

As you might remember, I made an impulsive tweet that I was launching the Starter Story on 9/25.

That date has come and gone and I've decided to wait and more slowly release community features. I don't think the site is big enough to launch a full fledged community yet.

I did add a login/signup though - and the ability to add comments.

I'm excited to build lots of cool features now that I have more time to dedicate to this project. Some ideas:

• Hacker News esque link board
• Job board
• "Launch" your products
• Starter and business pages

I also got my jimmies rustled after listening to the @IndieHackers podcast with @bendhalpern on how he grew @ThePracticalDev.

They have a really interesting sponsor model, where they have "logos" on their front page.

I want to move to that with @starter_story

This is a great model because it's less focused on CPM and ads, and more focused on "community".

It's also not fun finding a new sponsor every month for a couple hundred dollars.

Another initiative I'm pushing on - getting "tools" and "services" involved with Starter Story.

The ecommerce and CPG industry is an ecosystem of businesses and services. It's important to involve both sides of the coin and bring them together.

I implemented a "content calendar".

Allows me to queue up content so that I can put content on autopilot while I work on other parts of the business.

It's part of the reason I did the 24hr startup. I had content ready to go for about 2 weeks.

Shoutout @WalterDom_ for idea

Did some cool stuff with affiliate links too. It's always a pain to update my Shopify and Amazon affiliate links for every post.

I wrote a script that automatically adds my affiliate tag to all Shopify and Amazon links. Saves a bunch of time!

I also made an automated Twitter bot for posting quotes from my article.

Every day, it searches all of my articles and finds a quote, then posts it to Twitter. It's a nice way to add a little bit more engagement.

Finally, after a lot of "good" things, I want to talk about motivation issues and mood.

First half of the month was horrible.

I was super down, couldn't find motivation and was very unproductive.

I was trying a lot of things - new wakeup early commitments, tried to get into journaling, nothing really working.

One thing that really kept my going was my running (I'm doing 100 days in a row). That sparked the 24hr startup idea!

After the 24hr startup I got a lot more motivated :)

Oh - and one more thing - Twitter addiction is real! - I can't stop checking it after my timeline blew up. I need to figure this out - any ideas?

THANKS FOR READING! And drop any questions/comments you have :)